Not long ago, I was sitting on the floor in the middle of my living room looking at my shelves, thinking about the logistics of leaving my husband. The boxes. The dozens and dozens of books we’d bought for each other. I was baffled by how many of my things I couldn’t 100 percent call mine. But in a few hours he would wake up and I would have to ask him where he had been all night, and then I would have to decide whether I needed to leave him. Looking around at my home, at all the space and the stuff that we shared and had made together, I struggled to picture the physical act of it. “Every object in this room is part of our common biography,” Mary McCarthy told an interviewer in 1979. “Your house or your flat becomes a kind of shrine. Your love for each other may be going through rather shaky periods, but these solid objects are still there, like witnesses.”
Like McCarthy, I had also found myself drawn to the “rites and rituals of domesticity,” of shared world-building. I’d accepted, maybe sometimes even romanticized, the idea of an imperfect marriage, a union better than the sum of its parts. But it’s become more tempting to romanticize escaping an imperfect marriage than living with one. “So much of our culture depicts young girls dreaming about their weddings,” Lyz Lenz writes in her recent book, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life. “But every middle-aged woman I know dreams about living alone in the woods, maybe with a dog.” “The lure of divorce,” as Emily Gould titled a recent essay on her year of almost leaving her husband, is real for the same reasons I was finding divorce impossible to stomach as I sat looking at my things in my living room: my marriage, all marriage, maybe, was an account of all the time I’d put in, all the control I’d lost.
My husband and I spent the first six months of our marriage living in different countries. I went home to Hyderabad to be with my grandparents in late 2020, two weeks after signing our official marriage license, not knowing if the pandemic would prevent me from seeing them before it was too late; and because India wasn’t issuing any visas, he remained in New York. We implicitly promised to see each other as soon as possible, not knowing when that would be.
I’ve seen my parents, and the parents of people I grew up with, go through long periods of separation—taking a job far away for their children, moving in with aging parents—if it meant doing what needed to be done to build and support a family, and I thought that we, too, would foster sympathy and understanding as we assumed this challenge together. It did not occur to me at the time that this arrangement might be a problem, that as time went on he might grow to feel abandoned and want to punish me. By early 2021 he was vaccinated and going out to parties every night, his pent-up energy exploding in an indiscriminate and shameless level of too-close contact with strangers; I was huddling with my parents, grandparents and brother in a two-bedroom flat in Hyderabad while the second wave raged around us, killing at its height about four people per minute. When he finally joined me in India, I was so horrified by his absence that I couldn’t bear his presence. “I didn’t know how much you needed me,” he told me apologetically. “Of course I don’t need you,” I snapped back. “I would have been happy if I’d never met you.”
The cycle of humiliation and fury felt addictive: counting the nights he chose to spend away from me and the number of times he pleaded ignorance, nursing my grievances, slowly percolating my pain until I could whirl around accusingly at just the right moment and catch him in the act of not loving me. Sometimes this seems to be my husband’s main role: the living site of my own internal battles, between my ache for his body and my self-loathing over this ache, my need and my struggle to break free of my need. A constant flesh-and-blood reminder that intensely loving someone doesn’t always feel fair or ensure my wholeness, that it does not always accord with my commitments to egalitarianism or feminist autonomy. This is not an inequality of the material or structural kind, but it is still an imbalance, and it does speak to the general problem of the inadequacy of husbands, mine in particular.
At the time, the pervasive cultural advice suggested that to leave him no longer needed real articulation: one required a reason to stay, not to leave. Since then, the idea of an “emotional no-fault breakup” has only become more normal. It can be an act of courage or necessity, a feminist assertion and a refutation, as Lenz would have it, of “a whole capitalist system” that is invested in the idea that a woman’s “happiness is frivolous.” “I was determined to treat the divorce not as a life paused, but as life happening,” writes Leslie Jamison in Splinters, another recent divorce memoir. “Every feeling was a fucking miracle.” Leaving your marriage doesn’t need to feel like a big deal or a decision with scary social consequences, these books suggest; all that matters is what you want and how you feel. “If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave,” Jamison says, quoting a children’s book.
The sentiments expressed in the divorce memoirs rhyme with those I hear in my social world, as long-running tropes in feminist theory have increasingly found a foothold in popular discourse. Most of the couples in our friend group are skeptical of marriage on principle, seeing it as, at best, a pragmatic compromise with patriarchal ideals, which one should feel no guilt about abandoning. One friend recently remarked, about an ad for a divorce attorney (“When diamonds are not forever”), that she loved “the way these ads ruthlessly dissect the idea of marriage in a way that could almost be radical.” Another recommended to me the wedding announcement of a famous writer who wrote that she had always recoiled at the idea of marriage because she couldn’t bear to “locate aspiration or stability” in the family rather than the “collective.” Often, from this point of view, love itself is viewed as at best a cheesy and naïve—and at worst a reactionary—argument for the heterosexual family, a sort of malignant device meant to entrap us in some retrograde trad ideology. As the literary critic Sarah Brouillette argued in an essay on “domestic heteropessimism,” familial love perpetuates the “isolating, dependent, harrying conditions in which heterosexual misery is so common.” A recent review of The Zone of Interest in the New Inquiry compared domestic family ideals to the Nazi ideal of Lebensraum, colonial expansion and genocide.
