One of the things that strike me about all of this is that when you have been in a marriage (or relationship) for decades, the amount of sexual negotiation is nil. The amount of possible shame is nil. And trying to get to that point with someone else is incredibly frightening! The work you would have to put in, the time, the effort.
It's maybe a little solipsistic, but there's an argument that while the amount of sexual negotiation is nil, this also means you're not really able to negotiate for much outside whatever generally agreed upon normative sex you've settled into. Sure the NY Times "Modern Love" comments section has plenty of comments from 60-somethings who claim to have spent 40 years in a fully self-actualized and self-aware sexual relationship. But the reality is most of us end up with a well-worn sexual script by the time we're in our 50s and deviating from it is complicated and often awkward even if you do.
So while not negotiating has its qualities, the lack of negotiation has a stultifying quality to it. It may be (and probably is) that whatever we think we want outside of what we're used to really isn't that great, anyway, and that a vague sense of wanting something different is probably just a part of the bargain that comes with "broad general satisfaction."
Though overall I agree with your comment completely, especially the part about getting to the point of no shame/no negotiation with a new partner. I dated a woman fairly early in college for about 2 years and when it ended and I ended up dating someone else later, I was kind of dumbfounded by how normative I thought that relationship was in contrast to how not normative my experience with a new partner was. You don't really recognize comfort until its gone.
2. They don't want to be that one weird creepy old guy at the bar.
At the same time, the current girlfriend is someone he can live with, he may not be crazy in love but at least he knows her quirks, something better is not likely to come along and it will get her to stop whining for a ring.
Yes, but I think what I'm calling attachment here is not really what you're describing but rather attachment to the ideal of constant romantic reinvention and total sexual liberation. Of course the romantic ideal is an attachment too, but then this is just to say that I'm not much of a Buddhist.
SUPER interesting and I think I strongly disagree with you on nearly everything, but that's likely because I'm much older than you and also probably much more of a cougar. But I'm going to marinate on it a while before having a real opinion. (The real shocking behavior, lol.)
How conventional of you. I'm going to get a divorce and have a series of erotic adventures with this essay and an endless string of other hot Substack essays.
Cats don't do marriage, but I'm going to just hop into Aishwarya Rai's lap, then maybe get pettings from Mila Jovanich, and then eat my dinner on some porn star's kitchen floor.
I thought about a longish post about delusions and the how and why of cat ladies and an Aella-style discussion of asymmetric dating market expeectations as male and female humans age.
But I'll spare you all that and simply say that I used to think that cats were self-absorbed, at least until I read about this.
The thing that really gets me about this little boomlet of "dump your husband, for feminism" pieces is how clueless (or maybe just disinterested?) the women who write them seem to be about the callousness of what they're doing. It's not just a "don't be mean to dudes" point, either: I'm old enough to remember when Boomer men were hitting their midlife crises in the 70s and 80s, and responded by abandoning their wives and kids, buying a convertible and trying to date 20-somethings. Those dudes were roundly dismissed as deluded, childish and callous, precisely because of their failure to conceive of their ex-wife as, you know, a PERSON. A person whose time they'd wasted for 10 or 20 or 30 years. A person whose life they had just ruined.
Now that Gen X and Millennial women--at least the ones who can get book contracts or pieces placed in The Cut or NYT--are engaging in the same behavior, I don't see any more consideration for the possibility that their self-actualization has been bought at serious cost to their ex-husband's lives. Yes, obviously, as a legal matter, men and women should be able to divorce their spouse whenever they want to do so. But as a moral matter, I find the core idea running underneath these pieces--ie, that women never owe anything to anyone but themselves and, perhaps, their kids--to be just as unpleasant as it was when men treated their wives and marriages that way.
There's an effort here not to 'feel bad' about what you're doing, that you 'had' to do it for the sake of your authentic self. Or something. And all the unfortunate fall out for your husband, or you kids, well, it's just that. Unfortunate. And they'll all get over it.
That quote about the woman abruptly leaving her husband is the problem. Divorce needs to be a long and deeply considered decision, and unless the marriage is truly horrible, should come well after counseling and a great deal of effort on both sides, or at least the opportunity for you to put in the effort and watch your partner not do the same.
