Are Women Allowed to Be Happy in Their Marriages?

F or years, I resisted the idea of marriage the way I did any life outcome I was expected to deliver irrespective of want. If a piece of paper were the certifiable difference between calling a love true or false, then that love was rendered false by definition. I didn’t nurture any wedding fantasies in childhood—not the dress, not the party, not even the spouse—save for one: I stood up from the head table while the shape in a tux who sat next to me looked on in adoration. A mic appeared in my hand. Then, I gave a zingy, sexy speech that made the entire room laugh and blush and cry before it radically remade their understanding of desire. Eventually, I realized this was not a fantasy of becoming a wife. It was a fantasy of becoming a writer. Even as a younger person, I felt boxed in by the stories we tell about marriage—heterosexual marriage, in particular. The only part of it that struck me as appealing was how it handed me a captive audience—an audience to whom I hoped to explain what love really was. Decades later, when I actually did meet someone for whom I felt a desire vivid and complex enough to build a life on, I bumped up against the container of the marriage story again. After half a dozen years together, my husband and I eloped to Las Vegas—a decision that, when we first told other people, sparked a set of emotional responses far more varied than congratulations. At this point, our marriage story has become a fact I like to use to wrong-foot people because of how it departs from the expected narrative. Vegas, people say, admiringly or derisively—a moment my husband and I have come to regard as a sort of litmus test of character. This seems a fair exchange: I tell you my marriage story; you show me who you are. The canon of published writing about marriage and divorce struggles to escape our narrow ideas of the institution too. More than just revealing who the writer is, or what their marriage might be like, such stories seem to say just as much about who we are, culturally and socially, and what we value, sometimes to the point of hijacking the story itself. Marriage, to hear much of the literature tell it, is repressive, politically questionable, unoriginal, and even embarrassing. Some of these knocks are earned. But what happens when a writer wants to describe matrimony, or desire, or even interpersonal catastrophe, outside of all those terms? How can a writer make a meaningful, original intervention—one that honours the full emotional range of the relationship itself, whether its sublimity or its awfulness? “W hat story do you tell yourself about your union?” Scaachi Koul asks the reader early in Sucker Punch, her most recent collection of essays, published in February of this year. It’s a question that other books have, perhaps infamously, tried to answer. At this point, the phrase “divorce memoir” is sufficient to invoke a canon. Even as Sucker Punch situates itself within this burgeoning tradition, it also sets itself apart by resisting many of that canon’s worst tendencies. Koul, a journalist who frequently looks to her life for material, has told the story of her own union before. Her debut collection, 2017’s One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, is partly about courting and marrying her now ex. “I had told our story a thousand times,” she writes in Sucker Punch; “I wrote essays about him and me and us, and later, a book cataloguing the impossible challenge” of convincing her Indian father to accept her older white partner. The new book revisits that now-familiar story and deconstructs it with forensic attention. More than just a book about marriage or divorce, Sucker Punch is about the problem of turning those milestones into a story—how the well-rehearsed rhythms we use to talk about partnership are inadequate in capturing the truth of, and may even obscure, the real thing. In Koul’s case, this obscuring was quite literal; the professional telling and retelling kept her in the marriage longer than she wants to admit. In writing about marriage and divorce, the possible clichés are legion. Impressively, Sucker Punch resists nearly all of them. When her language slips into the breakup’s clean pre and post cleaving, Koul apologizes that she “keep[s] writing like this, separating everything into a before and an after.” “How do I tell you the story of the worst bet I ever made?” she wonders later in the book; would it be more honest if it were told with the wisdom of hindsight or from the innocent beginning? You get the sense that Koul is loath to bore her reader, but also herself—would that other writers were so self-aware. Perhaps the most seductive trap, one Koul avoids with improbable success, is the temptation to villainize her ex. Her possible causes for doing so transcend the reasons why the marriage ended. For someone like Koul, who has made a brand of being caustic in her writing, it could be easy, even natural. It would also make sense as a structural response to the first book, in which her ex was, as she describes it, the “hero.” But the book’s power is magnified by how diligently she resists taking potshots. Instead, Koul remains sincere, matter-of-fact, and relentlessly self-analytical. Sucker Punch ends up feeling exactly like the swing its title promises: a blow that lands hard, whether or not the reader has had the chance to steel herself for it. I was surprised by how many times it made me cry. W ithin the divorce memoir genre, metaphorizing marriage as a story has become a habit. This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, proclaims the title of Ann Patchett’s essay collection. To anyone who wants to know what happened when her marriage fell apart, Rachel Cusk writes in Aftermath, “I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth.” She adds, in a dry aside, “Lately I have come to hate stories,” her husband’s being that Cusk “had treated him monstrously.” Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful turns the metaphor into an entire structural principle. Throughout the book, she breaks the fourth wall with chapter titles like “A Note on Plot” and “A Note on the Author’s Intention.” In another recurring chapter, “This Moment Isn’t for You,” Smith chastises the reader for their presumptive desire—a desire that would not have occurred to this reader had I not been pre-emptively upbraided for it—to witness something on the page that she isn’t interested in depicting, like her children’s understandable upset at the drama that unfolds between their parents: “My children aren’t characters in a novel or a movie or a play,” she writes; “they’re real, and their grief is real, so this moment isn’t for you.” More than just appearing in the published work about marriage, getting meta has become part of the architecture of how we talk about the institution itself—a rhetorical trap that the marriage (or divorce) memoirist has the curious duty of having to situate themselves relative to. “Every marriage is turned into stories,” writes Haley Mlotek in No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, published a few weeks before Sucker Punch. The number of narratives is higher than two: “There are the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell our families, the ones we tell while the marriage is intact and the ones we tell after the divorce.” Mlotek is something of an expert on marriage stories. For one, she grew up around them—her mother worked as a mediator and marriage counsellor. Then, in the wake of Mlotek’s own divorce, she systematically consumes books and films and songs about the ends of relationships. On some days, she admits, all this content starts to feel repetitive. “God, I would think,” Mlotek writes, “are we really all the same?” If we are, it doesn’t bode well for the future of writing about marriage and divorce, which is already starting to feel overdetermined. This pressure to position one’s work relative to existing conversations has become strong enough to touch even some books that aren’t about divorce at all. In An Honest Woman, Charlotte Shane’s memoir about love and sex work, Shane lobs her marriage into the book like a grenade. “Any explanation of my decision to marry might sound provincial and patriarchal,” she says grandly. The explosive force of this declaration is somewhat diminished by the fact that it’s foreshadowed by the title. But even if it wasn’t, the assertion that any explanation might fall short sucks the juice out before the reader has had a chance to take a bite. Shane goes on: “Perhaps my heart, desperate for superlative expression, reached down into its own depths and in lieu of inventing something new and iconoclastic, seized upon the most banal tradition.” This disclaimer needlessly undercuts the power and the pathos of what follows: a deliriously joyful, genuinely pleasurable description of the dizzying attraction she feels for her partner, and how their commitment to one another intensifies that attraction rather than inhibits it. Marriage can be, Shane discovers, actually kind of hot—perhaps the real iconoclastic confession, if one the book stumbles into sideways. Her husband jokes that he’s so attracted to her that it seems like it shouldn’t be allowed. When he says my wife, Shane experiences “a giddy thrill, like he’s tickling me or whispering something naughty.” If there’s anything shocking about Shane’s admission, it’s the idea that it is so unusual as to merit prefatory remarks. And yet, the reason Shane gives for her union is perhaps the best and most understandable one there is: desire. What finer explanation could there be? A similar set of tensions played out in a review of Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small, an impassioned argument for aesthetic maximalism across cultural spheres. In one essay, Rothfeld makes the case for genuinely transformative erotic encounters, including within marriage, that exist beyond our established idioms for talking about sex. She also writes, in a manner both breathless and elliptical, about her desire for her husband. In a write-up of the book in The Hedgehog Review, reviewer Catherine Tumber reads Rothfeld’s celebration of eros as a straightforward admission that Rothfeld is in an open marriage—something that Rothfeld neither says nor suggests and is not factually accurate. The assumptions that undergird such reasoning—that surely the only way to make a marriage exciting is to open it up; that declamations of feminine desire can only be anointed radical if prefaced by “my husband can’t make me come”—suggest that our restricted imaginary for telling marriage stories hasn’t just torqued the way people write about them but the way they get read too. (The Review has since corrected the article and published a substantive response from Rothfeld.) “More has been written about how relationships don’t work, than about how they do,” writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in Monogamy. “We have virtually no language, other than banality, to describe the couple who have been happy together for a long time.” This is a shame, both for the ways it restricts the stories we’re able to tell and, perhaps, the possibilities we imagine for the ways we relate to one another. Even in pop culture, the figure of the “wife guy” and his uxorious spousal proclamations has become a punchline. We “husband guys” lack comparable representation. What story do you tell yourself about your union, as Koul puts it, is an open-ended one. Like any marriage, there are more than two ways to tell it. Marriage and monogamy might be bizarrely freighted cultural institutions and behaviours. To enter them at all, let alone write about them, demands that any participant reconcile it with their personal sense of ethics. But that does not mean the form of the story itself should become monogamous. In fact, it should mean quite the opposite. Open it up.The post Are Women Allowed to Be Happy in Their Marriages? first appeared on The Walrus.