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.

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