OUR MARRIAGES (AND NEAR MISSES)
Susan loved her boyfriend, whom she’d met in college, and her sparkling new engagement ring. Twenty-two years old and newly graduated, she was on the proper trajectory: get married, buy a house, and start having kids.
However, with the family dress—a gorgeous floor-length satin gown worn by three generations on her mother’s side—hanging in her closet and ready to be fitted, and Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette on her nightstand, Susan was having doubts. Her parents had recently divorced, the final straw coming on their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary: how romantic! Unfortunately, her parents’ relationship had modeled for her that marriage was a life sentence to be endured, not the happily-ever-after fairy tale she thought it should be. In the midst of picking out invitations and a reception hall, Susan got cold feet. She wasn’t sure she was ready for marriage, and, despite her fiancé’s disappointment, confusion, and sadness, she called off the engagement.
Vicki did not. She had just said, “I do,” when she fainted, perhaps a sign of what was to come.
It wasn’t how she pictured her wedding ceremony to be—flat on her back, in her beaded and feathered faux-suede wedding dress and scuffed Frye cowboy boots, cushioned by a thick, fragrant pine-needle bed on a Rocky Mountain trail with her new husband, sporting a top hat and overalls she’d embroidered with daisies, and about twelve friends (Vicki and her husband hadn’t even invited their parents) staring down at her and asking, “Are you okay?”
She thought she was okay, despite the fact that, at just twenty years old, she had married her boyfriend of two years. She had somewhat foolishly dropped out of college to follow him to Colorado and tied the knot for one reason—they were in love.
Never mind that they hadn’t talked about whether they wanted kids and how many, or where they were going to live, or how they were going to support themselves, or what their life goals were.
Love was enough, right?
Well, wrong. Three years later, they divorced.
While Susan’s and Vicki’s marriage stories are radically different—in part because Susan was wise enough to realize that love was not enough and she wasn’t really marriage material yet—there is one thing they both had in common: they were guided by what family, friends, and society expected of them, and what they themselves expected.
Marriage was just what people did. But that was decades ago. Surely with so many options nowadays—from cohabitation to choice parenthood to the brave souls who blend families to the rising numbers of those who celebrate solo living—that no longer holds true.
Except in many ways, it does.
When we asked an engaged couple in their twenties why they were getting married after almost three years of living together, they responded, “It’s what normal people do.”
Susan, by that account, wasn’t normal. Choosing to wait until her forties to marry for the first time, she was subjected to comments by friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers who repeatedly asked what was wrong with her. It was not considered natural to stay single for so long. Well-meaning people unwittingly tried to persuade Susan that she needed to find a husband rather than remain alone.
Of course, Vicki wasn’t quite normal by that definition either: She married and divorced not once, but twice. She met her second husband at age twenty-nine (he was thirty-six and was also divorced), married him at age thirty-one, and had their first baby at age thirty-four. This marriage was about having kids; otherwise, they would have continued to live their rather carefree life together in their Victorian flat in a trendy San Francisco neighborhood. When they divorced after fourteen years, their boys were young, nine and twelve, but they successfully co-parented them into fine young men. While no one has told her that something must be wrong with her, you can bet they think it. Most likely, they think her marriage was a “failed marriage” because it didn’t last forever. (Oddly, none of her friends gives her first marriage much credence, if any—“That marriage didn’t count,” they tell her.) Actually, Vicki believes her second marriage was a success; it gave them what they both wanted—children.
HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE
As a child of divorced parents, Susan knows firsthand how disruptive an unhappy marriage and subsequent divorce can be. When her parents split in 1981, emotional divorce support was virtually nonexistent. That experience, combined with years of working with couples in distress—whether striving to save their marriage or transition out of it—led Susan, as a licensed therapist, to channel her passion into offering support to people at perhaps one of the most crucial junctures in their lives.
What she found so striking was this: people felt incredible shame if they did not fit the marital mold. Practically everyone whose marriage ended said he or she felt like a failure or described the dissolution as a “failed marriage.” But admitting something isn’t working does not equal failure. In fact, it often takes more courage to go separate ways than it does to stay and pretend to the world that everything is fine.
Sadly, too many of us still think that way. If a marriage ends in divorce, people are all too eager to start pointing fingers at what went wrong—either the couple didn’t understand what commitment means, or they didn’t work hard enough on their marriage, or they were too focused on their own happiness, or they were too selfish or lazy.
It’s still all about blame, shame, and personal failure, instead of looking at the institution of marriage itself and asking, “Why isn’t it working well for about half of those who enter into it?” Actually, it isn’t working well for more people than that; many couples remain married in name only because the wife or husband needs the health benefits, or they own a business and it would lead to financial ruin, or they can’t afford to sell the house, or they live separate lives but decide to stick it out, unhappily, “for the kids.”