I’ve heard women describe themselves as cowardly for staying in unsatisfying relationships with men, but surely there is something more precise to say about the nature of these attachments. The reasons to leave are too many, and too boring. It could be abuse or adultery, restlessness or ambition, politics or simply tiring of cooking dinner every day of your life. Reasons to stay are hardly more illuminating. But how it feels to stay, and what it really looks like, down to limbs and glances, is something else. My personal literary canon on the subject of marriage is made up of authors who knew no shortage of abuse and adultery—and ambition—in their personal lives, but whose writing gets at something much murkier than inequality, of the domestic or sexual or material kind. Their portraits are anatomies of endurance, of routine unhappiness quietly stewing week into decade, sometimes thickening and sometimes loosening.
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In Mary McCarthy’s short story “The Weeds,” first published in the New Yorker in 1944, the unnamed protagonist agonizes over her inability to leave her overbearing husband, paralyzed by inertia and a fear of change. She tells herself she will leave “as soon as the petunias have bloomed.” But to leave her husband, she would have to abandon her garden, renounce all her possessions. What if she killed the flowers? Or, to take it only slightly further, what if she killed him? Both of those options seem easier than actually leaving him. “If he were dead, I could love him sincerely,” she thinks wildly. “What he would do for her by dying would be to relieve her of the necessity of decision.”
When the protagonist finally escapes to New York City, she is no less indecisive. She knows she “must discard her whole identity” to make it on her own, but worries she might just be enacting a “child’s dream of revenge … vicious and narcissistic.” Perhaps her husband is too much a part of her to be discarded. Unlike the modern divorce memoir, “The Weeds” wants to do more than analyze what went wrong, or who was at fault, or how it feels to extricate yourself from a love that feels so compromised and self-compromising. (Jamison, paraphrasing a friend’s advice: “Surviving divorce isn’t about getting what you want, because you won’t. It’s about making the best life you can, with what you get.”)
McCarthy is less interested in the question of why the woman can’t simply walk out and start a new life than she is in excavating a truthful account of how it feels to be stuck this way. Though she managed to leave her husband, McCarthy’s protagonist now feels a suffocating paralysis every time she picks up the phone to try to tell her friends what she has done, or fills out a job application, or tries to order a sandwich at the drugstore, every time she even considers talking to a stranger: “She had exchanged the prison of the oppressor for the prison of the self, and from this prison there was not even the hope of escape.”
The plot, in McCarthy’s stories, is always driven by the imperative to articulate the truth, no matter how contradictory or evasive. The narrator of “The Weeds” insists on owning and giving weight to her choices, even if they are repulsive. That a habit of ours might be maintained mostly out of inertia does not mean that this habit is not a part of us, or that breaking it will bring us closer to our true nature. McCarthy’s protagonist ends up returning to her husband out of fear, but she seems to stay with him out of a feeling that is much more complicated: a mix of revulsion and pity, an acceptance, in a “burst of generosity,” of his inadequacy, a private acknowledgment that he cannot simply be exorcised from her life.
McCarthy had arguably one of the worst husbands in history—Edmund Wilson beat her, forcibly committed her to a psychiatric ward and refused to let her have her own bank account. (“The Weeds” is inspired in part by her marriage to Wilson, and she managed to leave him for good shortly after its publication.) Her best friend, Elizabeth Hardwick, had it hardly any better with her chronically unfaithful husband, the poet Robert Lowell. But like McCarthy, Hardwick sought to describe these family unhappinesses seriously and precisely, regardless of whether they opened out onto a more just alternative. In 1970, she described the popular trend she was seeing around her of people living in defiance of the “conventions of bourgeois life.” Women were building a new “free and casual community” of caretaking in which “love comes from all; oatmeal may be spooned by a friend, as a delight, not a duty.” In emancipated relationships, free will is paramount; anything less than delightful is suffocating. But the insistence that nurturing and caring for other people must only be done if and when there is pleasure involved seems just as antisocial as the isolating suburban life described by marriage critics like Brouillette and Lenz.
McCarthy and Hardwick are both held in high regard by many progressive literary women today, but the lives they chose to lead are the kind that millennial feminism takes aim at: they were women who actively (and probably sometimes happily) took charge of child-rearing, played hostess for their husband’s friends, managed the household, organized family moves and trips. They moved in progressive circles for their time, no doubt, but today we tend to respect them despite rather than because of their knack for caretaking and their loyalty to their husbands.
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Grudging dependence has always felt to me like an inherent part of loving men—not knowing whether I am performing my acts of love out of my own free will or out of obligation or simply convention. But I think that’s why there is something refreshing about McCarthy and Hardwick’s recognition that drudgery, duty and forgiveness are always part of the work of love. That replacing the term “love” with “unwaged work” does not necessarily make it easier, personally and emotionally, to withhold that work and care from a loved one. And that the boundaries of “work-life balance” cannot always be so coldly drawn around the human beings whose lives are wound up in ours.
