IT IS WRONG to say that all egalitarian marriages are bad, just as it is inaccurate to say that all traditional marriages are good. In fact, there are some very happy ones in the former category. Nevertheless, the significantly higher divorce rate among dual-career couples is no statistical quirk. There is sometimes a level of suspicion and tension in the egalitarian marriage that is utterly contrary to its ideals of equity and the sharing of burdens. There is, among other problems, what Mrs. Pilgrim calls this “fear of being snookered.”

I ran into a friend today who is a typical casualty in many ways of one of these strange and unnatural bonds. 

He was disposing of debris outside his home and I stopped to talk.

Will his wife be moving back in?, I asked. We know each other well enough for me to pry.

No, he said. She will not be moving back in. In fact, pretty soon they will both be gone. They will be selling their house.

“What can you say?” he said. “It’s the same with all my friends.’

“What do you mean?” 

“You know, marriage and money problems.”

People say you can never judge what goes on between two people. That’s true, in the sense that one can never know everything. But when one observes a couple over a period of many years, one can make some reasonable conjectures. I make these conjectures fully aware that there are complications I cannot observe.

To a complete outsider, it may appear that what destroyed this marriage was the man’s drinking problem. It is true, it has been serious at times. I have seen him drunk. He goes through long periods when he is fine and long periods when he is clearly on the edge. This has been a major burden for his wife and I sympathize with her difficulties. But his drinking has not been completely incapacitating and he continues to work. He is quite successful in his work and has made a very decent living. He almost single-handedly, with his own two hands, converted a modest home into a palace, a palace that will soon be on the market.

I don’t believe his drinking put the nail in the coffin. Vodka didn’t destroy this marriage, though it did hurt it. The more serious problem was the wife’s uncontrolled materialism and the husband’s inability to resist it.

The supreme irony of the egalitarian marriage, in which the wife is earning her own money, sometimes much more than the husband, is that it makes women more materialistic, not less. Feminine materialism is a powerful force in both traditional and egalitarian marriages. It can sweep through a marriage like a tornado, leaving outward beauty and inner havoc. But in my opinion it is a more serious problem in egalitarian marriages. The idea that the dual-income marriage frees women from money worries, as the commenter Maggie Fox argued, is false. It embeds them in financial worries and often makes them reckless spenders. Given the availability of easy credit, this spending can be quite destructive.

My friend’s wife, who is a successful professional, has spent money with wild abandon for many years. On the face of it, this spending was noble. She wasn’t buying fancy vacations or loads of expensive clothes. Much of it went to their two children’s education, which included fantastically pricey private schools and high-end colleges. This couple spent many hundreds of thousands of dollars (I hesitate to say how much) on educaton expenses, financing a large portion of these with home equity loans. In many ways, I believe, this spending was a way for the wife to exert her maternal influence. She could not ensure her children’s success in simpler ways, by buildng their character and minds over many years, but she could do it in spectacular ways, by buying top-drawer education. She possesses an almost superstitious belief in the power of educational institutions to grant success in life. In this sense, she is utterly typical of the modern parent.

But I have found this faith in schools to be particularly avid in the professional wife. Instead of a paragon of independence, she becomes a slave to the back-breaking monetary demands of educational institutions and the years of expensive prepping they require. She accepts this slavery. She accepts it partly because she has no time to reflect upon it. She is too busy to think and highly susceptible to clever marketing. She steps onto the treadmill of spending and can’t step off.

Then there is the husband. He cannot be relieved of responsibility for all this. Why doesn’t he say no? In the case of my friends, the husband did try to say no for years. He argued with his wife. He said that the children didn’t need all this. He shrugged his shoulders and marveled at the exalted realm his children visited everyday. He didn’t like it. Ultimately, I suppose he could not win against the assertiveness, drive and determination of his wife. Many of these qualities she had acquired in her professional work. I guess in many ways he had accepted from the very beginning these qualities and perhaps even wanted them for his own mercernary reasons. He benefited monetarily from her aggression.

In the end, it’s done him in. He does not want to get divorced. He has told me that a number of times. She does.

“Where will you live?” I asked him.

“Oh,” he said. “I will get a studio apartment and not worry about anything but my work.” He is moving from a palatial home, with granite countertops and custom cabinetry, with a vaulted entranceway and a bathroom sink that reminds me of something I saw in a movie about ancient Rome, to a studio apartment.

She has already moved to an apartment nearby. After many years of hard work for both of them, they are poorer, not richer. I’m not saying she is the victor. They are both losers. But this woman is so headstrong she would have a hard time making any marriage contented, even one to a much richer man. Personally, I like both of them in their own ways. When she lets down her guard, she is a woman of endearing vulnerability and sweetness. I like her very much.

“Laurie,” she said to me once. “I am leaving and you cannot talk me out of it.”

But I sensed I could. 

I will miss them both and to think of their marriage ending makes me heartsick. To me, every dissolved marriage between people I know is like a bomb landing in my garden or on the house down the street. It leaves a hole, a void that will never be filled. I cannot hide my sadness in front of the embattled parties.  A man who was stronger from the very beginning and an entirely different way of being for her: these might have assured this particular couple, if not happiness, at least stability and companionship in their old age.

Charles writes:

Laura wrote: 

The supreme irony of the egalitarian marriage, in which the wife is earning her own money, sometimes much more than the husband, is that it makes women more materialistic, not less. 

That statement is very good. And it is accurate. A fellow female professional told me once that if she did not work, they could not afford the SUV, the ski trips, etc. I thought it strange she was willing to go through the rigors of working just to achieve those things. 

I feel like a stranger in a strange land.

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