someone who has herself always longed to be regarded as precious, and who has often done foolish things in order to test that regard, I get it. But I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.
I think of my friend Christine, who realized-on the eve of her fortieth birthday-that she had been postponing her real life forever, waiting for the validation of a wedding day before she could regard herself as an adult. Never having walked down an aisle in a white dress and a veil, she, too, had never felt chosen. For a couple of decades, then, she had just been going through the motions-working, exercising, eating, sleeping-but all the while secretly waiting. But as her fortieth birthday approached, and no man stepped forward to crown her as his princess, she came to realize that all this waiting was ridiculous. No, it was beyond ridiculous: It was an imprisonment. She was being held hostage by an idea she came to call the “Tyranny of the Bride,” and she decided that she had to break that enchantment.
So this is what she did: On the morning of her fortieth birthday, my friend Christine went down to the northern Pacific Ocean at dawn. It was a cold and overcast day. Nothing romantic about it. She brought with her a small wooden boat that she had built with her own hands. She filled the little boat with rose petals and rice-artifacts of a symbolic wedding. She walked out into the cold water, right up to her chest, and set that boat on fire. Then she let it go-releasing along with it her most tenacious fantasies of marriage as an act of personal salvation. Christine told me later that, as the sea took away the Tyranny of the Bride forever (still burning), she felt transcendent and mighty, as though she were physically carrying herself across some critical threshold. She had finally married her own life, and not a moment too soon.
So that’s one way to do it.
To be perfectly honest, though, this kind of brave and willful act of self-?selection was never modeled for me within my own family’s history. I never saw anything like Christine’s boat as I was growing up. I never saw any woman actively marrying her own life. The women who have been most influential to me (mother, grandmothers, aunties) have all been married women in the most traditional sense, and all of them, I would have to submit, gave up a good deal of themselves in that exchange. I don’t need to be told by any sociologist about something called the Marriage Benefit Imbalance; I have witnessed it firsthand since childhood.
Moreover, I don’t have to look very far to explain why that imbalance exists. In my family, at least, the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-? sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love. As the psychologist Carol Gilligan has written, “Women’s sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women is to see themselves in a relationship of connection.” This fierce instinct for entwinement has often caused the women in my family to make choices that are bad for them-to repeatedly give up their own health or their own time or their own best interests on behalf of what they perceive as the greater good-perhaps in order to consistently reinforce an imperative sense of specialness, of chosenness, of connection.
I suspect this may be the case in many other families, too. Please be assured that I know there are exceptions and anomalies. I myself have personally witnessed households where the husbands give up more than the wives, or do more child rearing and housekeeping than the wives, or take over more of the traditional feminine nurturing roles than the wives-but I can count those households on exactly one hand. (A hand that I now raise, by the way, to salute those men with enormous admiration and respect.) But the statistics of the last United States Census tell the real story: In 2000, there were about 5.3 million stay-?at-?home mothers in America, and only about 140,000 stay-?at-?home dads. That translates into a stay-?at-?home-?dad rate of only about 2.6 percent of all stay-?at-?home parents. As of this writing, that survey is already a decade old, so let’s hope the ratio is changing. But it can’t change fast enough for my tastes. And such a rare creature-the father who mothers-has never been a character anywhere in the history of my family.
I do not entirely understand why the women to whom I am related give over so much of themselves to the care of others, or why I’ve inherited such a big dose of that impulse myself-the impulse to always mend and tend, to weave elaborate nets of care for others, even sometimes to my own detriment. Is such behavior learned? Inherited? Expected? Biologically predetermined? Conventional wisdom gives us only two explanations for this female tendency toward self-?sacrifice, and neither satisfies me. We are either told that women are genetically hardwired to be caretakers, or we are told that women have been duped by an unjustly patriarchal world into believing that they’re genetically hardwired to be caretakers. These two opposing views mean that we are always either glorifying or pathologizing women’s selflessness. Women who give up everything for others are seen as either paragons or suckers, saints or fools. I’m not crazy about either explanation, because I don’t see the faces of my female relatives in any of those descriptions. I refuse to accept that the story of women isn’t more nuanced than that.
Consider, for instance, my mother. And believe me-I have been considering my mother, every single day since I found out I would be marrying again, since I do believe that one should at least try to understand one’s mother’s marriage before embarking on a marriage of one’s own. Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family’s history. It’s almost as though we have to look at the story in 3-D, with each dimension representing one unfolding generation.
While my grandmother had been a typical Depression-?era farmwife, my mother belonged to that generation of women I call “feminist cuspers.” Mom was just a tiny bit too old to have been part of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. She had been raised to believe that a lady should be married and have children for exactly the same reason that a lady’s handbag and shoes should always match: because this was what was done. Mom came of age in the 1950s, after all, during an era when a popular family advice doctor named Paul Landes preached that every single adult in America should be married, “except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective.”
Trying to put myself back into that time, trying to understand more clearly the expectations of marriage that my mother had been raised with, I ordered online an old matrimonial propaganda film from the year 1950 called Marriage for Moderns. The film was produced by McGraw-?Hill, and it was based on the scholarship and research of one Professor Henry A. Bowman, Ph.D., chairman of the Division of Home and Family, Department of Marriage Education, Stephens College, Missouri. When I stumbled on this old relic, I thought, “Lordy, here we go,” and I set myself up to be fully entertained by a bunch of tacky, campy, postwar drivel about the sanctity of the home and hearth-starring coiffed actors in pearls and neckties, basking in the glow of their perfect, model children.
But the movie surprised me. The story begins with an ordinary-?looking young couple, modestly dressed, sitting on a city park bench, talking to each other in quiet seriousness. Over the image, an authoritative male narrator speaks about how difficult and terrifying it can be “in the America of today” for a young couple even to consider marriage, given how rough life has become. Our cities are haunted by “a social blight called slums,” the narrator explains, and we all live in “an age of impermanence, an age of unrest and confusion, under the constant threat of war.” The economy is troubled, and “rising living costs vie against flagging earning power.” (Here, we see a young man walking dejectedly past a sign on an office building reading NO JOBS AVAILABLE, DO NOT APPLY.) Meanwhile, “for every four marriages, one ends in divorce.” It’s no wonder, then, that it’s so difficult for couples to commit to matrimony. “It is not cowardice that gives people pause,” the narrator explains, “but stark reality.”
I could not quite believe what I was hearing. “Stark reality” was not what I had expected to find here. Hadn’t that decade been our Golden Age-our sweet national matrimonial Eden, back when family, work, and marriage were all sanctified, straightforward ideals? But as this film suggested, for some couples, at least, questions about marriage were no simpler in 1950 than they have ever been.
The film specifically highlights the story of Phyllis and Chad, a recently married young couple trying to make ends meet. When we first meet Phyllis, she’s standing in her kitchen, washing dishes. But the voice-?over tells us that only a few years earlier, this same young woman “was staining slides in the pathology lab at the university, making her own living, living her own life.” Phyllis had been a career girl, we are told, with an advanced degree, and she had loved her work. (”Being a bachelor girl wasn’t the social disgrace it was when our parents called them spinsters.”) As the camera catches Phyllis shopping for groceries, the narrator explains, “Phyllis didn’t marry because she had to. She could take it or leave it. Moderns like Phyllis think of marriage as a voluntary state. Freedom of choice-it’s a modern privilege and a modern responsibility.” Phyllis, we are told, volunteered for marriage only because she decided that she wanted a family and children more than she wanted a career. That was her decision to make, and she stands by it even though her sacrifice has been a significant one.