In the introduction to his Maples Stories, a collection that covers forty years of a marriage, John Updike writes that a couple “develops an accent, then a dialect, and then a language all its own.” The title of this essay is inspired by Updike, who in his gentle and clear-eyed attention to these two protagonists who “presented themselves” to him named a nameless, heavy, suffocating thing—in my marriage and all marriage.
Updike completes my personal pantheon of American writers on relationships: like McCarthy and Hardwick, he thought and wrote extensively about marriage in modern life; like Edmund Wilson and Robert Lowell, he would win no prizes for husband of the year. He, too, divorced and remarried, like the couple at the center of the Maples stories, eventually. “Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared,” he writes. “That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed.” Updike was less interested in ideas of right and wrong, fault and innocence in a marriage, than he was in the question of how we do manage to live with the people we love, sometimes in hypocrisy, sometimes in humiliation and sometimes, most confusingly, in a tangled kind of comfort. His is a classic “male” voice, but (or maybe there is no but here) he is also the most anxious of the three to get to the heart of his own vulnerability.
We see the Maples tossing in bed, arguing in hospitals, feeding children by the fire, dancing with other people at parties. They continuously repeat “the musical pattern, the advance and retreat.” They don’t always, or even often, like each other—the question of liking someone is rarely relevant in family arrangements—but they have a “disarming familiarity” for and with each other; their private language is highly developed, their understanding of each other bone-deep; and yet they still retain their capacity to be surprised. More than once they are brought together not by a preference for each other alone, but by the needs of children, distant relatives, troubled friends. After over a decade together, Joan and Richard Maple had
talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy.
Richard Maple is in some sense a companion to McCarthy’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, even though as a type he’s just the opposite: an impatient, sometimes ungrateful, often unpleasant husband, but consumed by an entirely relatable fearfulness that Updike masterfully shows goes both ways. Richard is filled with self-loathing at his own dependence on his wife. He is miserable with her, and desperate to leave her. He says as much to her constantly. But just when she finally seems “willing to give up hope,” as Richard had done long ago, he is drawn back into the tug of their relationship, nervous about the finality of it. And so “their agony continued.” “Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die,” Updike writes. “Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together. They took a trip to Rome.”
The absurdity of this scene is all too familiar to me—that precise moment of wanting equally to leave (to end a fight) and stay (to continue a fight), to storm off (to make a point) and to drag the other person with me (out of fear of what comes after the point is made, or out of certainty that there will be no satisfaction in making the point at all). Many of my arguments with my husband take on more or less this color: I tell him to fuck off, and when he does, I drag him back, fearful, teary, still full of contempt yet consumed with need, still somehow inclined to push him away and do it all over again. My family witnesses our fights with alarm, and they often chastise me for being difficult. A friend once asked me if I even really wanted to be with him, with all the fighting I did, not realizing that even fighting is a way of being together when you fear so much his being gone.
Recently, during my second unsuccessful pregnancy, my husband agreed to keep me company teetotaling, a gesture of solidarity I didn’t quite realize the importance of until it was broken. To ask why it mattered so much to me would be pointless; but again I was horrified by how utterly abandoned it made me feel. He tried, like last time when we had been apart, to plead ignorance. There was, he rightly argued, a world of difference between the two of us, in this particular instance and also in most other things. This difference I insisted on challenging, wanting the stakes, of this and of most other things, to be felt equally. You take on a project together; you assume a responsibility together. You trust each other to carry yourselves in a certain way.
This stupid detail—because they are all stupid details, in the end—was my way of trying to create a complete and engulfing empathy. Later, I wondered in my notebook if maybe I wasn’t trying to literally put him inside my body. Such a togetherness does feel like a degrading intimacy, the boundaries of the self truly breaking down as we try to feel our way to something bigger, something else.
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In the stormiest weeks of my marriage, I felt plenty of scorn for how he had abandoned and returned to me, as if nothing had happened. And yet he had returned. We moved through the world together slowly, delicately—neither of us had anywhere else to go. We were in a country strange to both of us, using languages neither of us knew very well, and even something as small as fixing the toilet became a herculean group effort; most days, a fleeting feeling of closeness could as likely be a matter of logistics as of nostalgia.
And then a night of dangerously high fever, when he sat by my bedside quietly reciting a Sanskrit chant that my grandfather uses every morning; the days that followed, when he oiled my hair like my grandmother used to do when I was young. It is hard to articulate, though Updike does it well, how the strange, foreign surroundings might illuminate an already-present feeling of helplessness in the relationship, the feeling that, whether I am trying to call a plumber or recover from an illness or walk out on my husband, there is nowhere to go that would actually be much better than stewing away right here. I had blamed him for not being present enough in my world, and now he was in it, finally understanding and experiencing the strain I’d been under during our months of separation. He was now feeling as alone as I had, if I chose not to talk to him on any particular day, and now I could show him that he needed me as much as I had needed him. Now I could, technically, leave. After our fights he would sit down heavily on his bed to pull off his socks or wrap his blood-pressure monitor around his arm, looking pathetic and alone. My sense of injury was anchoring; I reveled in it. But it brought me little joy.
