On Divorce Cheerleading, Women’s Happiness, and Queer Relationship Real Talk

Sometimes you read a book and you immediately feel like, 'I have to talk to someone about this!' That’s how I felt after reading Lyz Lenz’s memoir/manifesto, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life. I definitely recommend reading it if you are interested in equal partnership and the social failures that make life, especially for mothers, so hard, regardless of your marital happiness or marital status.

What I found revolutionary about this book is that even modern, progressive, feminist takes on divorce are often firmly in the self-help realm: 'If, after trying a million ways to make your relationship better, (and we have a robust self-help industry you can buy into for this) you decide to get divorced, here are some ways to try to make the best of it.' This book is unabashedly, unapologetically pro-divorce.

It makes a compelling case that divorce is awesome and a totally acceptable choice in a lot of scenarios, and it shouldn't just be reserved for 'cardinal sin' behavior. This is such a juicy topic, that I invited some of my colleagues here at Better Life Lab to dive into it with me in a roundtable chat format (which we conducted over Slack.) All of us think about caregiving relationships, gender equity, and work-family justice in our professional lives, and we all have pretty different personal demographics and life experiences which I thought would make for a robust conversation. I hope you enjoy this edited and condensed version of our conversation.

MEET THE ROUNDTABLE:

Katherine Goldstein (She/her): 40, Cis, married to a man for 11 years, have three children together. We are both deeply committed to the idea of equal parenting and equal partnership, which I see as a constant rather than a one-off conversation as realities have shifted a lot through our career changes, moves, and adding more children to our family.

Haley Swenson (She/her): 37, Queer, cis, in a domestic partnership with a man for 8 years in her 20s, now married to a devoted feminist lady. Working part-time and doing the bulk of child care due to financial constraints.

Julia Craven (she/her): 31, Sadly, I'm cis hetero. It’s the worst thing about me. Was in a very serious relationship with a cishet man for 7 years. Coincidentally, I’ve never dated outside my race. Very on the fence about having kids because, I recently realized, I’ve never met a partner with whom I'd be willing to risk my life—literally and speaking in terms of my current freedom— to bring a child into this world. I’m open to that changing, and I’m open to it not changing.

Jasmine Heyward (they/them): 26, Queer, non-binary, has never been in a serious relationship with a cis person (coincidence not T4T). Also studies dysfunctional family dynamics, and therefore comes from a more theoretical perspective. Breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma by not having my own kids.

Katherine Goldstein: All right everyone, let’s get started. What was one argument Lynz made in the book that has stuck with you?

Haley Swenson: When you reach your late 30s, conversations about marriage and its value and what it means to have a happy one are all around. And, as Lenz notes extensively, there's so much intellectual and political chatter about the importance of marriage and the perils of divorce, and that just doesn't square with my friends and family members; and even personal experiences, where divorce has been liberating. There's something so refreshing about a book coming on the scene to say hey, divorce is great! More people, especially women, should probably get one! It's like, ‘Wow, now we can have the real conversation,’ the one based on reality that takes women's happiness seriously.

Katherine Goldstein: I think there are a lot of women who will read this book and it will be a turning point in them choosing to get divorced.

Julia Craven: The overarching argument is what stuck with me the most—that marriage, for many women, is a hellhole. I’ve never been married, which is an important caveat, but I’ve been in a long-term relationship (seven years) that slowly ate away at my individuality and my singleness in ways I never imagined it would. That relationship didn’t make marriage seem appealing.

I’m also pro-divorce because I saw how well it worked out for my Mama. But even though I’m pro-divorce, I’m not in the camp that dismisses marriage altogether. I think marriages can be happy and healthy!

Jasmine Heyward: I think I'm deeply deeply skeptical of marriage and that feeling is much stronger than any sort of feeling I have toward divorce specifically. And that's regardless of the gender of the people involved.

Haley Swenson: Lenz's husband in particular was almost cartoonishly bad, to me! I'd be advising girlfriends to consider a divorce for any one of his many faults--but hiding her feminist possessions and making her think she'd lost them was jaw-dropping.

Katherine Goldstein: She completely makes it seem like most marriages are hellholes. Setting aside her own story, in which she needed to get divorced, one tension for me is that while I like her emphasis on women valuing their personal happiness and claiming it as a real priority, I also think Americans are too individualistic and obsessed with unrealistic standards of happiness. One person cannot be everything to you! You can't be maximally happy all the time! That's OK! That doesn't mean everyone needs to get divorced. What do you all think?

