Hetero marriage and self help
A pointless union
It’s been a while since I was married. As in any marriage that ends, there were a lot of problems that contributed to the decision to split, but for me the thing that doomed us, maybe from the start, was getting trapped into heteronormative gender roles that seemed to snap shut around us faster and tighter than a bear trap.
Even if we’d seen a way out of this painful snare, the other problem was that I was the only one trying to free us. My efforts went nowhere. Eventually I could only use the power of refusal: refusing to pick up after him, refusing to do his laundry, etc. Not exactly a recipe for long term happiness.
I’m thinking about this all these years later in a context where good old compulsory heterosexuality and its prison guard, marriage, are coming back with a vengeance. Conservative “thinkers” and politicians are blaming lower rates of marriage for all sorts of social and economic problems. The solution must, therefore, be getting people married off like it’s going out of style (which it is).
As Lyz Lenz summarized over at
, this means encouraging women to lower their standards when it comes to male partners. An alleged “marriageability gap” exists now that women have a few decades of higher educational achievements and more opportunities for career success, while men’s prospects have “stagnated.” Women are gonna have to settle if marriage as we know it has any hope of surviving.Just a few problems with this plan, though. Men don’t seem to like dating, let alone marrying, women who earn more money, are more ambitious, or have more status than they do. It doesn’t work out so well for women, either. Lenz writes:
I stumbled upon a study that found that women who out-earned their male partners were 35 percent more likely to be victims of domestic violence.
A study by Pew Research found that in hetero couples where women out-earned their male partners, men had more leisure time and still did less housework. […]
Men who are in hetero partnerships where they earn less than their wives are more likely to cheat.
I previously wrote about the relentless heteronormativity of self help aimed at relationships. My argument was that maybe heterosexuality—as a system of beliefs, norms, and practices—was the problem:
I mean that maybe, just maybe, a lot of the problems self help advice is trying to solve stem from—or are at least related to—the inequalities, strictures, and indeed compulsory nature of heterosexuality in a heteronormative world.
In this context, all the relationship advice in the world isn’t going to help couples wrestle their way out of an institution that was never meant to be equal, mutually supportive, and a source of both security and freedom for both partners.
The other problem that makes marriage self help somewhat pointless is the one I noticed in my own marriage: it seems like women are the ones making all the effort to figure out how to change things.
Firstly, women are more likely to be readers of self help than men, according to a recent study. Secondly, following a more general trend in readership, men are much less likely to read books by women authors. Many of the most recommended self help books about marriage are written by men, so maybe men might read those. But how likely are men to read any of the books, self help or otherwise, about why marriage often sucks for women, given that these are probably almost exclusively written by women?
That’s a long-winded way of saying I question whether men, even the ones who want to participate in having a better marriage, are actively seeking to understand, and rectify, the issues that make marriage so unsustainable, and frankly unattractive, to growing numbers of women.
Are men reading Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play and setting up systems to divide domestic labour and child care in truly equitable ways? Are they picking up Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland and getting a glimpse into the occasionally darker side of marriage from a woman’s perspective? Have men devoured Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up and pledged to make things different in their own relationships?
I would love to be wrong about this, and sure: not all men. There are exceptions out there, I know. Ultimately, I don’t think the solution to what ails marriage lies solely in men getting their shit together, anyways. It would be a start, but like any institution, change doesn’t happen because of individual efforts.
Even if hetero couples manage to negotiate their way out of tight gender roles and exploitative labour set ups, the real battle isn’t with each other. It’s with all of the broader systems and cultural norms that exert tremendous pressure on people to conform to outdated and inherently troubling ways of being together.
Whether it’s as obvious as the utter lack of support for or availability of child care in many places or as subtle as taxation policy that punishes women who earn money outside the home, there are an exhausting number of ways that hetero marriage is structurally-supported to remain unequal. No amount of self help or even really excellent couples therapy is going to solve those conundrums.
As someone who enjoys reading self help (hence this entire Substack), I won’t go so far as saying it’s completely pointless to read relationship self help for hetero marriages. I suspect, though, that for many women it’s likely to be an exercise in frustration. You understand the problem, you feel seen by this book, you have a bunch of steps you can take to make change… and then, nothing happens. Whether it’s because a male partner isn’t really willing to shift things that, frankly, benefit him in the short term, or because the system just grinds you down, seeing a way out and then having that way booby-trapped is beyond discouraging.
I do appreciate all the writers taking aim at the dangerous political push to reestablish marriage as the only path to social stability.1 As constraining as the system propelling people into marriage is, the genie can’t fully go back in the bottle. Women, and a lot of men, too, have higher expectations and don’t want what conservatives are selling. I don’t know if marriage is redeemable, no matter how much good advice we throw at it, but even it is, it won’t be marriage as we knew it.
What I’m reading: Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby. That man can really write.
What I’m watching: Drag Race UK is back. You’d think I’d have bad feelings about UK drag queens ever since one made fun a zit I had in front of a massive crowd in Blackpool, but I can’t stay angry. They’re far too entertaining.
Check out Rebecca Traister and Anne Helen Petersen.