The Not Quite Unhappy Marriage
MARRIAGE CONFIDENTIAL
By KATIE ROIPHE
The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse
Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting
the Rules
By Pamela Haag
327 pp.
Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.
How does one write a whole book on the boredom of marriage without
becoming boring oneself? Pamela Haag’s “Marriage Confidential: The
Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses and
Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules” can, in spite of its exceptionally
boppy subtitle, only partly answer that question.
The book examines the contemporary matter of what Haag variously calls
“semi-happy” or “low-conflict” or “melancholy” marriages — that is, marriages
that are not unhappy enough to break up, but not exactly happy, either. She
writes: “Often, in my own case, I really can’t tell if my marriage is woeful or
sublime. Maybe I’m just so profoundly content that it feels like unhappiness, because nirvana is dull in this way, it lacks frisson.”
Haag quite consciously casts her study of lukewarm marriage in the
tradition of grand, ambitious books like “The Lonely Crowd” and “The Feminine
Mystique”; and in that tradition, she attempts to diagnose a malaise or anxiety
that no one has yet been able to capture in words. She duly takes the solemn,
vainglorious position that no one has ever openly tackled this topic, which is
— when the subject is the restlessness of conventional marriage — particularly
far-fetched.
The idea of a crisis in the institution of marriage is a familiar one,
anatomized over the years by critics from Mary Wollstonecraft to John Stuart
Mill to Bertrand Russell. In 1918, Marie Carmichael Stopes’s best-selling
“Married Love” included the lines “There is rottenness and danger at the
foundations of the State if many of the marriages are unhappy. . . . To-day,
particularly in the middle classes . . . , marriage is far less really happy
than its surface appears.” So one can’t in fact argue that the question of the
less than “really happy” marriage is unique to our own lonely and alienated
times.
The central premise of semi-successful marriages as a new and zeitgeisty
topic is part of what makes the book feel thin. To try to pin marital
unhappiness on the times is too reductive, and Haag’s method — which entails
interviewing about 50 people, and using online surveys, and going undercover on
Web sites as a married person looking for an affair, and taking out a fake
personal ad in The New York Review of Books — yields fairly predictable,
repetitive and uninteresting anecdotes. (Though the problem here is not so much
her evidence as what she does with it.)
Of course marriages are affected by the culture, by the particular
pressures of time and place, but measuring and analyzing that effect requires a
level of nuance and depth not mustered here. Other authors have accomplished this
much more potently in “big idea” books and in fiction: take John Updike’s
dazzling meditation, in the Rabbit novels, on how the spirit of the times
affects the Angstrom family through four decades of cultural change.
Many readers will be put off by the cute names and categories Haag comes
up with: “Tom Sawyer Marriage,” “Workhorse Wife,” “McMarriage,” “Oreo
marriages,” “Subway Parent.” This cuteness enhances the research’s flimsy
women’s-magazine feel, as does the breathless capitalizing: “Sticking It Out,”
“the Big Love,” “Good Guys and Wonderful Wives.” We can almost imagine a
magazine quiz emerging from the book: “Are you a Workhouse Wife or a Life
Partner?” This is somewhat pleasing, as quizzes and categories often are, but
the rich chaos of domestic life rarely fits so neatly into these kinds of
cartoonish classifications. And if it does — if you truly wake up and say, “I’m
in a Tom Sawyer marriage!” — I’m not sure that adds much to the sum total of
self-knowledge.
One also notices that Haag is far more interested in semi-happy women
than in semi-happy men. She objects to the workhorse wife supporting a dreamy
man (“Surely, freeing women from work and drudgery undertaken always for the
sake of others — fathers, husbands, mothers, children — was the point of
feminism”), though she doesn’t get into the details of why she thinks this is
so much worse than the prevailing middle- to upper-class model of the workhorse
man supporting a stay-at-home wife.
What is clear is that Haag harbors a low-grade obsession with “The
Feminine Mystique,” which she quotes throughout. The book, she writes,
“brilliantly and consequentially named the ‘problem that has no name,’ the
vague marital melancholy that beset author Betty Friedan’s own age.” I would
have thought that the problem Friedan named was not “marital melancholy,” per
se, but the entrenched political, social and economic oppression of women, but
never mind. The difference between Haag’s book and Friedan’s — aside from the
comparative seriousness, substance and originality of Friedan’s venture — is
that political language did help illuminate Friedan’s “problem that has no
name,” whereas in Haag’s case, the problem is not fundamentally political,
despite her efforts to pull and tug it in that direction.
The book’s unhappy combination of tweeness and grandiosity (a
low-conflict marriage, one could argue) is a shame, because somewhere buried
here is the core of an interesting idea. Haag’s talk of melancholy marriage or
low-conflict marriage, of compromising with one’s happiness at all costs, will
indeed look familiar to some readers: “People who divorce from low-conflict but
sad marriages to Good Guys and Wonderful Wives get little sympathy in our
anti-divorce age.” But her anecdotes and online surveys don’t go deep enough,
and her eagerness to get on with the business of diagnosing a cultural ill
lends a kind of glibness and exteriority to her project.
Here she treads on the territory of bolder, smarter books, like Laura
Kipnis’s “Against Love” or Cristina Nehring’s “Vindication of Love” or,
to go back farther in time, Gay Talese’s “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” But
Haag’s conclusions seem hedged and tepid. For example: “I take the humanist
view that well-intentioned spouses in a marriage can contemplate a variety of
ways to make their lives together more meaningful and happy.” Is there a single
soul on earth who would dispute that final summation? It’s a pretty watery,
platitudinous place to end up. Personally, I like my critics of marriage to be
more fiery, or at least more wryly amused.
The problem with attempting to write a consequential book about “the
problem that has no name,” which ambitious feminist writers try to do every few
years, is that often the problem under consideration is a touch more trivial
than the one Friedan took on. In this case: “we are a little bit unhappy in our
marriages” — not unhappy enough to, say, get divorced, but a little bit
unhappy. Such a feeling may very well be worth commenting on, but I’m not sure
it rises to the level of “a problem that has no name” on the magnitude of the
discontent Friedan described.
It is worth noting that with the advent of opportunity, of the
transformative and revolutionary equality women have achieved over the past
decades, marriages are not necessarily happier or more successful than those of
Friedan’s restless housewives; our intimate lives remain curiously untouched,
or unredeemed, by our politics. And while one can’t help emerging from
“Marriage Confidential” feeling semi-sorry for the semi-happy people
semi-trapped in these semi-drab marriages, one also wonders whether some
problems aren’t better off without a name.
Katie Roiphe, a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
at New York University, is the author of “Uncommon Arrangements: Seven
Marriages.”
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