Weekend reads: Calling it quits

The mood in the zeitgeist is oddly euphoric, depicting divorce not as a sad dissolution of an intimate bond but rather as an upbeat feminist flex.

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This week at Lean Out, we’re taking a look at the decline of marriage, in a podcast interview with Andrea Mrozek, co-author of a new book I…Do? Why Marriage Still Matters. For some time now, both on the podcast and in this newsletter, we’ve been exploring the rift between men and women — and working to understand what it means for our society.

We’ve delved into the crises facing modern men, and interrogated the rise of a liberal feminism that’s focused on autonomy and self-actualization, often to the exclusion of all else. We’ve heard writers and thinkers make the case for getting married — and, in one of the most personal interviews Lean Out has ever published, make the case for staying married.

Today, I want to focus on another element of the conversation: The glamorization of divorce.

It’s a topic that I touched on last summer on the podcast, with the cultural critic Kat Rosenfield. After that episode aired, I heard from a lot of you who felt it struck a chord, and so I decided to dig deeper. Below, you will find an excerpt from an extended essay that I wrote for The Literary Review of Canada, tracking the rise of the divorce memoir and its influence on how we think and talk about our most intimate relationships. (To continue reading this essay, please visit the LRC’s site; the first three articles are free).

Let me know what you think in the comments section! — TH

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Bored of the Rings: To have, to hold, and to head out

I want to be completely honest in a way I could not be if I had stayed. Telling the truth is often a demolition project.
— Lyz Lenz

The Monday that Lyz Lenz knew her marriage was over, she returned home late from a research trip to find the kitchen floor littered with garbage. Her husband had put a trash bag on the breakfast nook bench; it had fallen and opened, depositing a trail of orange peels, Goldfish crackers, wet napkins, and old cheese chunks. For Lenz, this carelessness was not a minor infraction in the history of a twelve-year marriage but the ultimate manifestation of its dysfunction. She had long felt her relationship was based on an unfair division of labour. Now, worn out from caring for small children, she decided to call it quits. The act of leaving inspired a book that taps into so many potent pop feminism tropes. “I want to tell you that breaking is our power,” the author based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, writes. “I want to tell you that walking away is a strength.”

This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life recounts a lacklustre union to a man Lenz portrays as a religious Trump voter who avoided housework and child care and pressured her to give up political writing to pen a mystery novel instead, preferably at night after the kids were in bed. “It soon became clear I could be successful or I could be married,” she recalls. The final straw came when she discovered he’d been hiding items he disapproved of in the basement, such as her “Write like a Motherfucker” coffee mug. Lenz moved on, universalizing her own unhappy matrimony, launching an indictment against the “commonplace horror” of heterosexual marriage itself, setting fire to her wedding dress, and musing about what a rejection of the age‑old institution might mean for women’s liberation writ large.

It does not seem to occur to Lenz that plenty of successful women are happily married to men, that not all marriages are unequal, or even that all men are unique individuals, as all women are. Similarly, Lenz seems unaware that a good number of women find fulfillment outside the work world — in family life, friendships, community, hobbies, or faith. Perhaps because of her narrow careerist frame, Lenz’s post-divorce life often reads as grim and joyless, featuring overwork, drinking, and detached sexual liaisons with men (“I owed them nothing”), including tangles with a fellow liberal writer who screamed at her and kicked her out of the car during arguments and wouldn’t wear condoms. In another deeply disturbing instance, a self-proclaimed feminist forced himself on her. It is curious, then, that This American Ex‑Wife has received so much cheerleading press attention, with the men’s magazine Esquire proclaiming it “a rousing and exuberant cry for a reckoning” and CBC Radio’s Ideas building an entire program around its themes. The mountain of coverage illustrates the extent to which Lenz’s heteropessimism has gone mainstream.

To continue reading, visit The Literary Review of Canada (the first three articles are free).