First, notice how The Atlantic entitled its two major articles this year regarding women’s ascent in the workplace and the shifts in the marriage landscape. The first was “The End of Men?”, and this one, “All The Single Ladies.” Both are Scare Titles, reminiscent of newspaper headlines in the 80s that sent those women hoping to find husbands OUT of the workplace and back into the home, while  recapitulating the preposterous idea that if women do well, men plummet. I wouldn’t have thought The Atlantic would have succumbed to this tiresome approach, but there you are. Let’s be clear: Women’s rise in the workplace is hardly The End of Men, any more than men’s historic dominance in the workplace ever signified The End of Women. Moreover, the fact that so many women are in the workplace doesn’t, alas, mean more women are running things there. As Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, laments, “Women are not making it to the top.” In corporations, women in C level jobs top out at 16 percent….”and the numbers are going in the wrong direction.”  In fact, sometimes I think that more women in the workforce is a bit of a practical joke, giving the top brass , overwhelmingly men, more women to serve the companies’ needs… but not run the companies.

 And while you’re absorbing the fact that yes, traditional marriage is pretty much over; and yes, we are now a country dominated by singles of both genders; and yes, we women can’t count on husbands necessarily to be the financial providers they once could be counted on to be; remember that choosing a man for reasons other than financial ones is what women have been demanding for over two decades. Women are the ones, after all, who have been leaving traditional marriage in droves—three quarters of all divorces have been initiated by wives for at least fifteen years. Breaking from that tradition is not bad for many women, but good.

 Next time: Why this social upheaval is good for both women and men, and how we will be told otherwise.  

 Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post Love, Lives and Scare Tactics appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

Nevertheless, I said..  Why? And what’s this “obey” business?  

We exchanged ideas. He was patient. “So: you want a Lucy Stoner marriage, is that it?” he said. Thankfully, since I didn’t know what a “Lucy Stoner marriage” was, he went on to tell me about his early brief marriage to a writer named Hagar Wilde that ended on friendly terms. “We had a Lucy Stoner Marriage,” he confided. They had lived in Greenwich Village, he told me, but she had insisted on a separate studio, one outside their home, for her work. (Hagar, by the way, wrote the famous screwball comedy with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, “Bringing Up Baby,” which I later decided was successful because she had a place of her own.) I hadn’t heard about his first marriage, of Hagar, or of a “Lucy Stoner marriage,” whatever that was, until then. He also told me that he and my mother did not have a Lucy Stoner marriage.

 So I asked. What’s this Lucy Stoner Marriage you and mom don’t have?  Is it improper? Illegal?  A girl could hope.

It turned out that he was referring to the marriage of the 19^th century  abolitionist and suffragist, Lucy Stone, to fellow activist Henry Blackwell on May 1, 1855. They wrote their vows at a time when women’s rights were not yet remotely on the horizon—sixty-four years before women got the vote. It was also ninety years after something called “The Rights of Persons” appeared in the commentaries of Sir William Blackstone, reiterating the law, which said that “…the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage….” and meant that wives were the property of their husbands: they couldn’t own or control their own property, serve on juries, hold elective office, sign a contract, have custody of their children or control their money, even if it was money they earned.

Lucy Stone’s and Henry Blackwell’s magnificent marriage statement, a staggering insistence on equality despite the law (and she kept her own name) was read aloud at their wedding ceremony by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higgins, who, to his credit, was so impressed that he made copies and distributed it to the local clergy should other couples decide to use it.  The ceremony must surely have given the guests the vapors.

My father got hold of these vows soon after our discussion, and gave them to me, whom he thereafter referred to from time to time as his “Lucy Stoner daughter.” Read them, and be reminded of what Lucy and Henry did for all of us.

Lucy Stone’s Marriage Statement

 While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess. We protect especially against the laws which give to the husband:

1. The custody of the wife’s person.

               2.   The exclusive control and guardianship of their children.

               3.    The sole ownership of her personal, and use of her real estate, unless previously settled upon her, or placed in the hands of trustees, as in the case of minors, lunatics, and idiots.

             4.    The absolute right to the product of her industry.

            5.    Also against laws which give to the widower so much larger and more permanent interest in the property of his deceased wife, than they give to the widow in that of the deceased husband.

           6.    Finally, against the whole system by which “the legal existence of the wife is suspended during marriage,” so that in most states, she neither has a legal part in the choice of her residence, nor can she make a will, nor sue or be sued in her own name, nor inherit property.