Some people probably do need to hear this message. People trapped in bad marriages too afraid to leave. But collateral damage will come with it. People leaving who should not have left, but committed to the hard work of making it better.
As a child of divorced parents, I've often reflected that parental divorce is all too often "the gift that keeps on giving" (in a negative way, of course) for the offspring. When I was 30, I had to go permanently no-contact with my mother because of her corrosive bitterness re her divorce, which had taken place 15 years earlier. I am now in my 60's, and I have friends in my age group who deal with continuing and seemingly unavoidable personal melodrama springing from their parent's divorces, most of which took place in the 1980's or earlier. The dumped husband might, in fact, latch on to a hot new partner himself and move on with his life; there's a greater risk that the kids might be long-term collateral damage.
From my own familial experience I suspect in many such cases one or both parties were people who never ought to have married anyone at all - leaving one with no real choice but to feel grateful that they nonetheless ventured it so that you managed to be born, life being just preferable to no-life.
You think your father should have stayed married to a woman you “had to go no-contact with” because she, despite being your only and biological mother, was so awful to be around? Ummm
No, I have no judgment of him for leaving. (If anything, I've judged him for not taking me with him). But my point is that anyone considering divorce should do so with an awareness that there may be a psychosocial price tag for their kids that they don't foresee.
To be fair I don't think this is fully equivalent. The stereotypical 80s Midlife Crisis Guy abandoned his kids, spent his money (and he may have been the only earner in the family) on women and frivolities like the token sports car, and left his wife and family in a difficult economic predicament. Miranda July seems to advocate peaceful coparenting and it's not like she's saying "take all his money!"
But yeah I do think there's a lot of the same essential unattractive desperation at play
I agree that the Millennial woman ditching her husband does seem to have a different, and better, approach to post-divorce co-parenting than her Boomer dad did when he just ghosted the family. Although even there, I don't feel great about all of the "the kids will be better off this way!" cope you see on that topic in these articles. That's what divorcing couples told themselves in the 80s, too, and I don't think it turned out that way very often. I think people remain too cavalier about the possibility that divorce will fuck up their kids.
But all of the self-absorbed, self-actualizing BS that Midlife Crisis Dad in the 80s and Midlife Crisis Mom in the 2020s use to justify their decision to blow up their families? Man, that seems identical. You feel suffocated by, and trapped in, your life now that you're in your 40s? You poor thing! Your life is... just like the life of everyone else in their 40s. Including, quite probably, your husband's. The solution isn't to blow everything up so you can, maybe, spend a glorious decade or two fucking around. The solution is to accept that you, too, are now unequivocally an adult, and you, too, will age and die. Sorry!
And while I try to be careful about being too harsh about this subject I think the idea of peaceful coparenting is in many cases a therapeutic mirage, not far removed from other self interested rationalizations. After all, how often is the other spouse really going to be positively predisposed to the one that destroyed a family over something so frivolous?
It's definitely more subtle than the guy who thought he could make it up to his kids with lavish gifts and trips to Disney or whatever but I think it's equally selfish and delusional.
Especially combined with new romance-seeking, it can seem to devolve into resentful time-keeping on the part of the parents. I was sad to witness in my own family even a grandparent enter into this sort of bitching: "She didn't get back from her trip, so he *had to* keep child [who had seemed so beloved, in the early years] an extra day", etc. In that case there was no peace, however, and no "co-" and no pretense of it. I'm sure it is much better than no such effort, though it's perhaps not irrelevant that the recent business with the fantasy writer and his wife, was framed as "peaceful co-parenting" and no one much seemed to want alone time with the child.
You can do it, but only if it is a priority for both parents and you get out of the marriage before things completely break down. I know this as my first wife and I were able to do it, and if you don't go throwing new romance in the others face, that can work too.
But, and I will say this from that same experience, it is a fine balance you need to keep.
I know of one couple that seems to have managed it but their divorce was strangely amicable. They even went to each other's subsequent weddings as guests.
Every other instance I've seen has had both spouses dive head long into dating and partying well before the papers are even signed. To me the behavior tells the story of what the priorities are, and it rarely seems to be the children.
Yeah I guess that's kind of my point - if you're unsatisfied, you ought to at least try to work things out with your partner, rather than just accepting your fate. If your partner is unwilling to do that, then it's a different story.
