She’s close to retirement and has been saving for years. Her adult son doesn’t need money, so her small stash supports the household she shares with her boyfriend of five years, a twice-divorced man  whose money mostly goes to his two young children by his second wife. My guest agreed to this arrangement, feeling strongly that his children should be his first priority, and that they could manage their household expenses together.. BUT, she says, “in  this protracted downturn, none of his money goes to our household; it all goes to his (second) ex-wife’s. I’m wondering where to draw the line. He does, after all, live here. He did, after all, make a financial commitment, albeit a small one, to our life together.”

Before you jump in to judge, remember that the number if women marrying men with children, from both first and second wives, is growing. And the economy isn’t.

Doesn’t it give you new appreciation for pre-nups? I remember thinking, once upon a time, that they were odious reminders to women not only of death and divorce, but that the new brides themselves were disposable and that, moreover, once disposed of, they’d surely be headed for poverty. But I now think prenups are a blessing for everyone. Particularly women.

Here’s the bitter truth for my guest: Money siphoned off from her joint household expenses that now goes to the household of his ex is his concern. But the deal hes breaking with his live-in lover is hers. It galls her that he now even wants more from her—that she support their household, but also that she contribute to paying off his growing debt, on the theory that “they” shouldn’t go more into debt.

No, that won’t fly. First off, they’re not married. Second, her lover’s debts and obligations may morally trump his obligations to her, but her own child (who may one day need money, too), her own home, and her own retirement money trump those obligations. They trump HIM, unless he figures out how to be in this dilemma with her (meaning that HER concerns and obligations be as important as his own).. She now needs to get out of the now0defunct deal and focus on her dwindling assets. He may call her heartless, cold, selfish (more on THAT in another blog). But who, exactly, will be grateful if she gives everything away to this family she doesn’t know? The  ex-wife? Oh, sure. The children? Uh-uh.  She will end up, in her retirement, both  resentful and poor because of a man who never should have begun living with her in the first place, and a family in whose lives she is not even a remote consideration..   

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 Well they must be really mad now, because America isn’t even a married culture anymore.  That picture of ourselves talk-show hosts and politicians and so many others insist on—the happily married American couple–is a very nice picture, but it has little to do with us in the US. No, as I’ve said a million times, we’re now a dating culture. What’s more, the Pew Research Center points out that nearly four-in-ten survey respondents in the 2010 Census said they believed that marriage is becoming obsolete.

I know we all hate change. But we’re doing some weird things with our denial of reality, like forcing our outmoded ideals and ideas on those who actually have gone with the flow. To wit: I mentioned in an earlier blog the fact that  Jane Bryant Quinn had noted, in her piece in AARP Magazine, that the magazine’s readers are dating and having weddings–but not actually getting married. That’s right, old folks are taking the vows in public, but not signing the papers.  They’re pretending. Why? Because they feel so pressured by their kids to put on the grandparently show. They’re afraid to depart from the sexless, it’s-over-for-us, role their kids have imposed on them.  As my neighbor, I’ll call him Joe, confided recently, “I don’t know how it happened, but I have  the three single most judgmental children on the planet. Self-righteous prigs, they are!”

Joe and his live-in girlfriend Amy, age 58, played along for awhile. (“For the sake of the grandkids. Like they care.”) “Finally, Amy and I couldn’t stand the righteousness of their disapproval; not to mention the stupidity of feeling like bad teenagers. So we said, Hey, you go live by your standards, we’ll live by ours.'”

Joe and Amy will remain unmarried, they say, and will continue to have sex. Really. And to live together. And, oh yes, they drink! Can you believe it? Sometimes–getaloadathis–they even drink too much!  And they swear.  And…..well, heaven only knows what’s happened to parents and grandparents these days. What has the world come to?     

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So, who is narrating the story of this photo in Victoria’s Secret window in Fairfield, Ct.?  (We added the type to illustrate where it might have been more appropriately shown) Odd  that the moment when women are powering ahead, storefronts and magazine covers  feature skinny young girls not only made  up to look like fashionable adults, but posing in a  way that clearly suggests  subjugation—as  does the girl above. Whose viewpoint is this, do  you think? Who’s telling girls about to inherit a legacy of unprecedented power that their  REAL power lies not in their education and their upcoming careers, but rather, in looking  like baby hookers,  pouting and bruised and with their arms up in their air as if in chains?  Are storeowners telling this story so they  can sell underwear? Perhaps. Photographers,  who want to make their mark? Maybe.

