House of Eratosthenes

House of Eratosthenes

On Marriage: Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Says the flibbertigibbet, I screwed around on my husband, so I guess marriage can’t work out for anyone…plus, I get to write a column!

On marriage: Let’s call the whole thing off
Author Sandra Tsing Loh is ending her marriage. Is it time you did, too?
By Sandra Tsing Loh
updated 6:27 a.m. PT, Mon., June 22, 2009

Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we bewailed the fate of our children.

And yet at the end of the day — literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks — when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized…no. Heart-shattering as this moment was — a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history — I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in “Against Love,” and as everyone knows, good relationships take work.

Which is not to say I’m against work. Indeed, what also came out that afternoon were the many tasks I — like so many other working/co-parenting/married mothers — have been doing for so many years and tearfully declared I would continue doing. I can pick up our girls from school every day; I can feed them dinner and kiss their noses and tell them stories; I can take them to their doctor and dentist appointments; I can earn my half — sometimes more — of the money…I can administer hugs as needed to children, adults, dogs, cats; I can empty the litter box; I can stir wet food into dry.

Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother — which is to say, my failure as a wife — I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I’ve begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?
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Imagine driving with me now to Rachel’s house for our new 40-something social hobby — the Girls’ Night dinner. Leap not from my car, even though I realize — given my confessed extramarital affair, avowed childhood desire to see my father explode into flames, and carpet of tattered Happy Meal wrappers — I may not strike you as the most reliable explicator of modern marriage. Still, we forge on, and what I’d like to do now is recant for a moment and not be quite so hard on marriage, which I think is a very good fit for some people.
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[Helen] Fisher, a women’s cult figure and an anthropologist, has long argued that falling in love — and falling out of love — is part of our evolutionary biology and that humans are programmed not for lifelong monogamy, but for serial monogamy.

“Why Him? Why Her?” explains the hormonal forces that trigger humans to be romantically attracted to some people and not to others (a phenomenon also documented in the animal world). Fisher posits that each of us gets dosed in the womb with different levels of hormones that impel us toward one of four basic personality types:

The Explorer — the libidinous, creative adventurer who acts “on the spur of the moment.” Operative neurochemical: dopamine.

The Builder — the much calmer person who has “traditional values.” The Builder also “would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends,” enjoys routines, and places a high priority on taking care of his or her possessions. Operative neurotransmitter: serotonin.

The Director — the “analytical and logical” thinker who enjoys a good argument. The Director wants to discover all the features of his or her new camera or computer. Operative hormone: testosterone.

The Negotiator — the touchy-feely communicator who imagines “both wonderful and horrible things happening” to him- or herself. Operative hormone: estrogen, then oxytocin.

Fisher reviewed personality data from 39,913 members of Chemistry.com. Explorers made up 26 percent of the sample, Builders 28.6 percent, Directors 16.3 percent, Negotiators 29.1 percent. While Explorers tend to be attracted to Explorers, and Builders tend to be attracted to Builders, Directors are attracted to Negotiators, and vice versa.

Exclaims Ellen, slapping the book: “This is why my marriage has been dead for 15 years. I’m an Explorer married to a Builder!”

The nitwit. Guess Fisher forgot about that fifth one there. Poor schmucks that are married to these nitwits; they’re about to lose half their stuff because they made the awful mistake of allowing their nitwit wives to read books.

Yup, it’s really as bad as people think it is. Middle-aged married women with a Cinderella complex, angry that life isn’t perfect and stress free, get all sauced up and talk each other into divorces. Then they bury their gross wrinkly noses in hateful chick-books carefully designed to expunge any doubts about it that might remain, download some hunky stud off the innerwebs, and the poor schlub who was stupid enough to marry them loses half his stuff.

And then they become authorities on marriage, graciously counseling women who are more mature and mentally balanced than they are. Making craploads of money, if they get lucky…and still pulling in that alimony check. So that girls’-night-out wine-buying slush fund stays all slushy.

This is the kind of thing that makes me think our whole society needs a reboot. In a number of our most treasured institutions, the rules are made by whoever among us have proven themselves to be, without any doubt, the most dysfunctional.