Observer Magazine: TILL LIFE US DO PART: After 20 years, two children and one affair, Sandra Tsing Loh finally called a halt to her marriage. It was too much work and too little sex. So why she asks does any woman still risk lifelong commitment on something as flimsy as love
BYLINE: Sandra Tsing Loh
SECTION: OBSERVER MAGAZINE PAGES; Pg. 32
LENGTH: 3452 words
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 rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day - literally during a five o'clock counselling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks - when given the final choice by our long-time family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realised. . . 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 her book 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 pay the bills; I can refinance the house at the best possible interest rate; I can drive my husband to the airport; in his absence I can sort his mail; I can be home to let the plumber in on Thursday between nine and three; I can make dinner conversation with any family member; I can ask friendly questions about anybody's day; 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 childcare 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 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 up, isn't the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?
I sense you picking up the first stone to hurl, even if you yourself may be twice or even three times divorced. Just because marriage didn't work for us doesn't mean we don't believe in the institution. Just because our own marital track records are mixed doesn't mean our hearts don't lift at the sight of our daughters' Tiffany-blue wedding invitations. After all, we can easily arrange to sit far from our exes, across the flower-bedecked aisle, so as not to roil the festive day. Just because we know that nearly half of marriages end in divorce - including perhaps even those of our own parents (my dearest childhood wish was not just that my parents would divorce, but also that my raging father would burst into flames) - doesn't mean we aren't confident ours is the one that will beat the odds.
Rachel is one of the women I regularly dine with, now that I have a divorced person's oddly relaxed - oddly civilised? - joint-custody schedule. It has been almost 10 years since I dined with adults on a weekly basis. My domestic evenings have typically revolved around five o'clock macaroni cheese under bright lighting and then a slow melt into dishes and SpongeBob. . . because yet another of my marital failings was that I was never able to commit to a nanny. Even though my husband and I both drew full-time incomes, I, as a writer, worked at home and hence was ambivalent, because if I had daily in-house help, what was my role as a mother? Would I be emotionally displaced? Also, I secretly worried that using domestic help was exploitative - recall Barbara Ehrenreich's dictum that she'd never let another woman scrub her toilets. Yeah, these are the various postfeminist hurdles that stretched before me at 2am as I lay awake in our bed, contorted not just by cats but by two children kicking me from both sides - Exhibit A of lazy, undisciplined attachment parenting.
Imagine driving with me now to Rachel's house for our new fortysomething social hobby - the Girls' Night dinner. Leap not from my car, even though I realise - 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. It certainly has been for Judith S Wallerstein (married more than 48 years, as the jacket flap indicates), co-author with Sandra Blakeslee of the 1995 book The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts . Through close observation of 50 happily married couples, the authors identified four templates for lasting nuptial success. The Romantic Marriage thrives on the spark of love that never dies. (Think of those affectionate eightysomethings in convalescent homes, still holding hands.) The Rescue Marriage features partners who fit each other like lost puzzle pieces, healing each other from mutual childhood traumas. (And then there are those shrieky co-dependent pairs: think of fiercely attached couples whose commitment is cemented by a commitment to unwholesome habits. Said a friend of his seventysomething parents, who sally off to their frequent cruises with huge mouthwash bottles filled with gin: "What they share is an enthusiasm for drinking.") The Traditional Marriage succeeds because the man works while the woman runs the home, a clear and valuable division of labour.
Today, the most common type of marriage is the Companionate Marriage, in which husband and wife each have a career, and they co-parent and co-housekeep according to gender-free norms they negotiate. Three decades ago, in their 1972 runaway bestseller, Open Marriage , Nena and George O'Neill suggested that such a modern arrangement might even include sexual freedom. But as we all know, the Sexually Open Marriage fizzled with the lava lamp. How, then, has marriage evolved? In what sorts of partnerships do we find ourselves in the 21st century?
