Couples are rewriting the rules of marriage.
They might have separate homes, have less sex with each other and perhaps more sex with others. They're renegotiating life based on how they want things to be and have tailored their partnerships to accommodate those desires.
Author Pamela Haag, 45, took notice.
"I saw spouses who were struggling with marriage, not having the marriages that they really wanted to have," says Haag, an independent writer and editor who lives in Baltimore with her husband and 9-year-old son. "I was trained as a historian, so I wanted to take stock of how marriage had changed over the last 50 years."
Inspired by those marriages and her own, she wrote "Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules" (HarperCollins, $25.99). The book was released Tuesday.
Haag, who has a PhD in history from Yale, says during the romantic heyday of the 20th Century, marriage pretty much had one script, and most people tried to follow it. But her book lifts the curtain on the New Age marriage that your next-door neighbors could have. Haag says these sometimes-provocative partnerships have produced semi-happy marriages, affair tolerators, new monogamists and more.
"I'm not endorsing anything," she says. "I'm providing all sorts of examples of actual couples who are happy and secure and thriving and who have a different perspective on what marriage means."
QUESTION: Your book describes several types of couples, but a lot of it focuses on the semi-happy couple. What's that couple like?
ANSWER: The semi-happy couple kind of lives in a shade of gray. These are marriages that aren't at all miserable, nor do they feel all that successful. ... One minute they can't imagine leaving their marriage, the next minute, they can't imagine staying in it. They're worried about divorce. They're not sure whether they should stick it out or if there's more, or if they should want more from life or from marriage. These are couples who generally are ambivalent, and what makes it even more interesting is that they contribute a lion's share to the divorce rate each year -- these low-conflict, but amiable marriages. It's not the couples who are screaming and throwing dishes at each other.
Q: The book describes some pretty nontraditional, New Age, even provocative types of marriage. Do you think it would scare anyone away from the altar?
A: I don't think it would scare people off. Americans are unique because we marry more than our peer countries, but we also divorce more. Forty percent of Americans think marriage is becoming obsolete, but people still believe in it, and I think that they believe in it for good reason.
But I do think that marriage is evolving, and we're living longer and healthier, so we might need to have some imagination about how to change marriages or keep them alive over the long term.
Q: Describe the rebel couples of your book's title.
A: OK, that's a term I invented for them. These are couples that are pushing the envelope but within a traditional marriage. They have a legally sanctioned traditional marriage, but maybe they're in a cohousing community. ... Or maybe they're practicing some updated version of an open marriage, or going on swinging holidays. They're, on the surface, traditional marriages, but underneath, are changing the rules a little.
Q: Why do you think so many couples end up unhappy?
A: The good news today is that we're marrying our best friends, and the bad news today is that we're marrying our best friends. For the first time in history, we're marrying people who are more like us in terms of career, education, life experiences and goals, and that's great because we get a lot of compatibility and partnership.
The challenge is that sometimes the marriage can become a very high-functioning partnership, but it loses that spark, or it loses its energy. It becomes too much like any other friendship or any other partnership.
Q: What other changes have come to marriage?
A: Well, one thing is that we marry people much later in life than in the 1950s romantic heyday. A lot of us have already come to marriage kind of heartbroken. We've already had the big romance with someone, and we might not choose to marry that person, but we had the big romance.
So, a subtle change from the romantic to the post-romantic is that people are seeking different things and have different expectations for marriage. They might want a home base. They might say marriage is virtually about stability, not the big passion and marrying the big love of your life.
With women working, that's a huge transformation in the marriage script. There are 50 different ways to organize things today in terms of breadwinning -- stay-at-home dads, stay-at-home moms, dual career -- but the challenge is fairness. Some of the post-romantic workhorses are really struggling with that sense of fairness because one spouse is ending up as the rock star of the marriage and the other spouse is the backstage roadie. That's a big challenge of our liberation.
Q: Of course I have to ask you what your husband thinks of the book.
A: Oh, he's very brave to let me write about this at all. ... We've had a shared interest in some of these questions about marriage. .... We also feel like there was so much shame attached even just to talking about mixed feelings in marriage, even though a good number of men and women have mixed feelings. So, we wanted to be a little more brave and at least share that much. I did not write a memoir, though!
To order a copy of "Marriage Confidential," go to www.pamelahaag.com.
Source: yellowbrix