Haley Swenson: I'm with you Katherine about happiness, in general! But why does it always seem women are compromising their happiness and men aren't? And that's not just anecdotal. So much time use research shows this--women will sacrifice leisure time constantly in marriage, whereas men rarely do, even with young children and busy jobs, for example.

Katherine Goldstein: That's a great point, Haley. What has happiness sacrifice looked like for you with relationships with men and women?

Haley Swenson: I've been in long-term relationships with men and with women. I didn't realize until my current relationship with my wife just how many times I bit my tongue and put my own needs and wants second to keep the peace in my former relationships with men. One part that really resonated with me was when Lenz described putting off her career goals, her need for help around the house, and her desire to travel. I think those points will resonate with lots of women.

Katherine Goldstein: Another question for the group to chew on: Were there points of the book that you found unconvincing? Or topics you felt she didn’t explore enough?

Jasmine Heyward: I spent 15 minutes in a bar talking to people I had just met about how unhinged the 'changing your last name' bit is.

Haley Swenson: I found myself unconvinced at times when she shifted between her own bad marriage and a critique of marriage in general, and not because I think marriage is a perfect institution or even one worth defending from a sociological perspective. I think there's a lot of evidence, from historians like Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Cott, that heterosexual marriage has changed tremendously over the years. It was clear hers wasn't going to get any better, but this is an institution that can be, and has been changed in profound ways. Collapsing the many historical examples of bad or unfair marriage practices, like coverture [a legal status where a married woman was consider to be under her husband’s authority], with today's marriage and her marriage today, felt like too big a stretch.

Katherine Goldstein: I don't feel like she explored the serious economic devastation and long-term poverty some women experience with divorce. She has a story about not having enough money for the kid's school supplies and asking her parents for some, but I don't feel like she grappled enough with this. For example, is leaving a mediocre marriage worth having to live in your car or a shelter? Also, there are serious long-term economic impacts: elderly divorced women are five times as likely to be poor compared to elderly married women. I don't know the answer to these hard questions, but I wish she'd explored it more.

Jasmine Heyward: As a person who works on trauma a lot, and therefore maybe situations like abuse/domestic violence more often, I am always going to ask what about the people who don't have strong family and friend networks anymore possibly BECAUSE their partner intentionally isolated them??

Julia Craven: That was a glaring oversight, in my opinion.

Katherine Goldstein: Haley and Jasmine, Lenz holds up queer relationships as the gender egalitarian paradise we all should aspire to. What was your take on Lenz's praise?

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Jasmine Heyward: I found it very [clearly from the perspective] of an elder millennial who lives in Iowa. The coastal elites generally dominate the convo, so fair enough, but it's not aligned with the world I live in, like at all. Example: U-Hauling [a jokey term that refers to how lesbians want to move in together very early in a relationship] probably isn't a thing in an environment where being out at all is higher stakes.

Katherine Goldstein: Haley, you've recently written in Slate about how social and policy forces can make it hard for queer couples to achieve equal partnerships too.

Haley Swenson: It's funny because over the years I have myself said how different, fairer, and healthier my queer marriage is than my heterosexual relationships in my 20s. And there's some research that backs that up. But since we became parents, it feels like things have started to look and feel more 'normative' than not. And that's not because we became traditionalists. That's what I wrote about in Slate. Queer parents have to juggle child care expenses, and tough financial circumstances just like straight ones.

Lenz points to queer friends as an alternative to the heterosexual marriage model, and it's true we do have the freedom of escaping the highly gendered scripts for how to get things done. But we put our pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else, and trust me, we haven't found a way to sidestep the really hard questions and the need for sacrifice at times.

This relates to your point about poverty as a consequence of divorce, Katherine. Economic and policy conditions are a huge barrier to equality for all of us, and I don't think divorce gets you any closer to overcoming those than being queer does. Traditional marriage roles are part of the problem, but they aren't the whole problem.

Katherine Goldstein: Ok y'all, since we work at a think tank, let's talk policy. Lynz explores the history and public policy implications of how marriage works in America, some of which was really eye-opening to me. What did you all learn or what stuck out to you about some of the social policies she discusses in the book?

