Marriage and Its Discontents

By Larry Smith, AlterNet. Posted August 17, 2004.

As men and women struggle to find a balance between careers and family, tradition and independence, lasting love and fleeting lust, they find few easy answers. "It's complicated," seems to be the best we can do when faced with the exigencies of the post-modern marriage. And yet the complaints sound very much the same: Women want their husbands to do more around the house and with the kids; men wish their wives were less involved with their every move, and both yearn for a few moments of peace, quiet, and yes, solitude.

And who better to shed light on this He said/She said discourse of marital confusion than two people married to each other. Daniel Jones and Cathi Hanauer are each editors of a collection of essays that explore the funhouse world of matrimony from the perspective of men and women, respectively.

Hanauer's "The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage" came out in 2003 and quickly became a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list. Hanauer soon after challenged her husband to put together the masculine response to Bitch. The result: "The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom," which was released earlier this year.

At the core of both Bitch and Bastard are explorations of what writer Kevin Canty describes in his unflinching essay, "The Dog in Me," as a world where "something's come loose, something's come unglued ... we no longer feel quite comfortable in our roles, no longer quite fit the people we imagine ourselves to be."

AlterNet spoke to Cathi Hanauer and Daniel Jones from their home in Northampton, MA.

"The Bitch in the House" offers a startling window into the deep- seated anger that women struggle with in their everyday lives. What led you to this project?

CATHI: Bitch came from what was on the mind of my peers – those of us who were ambitious working mothers with young children and who were feeling overwhelmed by the juggling act their lives had become. We wanted to know: How are we supposed to do it all?

We were also trying hard to grapple with co-parenting; I felt disillusioned with the way it was turning out back then. So the book began to evolve into the story of my life and what I was going through right then. And the more I looked into that, the more I realized there was a story there.

What was this anger really about? Were all women feeling it, or just working mothers of young kids? So I expanded the book to include ambitious, thinking women of all generations (ages 24 to 67) in all situations talking about the choices they'd made – what was working and what was not, in this post-feminist, supposedly egalitarian society.

"Bastards on the Couch" is, of course, a response to Bitch. When did the alarm bells go off – when did you realize that a man's point of view was sorely needed?

DANIEL: One went off when a reviewer of Bitch said about a husband of one of Cathi's contributors: "He can't be trusted with simple tasks." I knew this guy. He was an Ivy League-educated man at the peak of his profession, Someone who coached his son's little league team, cleaned the house and helped out as much as he could. And yet he couldn't be trusted with simple tasks?

In the case of Bastards, a lot of guys I knew were thinking: Where and when did I become the bad guy? I'm more involved in my children's lives than ever before. I'm supporting my wife in her career choices. I'm trying to split our responsibilities down the middle. Yet somehow I've become the bad guy.

Often they aren't the bad guys so much as they're the most convenient recipients of their wives' frustrations. But also, traditional role models are hard to shake. No matter how enlightened we all try to be, many of us spent our entire childhoods absorbing the often more traditional roles of our parents. So it's not so surprising, to me at least, that we lapse into those roles every now and then.

A lot of the problems discussed in both your books are due to children and how they turn lives upside down. You come away feeling as though having kids is a bad idea.

CATHI: For women especially – but it applies for men, too – there's a maternal instinct that conflicts directly with ambition, or at least it seems to. It's something you don't face until you have a child. You can't understand the intensity of that dilemma, and the conflicts it can cause if you're a working woman until you become a parent.

Then begins the dilemma: Am I going to work or am I going to take care of my baby? And if I have to do both – or I want to do both – how can I find the time and the energy for it? The cliché that she has two full-time jobs is true. So suddenly she's completely overwhelmed, at least when the baby is young and if she has the sort of career that's unforgiving.

Larry Smith, a board member of AlterNet's parent organization the Independent Media Institute, is the articles editor at Men's Journal magazine.

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