It is humiliating to realize that I have reached a point where it might be less painful to be unhappy with someone else than to be free and (possibly) happy on my own. Loving someone means having my happiness dependent on his, and losing control of your own happiness can feel demeaning. But perhaps remaining in control is overrated; perhaps the difficulty we faced was less a systemic issue to revolt against than a state to be experienced and negotiated in its everyday highs and lows. In denouncing subjective love and the experience of partnership with men—as frustrating and unsatisfying as it can be—I sometimes think that critics of marriage strike a blow less against capitalism or heteronormativity than against the imperfect bonds of friendship and love that are, for many people, their only respite from them.
Less than two days after Richard Maple arrives in Rome with his wife on their strange anti-honeymoon, he falls ill with a debilitating stomach pain, precipitated in large part, he tells Joan, by “being here, so far from anywhere, with you, and not knowing … why.” They are trapped in the city, in a sense trapped in their marriage. But they forge ahead. Joan reads travel books in their room while Richard sleeps. They pick restaurants at which to have silent, less-than-satisfying meals. The Maples’s holiday is a portrait of their submission, if not to each other then to their begrudging dependence on and acceptance of each other. Presented with the possibility of their own freedom, they chose each other. They did this repeatedly, in part out of weakness, but perhaps in equal part out of strength.
Richard’s real problem, he admits, was that he wanted, in spite of all his other feelings, for Joan to be happy. “Away from her, he could not know if she were happy or not,” but he wanted to always be sure that she was happy without having to be around—he also, paradoxically, could not bear the idea that she could be happy without him. His fear of not being needed repeatedly won out over his distaste at needing her. I, too, can never tell which I want more—for my husband to be happy or for him to want me to be happy.
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The mid-century marriage stories continue to compel us, dated though they might be, because they understand that, for better or worse, we live, as Hardwick once wrote, “by and through” other people. Leaving the story is hard because the story is always at once wrong and not wrong. Wrong for one party and not wrong for the other, and it feels sad to try and differentiate, to extract myself from the business of someone else’s needs.
In a series of critiques of second-wave feminism published in the early Seventies, Hardwick, perhaps partially working out her own situation, expressed skepticism about women’s recourse to self-reliance as “a private investment, a savings account that acknowledges the shakiness of marriage.” Through the “demotion of fidelity and the elevation of equality” in the relations between the sexes, this particular brand of feminism had declared that “it is an illusion to imagine the pure self can ever be lived by and through anyone else.” But “we are imprisoned by these negatives,” our bleak assessments of our partnerships and the world at large. She knew, as McCarthy did, that the fear of imprisonment itself could become its own prison—and that overcoming this fear was a different kind of liberation: “Sympathy is a gift, sometimes almost an occupation.”
In June of 1977, seven years after he had abandoned Hardwick and their young daughter for the British writer Caroline Blackwood, Robert Lowell returned to the U.S. from England; he had been hospitalized several times, and Blackwood, suffering from her own mental health issues, could not deal with him at his worst. Hardwick had stayed in touch with him throughout their divorce, writing him loving letters, managing his finances and looking after his health; when he had nowhere else to go, she took him back in. They built a routine together, reading, writing. Lowell’s things had remained in her home, barely touched, and he settled into them as he began to get better for the last time (he would die two months later). In a remarkable, somewhat dazed letter to McCarthy, Hardwick wrote that “there is a general peacefulness (except when there isn’t).” She wasn’t exactly happy, but “we, together, are having a perfectly nice time, both quite independent and yet I guess dependent.”
I cannot begin to fathom the instincts and impulses that would bring about such a situation, but I have always found it mesmerizing. It may not be the “right” kind of love—it is neither passionate nor just—but it is an enchanting, degrading intimacy, the kind that floats to the surface of all our rallying cries for freedom and our cold calculations of fairness and equality. As Hardwick admitted, “we are trying to work out a sort of survival for both of us.”
Sometimes I imagine a more detached, or at least slightly less deranged, version of my relationship: amicable, controlled, dignified; more equal. But the books on my bookshelf reveal another option: freedom from the fantasy of autonomy, to find that trickier, truer, more interesting space between choice and obligation. Then life might proceed without the constant fear of imprisonment or loss of identity, without trying to settle debts as though we have generations of humiliation to still compensate for.
In 2015, five years before her husband left her in an event that marked the inception of her recent novel Liars (2024), the poet Sarah Manguso wrote in an essay for Harper’s that motherhood, for her, was a decision to not “reach the end of my life intact.”
Liars, another entry into the past year’s glut of divorce writing, builds on her argument that “traditional marriage is a domestic abuse paradigm,” as she said in a recent interview, and that “the entire civilization is screaming” at women “from the cradle” so that they are “impelled to make this bad choice” to marry men. But I find the earlier essay about motherhood, written in a radically different register, to offer a more meaningful way of thinking about marriage. To have remained intact by the end seems to me now to indicate a real loss, or a series of missed opportunities. What am I saving myself for? The line reminded me of a feeling I had, shortly after my wedding, that I was giving up on the romantic notions I’d grown up with, about living an unconventional life free of attachments. And yet I can’t imagine anything weirder, anything that brings me closer to what Manguso called “the extreme edge of experience,” than being married. I certainly know I won’t reach the end of my life intact. I’m not intact now.
Art credit: Amy Bennett, Rubber Gloves, 2018. Oil on panel, 4 × 5 in. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC.
