The following will read like a targeted assault. It’s not. (Well, maybe …) No, really. It’s not. It’s about attitudes and conventions we’ve come to accept that we used to find shameful. And while I’m aware I really go with gusto where this rant takes me, I have a larger point.
To catch everyone up: Popular blogger Sweetney tells everyone (and that would be everyone, not just those who support her in her newest romance) that she’s in love with a married man whom she said she wouldn’t get involved with until he left his wife. So he left his wife. Physical adultery? By most definitions, no, but emotional infidelity at the very least.
(And you know what? I feel icky even discussing this. It’s not my business. It shouldn’t even be on my blog, except that when these things happen in threes it’s the universe’s way of telling you, “Update your blog, bitch!”)
Muckrakestress Anna tries to point out in Sweetney’s comments that perhaps this isn’t to be celebrated. Her respectful comment is blocked, so she publishes it on her blog. Fascinating discussion takes place.
I find Sweetney’s post nauseating, as a wife, a friend of several divorced women and an adult child of divorce. It contains song lyrics that belong as embellishment on a high school notebook, not in a blog describing the destruction of someone’s marriage. (Someone who, reportedly, doesn’t read the Internet, so hey! It’s all good.) But it’s this sentence that sums up what I find repugnant about this whole (pardon me) affair:
But who is responsible for such feelings when they come unbidden and unwelcome?
YOU are, Sweetney! You, the adult, mother, co-parent, once a wife who surely can understand what this would feel like, friend, human being and did I mention adult?! Is she actually saying that when feelings exist, only the course of action is to surrender and heed its call?
When you’re 4 (or Bill Clinton), that’s called poor impulse-control. But when you’re an adult, I guess it’s all about being evolved and self-actualized and other bullshit that her sycophantic followers have bought wholesale. (WHY hasn’t a sarcasm font been invented yet? I really needed it up there on “evolved” and “self-actualized.”)
Seriously, that sentence — Who is responsible for such feelings when they come unbidden and unwelcome? Is that it, right there? The justification? Yeah, not responsible. I’d apologize, or at least feel bad a little, but, see? Not responsible. Doop-dee-doo. *Skips merrily.*
What does one wear when she thinks a sentence like that? Something gauzy straight out of Stevie Nicks’ closet, I’m picturing.
Not only is she not responsible, she’s not responsive, since she won’t post voice of reason “trollish” comments.
I can’t even touch what comes next:
The greatest love stories ever authored each tell tales of star-crossed lovers …
Give me. a fucking. break.
I know this reads like the most personal of attacks. I don’t know Tracey and I doubt I ever will. She sure as hell isn’t the only person behaving this way. She is simply someone who bought into a view about love and marriage that we’ve as a generation have been sold, a view that will damage generations to come.
This way of looking at marriage is so prevalent it’s not even thought of as unusual anymore. It’s so become an accepted inevitability that divorce and the temptation to commit adultery in some fashion will visit upon you (There it is again: It Happened to Me! I Didn’t Ask For It!) that it’s those who pause to ask, while ducking, “Um, is this something to be celebrated?” are now deemed countercultural. Or even (*pouty face*) harsh.
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If I don’t hate Tracey, then where’s all this anger coming from, you ask?
On Christmas Day, I went to see a movie, “It’s Complicated,” with my husband, the man I’d be divorcing right now if I believed the collectively accepted wisdom about love and marriage. If I believed what I believed when we first got married after living together for a few years. See, I’m not getting anything out of my marriage right now. My husband has no time for me. He doesn’t meet any of my needs: He doesn’t bring home a paycheck, his absence makes my life measurably more difficult and there’s a huge emotional distance between us. By the standards of modern American culture, this marriage has been over for a while now. I need to dump him and move on with my life. I deserve to.
Somewhere — by some grace, or maybe by witnessing other marriages break up, notably that of my own parents — I began to see how destructive this attitude is. It’s a complete misconception about the purpose and nature of marriage. If you want to feel loved, appreciated and attended to at all times — hell, even 50 percent of the time — marriage will be a grave disappointment to you.