We believe that personal independence and equal human rights can never be forfeited, except for crime; that marriage should be an equal and permanent partnership, and so recognized by law; that until it is so recognized, married partners should provide against the radical injustice of present laws, by every means in their power.

Of all the vows I’ve heard– and God knows I’ve heard many, delivered on mountaintops and in ski lodges, vows that became singalongs and hugathons, words written by the church, Leonard Cohen, or by couples themselves; words uttered by straight couples and gay couples; young couples and old couples; couples who were high, and couples who were low–these are the most meaningful to me. They speak not just to one man’s and one woman’s defiant, passionate intention to treat each other as equals at a time when the law forbade such a thing, but to their uncanny understanding that enduring love depends on it.  I’m proud to have been a Lucy Stoner daughter. And I’m proud to be a Lucy Stoner wife.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content.   

The post Lucy Stone: A Place of Honor on National Women’s Equality Day appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

I worry particualarly about women, vulnerable now to similar magical-thinking-solutions. I’m hearing young women talk about finding a guy to marry—quickly. I’m hearing older women talk about the futility of trying to reinvent themselves and instead figuring they’ll just hang on for dear life. As with trying to solve the world’s problems with faith and belief systems, trying to stay safe through all the old conventional means is dangerous to our collective psyche. When the economy is tight, and when men get scared, certain things happen like clockwork: There’s more domestic violence. Women tend to retreat; to return to the home, if not literally, then figuratively, as if the homely virtues ever paid off. We imagine that things were so much better long ago.

I’m feeling a backlash coming on. Before I read a new study showing that women are better off marrying earlier, or that men are happier with young women who aren’t focused on their careers,  or that corporate women are  leaving top jobs to “spend more time with the family,” I want to weigh in.  Throughout history, women have taken the heat for the culture’s fears, and in specific ways.  Whether they’ve left work so men returning from war can have the jobs, or raced into marriage before they’re “too old” or too successful, women have tended to feel powerless to avert the scary endings. and we’ve envisioned no bravery other than falling back into old roles.

Women, conventional goodness isn’t your friend. Maintaining your vision for the future is. If we do all the things we used to do when chaos frightened us with, oh, loss of love, loss of husbands, loss of social approval, loss of funds, loss of everythng, we lose something far more precious: We lose our hope for evolving as women. We mustn’t ever again let anything, especially a flagging economy, threaten our own ability to push through the confines of that old story, the Romance Plot, the one that hurls women back into the kitchen.  Yes, we all yearn for security, but it never did come in the form of  old ideas, old roles, old habits.  Don’t idealize what never was. We’ve spent years setting free a new narrative, one that promises forward movement in the home, in our relationships, inside ourselves. The old story that we fantasize as being magically problem-free, actually brought more women lifelong depression than it did safety and security.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post The Coming Backlash appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

I always want to know who’s doing the asking.

When you see a study claiming to somehow assess our morals, be suspicious of interest groups conducting that study—just as you’d be suspicious of a drug company conducting a study of one of its drugs. You want to know if it’s the Christian Right surveying people on their infidelity habits, say, or if it’s a neutral organization like the Pew Research organization, which analyzes census data. For when the Very, Very Righteous claim to be objective about a moral issue, I get very very nervous. Now the Barna Group, a research firm devoted primarily to the exploration of faith and spirituality, is not a biased group, and I don’t distrust its findings. So I was interested in its recent marriage study of 5017 adults selected from across the continental U.S. It concluded that born-again Christians are most likely to marry (84 percent of them, next to just 74 percent of those aligned with non-Christian faiths, and 65 percent of those who call themselves agnostics and atheists). That’s interesting. But don’t let anyone get all moral on you here: the study doesn’t show that Christians stayed married longer.

Christians of all stripes, born-again or not, are just as likely to divorce as anyone else. Born-again Christians in the study who were not evangelical (meaning, born-again Christians who meet less-stringent criteria among the born-again sect than do evangelical born-again Christians) were indistinguishable from the national average: 33 per cent have been married and divorced. Further, when evangelical born-again Christians and non-evangelical born-again Christians are combined under the heading of “born-again adults,” the number of their divorces is statistically identical to that of non-born-again adults: 32 per cent vs. 33 percent.