Not long ago, I was sitting on the floor in the middle of my living room looking at my shelves, thinking about the logistics of leaving my husband. The boxes. The dozens and dozens of books we’d bought for each other. I was baffled by how many of my things I couldn’t 100 percent call mine. But in a few hours he would wake up and I would have to ask him where he had been all night, and then I would have to decide whether I needed to leave him. Looking around at my home, at all the space and the stuff that we shared and had made together, I struggled to picture the physical act of it. “Every object in this room is part of our common biography,” Mary McCarthy told an interviewer in 1979. “Your house or your flat becomes a kind of shrine. Your love for each other may be going through rather shaky periods, but these solid objects are still there, like witnesses.”
Like McCarthy, I had also found myself drawn to the “rites and rituals of domesticity,” of shared world-building. I’d accepted, maybe sometimes even romanticized, the idea of an imperfect marriage, a union better than the sum of its parts. But it’s become more tempting to romanticize escaping an imperfect marriage than living with one. “So much of our culture depicts young girls dreaming about their weddings,” Lyz Lenz writes in her recent book, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life. “But every middle-aged woman I know dreams about living alone in the woods, maybe with a dog.” “The lure of divorce,” as Emily Gould titled a recent essay on her year of almost leaving her husband, is real for the same reasons I was finding divorce impossible to stomach as I sat looking at my things in my living room: my marriage, all marriage, maybe, was an account of all the time I’d put in, all the control I’d lost.
My husband and I spent the first six months of our marriage living in different countries. I went home to Hyderabad to be with my grandparents in late 2020, two weeks after signing our official marriage license, not knowing if the pandemic would prevent me from seeing them before it was too late; and because India wasn’t issuing any visas, he remained in New York. We implicitly promised to see each other as soon as possible, not knowing when that would be.
I’ve seen my parents, and the parents of people I grew up with, go through long periods of separation—taking a job far away for their children, moving in with aging parents—if it meant doing what needed to be done to build and support a family, and I thought that we, too, would foster sympathy and understanding as we assumed this challenge together. It did not occur to me at the time that this arrangement might be a problem, that as time went on he might grow to feel abandoned and want to punish me. By early 2021 he was vaccinated and going out to parties every night, his pent-up energy exploding in an indiscriminate and shameless level of too-close contact with strangers; I was huddling with my parents, grandparents and brother in a two-bedroom flat in Hyderabad while the second wave raged around us, killing at its height about four people per minute. When he finally joined me in India, I was so horrified by his absence that I couldn’t bear his presence. “I didn’t know how much you needed me,” he told me apologetically. “Of course I don’t need you,” I snapped back. “I would have been happy if I’d never met you.”
The cycle of humiliation and fury felt addictive: counting the nights he chose to spend away from me and the number of times he pleaded ignorance, nursing my grievances, slowly percolating my pain until I could whirl around accusingly at just the right moment and catch him in the act of not loving me. Sometimes this seems to be my husband’s main role: the living site of my own internal battles, between my ache for his body and my self-loathing over this ache, my need and my struggle to break free of my need. A constant flesh-and-blood reminder that intensely loving someone doesn’t always feel fair or ensure my wholeness, that it does not always accord with my commitments to egalitarianism or feminist autonomy. This is not an inequality of the material or structural kind, but it is still an imbalance, and it does speak to the general problem of the inadequacy of husbands, mine in particular.
At the time, the pervasive cultural advice suggested that to leave him no longer needed real articulation: one required a reason to stay, not to leave. Since then, the idea of an “emotional no-fault breakup” has only become more normal. It can be an act of courage or necessity, a feminist assertion and a refutation, as Lenz would have it, of “a whole capitalist system” that is invested in the idea that a woman’s “happiness is frivolous.” “I was determined to treat the divorce not as a life paused, but as life happening,” writes Leslie Jamison in Splinters, another recent divorce memoir. “Every feeling was a fucking miracle.” Leaving your marriage doesn’t need to feel like a big deal or a decision with scary social consequences, these books suggest; all that matters is what you want and how you feel. “If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave,” Jamison says, quoting a children’s book.
The sentiments expressed in the divorce memoirs rhyme with those I hear in my social world, as long-running tropes in feminist theory have increasingly found a foothold in popular discourse. Most of the couples in our friend group are skeptical of marriage on principle, seeing it as, at best, a pragmatic compromise with patriarchal ideals, which one should feel no guilt about abandoning. One friend recently remarked, about an ad for a divorce attorney (“When diamonds are not forever”), that she loved “the way these ads ruthlessly dissect the idea of marriage in a way that could almost be radical.” Another recommended to me the wedding announcement of a famous writer who wrote that she had always recoiled at the idea of marriage because she couldn’t bear to “locate aspiration or stability” in the family rather than the “collective.” Often, from this point of view, love itself is viewed as at best a cheesy and naïve—and at worst a reactionary—argument for the heterosexual family, a sort of malignant device meant to entrap us in some retrograde trad ideology. As the literary critic Sarah Brouillette argued in an essay on “domestic heteropessimism,” familial love perpetuates the “isolating, dependent, harrying conditions in which heterosexual misery is so common.” A recent review of The Zone of Interest in the New Inquiry compared domestic family ideals to the Nazi ideal of Lebensraum, colonial expansion and genocide.
