The egalitarian dream of companionate marriage in which men and women co-parent, co-dust, co-cook, and co-resent each other is explored in an article in Atlantic, a magazine that has matched our cultural decline with its own remorselessly juvenile articles on family decay. The author, Sandra Tsing Loh, bares her divorce for all the world to see. She and her middle-aged teeny-bopper girlfriends say their husbands do the cooking, but decline to have sex. When girls become guys and guys become girls, who feels like love? Animals in the zoo have the lowest reproduction rates on earth. They’re just not in the mood.

The article doesn’t simply stop at a voyeuristic view of one couple’s willful destruction of their childrens’ lives. It goes one step further and in the hallowed tradition of modern intellectuals pronounces the very institution of marriage defunct. This sort of aggression is what differentiates the Atlantic from harmless trash. Loh says:

  In any case, here’s my final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.

Melissa writes:

I was thoroughly depressed and saddened (probably appropriately and beneficially) by your Atlantic article tip. Your diagnosis was good, but I think some of their problems is that they should remember that love evolves and that thrilling falling-in-love period is followed by a mellow holding-hands period. Sex is still to be had, it will be different, but if you are not having it your marriage will falter. They should have started years ago by quitting jobs to stay home and make cookies and love for and to their men.

Laura writes:

I am horrified by these couples, by the reversal of roles and the alienation of the wives from their homes. I agree they should have baked more cookies and spent more time loving their men. The author surrounds her divorce with such an air of inevitability, as if she were a passive bystander to the whole thing. The casualness with which she mentions her affair suggests she wasn’t even married to begin with.  That’s the bottom line here. These couples were involved in what Anthony Esolen calls “pseudogamy.” The commitment was half-hearted and nonchalant.
 
It’s difficult to have a normal sex life when both husband and wife are working or are constantly active. I have known housewives who fill their lives with so much rushing around I’m sure they have poor relations with their husbands. Women have a hard time going from constant activity to physical intimacy. The men in this article seem depressed or repelled by the masculinity of their wives. Or perhaps they also are simply too tired. Many couples are running on fumes and fall into a pattern of physical estrangement. A sexless marriage, except in the event of illness or mutual restraint, is not a marriage.

Melissa writes:

I have a close friend, the godmother of one of my children, who feels desperately to feel vital and of import that she is scheduled to the hilt with volunteer work at the kid’s school and at their church and filled with resentment towards her husband. She believes that God’s plan is fundamentally misogynistic in that husbands father children and retain the lives they had before. She resents her fertility and is actually fearful of his ability to impregnate her. She actually deprived him of intimacy for six and eight months at a time. Her husband started to use Internet porn with alarming frequency and after he brought it up in confession with a priest he asked to speak to the both of them together. While the priest did not excuse the husband’s behavior he placed a great deal of blame on the wife. While she has improved of late she is still hostile to her husband. I think she looks in on the homes in Perfection and craves it so desperately that she can’t see how living there eats the residents from the inside out. The stress of maintaining perfection is a killer. She also fails to see how her husband does NOT live life as he did before they were married.
 
He knows the pressure of supporting a single income family. Her brief stint with a home-based party-sales “job” actually cost them money. He pays the bills, including parochial school tuition, as well as her therapy bills and her classes. He no longer goes fishing, the boat was sold years ago, he no longer goes out with my husband (he really does not go out too much either), and his Saturday tee time has given way to children’s athletic practices and games. I think he actually spends less time with his friends than many husbands, but she resents it and sees it as robbing her of precious time alone. Which, come to think of it, is funny because her kids are gone all day.

Laura writes:

Domestic women are not immune to selfish feminist outrage. It’s weird. Perhaps they feel inadequate and show it by over-scheduling their lives to prove they too are busy and proficient.

That is one very enlightened priest. A woman who denies her husband sex except in the event of illness is violating her marriage and showing outrageous disrespect. Women go through periods of exhaustion, that’s different than the deliberate suspension of intimacy. All in all, that’s a very sad story. Sex is an integral part of married life, not some extra frill.

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