Ditto infidelity statistics, of which I’ve seen many—from Kinsey’s to Playboy Magazine’s to independent researchers’. It doesn’t matter if the study is sponsored by a group so morally righteous you don’t dare have a Hershey bar in their presence, any responsible method of taking our national moral temperature always uncovers one truth: We don’t differ much. Wel have the same fever, whatever our religious persuasion, however often we go to church, synagogue or mosque. Most of us marry at some point. Many of us do something we hadn’t planned to do that challenges that marriage and that may or may not end the marriage. Many of us divorce. Many of us then date for awhile, then marry again, then divorce again and then date around some more and maybe marry yet again. Increasingly we are a Singles’ Nation–which isn’t the fault of feminists ( a favorite group to point fingers at), of atheists, of non-born-agains, or anyone else.

Anyone who clears his throat to tell you otherwise—like that his group is in any way morally superior to yours–should be asked to go home and deliver his sermon to his own family…if his family still lives with him.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post Why the Very, Very Righteous Make Me Very, Very Nervous appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

While the parents of gay men and Lesbian women are ecstatically pushing marriage and children on their kids, these same kids are finding themselves under a startling new kind of societal pressure, not always welcome. “Just as I got my parents used to the idea that I was a societal flop, a cultural bad girl, a institutional drop-out,” says a young woman friend of mine who has been living with another woman for a few years, “along comes my eligibility into the most sanctified status of all, the one state-of-being the culture worships: marriage. And my parents have gone into deranged White Picket Fence mode. They asked me—really—if Samantha and I wanted a Dalmatian puppy after we were married.

 “A puppy?” I said. “You may recall that I don’t like dogs. And…after we’re married?  I’m 21. Whoever said we’re getting married, mom? Oh, and isn’t it YOU who loves Dalmatians? I hate them!”

Hey, I’ve been speaking with wives, and their mothers, and their daughters, for years. I know that the minute marriage is in the air, the minute a rock goes on a finger (or, absent a rock, a celebration of the very possiblity of engagement), people get goofy. Mothers’ fantasies go wild.  Fathers start having the Saving-for-College talks. It’s unstoppable.

But here’s why it’s worth indulging them. Marriage in this country is on the wane. More American households are led by singles than by married couples. of COURSE we worship marriage! It’s eluding us! It’s no longer the norm! This fantasied state of forever, this lifelong bliss, that’s the picture of marriage that lives in us. And, the more marriage recedes in our kids’ imaginations, the more the culture will idealize it. However bitter our divorces are; however absurd our choices; however numerous  and disastrous our remarriages, we will continue to hope for love everlasting and imagine that it is to be found in wedlock. So the puppy thing; the happy kids, the picket fences, they dance in our heads like sugarplums.

If marriage is to make a comeback, gay men and women wanting to marry will certainly help. You can’t have the institution without all the ceremony that surrounds it. So straight or gay, first marriage or fourth, let your families dream and fantasize, insane and unrelated to your own fantasies as they may be.  The notion of bliss, even with the pressure on you to provide it,  is the price of the ticket.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post “So, Fred, When You Gonna Make Me A Grandma?” appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

A brief romp through history reveals the story of men’s reactions to wives’ affairs. Think: Anna Karenina, Tess of the Durbervilles, Madame Bovary, Desdemona (who didn’t have an affair but whose husband, Othello, merely fantasized that she did and killed her in the name of his love). In art as in life, husbands are rational and dispassionate about their own infidelities but insanely irrational and dispassionate about their wives’.   And in life as in art,  the unfaithful heroine too often dies by her husband’s hand, or else finds herself on the street, marginalized and miserable and dispensed with. She no longer may take poison, hurl herself under a train, or find herself in a threshing machine as her fictional representatives did, but the legacy of  their punshment lives on.

Because we live in a culture that still believe that  a man’s infidelity arises from biology, we still tell wives not to take it personally. Because we also believe that wife’s infidelity arises not from biology nor need but from a moral failure, unfaithful wives simply cannot be heard. Maybe someday this will be different. But for now, it is a rare husband in a heterosexual marriage who can hear about a wife’s need for others. The cultural imperative that she be faithful is simply too entrenched in straight men’s psyches. The same men who tell women not to take infidelity personally because their own straying is meaningless and understandable,  take their wives’ infidelity very personally indeed. They see themselves as cuckolded. It’s a double standard that lies deep in our collective psyches, and I beg women to take it seriously.

