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 Ms 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.”
Ms 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, anatomised 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 Ms Haag’s method – which entails interviewing about 50 people, and using online surveys, and going undercover on websites 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.
Of course marriages are affected by the culture, by the particular pressures of time and place, but measuring and analysing that effect require a level of nuance and depth not mustered here.
Many readers will be put off by the cute names and categories Ms 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 capitalising: “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 Ms Haag is far more interested in semi-happy women than in semi-happy men. She objects to the workhorse wife supporting a dreamy man, 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.
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What is clear is that Ms Haag harbours 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 Ms Friedan named was not “marital melancholy,” per se, but the entrenched political, social and economic oppression of women, but never mind. The difference between Ms Haag’s book and Ms Friedan’s – aside from the comparative seriousness, substance and originality of Ms Friedan’s venture – is that political language did help illuminate Ms Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” whereas in Ms 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. Ms 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. 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.
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 Ms 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 Ms 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 Ms 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.
MARRIAGE CONFIDENTIAL
Pamela Haag
Harper/HarperCollins Publishers
327 pages; $25.99
©2011 The New York Times News Service