Enter with me, finally, the home of my friend Rachel. (I must now pause to announce that I've carefully disguised some of the individuals whose lives we're about to dissect.) Rachel, 49, an environmental lawyer, is married to Ian, 48, a documentary film editor. They have two sons, nine and 11. Rachel is cooking dinner for three of us: Ellen (a writer, married with children), Renata (violinist, single, lithe and prowling at 45) and me. Rachel is, more accurately, reheating dinner; the dish is something wonderfully subtle yet complex, like a saffron-infused porcini risotto, that Ian made over the weekend and froze for us, in Tupperware neatly labelled, because this is the sort of thoughtful thing he does. Ian's always perfecting some polenta or bouillabaisse. If someone requests a cheeseburger, he will fire back with a fluffy creation of marbled Angus beef, Stilton and homemade ketchup. Picture him in bike shorts (he's a cyclist), hovering over a mandala of pots that are always simmering, quietly simmering. To Ian's culinary adventurousness, Rachel attributes the boys' sophisticated taste buds - they eagerly eat everything: curry, paella, seaweed, soba noodles. My own girls are strictly macaroni-cheese-centric (but I've been told in therapy not to keep beating myself up over the small things).
Since her own home fires seemed to roar so warmly, I was hesitant to hit Rachel with news of my breakup, and it is true that her first reaction was a degree of disbelief and horror even more pronounced than everyone else's in our village of long-time marrieds. "But what about the children?" she wailed. I explained that since their parents had been in parallel motion since they were born, the girls appeared - on the surface at least - to be unfazed. On top of my musician husband's roadwork, some years I'd logged 200 shows as a theatre performer, carrying my babies in buckets to hotel rooms. In addition, when my girls' cousins - at ages six, five and two - suddenly lost their mother through illness, we had done an emergency move-in with my brother for two years (while my husband remained on the road), so my girls were more used to sitting down to dinner with an extended family tribe than with one father and one mother. Now primary school age, my children seem relatively content as long as they remain in their own house, their own beds, and their own school, with Mom and Dad coming and going as usual (and when Dad's in the house, I pick them up from school every day so they always see me). Their most ardent daily fixations continue to be amassing more Pokemon cards and getting a dog named Noodles to add to their menagerie of five fish and two cats, Midnite and Cuteface.
But it is now our second Girls' Night dinner since my horrifying announcement, and Rachel has eschewed Ian's customary wine-club Bordeaux and is mixing some alarmingly strong martinis.
Leaning forward heavily across the bar, she swirls her glass and huskily drops the bomb: "I have to tell you - since we talked, I too have started thinking divorce." "No!" we girls exclaim. With a stab of nausea, I suddenly feel as though now that I've touched my pool of friends with my black pen, a cloud of ink is enveloping them.
"You can't!" Renata cries. "Ian - he's the
perfect father! The perfect husband! Look at this. . . kitchen!"
It's true: the kitchen is a prime example of Ian's contribution to their union. He based the design of the remodel on an old farmhouse kitchen they saw during their trip to Tuscany, and of course - carpentry being another of his hobbies - he did all the details himself, including building the shelves. One of the room's marvels is how ingeniously and snugly all the speciality kitchenware is housed - the hanging copper pots, the garlic press, the mandolin, the lemon zester, the cafetiere. . .
"Ian won't have sex with me," Rachel says flatly. "He has not touched my body in two years. He says it's because I've gained weight." Again, we stoutly protest, but she goes on. "And he thinks I'm a bad mother - he says I'm sloppy and inattentive."
The list of violations unfurls. Last week Rachel mistakenly gave the wrong medication to the dog, a mistake Ian would never make. She also forgot to deglaze the saucepan and missed the window to book the family's flights on Expedia, whose chiming bargains Ian meticulously tracks.
Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her £ 80,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling ice cream. The main breadwinner, Rachel is really the Traditional Dad, but instead of being handed her pipe and slippers at six, she appears to be marooned in a sexless remodelling project with a passive-aggressive Competitive Wife.
Rachel had even asked Ian point-blank: "Do you want a divorce?" And Ian said absolutely not - they must show discipline and work at the marriage (again with the work!), since any domestic upset could negatively affect the boys, who were now facing a particularly fraught time at their new school, where they have an extraordinarily challenging roster of extracurricular activities and a quarterly testing schedule.
"You know, it's funny," says Ellen, after a moment of gloom. (Passing note: Ellen has been married for 18 years, and she also, famously, never has sex. There were the hot 20s with Ron and the making-the-babies 30s, and in the 40s there is. . . nothing. Ellen had originally picked Ron because she was tired of all the bad boys, and Ron was settle-down husband material. What she didn't know was that after the age of 38, thanks to Mr Very Settled-Down, she was never going to have regular sex with a man again.)
"When marriage was invented," Ellen continues, "it was considered to be a kind of trade union for a woman, her protection against the sexually wandering male. But what's happened to the sexually wandering male?"