While Vicki’s parents may or may not have stayed married for the kids, they bickered so much that she often thought they would have been much happier if they divorced. At one point, her mother did move out of the house—actually, she moved to another state for about ten years. At the time, Vicki—in her self-absorbed twenties and newly married to her first husband—didn’t realize that her mother, then in her early forties, was somewhat of a rebel. It took guts for a middle-aged woman to up and leave her comfortable suburban New York City home and buy a condo in Miami—a city where she knew no one but a daughter, Vicki’s older sister—get a job, and start a new life for herself, albeit with her husband joining her once a month for a long weekend. It wasn’t until Vicki was in her late forties and twice divorced that she sat her mom down and asked her, “What was that all about?”
“I’d had enough,” was all her mother said. With many years of marriage behind her, Vicki knew what her mother meant. Eventually, her father permanently joined her mom in Florida, and they lived together in somewhat peaceful coexistence until they passed away after sixty-one years of marriage.
There are many other people like Vicki’s mother, people who are willing to change what clearly isn’t working. Couples are tweaking the institution to fit their needs even if it looks pretty much like a traditional marriage from the outside. Serial monogamy, blended families, open marriages, covenant marriages, commuter marriages—these variations-on-a-theme arrangements are already happening. We wrote The New I Do because we believe it’s time to end the blaming, shaming, and sense of failure many feel, as well as the notion that some people need to keep their marital choices in the closet lest they be judged.
We hope to change that. We hope to normalize what is already happening. And, just as important, we want to offer those who may want to marry one day—perhaps even you—or those who would like to transform their marriage, a few new marital road maps that will set them up for success. We know it won’t be easy. We’re asking you to let go of the vision you have in your head of what marriage “looks like.” Amazingly enough, a 1950s model of family persists today even though so few of us live in those sorts of families, even though we have so many more options than men and women had back then, as sociologist Stephanie Coontz has so exhaustively detailed in her books, including Marriage, a History and The Way We Never Were. We thank Coontz and other researchers who have been willing to put marriage under a microscope. We also thank those of you who not only have paid attention to the shifts in the institution of marriage but who also are willing to explore ways to make it work better for more people and who have shared your thoughts and stories with us. We have changed your names in this book, but your stories are honest and real.
A DO-IT-YOURSELF MARRIAGE
If you picked up this book, you most likely are entertaining the idea of getting married, if not immediately, then one day. Or, you are in a stagnant long-term marriage and you’re looking for creative ways to reinvent your relationship in the hopes of avoiding divorce. You probably know that there is no shortage of books on the subject, shelved as marriage-advice books. Maybe you’ve flipped through the pages on marriage tips, skimmed a chapter or two, or read an excerpt in a magazine. Even if you haven’t, you can guess what’s inside. The “secrets” those books will no doubt cover are how to improve communication, resolve conflict, manage expectations, and enhance intimacy and sex.
While we don’t have anything against books that help people discover or rediscover ideas to boost romance or communication, this is not one of those books. This is not a how-to guide to help you keep your marriage alive or exciting. And it most definitely is not a manual that offers secrets of living “happily ever after.”
This is a book about redefining marriage—your marriage, and marriage in general.
Our hope is that you will think more consciously about what kind of marriage suits you. It may look nothing like the union your parents, relatives, friends, or—heaven forbid—celebrities have. We want to challenge you to ask yourself what you truly want and need from a marriage and help you find a way to express this to your partner with honesty and clarity.
Whether you are thinking about getting married for the first and only time or if you are wondering if you should say “I do” for the second, third, fourth, or tenth time, or if you are curious about re-creating the marriage you are in, we will offer you different ways to be a couple so that whichever model you choose, you will be more likely to succeed.
If, like us, you have seen marriages around you end in separation and divorce, this book is for you. If you have seen marriages remain intact even if they’re unhappy, sex-deprived, and loveless, this book is for you. If you are questioning whether marriage is still worth it, this book is most definitely for you. And, if you’re in a marital rut, this book is for you. Couples often run to therapists or self-help books to “work” on a troubled marriage, whether to boost their communication or intimacy or to lessen their conflict. Again, those skills are nice in concept, but they don’t always work. We believe couples might want to consider renegotiating the terms of their marital contract to better fit their needs and goals as their life circumstances change.
Most couples enter marriage believing they will do things differently; they’ll be better, smarter, more intuitive, and more in tune than everyone else. But as long as they keep entering into the same marital model—traditional marriage—their good intentions will often reach the same results. We should mention that we believe in marriage. We are rooting for marriage. But we recognize that the marital model in our modern-day culture sets up too many people for failure.
“We have unprecedented latitude to define marriage in our own image, and not in our parents’ image,” notes Pamela Haag in her book Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules. The real opportunity and potential of her marriage generation, she laments, is not being taken advantage of because marriage hasn’t been redefined.
Until now, that is.