But come on, folks, it’s endemic. Who’s so scared of women’s power that all they can do is send messages to young girls that say, Forget about it, girls: What you’re good for is sex. JC Penney and Forever 21 are right now offering them tshirts that say, “I’m Allergic to Algebra” and “I’m Too Pretty to do Homework.” Cute?  Innocent? Not when you remember who is coming home with more bachelors and masters degrees. Not when you know who is the majority of the workforce. Ask yourself, Who doesn’t like those facts?

If we’re not interested in who is urging this role on girls, who is urging them to be anorexic and provocative and passive, we shouldn’t be surprised that even the youngest teenagers are gaining popularity by giving fellatio at parties to as many boys as possible. (Have you heard the new one? It’s called “Pterodactyling,” and, like its sad little cousin, Rainbowing, young girls do it to get “street cred.”)

When girls are afraid to be round, as women really are, they’re also afraid to be women; they’re afraid to be imperfect; they’re afraid grow up.  So who’s teaching them to back off from being round, powerful, assertive women?  Who’s telling them to shut up and back off? Who’s urging them to become underweight and ill and to think of themselves as nothing other than–oh how tired and tiring this is–sex objects?  And—really, please, ask yourself not only who, but WHY?

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In reading Deborah Solomon’s interesting review of the new book, “My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz”in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I was struck once again by how free literary and artistic men have historically felt to reveal themselves in all their egomaniacal splendor or horror (think Picasso, Hemingway, Styron, Faulkner, Keroac, to name a few) while literary and artistic women have kept silent about themselves (from Austen on).. Steiglitz, the famous photographer and gallery owner, wrote letters that Solomon says “read like an exercise in negative self-salesmanship,” endlessly revealing his hypochondriacal, egomaniacal, wounded self without inhibition to the woman he first hoped to and then did marry.  O’Keeffe, by contrast, throughout their friendship and later marriage “retained her armor of discretion,” Solomon says. She remained silent about her deepest self in these letters–just as she remained silent when critics asked whether those luscious flowers of hers depicted women’s sexual organs.

It would be a mistake to assume that O’Keeffe kept silent about sexuality, and about her deepest self, unintentionally—and Solomon doesn’t suggest that she does.  One of my favorite writers, the late Carolyn G. Heilbrun, wrote a book, Writing a Woman’s Life, asking  why so many autobiographies and biographies of brilliant, important women were so poisonously boring. If famous men can speak of their
cutthroat ambition, their lust for power, mistreatment of women, their deals with drugs, alcohol and the devil,  why did brilliant women artists and writers hold back? Why did their biographers shrink from delving into the souls of their subjects’ lives?

The answer is, because women aren’t supposed to be too angry, too destructive, too ambitious–and God knows, too sexual. Any one of those could kill her reputation, if she was lucky enough to have a reputation while she was alive. One could be a monster of  arrogance, self-importance, destructive ego and temper, and still be thought a brilliant artist but only  if one happened to be a man. At the time O’Keeffe lived, in the early 20^th century, women artists and writers had to pretend to have got where they were through luck, happenstance, or the kindness of  strangers—as though no “unladylike” emotion ever propelled or undid them. And their biographers unconsciously colluded in the charade.

Forutnately, we now have women who feel less inhibited about telling the truth about their lives and themselves, and we have  biographers willing to help excavate these truths.  Knowing how women learn to blunt the pain of rejection; the strain of success and power; the rage and self-loathing at failure….the emotions with which all artists struggle, Heilbrun said in 1979, “We must ask women writers to give us, finally, female characters who are complex, whole, and independent—fully human.” O’Keeffe knew the thin line she walked in the 1920s and 30s, with some people calling her a minor talent; others calling her sexually obsessed, and chose even in her letters to her husband to shut up.  It is in no small part thanks to Heilbrun’s understanding of women’s self-silencing,  that  modern artists and biographers are exposing more of women’s deepest truths.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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I’ve long been curious about the dearth of pleasure we experience in this, the most gratification-focused culture on earth, as are the many women I’ve spoken with over the years in my books.  I understand the reasons for it now, thanks to the extensive work I’ve done with brilliant friends and colleagues who have shared my passionate involvement in the issue.  Elizabeth DeBold, bestselling author, PhD. and EnlightenNext Magazine senior editor, some time ago provided me with  so much insight and understanding  as a result of her own work, and her amazing book, Mother/Daughter Revolution: From Betrayal to Power. Our dialogues then were indispensible for my writing of Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women into Wives. We, along with other brilliant women concerned with the issue–Carol Gilligan, Deb Tolman, Dana Crowley Jack, Annie Gottlieb, the late Jean Baker Miller, to name a few– felt ourselves to be a kind of underground posse, excavators digging out the truth about what women want (and girls; and men; and couples) when the language for our desires seemed as deeply buried as the recognition of it was to Freud,  and we set about to dig for the reasons why our culture has been so hellbent on obscuring them.