For better or worse, a human female who is candidly and openly advertising that she is available for no-strings-attached sex can probably get it. She doesn't even need to be any Aphrodite or Bastet, just having the requisite number of breasts and a functioning vagina is enough to get men. Yes, even high status men, if it's clear that all she really is after is sex and she doesn't have another agenda. (NFL players are advised to record their hookups, in order to make it harder to claim rape after the fact...)
But if a lot more women started acting that way, the casual sex market would look very different.
Whole thing reminds me of "learn to code!" If all humans learned to code (or play middle linebacker in the NFL) coders and middle linebackers would be a glut.
Fair enough. Men don’t currently get book deals or magazine articles in which they celebrate the emancipatory power of blowing up their families, though.
It's a whole industry milieu built on top of the "men as a class always oppress women as a class and women have no power so they therefore can do no wrong" ethos of 2010s social justice feminism, so it's not difficult to understand why concerns about being callous or cruel towards men wouldn't cross the minds of the women who are deeply entrenched in all of this.
As a result the only skepticism and criticism is going to come from people on the outside.
Presumably almost everyone on the inside has been effectively conditioned through oblique social threats to avoid even thinking of criticisms of this stuff in the first place, and those who've deftly managed to stay involved and avoid getting filtered out of the milieu while holding their own conscious personal doubts about it know that they're likely to lose opportunities and friends if they voice their concerns.
Great piece, Freddie. I think there is a time for both approaches. We should date and screw around and discover ourselves, sexually and otherwise, but often that's in pursuit of finding something that lasts eventually. If you've been in an unhappy marriage for a long time, maybe you have to go through this afterwards. But I do agree that ultimately the goal is to find something stable, something that can support you when you're old. A bulwark, a foundation. If you're so lucky, I suppose. I can't imagine being satisfied with flings into my dotage. They're barely satisfying now.
It feels almost like a version of nostalgia actually. Nostalgia sells. Sex sells. It's a "new" idea only in that it's selling sexual liberation to older women, but it's all about nostalgia for a younger, freer lifestyle.
This is my observation with friends in their 40s who've gotten divorced. Afterward, there is some serial sexual flinging for a while -- a liberating celebration phase, I guess -- and eventually they settle down into stable relationships again. Having had my share of flings in my younger days, I can vouch for the fun and carefree aspect. But since these flings were with real actual people with their own flaws and annoying habits, eventually the novelty did wear off. It was an important phase, though -- one that taught me to value deep, connective relationships and be realistic about the limitations of short flinging. It inoculated me against taking my now occasional fantasies about running away from my blessed, mundane, middle-aged life seriously.
“I suspect a lot of people who consider lifelong serial partnering are doing so while quietly wanting the romantic ideal, one person for life, but the pain of looking for it has driven them into rejecting it as a form of self-defense, rationalizing unhappiness.”
I think this one sentence describes 90% of the people you are talking about here. Polyamory is monogamy for people who are done taking risks
Or, they got the romantic ideal early and without much effort, don't really understand how lucky they are, and can't imagine anything worse than being perceived as "basic".
This whole Miranda Joy movement is, as Freddie suggests, essentially just death denial. It's the female version of the cliched male mid-life crisis. How can her acolytes not see that? Perhaps it can "work" for a year or two but what then? I look forward to hearing from these women when they're in their sixties to confirm their lack of regret.
Yeah, there is a real denial of female aging here that fits in alongside all of the cosmetics and plastic surgery marketed at women -- the false idea that with the right lip filler (and newly minted divorce, I guess) we can remain young, hot and conventionally sexually desirable forever. As if there is nothing else to shoot for in life -- deep interpersonal relationships, career fulfillment??
Ophelia December wrote a story about how after 35 years of marriage to Hamlet, the Change well in the rearview mirror, she wasn't *all that* into him (or, contra July, anyone) but she continued, affectionately, to do her marital duty, and honestly was just grateful that Hamlet, was still sufficiently into her or not too demanding or simply honorable enough, to remain faithful, as that is not something that can be taken for granted.
Once in awhile, she might even muse about how - if she died, or stepped aside - he might have another child. And that made her sad, from a couple of angles.
