Harridan. Virago. Termagant. Shrew. Harpy. Misandrist. Do these words best describe writer Ellen Tien, whose essay,
Divorce Dreams, demonstrate ... well, we'll get to that.
First, some choice quotes:
I contemplate divorce every day. It tugs on my sleeve each morning when my husband, Will, greets me in his chipper, smug morning-person voice, because after 16 years of waking up together, he still hasn't quite pieced out that I'm not viable before 10 a.m.
[...]
He had dropped me off in front of a restaurant, prior to finding a parking spot. As I crossed in front of the car, he pulled forward, happily smiling back over his left shoulder at some random fascinating bit (a sign with an interesting font, a new scaffolding, a diner that he may or may not have eaten at the week after he graduated from college), and plowed into me. The impact, while not wondrous enough to break bodies 12 ways, was sufficient to bounce me sidewise onto the hood, legs waving in the air like antennae, skirt flung somewhere up around my ears.
For one whole second, New York City stood stock-still and looked at my underwear.
As I pounded the windshield with my fist and shouted --"Will, Will, stop the car!" — he finally faced forward, blink, blink, blink, trying, yes, truly trying to take it all in. And I heard him ask with mild astonishment, very faintly because windshield glass is surprisingly thick, "What are you doing here?"
[...]
Don't misunderstand: I would not, could not disparage my marriage (not on a train, not in the rain, not in a house, not with a mouse). After 192 months, Will and I remain if not happily married, then steadily so. Our marital state is Indiana, say, or Connecticut — some red areas, more blue. Less than bliss, better than disaster. We are arguably, to my wide-ish range of reference, Everycouple.
Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man, the kind of man who will leave his longboat-sized shoes directly in the flow of our home's traffic so that one day I'll trip over them, break my neck, and die, after which he'll walk home from the morgue, grief-stricken, take off his shoes with a heavy heart, and leave them in the center of the room until they kill the housekeeper. Everyman.
Still, beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriage — Everymarriage --runs the silent chyron of divorce. It's the scarlet concept, the closely held contemplation of nearly every woman I know who has children who have been out of diapers for at least two years and a husband who won't be in them for another 30. It's the secret reverie of a demographic that freely discusses postpartum depression, eating disorders, and Ambien dependence (often all in the same sentence) with the plain candor of golden brown toast. In a let-it-all-hang-out culture, this is the given that stays tucked in.
[...]
Mind you, when I say Mid-Wife Crisis, I mean the middle-of-married-life kind, not the kind where you go to Yale to learn how to legally brandish a birthing stool. As one girlfriend remarked, it's the age of rage — a period of high irritation that lasts roughly one to two decades. As a colleague e-mailed me, it's the simmering underbelly of resentment, the 600-pound mosquito in the room. At a juncture where we thought we should have unearthed some modicum of certainty, we are turning into the Clash. If I go will there be trouble? If I stay will it be double? Should I stay or should I go?
[...]
Maybe one day, marriage — like the human appendix, male nipples, or your pinky toes — will become a vestigial structure that will, in a millennium or two, be obsolete. Our great-great-great-grandchildren's grandchildren will ask each other in passing, "Remember marriage? What was its function again? Was it that maladaptive organ that intermittently produced gastrointestinal antigens and sometimes got so inflamed that it painfully erupted?"
Yes. Yes it was.
Until that day of obsolescence, we can confront the dilemma and consider the choice a privilege. Once upon a time is the stuff of fairy tales. As for happily ever after — see appendix.
So what does one make of this? My thoughts initially were irritation: She disparages her husband publicly, in a national publication and on the Internet, and then claims she doesn't. She calls him a Moderately Bad Man, like all men. Whew! More male-bashing — initially I tried to work up some outrage. Here we go again — men are buffoons, men are stupid, men are clueless, men need constant supervision.
But you know what? This essay is such an extreme example of self-absorbed, self-entitled spiritual bankruptcy that it rings utterly false when it tries to make a broader point about society. I just didn't buy it.
That's to say, I may know women who occasionally think like this in their darker moments — but I have never personally met a woman who is so self-absorbed that she would feel entitled to call her husband and all men "moderately bad" in a national publication and air all sorts of dirty laundry in public.
Yes, I know there are some female writers out there who make a living out of this sort of schtick — a few years there was that creep who wrote about getting pregnant with triplets and decided to kill two of them so that she wouldn't have to buy big Mayonnaise jars at Costco. And there was that former Gawker who wrote a longish essay in the New York Times that was completely devoid of self-insight.
And a few more here and there. But there aren't large numbers of them, and I never see them.
Therefore, I think the problem is less social than psychological — in other words, whatever the problem she's talking about here is, it's her problem.
So: harridan, virago, termagant, shrew, harpy, misandrist? Nah. Sad. Poisoned. I hope she finds a way to drain that poison, 'cuz it's really killing her if she's willing to expose this much.