I can’t divorce my husband any more than I can divorce my daughter. I love him. He wasn’t put here to make me feel giddy and butterfly-ie every day. Right now is my time to serve him the best I can. A better woman would actually make his life easier. Me, I’m just trying to make him laugh once a day. (I’m waiting for him to find huge piles of dirty laundry as hilarious as I do.) And stick by him, as he has when I’ve been a mess that no other man would remain married to.
So anyway, here we are on what is an unprecendented date night, seeing a movie that makes a mockery out of marriage and, even worse I think, a mockery out of divorce. Meryl Streep’s character, Jane, begins an affair with her ex-husband, Jake, who’s married to the woman (Agness) he cheated on Jane with. That woman deserves to be cheated on because she was the cheater in the first place and she had an affair while she was having an affair with Jake and that affair resulted in the now-5-year-old boy Jake is raising with Agness.
I wanted to SOL (that’s scream out loud) when Jane runs into Jake in an elevator in a medical building where he was coming from a fertility clinic. It was shorthand for: “Jake’s being punished for leaving his wife for a younger woman. The younger woman wants to have babies, and Jake doesn’t even want the child already in his charge. It’s now complicated, just as it probably was when he bailed on his first marriage — busy careers, young kids who need them, no time for it to be about the all-important me.”
Jake wants Jane back. Jane is now an empty-nester and has time to make Jake his favorite meals and lavish attention on him. Who wouldn’t want that? (Where’s the feminist outcry about this? You’d think the female fans of director Nancy Meyers would be outraged. Or is it because Alec Baldwin is so darned irresistible?)
Except, you just can’t get whatever you want, especially when marriage vows have been taken. Otherwise, what is the point of getting married? Why pledge to raise children together? Why do we make the commitment at all?
(The other things that made me nuts about this movie are legion. The sets, however, are pure shelter porn.)
There’s a scene where Jake and Jane’s three grown children find out Mom and Dad have been fooling around, and Meryl Streep has to comfort them as they all three huddle in bed together. It’s over the top, but the point is: You ripped us apart once; why would you be so cruel as to do it again?
Do I need to make the disclaimer about abuse, violence, drugs, the fact that your spouse has been operating a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme without your knowledge … yes, there may be some valid reasons for divorce. But submitting to complicated and unbidden feelings isn’t one of them.
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And this will be where I lose some of you. I attend church weekly — a Catholic church at that. That doesn’t necessarily diminish my credibility on this or any other topic. Come on — be the open-minded free-thinker you purport to be and hear me out.
I stewed about the way the movie treated broken homes, broken families, broken promises so cavalierly, even glamorizing them, for a day or so, not knowing what to do with it all. Until I heard the Sunday homily. (Wait! Don’t leave!)
This past Sunday is what is known as the Feast of the Holy Family, coming right after Christmas. The homily was short and sweet: Cherish your family. Your whole family, the crazy aunts, cousins and in-laws included. And not just when things are easy. We were given our family (and if it would make you more comfortable, if you can swallow what I’m saying more palatably, our families are given to us by, oh, let’s say, the cosmos or Mother Nature) for a reason: to teach us how to love. Not be fulfilled at all times, but to give us the grace needed to cope with difficult times and to show love to others. (And, if you’re a believer, to prepare us for what comes next, but I’ll spare you that since I know most of my readers don’t ride the same bus I do on this topic.)
And that explains why all these instances of adultery, both in the blogosphere and on screen, are offensive. Because our spouses are our family. We chose them, but they become family when we make that commitment. No one would ever write a post celebrating the fact that she came in between a parent and child. So, here it is, the point I promised I’d make but as I went on became just as doubtful as the rest of you that I’d ever get to it:
Families don’t spontaneously break up any more than they magically stay together. Someone needs to be responsible.
This morning, my husband got up with Tink at 7 and let me sleep in.