But she dared not publish it, in order to spare the internet's (and the publishing industry's) delicate, rather prudish feelings. What was once a commonplace of the joke writer, would now be outré. The facts of life - especially that they are not all that big a deal - are best kept hidden from an adolescent world.
Yeah, the problem with the serial fucking is that it should be done when you're young. Everybody is more fuckable, everyone's equipment works, everyone has fewer responsibilities (yes, those are a thing), everyone is much farther from having to prepare for their decline years. If you didn't do enough of it early, you can try to do it late, but it won't fit as well into your life. It just won't. Just like it's better to raise kids with two parents present even though you can certainly do it with one, our endless desire to believe that all decisions are good, and all are equally good, runs up against reality.
What a bank-shot way to be introduced to Miranda Joy. This decision that the normies are making to blow it all up after 30 years of stability certainly raises my eyebrows. I'm well aware from personal experience that every life choice has its grind. Riding the trains with my guitar strapped to my back? LONELY. Also, these women need to take into account that a single woman of a certain age will get the pariah effect. I got so tired of seeing women grip their husband's elbow when I walked in the room. I don't want him. Don't worry.
Middle-aged people should view her advice to detonate your life and join her cause the way they would view someone who said you should cash out all your retirement plans and roll it all into the start-up they have.
Very good piece. Getting up into middle age a bit myself I've now seen a couple of my buddies' marriages blown up by their wives for things along these lines. I suspect more are coming.
Obviously you never know what's going on behind closed doors and I don't think it would be a good idea to return to tougher divorce laws. However in all cases it seems obvious to me that the chances of finding happiness on this path are extremely slim. I've started to wonder if women, a few generations now into full legal equality, aren't starting to run into the female version of the mid life crisis you used to hear about with men, buying a sports car and ditching their wives and kids for the secretary. It isn't any less irresponsible however you couch it.
I'm hoping the whole thing is a fad. It isn't like reddit isn't already over flowing with regret stories about polyamory, blown up marriages, and kink gone wrong.
In fairness that book was quite romantic, though I think the idea of the mom being left all to her own devices, long bath and so forth, for the weekend was doing much of the work, plus America's fondness for Nat. Geo., as also somehow (freed from the hamburger meat demanded by her American family!) the very appealing sounding vegetarian stuffed peppers that she prepared for her unexpected guest, so cozy and Moosewood-like that it's all I really recall of it.*
I cannot help but compare it to another book, though, in its treatment of the absent, stolid husband, and that is "The Age of Innocence". The latter's not a favorite book by any means - I prefer "The House of Mirth" or even "Ethan Frome" - and I don't remember it very well. I'll have to just paraphrase - toward the end the protagonist realizes that the long secret of his heart has been guessed, and "that it should have been his wife" who so guessed it, "greatly moved him".
Stuffed peppers v. that one line.
*I do recall a very stupid line from an otherwise competently written book, now I think of it. The view of the Italian war bride is that rural Iowa is "a great place to raise kids, but not a great place to raise adults".
Maybe it's a necessary fad. Maybe it's a growing pain society goes through -- first with men, then with women -- to come out the other side healthier. We start with backlash from marriages feeling confining, from the idea that you HAVE to stay in them. Then, in a couple of generations, we have people going back to a more egalitarian, less confining version of long-term, committed relationships that LOOK similar to today's marriages but feel different. (I say "maybe" in the honest sense -- like it's one possible path, though not a certainty.)
One of the things that strike me about all of this is that when you have been in a marriage (or relationship) for decades, the amount of sexual negotiation is nil. The amount of possible shame is nil. And trying to get to that point with someone else is incredibly frightening! The work you would have to put in, the time, the effort.
Nope, I like things just the way they are.
It's maybe a little solipsistic, but there's an argument that while the amount of sexual negotiation is nil, this also means you're not really able to negotiate for much outside whatever generally agreed upon normative sex you've settled into. Sure the NY Times "Modern Love" comments section has plenty of comments from 60-somethings who claim to have spent 40 years in a fully self-actualized and self-aware sexual relationship. But the reality is most of us end up with a well-worn sexual script by the time we're in our 50s and deviating from it is complicated and often awkward even if you do.
So while not negotiating has its qualities, the lack of negotiation has a stultifying quality to it. It may be (and probably is) that whatever we think we want outside of what we're used to really isn't that great, anyway, and that a vague sense of wanting something different is probably just a part of the bargain that comes with "broad general satisfaction."