In our parents' era, the guy hit 45, got the toupee, drove the red Porsche and left his
family for the young, hot secretary. We are unable to imagine any of the husbands driving anything with fewer than five seat belts.
"Ron only goes as far as the den," Ellen says. "He has his internet porn bookmarked on the computer."
Of the four of us, Renata has the fastest-thrumming engine, as evidenced by her rabid in-the-moment sex-tryst texting ("omg he flyz in 2nite @ 2 am!!!"). One imagines a string of men toppled behind her in ditches like crashed race cars. "My problem is, I'm a dopamine freak!" She waggles her hands in the air. "Dopamine!"
"Helen Fisher!" Ellen exclaims, pointing at her.
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. (In stretches of four years, to be exact, approximately the time it takes to
get one kid safely through infancy.) 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: oestrogen, then oxytocin.
Fisher reviewed personality data from 39,913 members of Chemistry.com. Explorers made up 26% of the sample, Builders 28.6%, Directors 16.3%, Negotiators 29.1%. 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!" (Ron literally is a builder - like Ian, he crafts wonderful shelves and also, of course, cooks.) But what can Ellen do? Explorer-Explorer tends to be one of the most unstable combinations, whereas Fisher suspects "most of the world's 50-year marriages are made by Builders who marry other Builders".
Some of us stay married because we're in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 70s parents, who made such a hash of it. What looks appealing to us now, in an increasingly frenetic, digital world, is the 1950s marriage. Writes Karen Karbo, in Generation Ex , reminiscing about her mother's evening routine of serving Old-fashioneds to her dad by the pool: "At the turn of the millennium, our marriages and remarriages bear almost no resemblance to these single-paycheque, cocktail-hour unions. Once considered sexist and monotonous, these staid marriages are emblems of an easier time. What seemed too dull and constricting a mere 15 years ago now looks luxurious, like those huge gas-guzzling cars with all that chrome and the tuck-and-roll seats."
Some of us stay married because along with fancy schools, taekwondo lessons and home-cooked organic food, the two-parent marriage is another impressive - and rare - attainment to bestow on our fragile, gifted children.
Some of us stay married because. . . what else is there? A lonely apartment and a hotplate?
That said, it's clear that females are dissatisfied - more and more, divorce seems to be initiated by women. If marriage is the Old World and what lies beyond is the New World, it's the apparently stable men (comfortable alone in their postfeminist den with their Cook's Illustrated and their porn) who are Old Worlders, and the Girls' Night Out, questionnaire-completing women who are the questing New Worlders.
To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule "date night" only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen bitches, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored - it's a bum deal. And then our women's magazines exhort us to rekindle the romance. You rarely see men's magazines exhorting men to rekindle the romance.
So, herewith, some modest proposals. Clearly, research shows that what's best for children is domestic stability and not having to bond with, and to be left by, ever new step-parent figures. Less important is whether or not their overworked parents are logging "date night" (or feeling the magic). So why don't we accept marriage as a splitting-the-mortgage arrangement? As Fisher suggests, rekindling the romance is, for many of us, biologically unnatural, particularly after the kids come. (Says another friend of mine, about his wife
of 23 years: "My heart doesn't lift when she walks into the room. It sinks, slightly.") If
high-revving women are sexually frustrated, let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaisse and ignoring them in the home,
and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend
the kids never see. Alternately, if both spouses find life already rather exhausting, never mind chasing around for sex. Long-married
husbands and wives should pleasantly agree to be friends, to set the bedroom aglow at night by the mute opening of separate laptops and just be done with it. More than anything, aside from providing insulation from the world at large, that kind of arrangement could be the perfect way to be left alone.
As far as the children are concerned, how about the tribal approach (a natural, according to both primate and human evolution)? Let children between the ages of one and five be raised in a household of mothers and their female kin. Let the men/husbands/boyfriends come in once or twice a week to build shelves, prepare that bouillabaisse or provide sex.
Or best of all, after the breast-feeding and toddler years are through, let those nurturing superdads be the custodial parents! Let the Type A mums obsessively work, write cheques and forget to feed the dog. Let the dads then, if they wish, kick out those sloppy working mothers and run effective households, hiring the appropriate staff if need be. To a certain extent, men today may have more clarity about what it takes to raise children in the modern age. They don't, for instance, have today's working mother's ambivalence and emotional stickiness.
In any case, here's my final piece of advice: avoid marriage - or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.
