Transcript: Larissa Phillips
An interview with the American essayist and farmer
Men and women don’t seem very happy these days. They are dissatisfied with dating, polarized politically, trash talking each other online, and both marriage and fertility are on the decline. What is responsible for this rift between men and women? My guest on the program this week has been mulling this question over, and she says we might want to reconsider some of the assumptions of feminism — starting with the idea that marriage and family are “a trap.”
Larissa Phillips is an American essayist and the founder of the Volunteer Literacy Project. With her husband, she runs the Honey Hollow Farm in upstate New York.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It’s fun to have you on the show. For listeners, we met a while back at an off-the-record Unspeakeasy retreat hosted by our friend Meghan Daum. We can’t say what was talked about there, but I can say that I was presenting on the tensions between men and women, a topic that I named, tongue-in-cheek, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” This is the topic that I’m most interested in right now and that you are also intensely interested in. And I have to say, you have become one of my favourite contemporary essayists — particularly on this topic.
LP: Oh my gosh, thank you.
TH: To start today, we know that men and women are unhappy, each in their own way. By many accounts, men and women are finding romantic life stressful. We see they are polarized politically. Marriage is on the decline, as is the birth rate. What is your overall diagnosis? What do you think has gone wrong between men and women? We’ll start off on a really easy question.
LP: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s a big one. There’s a lot there. I don’t know if there’s any one thing. I mean, there are just so many factors. There’s so many great things about feminism; second wave feminism did so many important things, but I do think it caused a lot of problems also. It created a lot of rifts.
I always think of when I read about the drug trade. When they get rid of a big kingpin and the streets are open for who is going to be in charge, there ends up being more mayhem and more murder, more crime, because of that scramble for power. I always think of that, because I feel like the scramble for power in the home [is similar]. There’s a scramble for power going on — even just little power. Who’s in charge of the kitchen? Who’s in charge of the children? Everything has to be negotiated and discussed. In some ways, it’s great. We have the freedom. We can figure out our homes in a way that best suits our individual needs. But on the other hand, it takes several years of figuring out who’s in charge of what and who gets the final say. I feel like that’s a big problem.
TH: I agree. I want to touch on some of the essays that you’ve written this past couple of months. One of them, which we’ll get to in a minute, is about your long marriage. I loved this for so many reasons. In part, I had just been researching this raft of divorce memoirs. Such a trend.
LP: There are so many. It’s a real trend. And it’s so exciting — I mean, structurally. In terms of writing an essay or a memoir, it’s exciting. That’s an exciting moment. It’s like, “Then I said goodbye and I launched off on my own.” That’s what we want. The happy ending is not so exciting.
TH: This is the thing. You just saw this viral essay from Cathi Hanauer in The New York Times, “The Case for Ending a Long, Mostly-Good Marriage.” These are the people that started the Modern Love column. I thought it was a very good example of this whole genre of writing and thinking about divorce. But you just don’t hear that many stories from women who have stayed through rough patches and have healed in a marriage. That’s part of why I love your essay.
Before we get to that essay, let’s talk about the background here, so that listeners know what we’re talking about. You have another essay, for The Free Press as well, “How I Became a Wife.” Like me, you come from radical, progressive, bohemian circles. I want to read a quote from that essay:
“When I was growing up in the ’70s, the daughter of two activist types who hoped to change the world, marriage sounded like a trap. Wives seemed sad and overwhelmed, like the always-pregnant Irish mom who lived around the corner from us when I was little. Or they were repressed and miserable, like the ones I read about in The Women’s Room, that classic 1977 novel beloved by the second wave feminists—who were busy deconstructing every idea foundational to family life, from gender roles to monogamy, aided and abetted by the hippies and iconoclasts.”
I love that. It speaks to me and my childhood too. How did you end up embracing the institution of marriage?
LP: Very reluctantly. That essay was so difficult to write. I felt like there was this internal voice just nagging at me the whole time — hissing at me, “You can’t say that.” I was joking that just saying the word wife was very difficult. It is such an unattractive word to me, at a deep level, because I just had so many negative connotations with it. I always thought being a wife would be a terrible thing. It sounded very boring and staid and unintellectual and unadventurous. But I guess the prevailing factors were, A, I like men, and B, I wanted to have babies. Those are two very deep factors within me.
So, I ended up in a long-term monogamous relationship and we had children. And then everything just kind of falls into place. You do need help. You do need support. It is hard to stay together. It is hard to raise children. It’s hard to do a lot of things. And the more support you can have, the better.
TH: Talk to me about this next essay that you wrote, about going through a rough patch and what that looked like.
LP: Well, first I just want to say about the essay itself that my editor was the one who suggested it. She’s 30. She’s brilliant. I’m always amazed that she can give me such amazing edits. She’s a 30-year-old Brit and she’s just great. She said, “Did you read the essay about divorce, in New York Magazine or something?” I said, “Which one?” Because there are so many, I literally didn’t know. Then she said, “You have to write [this]. Larissa, we really need a piece that defends marriage because this is all we are hearing. People in my age group, the only thing we hear is that marriage is impossible.”
She knows how I feel about marriage, that I came to it reluctantly, not as a booster from the beginning. That I struggled to embrace it. She said she wanted “a not-smug defence of marriage.” I thought, “Okay, absolutely, I would love to write that.” I thought it was interesting that she was beseeching me for a different viewpoint. The only way that I could write it was to be honest about it. Because it is hard.