Though overall I agree with your comment completely, especially the part about getting to the point of no shame/no negotiation with a new partner. I dated a woman fairly early in college for about 2 years and when it ended and I ended up dating someone else later, I was kind of dumbfounded by how normative I thought that relationship was in contrast to how not normative my experience with a new partner was. You don't really recognize comfort until its gone.
It is my theory that the real reason a lof of male humans get married is because
1. The thought of having to go through the negotiation and "getting to know you" with another partner is too tireseome to contemplate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFokXnCCMf8
2. They don't want to be that one weird creepy old guy at the bar.
At the same time, the current girlfriend is someone he can live with, he may not be crazy in love but at least he knows her quirks, something better is not likely to come along and it will get her to stop whining for a ring.
Yes, but I think what I'm calling attachment here is not really what you're describing but rather attachment to the ideal of constant romantic reinvention and total sexual liberation. Of course the romantic ideal is an attachment too, but then this is just to say that I'm not much of a Buddhist.
I found this very empowering.
I have nothing to add except to say I think this is one of the best things you've ever written.
SUPER interesting and I think I strongly disagree with you on nearly everything, but that's likely because I'm much older than you and also probably much more of a cougar. But I'm going to marinate on it a while before having a real opinion. (The real shocking behavior, lol.)
Very attractive and successful older dudes seem like the exception to various rules, the Red Pill psychos were obsessed with that.
I love this piece so much, I’m going to get a divorce and marry it.
How conventional of you. I'm going to get a divorce and have a series of erotic adventures with this essay and an endless string of other hot Substack essays.
Cats don't do marriage, but I'm going to just hop into Aishwarya Rai's lap, then maybe get pettings from Mila Jovanich, and then eat my dinner on some porn star's kitchen floor.
Actually guffawed
Thanks for the laugh!
So Miranda July will become Miranda December?
Like saying that "Getting laid is easy. just be a rock star or JFK or an alpha tomcat."
Why didn't you think of that before?
lol
I think the problem is she's already Miranda October and she knows it.
This is way too witty for the interwebs
I thought about a longish post about delusions and the how and why of cat ladies and an Aella-style discussion of asymmetric dating market expeectations as male and female humans age.
But I'll spare you all that and simply say that I used to think that cats were self-absorbed, at least until I read about this.
The thing that really gets me about this little boomlet of "dump your husband, for feminism" pieces is how clueless (or maybe just disinterested?) the women who write them seem to be about the callousness of what they're doing. It's not just a "don't be mean to dudes" point, either: I'm old enough to remember when Boomer men were hitting their midlife crises in the 70s and 80s, and responded by abandoning their wives and kids, buying a convertible and trying to date 20-somethings. Those dudes were roundly dismissed as deluded, childish and callous, precisely because of their failure to conceive of their ex-wife as, you know, a PERSON. A person whose time they'd wasted for 10 or 20 or 30 years. A person whose life they had just ruined.
Now that Gen X and Millennial women--at least the ones who can get book contracts or pieces placed in The Cut or NYT--are engaging in the same behavior, I don't see any more consideration for the possibility that their self-actualization has been bought at serious cost to their ex-husband's lives. Yes, obviously, as a legal matter, men and women should be able to divorce their spouse whenever they want to do so. But as a moral matter, I find the core idea running underneath these pieces--ie, that women never owe anything to anyone but themselves and, perhaps, their kids--to be just as unpleasant as it was when men treated their wives and marriages that way.
There's an effort here not to 'feel bad' about what you're doing, that you 'had' to do it for the sake of your authentic self. Or something. And all the unfortunate fall out for your husband, or you kids, well, it's just that. Unfortunate. And they'll all get over it.
That quote about the woman abruptly leaving her husband is the problem. Divorce needs to be a long and deeply considered decision, and unless the marriage is truly horrible, should come well after counseling and a great deal of effort on both sides, or at least the opportunity for you to put in the effort and watch your partner not do the same.
Some people probably do need to hear this message. People trapped in bad marriages too afraid to leave. But collateral damage will come with it. People leaving who should not have left, but committed to the hard work of making it better.
