Glamorizing Divorce

Divorce, male-female friendships, and more in this week's digest

Glamorizing Divorce

Kat Rosenfield had a sparkling article over at the Free Press asking, “Does divorce make you hotter?” It’s a look at the way divorce is glamorized in our society.

I’ve been thinking lately of that party, those women, the husbands they jettisoned like so much dead weight in a mimetic frenzy of best-life-living. Maybe the men were bad and deserved it, but it strikes me that nobody ever said so. My friends didn’t talk about being unhappily married; they just thought they’d be happier divorced, and no wonder. Even as divorce has retreated from the oft-cited peak rate of 50 percent, its place in the culture has all the urgency and incandescence of a current thing.

This year, we’ve already had a glut of divorce memoirs from authors celebrity and non; a much-hyped “divorce album” from Ariana Grande; a buzzy debut novel called The Divorcées, which is set on a ’50s “divorce ranch” in Reno; a piece in The Cut, on Valentine’s Day no less, entitled “The Lure of Divorce”; and a New York Times feature about how Emily Ratajkowski has set off a booming new market for “divorce rings,” refashioned from the wearer’s old wedding band. One of them is engraved with the word badass, a detail I would have found absolutely impossible to believe had it not been accompanied by photographic evidence.

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Of course, these stories suffer from selection bias, in that they are created by and for the type of woman who sighs wistfully at the thought of divorce—as opposed to those of us who sometimes wake up sweating from nightmares in which we have inexplicably dumped our very good husbands. But they’re also a product of a popular “woman empowered by everything woman does” paradigm, where all choices made by women are a product of liberation, hence feminist, hence good. There is no error or disappointment that can’t be yass-kweened away.

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I try to imagine a world in which we’d tell a man that getting divorced made him badass, instead of a schmuck, a deadbeat, a loser who didn’t try hard enough. A world in which divorce rings for men are a thing, let alone one positively written about in The New York Times. It would never happen, of course. It’s only women who are seen as requiring this particular brand of cheerleading, who are relentlessly encouraged to reframe all their negative experiences as the best thing they ever did.

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Heaven forfend a woman admit that she made mistakes or has regrets or, worst of all, wishes she had her husband back. In this vision of feminism, marriage is a trap, divorce is a superpower, and women are not so much people as Strong Female Characters. Our therapy culture has one crucial caveat: it’s okay not to be okay, but being not okay about a man is a bridge too far.

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At their most strident, the cheerleaders for divorce wouldn’t just see every couple torn asunder in the name of women’s liberation. They would free women from one confinement, only to trap them in another—one that may be stifling and lonely in its own way, not to mention sexually frustrating and also a lot of work, especially if children are involved.

It is true that marriage has not always been an institution that served women well, and also one in which we were once pressured to participate, no matter how unhappily. This was a mistake. But it would also be a mistake to now demand that women reject marriage just as reflexively, to tell us that divorce will make us fitter, happier, and hotter.

It’s interesting, that last one: women are allegedly made more appealing by divorce, but nobody ever specifies to whom.

Click over to read the whole thing. It’s a banger.

If it lets you through the paywall, the essay at the Fence by Róisín Lanigan called “The Chic Young Divorcée” is also worth a read.

Why Can’t We Just Be Friends?

New York Magazine ran a recent article about friendship after marriage, and the female author’s problem with having her friendships with men dissipate and disappear after they married or got a girlfriend.

Much of what is written about friendships between men and women follows the plot of When Harry Met Sally: Straight men and women can’t be friends because there will always be the threat of sexual attraction. Reductionistic and old-fashioned, that theory doesn’t accurately capture my experience. I could only remember one friendship with a guy that I had cooled off because it felt inappropriate, and I’ve never picked up on any of my friends’ partners feeling threatened by me. When I turned to my female friends for solidarity and, hopefully, a more nuanced take, I was shocked by the immediate identification with my predicament.

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Many, many women I talked to repeated the implicit rule that they were allowed to stay connected to the guy friends they made before partnering but not to make new ones. This was rarely about, as the old tropes say, jealousy on the part of spouses or a clear suspicion that these relationships were destined to be sexual. Rather, it just felt not okay to build connections with men beyond acquaintance once everyone was partnered. Men also experienced this taboo in their efforts to make new female friends, something my brother Ben referred to as “not kosher.”

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“I would almost rather give up my sexual liberty than my friendship liberty,” Julia told me. She sees the social barriers that keep partnered men and women from becoming friends as akin to fear of sexual non-monogamy in that they project a desperate need to uphold the nuclear family at all costs, an aspect of married life she feels she “didn’t sign up for.” Once people have monogamously partnered up and had children, she believes, many people “become arch-conservatives who are terrified about the sanctity of family life.” Sexual monogamy is apparently not enough to protect couples — social monogamy is also demanded.

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The rewards feel palpable, I need men who are more than just love interests — or, in My Best Friend’s Wedding parlance, I need Jell-O as much as I need crème brûlée. When I begin to feel awkward or beholden to convention, I try to conjure the special joy that spending time with Brent will bring me. To repurpose another familiar line — there won’t be marriage, there won’t be sex … but, by God, there’ll be dancing.

Newsletter #25 from back in 2018 was all about the negatives that come from male-female friendships, such as falling for someone and getting stuck in the friend zone. I have a rule that I will not be 1:1 personal friends with anyone of the opposite sex.

Newsletter #25: What Do We Do About the Friend Zone?

Best of the Web

Comment: Men Only Want One Thing

Brad Wilcox: Why marriage is good for men

CNN: Australian state appoints official for ‘Men’s Behavior Change’

Phil Cotnoir: Leaning into Evangelical Re-enchantment - Includes a mention of Yours Truly

New Content and Media Mentions

I and Life in the Negative World received a number of mentions this week.

My book was featured in Warren Smith’s quarterly list of books worth noting. I discussed the book on the Family Beacon podcast, and on the second installment of my podcast with Street Talk Theology.

And there were mentions in Providence Magazine, agains in Providence Magazine, Religion Unplugged, Juicy Ecumenism, Ad Fontes Journal, and American Reformer.

If you missed it, this week’s new content:

• My podcast was with Jonathan Whitehead on the future of the Southern Baptist Convention.

• I wrote that limiting beliefs protect as well as artificially constrain us.

• And I featured some article about what went wrong with capitalism.

Cover image credit: Adele by Wikimedia Commons/Lady Lotus, CC BY-SA 4.0