I'd always kinda rolled my eyes at 'marriage promotion' as a policy priority that has been robustly funded to the tune of billions, under Republican and Democratic administrations. But what I didn't realize is that money for this has been used INSTEAD of creating robust, universal safety nets for all kinds of families. This was infuriating to me.

The argument that ‘marriage keeps people out of poverty’ and therefore we don't need other things to keep people out of poverty showcases that America has a kind of a ‘marriage supremacy' culture, beyond just the tax breaks people get.

Haley Swenson: I will never cease to be shocked by how recently marriage operated legally to subsume a woman's identity under a man's. The surname name change is maybe the last remaining vestige of that. Given how recently married women could have their own line of credit [1974] or how recently men could abuse and even rape their wives [marital rape wasn’t outlawed in every state nationwide until 1993], it's absolutely astonishing how romanticized marriage still is in our culture at large.Why don't the marriage promotion think tanks ever stop and explore whether there's some relationship between this history and the fact that women are disproportionately likely to initiate divorce? It's again erasing women's happiness and well-being in favor of some larger political and economic pursuit. Welfare reform in the 90s took money directly out of single mothers’ bank accounts and gave it to unproven marriage promotion efforts!

Jasmine Heyward: I'm reading a book about violence prevention programs and it highlights this quote from George H. W. Bush where he touted a new approach to social support that would be a huge sea of charities, nonprofits, etc. that would be 'a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky' specifically instead of having a government-funded social safety net. (This was 1988). I think this reflects a libertarianism that is also tied to this whole idea of promoting the nuclear family unit instead of a social safety net.

Katherine Goldstein: It’s also a way to inject a 'traditional' Christian worldview into our public policy.

Haley Swenson: Can I recommend this piece from the New Yorker about these programs? [Journalist Katherine Boo reports on how hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on these efforts in the early 2000s. ]

Julia Craven: So, I have a slightly alternative look at marriage. I agree with everything y’all have said about 'marriage supremacy,' but I also think about this and how it works within a Black historical context.

Black people haven’t always been allowed to marry someone on our own terms, if we were permitted to marry at all. Plus, Black women have never been economically submissive and have always worked outside the home. So, while I’m 100% on board with calling 'marriage supremacy' to task and getting rid of the nuclear family as an ideal, I don’t know how well Lyz’s argument applies to me.

Haley Swenson: Julia, great point! She does talk about women of color and how Black Americans in particular have been excluded from marriage at various points, but she doesn't dive deep into how these experiences of marriage vary. At times it felt like she was only using these data points to bolster her thesis, rather than really incorporating them into her understanding of the institution. I mean, if you look at how low marriage rates are in Black communities, doesn't it suggest marriage has already lost its supremacy among many families? How does she square that with the notion that it's so dominant?

Katherine Goldstein: I want to hear more about this, Julia!

Julia Craven: Statistically speaking, 79% of Black women are the breadwinners for their families. And to top it all off — the same welfare structure that promoted marriage operated as a means to destroy that opportunity for Black women by keeping them in poverty through reduced benefits.

Katherine Goldstein: Could you imagine choosing marriage feeling like a liberated choice for yourself?

Julia Craven: No, but only because marriage doesn’t factor into my liberation politics. It might be for some people, but it isn’t for me. Should I get married, it’ll be because I want to, because I love that person, and because—and this isn’t a popular take—I understand the social value of codifying a long-term relationship.

I AM NOT SAYING THAT THE LAST PART IS RIGHT, but that’s the society we live in. And it’s something I think about.

Haley Swenson: I think I share with Lenz the feeling that there should be viable economic paths for people who don't want to be married for whatever reason. But I think there's another step we have to take, that she doesn't make in the book, which is to disentangle the social safety net and property from marriage, in order for it to truly be a 'choice,' meaning it's accessible to all but not necessary. Who would get married under those conditions? Why call it marriage and why codify it when you can just be together and committed with all the same rights? I think pro-marriage intellectuals should consider that question. If marriage is so positive, it should be free of coercion. Nobody's livelihood or rights should hang in the balance. One thing Lenz shows very successfully in this book is that even though much has changed since coverture, coercion is still at play for many many people, women especially.

Lyz Lenz’s book, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life is available whenever books are sold.