As a child of divorced parents, I've often reflected that parental divorce is all too often "the gift that keeps on giving" (in a negative way, of course) for the offspring. When I was 30, I had to go permanently no-contact with my mother because of her corrosive bitterness re her divorce, which had taken place 15 years earlier. I am now in my 60's, and I have friends in my age group who deal with continuing and seemingly unavoidable personal melodrama springing from their parent's divorces, most of which took place in the 1980's or earlier. The dumped husband might, in fact, latch on to a hot new partner himself and move on with his life; there's a greater risk that the kids might be long-term collateral damage.
I feel for you, but as someone with miserable parents who stayed together, you can have just as much drama and no divorce.
From my own familial experience I suspect in many such cases one or both parties were people who never ought to have married anyone at all - leaving one with no real choice but to feel grateful that they nonetheless ventured it so that you managed to be born, life being just preferable to no-life.
As a person whose parents stayed together while quite miserable, I am glad that they have each other now in their later years
As someone in a similar boat (I am 54) this comment cannot be appreciated enough.
You think your father should have stayed married to a woman you “had to go no-contact with” because she, despite being your only and biological mother, was so awful to be around? Ummm
No, I have no judgment of him for leaving. (If anything, I've judged him for not taking me with him). But my point is that anyone considering divorce should do so with an awareness that there may be a psychosocial price tag for their kids that they don't foresee.
Don't you know, when she does it, she's "discovering her sexuality".
When he does it, he's a cheater and a creep.
To be fair I don't think this is fully equivalent. The stereotypical 80s Midlife Crisis Guy abandoned his kids, spent his money (and he may have been the only earner in the family) on women and frivolities like the token sports car, and left his wife and family in a difficult economic predicament. Miranda July seems to advocate peaceful coparenting and it's not like she's saying "take all his money!"
But yeah I do think there's a lot of the same essential unattractive desperation at play
I agree that the Millennial woman ditching her husband does seem to have a different, and better, approach to post-divorce co-parenting than her Boomer dad did when he just ghosted the family. Although even there, I don't feel great about all of the "the kids will be better off this way!" cope you see on that topic in these articles. That's what divorcing couples told themselves in the 80s, too, and I don't think it turned out that way very often. I think people remain too cavalier about the possibility that divorce will fuck up their kids.
But all of the self-absorbed, self-actualizing BS that Midlife Crisis Dad in the 80s and Midlife Crisis Mom in the 2020s use to justify their decision to blow up their families? Man, that seems identical. You feel suffocated by, and trapped in, your life now that you're in your 40s? You poor thing! Your life is... just like the life of everyone else in their 40s. Including, quite probably, your husband's. The solution isn't to blow everything up so you can, maybe, spend a glorious decade or two fucking around. The solution is to accept that you, too, are now unequivocally an adult, and you, too, will age and die. Sorry!
I think you're right about this.
And while I try to be careful about being too harsh about this subject I think the idea of peaceful coparenting is in many cases a therapeutic mirage, not far removed from other self interested rationalizations. After all, how often is the other spouse really going to be positively predisposed to the one that destroyed a family over something so frivolous?
It's definitely more subtle than the guy who thought he could make it up to his kids with lavish gifts and trips to Disney or whatever but I think it's equally selfish and delusional.
Especially combined with new romance-seeking, it can seem to devolve into resentful time-keeping on the part of the parents. I was sad to witness in my own family even a grandparent enter into this sort of bitching: "She didn't get back from her trip, so he *had to* keep child [who had seemed so beloved, in the early years] an extra day", etc. In that case there was no peace, however, and no "co-" and no pretense of it. I'm sure it is much better than no such effort, though it's perhaps not irrelevant that the recent business with the fantasy writer and his wife, was framed as "peaceful co-parenting" and no one much seemed to want alone time with the child.
You can do it, but only if it is a priority for both parents and you get out of the marriage before things completely break down. I know this as my first wife and I were able to do it, and if you don't go throwing new romance in the others face, that can work too.
But, and I will say this from that same experience, it is a fine balance you need to keep.
I know of one couple that seems to have managed it but their divorce was strangely amicable. They even went to each other's subsequent weddings as guests.
Every other instance I've seen has had both spouses dive head long into dating and partying well before the papers are even signed. To me the behavior tells the story of what the priorities are, and it rarely seems to be the children.