With no traditional wife in the picture, a wife bound by strict laws made centuries ago by men,  married gay men and Lesbians might find openness and honesty easier. But in straight couples, wives will find it difficult to shed these laws, however much they want to, for the rules live deep within us.  Pick up a newspaper. See the way unfaithful women are treated in the courts. See the dead bodies of women who tried to forswear sexual exclusivity and had tthe bad judgment to tell the truth.  Honesty be damned.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post Honesty about Infidelity? Not on Your Life! appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

That traditional marriage has been sensational for men but not for women cannot have escaped notice. Year after year, studies consistently show that men thrive—emotionally, physically, spiritually—inside the very same institution in which women tend to languish, become depressed, and lose themselves. This counterintuitive truth, that so many wives become less themselves in marriage, as if the very walls of the institution contract their souls, goes against our deepest assumption: that women want marriage more than men and that, moreover, it is the most natural place in which a woman might flourish. Not so. If it were, and if wives were thriving, then over two thirds of divorces wouldn’t be initiated by wives.

Created by men for the wellbeing of husbands and children and the safety of wives, marriage was indeed desirable for women. If a woman didn’t marry she had no other place to be; no income; no resources. So yes indeed women wanted to be wives: the alternative was to be a maid or governess, at best; out on the street otherwise.

A gay man or a gay woman who marries will not face the odd loss of self the traditonal wife has experienced, for the simple reason that, unless he or she chooses a traditional role scenario neither will ever be a wife. The conduct books of the 19th century that created the character of the wife, a character necessary in a culture that required women to stay home and be glad of it, nearly killed even the best of women. In 1942, when she was forty-nine and at the peak of her career, Virginia Woolf addressed a group of professionals about the “phantom” who threatened to ruin her writing, that “utterly unselfish” Angel of the House whose cloying goodness menaced the integrity of Woolf’s work. As she wrote then about this monstrous cultural creation known as a wife :

“I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.”

Woolf went on to write that this beatific construct continued her characterological dirty work, hovering over Woolf’s own psyche aas well as her pages, “always creeping back when I thought I had dispatched her.” And this is what wives faced. It is what they still face. The task of killing off the wife, whose value is so bound up in her supposedly natural-born selflessness, her virtue, her moral superiority, her godliness that women who buy into it can’t think straight after awhile, is so daunting that I’m shocked, each day, to hear women say to me, “I like being married….but why don’t I feel like me anymore?”.

Gay men and women will not have to shake off this ghost of marriage past. There will be other daunting psychological issues we can’t foresee; other idealized images they’ll have to contend with.. But the killer icon, the dutiful, perfect, soul-smashing wife, that thing men once put on a pedestal, will not be one of them. Amen to that.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post One Reason Gay Marriage is Great for Straight Marriage appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

More evidence that women’s attitudes toward  marriage have changed dramatically: The Pew  Research Center, which analyzes census data,  confirms what I’ve been hearing from  women:  the desire to make their own self-expansion as important as it has always been for men and children.

Women want more space in their relationships. Yes, I know, we used to mock men for saying they wanted more “space”– because it was such a cowardly euphemism for  “I’m outtahere.”  But women mean it differently: They don’t necessarily want to leave their relationships,  but they definitely want to expand; to flourish inside their relationships, just as men always have.  Hearing the word “space,” though, men tend to hear the worst: they hear the ambivalence; they  hear what they call women’s  “commitmentphobia.” Funny: That’s the very word women once used to describe their ambivalent, skittish boyfriends, the men who didn’t want to get married. 

But now, men do want to get married. And that women are thinking twice about it shouldn’t surprise anyone/ It’s long been clear that women often don’t thrive in the institution of marriage ….while men, emphatically, in every study, do. (If you want to know why, read my book, Marriage Shock.)

Another finding in the census analysis shows two other related cultural changes: First, that financial security isn’t scaring women into marriage as it once did; and second, that more men now “marry up,” wedding educated, successful wives who will bring home at least as much bacon as they do. Single women view this new fact not as an expectation of welcome equality but simply as one more addition to a wife’s should list: you know, that they should be cook, housekeeper, child-rearer, nurturer, lover, relationship-maintainer…and now, money-maker.

The question I’m always asked is this: If women are happy being single,  and they’re not racing into marriage either for financial gain or for children (another census finding, incidentally), what do they seek in a relationship? (Besides space., that is?)

They want what they’ve always wanted: connection. Connection with an emotionally present, relationally skilled partner who is also inclined to want intimacy. A partner who sees marriage as women do—as a place for growth and self-expansion for both partners, not just for one.  A partner who doesn’t want a high-achieving wife and then switch gears and want her to assume the old, traditional wifely role as well.

Does this sound unreasonable on women’s part? Are women demanding too much?

Not at all.