I’ve heard women describe themselves as cowardly for staying in unsatisfying relationships with men, but surely there is something more precise to say about the nature of these attachments. The reasons to leave are too many, and too boring. It could be abuse or adultery, restlessness or ambition, politics or simply tiring of cooking dinner every day of your life. Reasons to stay are hardly more illuminating. But how it feels to stay, and what it really looks like, down to limbs and glances, is something else. My personal literary canon on the subject of marriage is made up of authors who knew no shortage of abuse and adultery—and ambition—in their personal lives, but whose writing gets at something much murkier than inequality, of the domestic or sexual or material kind. Their portraits are anatomies of endurance, of routine unhappiness quietly stewing week into decade, sometimes thickening and sometimes loosening.
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In Mary McCarthy’s short story “The Weeds,” first published in the New Yorker in 1944, the unnamed protagonist agonizes over her inability to leave her overbearing husband, paralyzed by inertia and a fear of change. She tells herself she will leave “as soon as the petunias have bloomed.” But to leave her husband, she would have to abandon her garden, renounce all her possessions. What if she killed the flowers? Or, to take it only slightly further, what if she killed him? Both of those options seem easier than actually leaving him. “If he were dead, I could love him sincerely,” she thinks wildly. “What he would do for her by dying would be to relieve her of the necessity of decision.”
When the protagonist finally escapes to New York City, she is no less indecisive. She knows she “must discard her whole identity” to make it on her own, but worries she might just be enacting a “child’s dream of revenge … vicious and narcissistic.” Perhaps her husband is too much a part of her to be discarded. Unlike the modern divorce memoir, “The Weeds” wants to do more than analyze what went wrong, or who was at fault, or how it feels to extricate yourself from a love that feels so compromised and self-compromising. (Jamison, paraphrasing a friend’s advice: “Surviving divorce isn’t about getting what you want, because you won’t. It’s about making the best life you can, with what you get.”)
McCarthy is less interested in the question of why the woman can’t simply walk out and start a new life than she is in excavating a truthful account of how it feels to be stuck this way. Though she managed to leave her husband, McCarthy’s protagonist now feels a suffocating paralysis every time she picks up the phone to try to tell her friends what she has done, or fills out a job application, or tries to order a sandwich at the drugstore, every time she even considers talking to a stranger: “She had exchanged the prison of the oppressor for the prison of the self, and from this prison there was not even the hope of escape.”
The plot, in McCarthy’s stories, is always driven by the imperative to articulate the truth, no matter how contradictory or evasive. The narrator of “The Weeds” insists on owning and giving weight to her choices, even if they are repulsive. That a habit of ours might be maintained mostly out of inertia does not mean that this habit is not a part of us, or that breaking it will bring us closer to our true nature. McCarthy’s protagonist ends up returning to her husband out of fear, but she seems to stay with him out of a feeling that is much more complicated: a mix of revulsion and pity, an acceptance, in a “burst of generosity,” of his inadequacy, a private acknowledgment that he cannot simply be exorcised from her life.
McCarthy had arguably one of the worst husbands in history—Edmund Wilson beat her, forcibly committed her to a psychiatric ward and refused to let her have her own bank account. (“The Weeds” is inspired in part by her marriage to Wilson, and she managed to leave him for good shortly after its publication.) Her best friend, Elizabeth Hardwick, had it hardly any better with her chronically unfaithful husband, the poet Robert Lowell. But like McCarthy, Hardwick sought to describe these family unhappinesses seriously and precisely, regardless of whether they opened out onto a more just alternative. In 1970, she described the popular trend she was seeing around her of people living in defiance of the “conventions of bourgeois life.” Women were building a new “free and casual community” of caretaking in which “love comes from all; oatmeal may be spooned by a friend, as a delight, not a duty.” In emancipated relationships, free will is paramount; anything less than delightful is suffocating. But the insistence that nurturing and caring for other people must only be done if and when there is pleasure involved seems just as antisocial as the isolating suburban life described by marriage critics like Brouillette and Lenz.
McCarthy and Hardwick are both held in high regard by many progressive literary women today, but the lives they chose to lead are the kind that millennial feminism takes aim at: they were women who actively (and probably sometimes happily) took charge of child-rearing, played hostess for their husband’s friends, managed the household, organized family moves and trips. They moved in progressive circles for their time, no doubt, but today we tend to respect them despite rather than because of their knack for caretaking and their loyalty to their husbands.
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Grudging dependence has always felt to me like an inherent part of loving men—not knowing whether I am performing my acts of love out of my own free will or out of obligation or simply convention. But I think that’s why there is something refreshing about McCarthy and Hardwick’s recognition that drudgery, duty and forgiveness are always part of the work of love. That replacing the term “love” with “unwaged work” does not necessarily make it easier, personally and emotionally, to withhold that work and care from a loved one. And that the boundaries of “work-life balance” cannot always be so coldly drawn around the human beings whose lives are wound up in ours.