There was a moment — I think I mentioned it in the essay — where all of our friends got divorced. In one year, we lost our entire group of friends to divorce. I was like, “We are the ones that are still standing? You’ve got to be kidding me.” I thought we were the weirdos. I thought we were the ones who were just kind of barely on the edge of the boundary. We are a little bit off the beaten path, my husband and I. We have figured everything out so individualistically, according to us, and we’re both a little bit eccentric. So, it was just so shocking to me, like, “You guys [are divorcing]? I thought you guys were doing it great.” I was shocked that it was us [that made it]. But it was. We stuck around.
As Penelope Trunk has said — she’s a life coach and I’ve heard her on Meghan’s show — she had this great quote about how all long-term relationships are a process of growing apart and growing back together. I think that’s so important. It’s not just marriage, it’s all relationships. My kids are in their twenties, and there are years that I’ve enjoyed them more than other years. With my siblings, I come in and out of being close with them. We have rifts and we have fights, and there are times that I can’t stand them. Then there are other times that I’m so grateful to have siblings. That’s how it is. You can’t go decades and decades in a relationship without having some give and take.
My husband and I just stuck around, and then we got back to how it had always been. I’m so grateful. I enjoy my husband so much, and I really love this stage of life. I’m always saying, “Wait, you guys, your fifties are amazing.” They are amazing. Because physically things haven’t started to fall apart. I ride horses and we do farm work. But also, a lot of the anxiety is gone. A lot of the stuff that makes being young hard is gone. It’s really nice to get to this age and to have someone who’s shared your life with you. I really think that’s the goal. To me, that should be the goal.
We can talk about this more — I don’t know where you want to [go with] this — but just the idea of family … I’ve come to really think that family is so important. Even from a public health perspective. We’ve kind of been attacking the family. The left has attacked the family for a long time. The family, especially for women, was supposed to be so oppressive. It’s so much work and it holds us back. But from a public health perspective, the family is a brilliant system.
It’s also kind of radical. Two people can form their own nation, their own world. I think I said in the first wife essay that you’re making your sovereign nation. You get to make the rules.
TH: Say more about that.
LP: It really is a radical thing. It used to be that you had to stay with your family. Of course, there are beautiful aspects of that. But I’m the youngest child, and for me, if I had stayed in a family system where I brought my husband into my family, or went to live with my husband’s family, there would have been a lot of problems. There are reasons that people did not want that. There are really compelling reasons that people did not want to stay under their parents’ household for the rest of their lives, in the same sibling order that they grew up in. There are so many reasons why you would say, “No. We don’t care if we’re poor. We don’t care if it’s going to be hard, if we have to do the laundry ourselves. We want out. We want our own independent world. We want to create our own rules. We don’t like the way our parents did that. We want to make our own rules.” It’s an incredible thing. From a radical perspective, or a personal autonomous-goal perspective.
In terms of health, it’s the best for children. Who’s going to take care of the children? It’s either going to be the family or it’s going to be the government. Ideally, you’d get a little help from the government. But the family, the mother, has really compelling reasons to take care of her children. And those reasons, that urge, have been honed over millions of years. I don’t know how many years, but a lot of years. It’s a very strong instinct to take care of your children. No one else will take care of your children the way the mother will.
Then as you get older … When you’re old, I don’t know who is going to take care of all of these people who don’t have children. We haven’t seen it yet. We don’t know what it’s going to look like. Because Gen X, my generation, is in our fifties and getting into our sixties. I have so many friends who didn’t have children. A lot more Gen X didn’t have children than Boomers didn’t have children. We aren’t old yet. What is it going to look like? Who is going to take care of them?
Of course, people will go into nursing homes. But who is the child who’s going to come in, the grown-up child, and make sure that the parent didn’t fall out of bed, or didn’t lose their health insurance, or is getting attention? Everyone who has had a parent in a nursing home knows that you cannot just leave them there. You need someone from the outside coming in to check on them. So, who’s it going to be? There are going to be social workers who do that. But I hope you have money, I hope people have money to do that. I just think it’s terrifying.
We grew up hearing that idea scoffed at — that idea of who’s going to take care of me when I’m old. It seemed like such a terrible thing that parents would say to their children. Have you heard that?
TH: One hundred percent. I remember hearing that in my early thirties, and it landed a lot differently in my early thirties than it did in my late thirties and in my forties.
LP: Right. Yes. Because people need to be taken care of. It’s a fact of life, and it’s how old people have always been taken care of. Now we have a little bit of help from the state, from the government, and that’s great — and from institutions. But it is never going to replace people who are related to you, who have a compelling interest in taking care of you. So, I think it’s really scary.
My mother is very into AI. She loves new gadgets and new things. She’s like, “Oh, AI is going to do it.” I’m like, “Mom, you can’t even find Siri.” We have Alexa set up and she can’t figure it out. She can’t use it. We try to get her used to turning it on. Technology is hard for older people. Hopefully AI will become more usable, but it’s still going to be [difficult]. I don’t know if old people are who they are thinking of when they create the interface. Maybe they will start, but I don’t know, I think the family is a really good thing. I’m really pro-family.
TH: So am I. I think that the bonds of duty and care are strongest with family. You would like to think you can have a chosen family, but in the realities of the modern world — when everyone is moving all the time for jobs, people are overly busy, work is precarious, and all of those things — the idea that that duty and care will extend far beyond your family is, unfortunately, unrealistic.
LP: Yeah, I think it is too. Of course it happens. And of course there are people who go no contact with their parents. There are dysfunctional families. But in general, it’s the best solution, just from a purely objective perspective. How are you going to deal with children? How are you going to deal with the vulnerable? Children are vulnerable. Old people are vulnerable. What’s the solution? It just seems like a beautiful, really elegant solution to some problems that are never going to go away. It really is elegant.
TH: I want to go back to your essay for a moment, just to tease this out for listeners. You faced a crisis in your marriage, I guess about eight years in. Can you describe what that moment was like and how you got beyond it?