If a man wants a woman to be a breadwommer. and to marry him on his timetable, then she has every right to make her own demands on him.  And if she can’t get what she needs,  then why wouldn’t she decide to stay among the unprecedented 110 million unmarried people who make up the majority of households in America? Why wouldn’t she remain outside an institution that she fears might confine her, and instead join those single people who say they very much enjoyi their independent status… and their space?

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content.  

The post “Honey, I want some…SPACE!” appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

Marriage needs a victory, for it’s in deep trouble. I’ve long lamented the high rate of depression among young married women—a depression the culture has stonewalled, and which has led to a massive walkout strike among wives. I call it “Matrimorphosis,” this transformation of sexy, authentic brides into unhappy wives. And now that so many middle-class women no longer need marriage to put a roof over their heads, they’re finding other ways to live.

When I wrote in my book, Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women into Wives, that three-quarters of all divorces are initiated by wives, the response wasn’t, What can this culture do to please wives? No, it was, Who are these overentitled, spoiled women? How dare they leave this hallowed institution that’s so good for them!

It obviously wasn’t so good for them. We are now an unmarried nation. Singles are 110-million strong, meaning that the majority of households are unmarried households. Cohabiting ones, yes. Single with kids, yes. But not married ones. A Pew Research Center nationwide survey analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau reports that four in ten respondents say that traditional marriage is becoming obsolete.

So the joy I feel for gay men and women who have finally been given the right to wed has as much to do with my hope that they’ll create something new and wonderful with their marriages, as it does with my delight that they will share in all the benefits married people have reaped for so long. My hope is that they will resist trying to emulate the idealized, picket-fence version of marriage, and instead go for unconventional, nontraditional marriages—always, I’ve found, the most successful kind. I hope they throw out the “iron framework of men’s reasoning”—a phrase from The Scarlet Letter—that has for so long turned loving heterosexual couples into strangers; turned young, sexual, outspoken brides into muted, unhappy wives; and turned our nation into one that believes marriage is gone for good.

Yes, it’s the couple that doesn’t follow the script that has the best chance of success; the couple that doesn’t see itself through the eyes of the culture; the couple that doesn’t idealize marriage but sees instead a vision of authentic connection and commitment. Gay men and women have never had to follow tradition’s rules, since they’ve been hurled outside them, and my hope is that they won’t idealize traditional marriage now that they’re inside its rules. I don’t mean rules of sexual fidelity. I mean something larger — the hidden rules and regulations buried deep within the institution’s ancient walls, the ones that can kill the soul. My hope is that they rewrite the script and come up with a brand new plot. As for the culture itself, it has a new chance to support marriage–this time, by asking, How do we please these newlyweds? How do we give them not what we believe they should have but what they tell us they need? How do we support their unique, long-desired, well-deserved marriages?

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post Ask Not What Gay Marriage Can Do For Us, But What We Can Do For Gay Couples appeared first on Dalma Heyn.

An interviewer not long ago asked the creator of “Mad Men,”  Matthew Weiner, whether he felt Don Draper’s fall from power and failed marriage was a result of his basic, underlying badness–a badness like, say, Tony Soprano’s.

Not at all, he replied. Draper, unlike Soprano, “has a lot of admirable qualities and is basically a moral person, and he makes mistakes. His morality is conflicting. It’s situational, which is the disease of the 21st century.”

There it is.

Today’s Times asks researchers why masters of the universe (and Draper is the tv example of one) screw up and dissemble and hurt everybody they love.  Some researchers say it’s testosterone. Some say it’s power. Some say it’s a fusion of ambition and desire. Some say it’s a control system gone awry in the brain. While I look forward to more such answers in the future—to, say, why sports champions hit the top of their game and suddenly decide to cheat; what prompts  politicians to have children with their household help;  why billionaires defraud and ruin the financial lives of their clients,  I imagine we’ll eventually find something pretty dull. Like, that they feel they occupy a realm above the law and without consequences. And that they feel frighteningly secure in that rarefied air, but, armed with their raging testosterone and entitlement, get itchy to move on to a way cooler place.

And when they ‘re under pressure to say, as Anthony Weiner did, “I don’t know what I was thinking,” I believe him, but alas, I feel nothing. When they eventually feel bad and start apologizing to their wives and families, I yawn. At least  Bernie Madoff  has the courage of his sick convictions. From his jail cell he reportedly announced, “Fuck my victims. I carried them for twenty years, and now I’m doing 150 years.”

Yeah, well, whatever.

Please like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter, join my LinkedIn network, and visit my YouTube channel to receive exclusive content. 

The post Weiner’s Reasons? Schwarzenegger’s Apology? Do We Care? appeared first on Dalma Heyn.