In the introduction to his Maples Stories, a collection that covers forty years of a marriage, John Updike writes that a couple “develops an accent, then a dialect, and then a language all its own.” The title of this essay is inspired by Updike, who in his gentle and clear-eyed attention to these two protagonists who “presented themselves” to him named a nameless, heavy, suffocating thing—in my marriage and all marriage.
Updike completes my personal pantheon of American writers on relationships: like McCarthy and Hardwick, he thought and wrote extensively about marriage in modern life; like Edmund Wilson and Robert Lowell, he would win no prizes for husband of the year. He, too, divorced and remarried, like the couple at the center of the Maples stories, eventually. “Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared,” he writes. “That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed.” Updike was less interested in ideas of right and wrong, fault and innocence in a marriage, than he was in the question of how we do manage to live with the people we love, sometimes in hypocrisy, sometimes in humiliation and sometimes, most confusingly, in a tangled kind of comfort. His is a classic “male” voice, but (or maybe there is no but here) he is also the most anxious of the three to get to the heart of his own vulnerability.
We see the Maples tossing in bed, arguing in hospitals, feeding children by the fire, dancing with other people at parties. They continuously repeat “the musical pattern, the advance and retreat.” They don’t always, or even often, like each other—the question of liking someone is rarely relevant in family arrangements—but they have a “disarming familiarity” for and with each other; their private language is highly developed, their understanding of each other bone-deep; and yet they still retain their capacity to be surprised. More than once they are brought together not by a preference for each other alone, but by the needs of children, distant relatives, troubled friends. After over a decade together, Joan and Richard Maple had
Richard Maple is in some sense a companion to McCarthy’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, even though as a type he’s just the opposite: an impatient, sometimes ungrateful, often unpleasant husband, but consumed by an entirely relatable fearfulness that Updike masterfully shows goes both ways. Richard is filled with self-loathing at his own dependence on his wife. He is miserable with her, and desperate to leave her. He says as much to her constantly. But just when she finally seems “willing to give up hope,” as Richard had done long ago, he is drawn back into the tug of their relationship, nervous about the finality of it. And so “their agony continued.” “Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die,” Updike writes. “Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together. They took a trip to Rome.”
The absurdity of this scene is all too familiar to me—that precise moment of wanting equally to leave (to end a fight) and stay (to continue a fight), to storm off (to make a point) and to drag the other person with me (out of fear of what comes after the point is made, or out of certainty that there will be no satisfaction in making the point at all). Many of my arguments with my husband take on more or less this color: I tell him to fuck off, and when he does, I drag him back, fearful, teary, still full of contempt yet consumed with need, still somehow inclined to push him away and do it all over again. My family witnesses our fights with alarm, and they often chastise me for being difficult. A friend once asked me if I even really wanted to be with him, with all the fighting I did, not realizing that even fighting is a way of being together when you fear so much his being gone.
Recently, during my second unsuccessful pregnancy, my husband agreed to keep me company teetotaling, a gesture of solidarity I didn’t quite realize the importance of until it was broken. To ask why it mattered so much to me would be pointless; but again I was horrified by how utterly abandoned it made me feel. He tried, like last time when we had been apart, to plead ignorance. There was, he rightly argued, a world of difference between the two of us, in this particular instance and also in most other things. This difference I insisted on challenging, wanting the stakes, of this and of most other things, to be felt equally. You take on a project together; you assume a responsibility together. You trust each other to carry yourselves in a certain way.
This stupid detail—because they are all stupid details, in the end—was my way of trying to create a complete and engulfing empathy. Later, I wondered in my notebook if maybe I wasn’t trying to literally put him inside my body. Such a togetherness does feel like a degrading intimacy, the boundaries of the self truly breaking down as we try to feel our way to something bigger, something else.
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In the stormiest weeks of my marriage, I felt plenty of scorn for how he had abandoned and returned to me, as if nothing had happened. And yet he had returned. We moved through the world together slowly, delicately—neither of us had anywhere else to go. We were in a country strange to both of us, using languages neither of us knew very well, and even something as small as fixing the toilet became a herculean group effort; most days, a fleeting feeling of closeness could as likely be a matter of logistics as of nostalgia.
And then a night of dangerously high fever, when he sat by my bedside quietly reciting a Sanskrit chant that my grandfather uses every morning; the days that followed, when he oiled my hair like my grandmother used to do when I was young. It is hard to articulate, though Updike does it well, how the strange, foreign surroundings might illuminate an already-present feeling of helplessness in the relationship, the feeling that, whether I am trying to call a plumber or recover from an illness or walk out on my husband, there is nowhere to go that would actually be much better than stewing away right here. I had blamed him for not being present enough in my world, and now he was in it, finally understanding and experiencing the strain I’d been under during our months of separation. He was now feeling as alone as I had, if I chose not to talk to him on any particular day, and now I could show him that he needed me as much as I had needed him. Now I could, technically, leave. After our fights he would sit down heavily on his bed to pull off his socks or wrap his blood-pressure monitor around his arm, looking pathetic and alone. My sense of injury was anchoring; I reveled in it. But it brought me little joy.