I think this is a relentlessly bleak worldview, and actually has a lot in common with the nihilism it is ostensibly opposed to.
Yeah I guess that's kind of my point - if you're unsatisfied, you ought to at least try to work things out with your partner, rather than just accepting your fate. If your partner is unwilling to do that, then it's a different story.
For better or worse, a human female who is candidly and openly advertising that she is available for no-strings-attached sex can probably get it. She doesn't even need to be any Aphrodite or Bastet, just having the requisite number of breasts and a functioning vagina is enough to get men. Yes, even high status men, if it's clear that all she really is after is sex and she doesn't have another agenda. (NFL players are advised to record their hookups, in order to make it harder to claim rape after the fact...)
But if a lot more women started acting that way, the casual sex market would look very different.
Whole thing reminds me of "learn to code!" If all humans learned to code (or play middle linebacker in the NFL) coders and middle linebackers would be a glut.
They got ChatGPT for that. Besides, most dudes would read it and ask themselves "so, what's the catch?"
Sounds like you don't need an LLM.
No need for the past tense, men still do that.
And yes, it's terrible for everyone involved, regardless of gender.
Fair enough. Men don’t currently get book deals or magazine articles in which they celebrate the emancipatory power of blowing up their families, though.
It's a whole industry milieu built on top of the "men as a class always oppress women as a class and women have no power so they therefore can do no wrong" ethos of 2010s social justice feminism, so it's not difficult to understand why concerns about being callous or cruel towards men wouldn't cross the minds of the women who are deeply entrenched in all of this.
As a result the only skepticism and criticism is going to come from people on the outside.
Presumably almost everyone on the inside has been effectively conditioned through oblique social threats to avoid even thinking of criticisms of this stuff in the first place, and those who've deftly managed to stay involved and avoid getting filtered out of the milieu while holding their own conscious personal doubts about it know that they're likely to lose opportunities and friends if they voice their concerns.
Great piece, Freddie. I think there is a time for both approaches. We should date and screw around and discover ourselves, sexually and otherwise, but often that's in pursuit of finding something that lasts eventually. If you've been in an unhappy marriage for a long time, maybe you have to go through this afterwards. But I do agree that ultimately the goal is to find something stable, something that can support you when you're old. A bulwark, a foundation. If you're so lucky, I suppose. I can't imagine being satisfied with flings into my dotage. They're barely satisfying now.
Yeah indeed. Different strokes for different folks. The point is that the cool new version is being sold with a little too much idealization.
It feels almost like a version of nostalgia actually. Nostalgia sells. Sex sells. It's a "new" idea only in that it's selling sexual liberation to older women, but it's all about nostalgia for a younger, freer lifestyle.
This is my observation with friends in their 40s who've gotten divorced. Afterward, there is some serial sexual flinging for a while -- a liberating celebration phase, I guess -- and eventually they settle down into stable relationships again. Having had my share of flings in my younger days, I can vouch for the fun and carefree aspect. But since these flings were with real actual people with their own flaws and annoying habits, eventually the novelty did wear off. It was an important phase, though -- one that taught me to value deep, connective relationships and be realistic about the limitations of short flinging. It inoculated me against taking my now occasional fantasies about running away from my blessed, mundane, middle-aged life seriously.
Absolutely. Inoculation is a great way to think about it, which is why it's so important for people to get that phase in before settling down.
“I suspect a lot of people who consider lifelong serial partnering are doing so while quietly wanting the romantic ideal, one person for life, but the pain of looking for it has driven them into rejecting it as a form of self-defense, rationalizing unhappiness.”
I think this one sentence describes 90% of the people you are talking about here. Polyamory is monogamy for people who are done taking risks
Or, they got the romantic ideal early and without much effort, don't really understand how lucky they are, and can't imagine anything worse than being perceived as "basic".
This whole Miranda Joy movement is, as Freddie suggests, essentially just death denial. It's the female version of the cliched male mid-life crisis. How can her acolytes not see that? Perhaps it can "work" for a year or two but what then? I look forward to hearing from these women when they're in their sixties to confirm their lack of regret.
Yeah, there is a real denial of female aging here that fits in alongside all of the cosmetics and plastic surgery marketed at women -- the false idea that with the right lip filler (and newly minted divorce, I guess) we can remain young, hot and conventionally sexually desirable forever. As if there is nothing else to shoot for in life -- deep interpersonal relationships, career fulfillment??