I’m thrilled  that Elizabeth DeBold and I are  doing what we’ve so long wanted to do: discussing this and  many other deeply felt issues women face today, in a dialogue at M.I.T. in Boston (77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA; 7:30 pm) next Friday night, June 24th. It’s called “Women Surfing the Edge of Change: Life, Love and Work in our Confusing Time.”   We hope you’ll join us.  For more detailed information and to register, click here.

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There’s no difference between the religious cheaters and the nonreligious cheaters. Every study except those funded by religious groups says so.  Here’s one, a study of born- again Christians. They are more likely to marry, according to the Barna Group’s recent marriage study of 5017 adults selected from across the continental U.S. (84 percent next to 74 percent among people aligned with nonChristian faiths, and 65 percent among agnostics and atheists) but they’re just as likely to divorce as everyone else. And born-again Christians who are not evangelical (meaning, those who meet less stringent criteria among the born-again sect than do evangelical born-agains) are indistinguishable from the national average: 33 per cent have been married and divorced.  Moreover, when evangelicals and non-evangelical born-again Christians are combined into a class of born-again adults, their divorce number is statistically identical to that of non-born again adults: 32 per cent vs. 33 percent!

So, as you  listen to the various machinations of the Righteousness Crew, those Family Values people who wear their sanctimoniousness on their sleeve (and pants), remember one thing: God has nothing to do with it. Whether you believe in God or not,  whether you go to church daily or are just a despicable heathen with nary a thought of church on Easter, you share similar habits with all God’s children with regard to sex, marriage and divorce.

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I just spoke with 15 young women in their twenties about pay inequality. What do you think, I asked, when you realize that women get less than men for the same job? They looked at me with that wry “What else is new?” look I’ve become familiar with when discussing issues that are as deep in our culture as the minerals in our bones. It’s a bored look, like “How lame is that?”…but it’s not an outraged look. I KNOW you don’t like it and don’t think it’s fair, I went on, hoping to touch on some fury, but what do you feel when you realize that you constitute the majority of the workforce, but get 77 cents for every dollar a man gets for your same job? That you’ve worked like hell to get to the finish line only to find that it’s about a fourth farther on that men’s finish line.  And that economists estimate that your unwillingness to assert your own worth costs each of you about $500,000 in earnings by the time you reach 60?

“I haven’t had that experience yet,” a new lawyer said. “I haven’t had it that starkly presented, where, like, I share an office with someone who makes $100,000 and I make $77,000. So I’m still filled with that half-pissed-off/ half grateful- to- be -in- the- firm feeling.”

“You mean, the ‘I should be happy I’ve gotten THIS far’ feeling?” another woman asked. “‘Cause I know that feeling. And I also know it’s a way of tamping down the outrage.”

Yes, it is. It’s what Catholicism’s meek-inheriting-the-earth has communicated to third-world workers. A Mexican businessman fighting for the pay rights of other workers once told me that that attitude, more than anything else, keeps Mexican businessmen from fighting harder to get to the top. “What do you say about aggression and ambition to a man who believes God loves him more if he’s poor and meek than if he’s assertive and proud?”

Exactly what we’ve said, in effect, about ambition and pride to young women. It’s not religion that makes them so afraid of being aggressive, it’s the whole culture that’s given them the message.

Young women, don’t buy into this. Don’t be so grateful to be working that you forget how valuable your work is. And if you don’t believe it’s as valuable as a man’s, then we need a new feminist movement. One that  says it all over again, and allows you to hear the numbers rather than a voice that says, as if it’s a religious voice,  “Thou who dost fight For Women are fighting Against Men.”

That $500,000 that you could have by the time you’re sixty if you fight for it now will come in very handy. A greater boon when you reach 65. Particularly since there are those fighting right now to see to it that you don’t get the retirement income you will have earned.

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