It is humiliating to realize that I have reached a point where it might be less painful to be unhappy with someone else than to be free and (possibly) happy on my own. Loving someone means having my happiness dependent on his, and losing control of your own happiness can feel demeaning. But perhaps remaining in control is overrated; perhaps the difficulty we faced was less a systemic issue to revolt against than a state to be experienced and negotiated in its everyday highs and lows. In denouncing subjective love and the experience of partnership with men—as frustrating and unsatisfying as it can be—I sometimes think that critics of marriage strike a blow less against capitalism or heteronormativity than against the imperfect bonds of friendship and love that are, for many people, their only respite from them.
Less than two days after Richard Maple arrives in Rome with his wife on their strange anti-honeymoon, he falls ill with a debilitating stomach pain, precipitated in large part, he tells Joan, by “being here, so far from anywhere, with you, and not knowing … why.” They are trapped in the city, in a sense trapped in their marriage. But they forge ahead. Joan reads travel books in their room while Richard sleeps. They pick restaurants at which to have silent, less-than-satisfying meals. The Maples’s holiday is a portrait of their submission, if not to each other then to their begrudging dependence on and acceptance of each other. Presented with the possibility of their own freedom, they chose each other. They did this repeatedly, in part out of weakness, but perhaps in equal part out of strength.
Richard’s real problem, he admits, was that he wanted, in spite of all his other feelings, for Joan to be happy. “Away from her, he could not know if she were happy or not,” but he wanted to always be sure that she was happy without having to be around—he also, paradoxically, could not bear the idea that she could be happy without him. His fear of not being needed repeatedly won out over his distaste at needing her. I, too, can never tell which I want more—for my husband to be happy or for him to want me to be happy.
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The mid-century marriage stories continue to compel us, dated though they might be, because they understand that, for better or worse, we live, as Hardwick once wrote, “by and through” other people. Leaving the story is hard because the story is always at once wrong and not wrong. Wrong for one party and not wrong for the other, and it feels sad to try and differentiate, to extract myself from the business of someone else’s needs.
In a series of critiques of second-wave feminism published in the early Seventies, Hardwick, perhaps partially working out her own situation, expressed skepticism about women’s recourse to self-reliance as “a private investment, a savings account that acknowledges the shakiness of marriage.” Through the “demotion of fidelity and the elevation of equality” in the relations between the sexes, this particular brand of feminism had declared that “it is an illusion to imagine the pure self can ever be lived by and through anyone else.” But “we are imprisoned by these negatives,” our bleak assessments of our partnerships and the world at large. She knew, as McCarthy did, that the fear of imprisonment itself could become its own prison—and that overcoming this fear was a different kind of liberation: “Sympathy is a gift, sometimes almost an occupation.”
In June of 1977, seven years after he had abandoned Hardwick and their young daughter for the British writer Caroline Blackwood, Robert Lowell returned to the U.S. from England; he had been hospitalized several times, and Blackwood, suffering from her own mental health issues, could not deal with him at his worst. Hardwick had stayed in touch with him throughout their divorce, writing him loving letters, managing his finances and looking after his health; when he had nowhere else to go, she took him back in. They built a routine together, reading, writing. Lowell’s things had remained in her home, barely touched, and he settled into them as he began to get better for the last time (he would die two months later). In a remarkable, somewhat dazed letter to McCarthy, Hardwick wrote that “there is a general peacefulness (except when there isn’t).” She wasn’t exactly happy, but “we, together, are having a perfectly nice time, both quite independent and yet I guess dependent.”
I cannot begin to fathom the instincts and impulses that would bring about such a situation, but I have always found it mesmerizing. It may not be the “right” kind of love—it is neither passionate nor just—but it is an enchanting, degrading intimacy, the kind that floats to the surface of all our rallying cries for freedom and our cold calculations of fairness and equality. As Hardwick admitted, “we are trying to work out a sort of survival for both of us.”
Sometimes I imagine a more detached, or at least slightly less deranged, version of my relationship: amicable, controlled, dignified; more equal. But the books on my bookshelf reveal another option: freedom from the fantasy of autonomy, to find that trickier, truer, more interesting space between choice and obligation. Then life might proceed without the constant fear of imprisonment or loss of identity, without trying to settle debts as though we have generations of humiliation to still compensate for.
In 2015, five years before her husband left her in an event that marked the inception of her recent novel Liars (2024), the poet Sarah Manguso wrote in an essay for Harper’s that motherhood, for her, was a decision to not “reach the end of my life intact.”
Liars, another entry into the past year’s glut of divorce writing, builds on her argument that “traditional marriage is a domestic abuse paradigm,” as she said in a recent interview, and that “the entire civilization is screaming” at women “from the cradle” so that they are “impelled to make this bad choice” to marry men. But I find the earlier essay about motherhood, written in a radically different register, to offer a more meaningful way of thinking about marriage. To have remained intact by the end seems to me now to indicate a real loss, or a series of missed opportunities. What am I saving myself for? The line reminded me of a feeling I had, shortly after my wedding, that I was giving up on the romantic notions I’d grown up with, about living an unconventional life free of attachments. And yet I can’t imagine anything weirder, anything that brings me closer to what Manguso called “the extreme edge of experience,” than being married. I certainly know I won’t reach the end of my life intact. I’m not intact now.
Art credit: Amy Bennett, Rubber Gloves, 2018. Oil on panel, 4 × 5 in. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.