Ophelia December wrote a story about how after 35 years of marriage to Hamlet, the Change well in the rearview mirror, she wasn't *all that* into him (or, contra July, anyone) but she continued, affectionately, to do her marital duty, and honestly was just grateful that Hamlet, was still sufficiently into her or not too demanding or simply honorable enough, to remain faithful, as that is not something that can be taken for granted.
Once in awhile, she might even muse about how - if she died, or stepped aside - he might have another child. And that made her sad, from a couple of angles.
But she dared not publish it, in order to spare the internet's (and the publishing industry's) delicate, rather prudish feelings. What was once a commonplace of the joke writer, would now be outré. The facts of life - especially that they are not all that big a deal - are best kept hidden from an adolescent world.
Yeah, the problem with the serial fucking is that it should be done when you're young. Everybody is more fuckable, everyone's equipment works, everyone has fewer responsibilities (yes, those are a thing), everyone is much farther from having to prepare for their decline years. If you didn't do enough of it early, you can try to do it late, but it won't fit as well into your life. It just won't. Just like it's better to raise kids with two parents present even though you can certainly do it with one, our endless desire to believe that all decisions are good, and all are equally good, runs up against reality.
What a bank-shot way to be introduced to Miranda Joy. This decision that the normies are making to blow it all up after 30 years of stability certainly raises my eyebrows. I'm well aware from personal experience that every life choice has its grind. Riding the trains with my guitar strapped to my back? LONELY. Also, these women need to take into account that a single woman of a certain age will get the pariah effect. I got so tired of seeing women grip their husband's elbow when I walked in the room. I don't want him. Don't worry.
Middle-aged people should view her advice to detonate your life and join her cause the way they would view someone who said you should cash out all your retirement plans and roll it all into the start-up they have.
Can it work? Maybe.
Very good piece. Getting up into middle age a bit myself I've now seen a couple of my buddies' marriages blown up by their wives for things along these lines. I suspect more are coming.
Obviously you never know what's going on behind closed doors and I don't think it would be a good idea to return to tougher divorce laws. However in all cases it seems obvious to me that the chances of finding happiness on this path are extremely slim. I've started to wonder if women, a few generations now into full legal equality, aren't starting to run into the female version of the mid life crisis you used to hear about with men, buying a sports car and ditching their wives and kids for the secretary. It isn't any less irresponsible however you couch it.
I'm hoping the whole thing is a fad. It isn't like reddit isn't already over flowing with regret stories about polyamory, blown up marriages, and kink gone wrong.
The Miranda July of the mid-90s was "The Bridges of Madison County".
That is a both insightful and hilarious observation.
Also, Reba McEntire’s 1992 song “is there life out there?”
In fairness that book was quite romantic, though I think the idea of the mom being left all to her own devices, long bath and so forth, for the weekend was doing much of the work, plus America's fondness for Nat. Geo., as also somehow (freed from the hamburger meat demanded by her American family!) the very appealing sounding vegetarian stuffed peppers that she prepared for her unexpected guest, so cozy and Moosewood-like that it's all I really recall of it.*
I cannot help but compare it to another book, though, in its treatment of the absent, stolid husband, and that is "The Age of Innocence". The latter's not a favorite book by any means - I prefer "The House of Mirth" or even "Ethan Frome" - and I don't remember it very well. I'll have to just paraphrase - toward the end the protagonist realizes that the long secret of his heart has been guessed, and "that it should have been his wife" who so guessed it, "greatly moved him".
Stuffed peppers v. that one line.
*I do recall a very stupid line from an otherwise competently written book, now I think of it. The view of the Italian war bride is that rural Iowa is "a great place to raise kids, but not a great place to raise adults".
Maybe it's a necessary fad. Maybe it's a growing pain society goes through -- first with men, then with women -- to come out the other side healthier. We start with backlash from marriages feeling confining, from the idea that you HAVE to stay in them. Then, in a couple of generations, we have people going back to a more egalitarian, less confining version of long-term, committed relationships that LOOK similar to today's marriages but feel different. (I say "maybe" in the honest sense -- like it's one possible path, though not a certainty.)