It got me thinking: Can this marriage– between secret behavior and the worldwide web –be saved? I don’t think so.  Among those millions of cheating hearts lies at least one who’s out for vengeance, either of the web visitors or the website itself.

Many years ago, when I was a guest on Oprah!, women all over the country who were having or who had had affairs were invited on the show to discuss a book I’d written,The Erotic Silence of the American Wife.  In they came,  thrilled to be flown into Chicago for their favorite daytime show.  “Don’t you care that you might be found out?” I asked several excited young women when they arrived in the studio.

“My husband doesn’t watch daytime TV,”  they answered.

But your friends and family?

No worries, they assured me. They would wear disguises–wigs and sunglasses and hats and other flimsy covers. Really? With a studioful of women in what seemed like fright wigs and groucho noses,we could have been on the set of  I Love Lucy, watching Lucy Ricardo in her endless attempt to try to hide something from Ricky.

So much for secrecy. While secrecy is the engine that fuels affairs, I think these women were ambivalent about keeping their affairs a secret–or they wouldn’t have come onto a national TV show. To tell or not to tell?: That is the question, and mental health experts (like me) disagree wildly. Some advocate telling all; others, going to the grave with your mouth shut.  These women, like those on the hacked website, feel two opposing impulses simultaneously after it’s over : the moral imperative to speak the truth to one’s spouse–being honest–and the moral imperative to hide it, so as not to hurt one’s spouse and jeopardize the marriage–being honorable. (Openness  usually wins, for better or worse: it is the American way. Discretion–the European way–is not popular here. As a nation, we believe “discreet” to be more like “deceit.”) Beyond the guilt that affairs engender, there’s a deep, deep ambivalence about keeping the secret.

Just as the Oprah guests can’t have been entirely psychologically committed to keeping their affairs a secret, so must many visitors to sites like Ashley Madison be ambivalent–and in denial–about the security and privacy of any such site, no matter how impenetrable they imagine them to be.  I have to believe that the millions of people willing to open their pocketbooks, fantasies and libidos to website managers and anonymous potential lovers are ambivalent–hoping subconsciously as much to reveal their secret desires for love and sex as to keep them.  It is a push-pull toward and away from safety, toward and away from freedom, toward and away from moral rectitude. And it’s an ambivalence as old as marriage itself.

Tell me your thoughts. (But please, no moralizing! This isn’t about good people vs bad people!)

–Dalma

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Who needs men to ridicule and demean executive women when women will do it for them?

When my mother wrote a humor column , “The Wit Parade,” in the Journal of The American Medical Association (JAMA), she wrote it under the byline, “E.E. Kenyon.” The initials suggested that she might well be a man. Why not claim her gender and put her real name (Ethel Elizabeth Kenyon)?– Because, she told me, “No one thinks women are funny. No one wants to see jokes picked out by a woman. No one would pay attention.” Granted, she wrote a hundred-plus years after George Eliot made a similar decision, but her point–that no one would have her back at JAMA if readers found out she was a woman and rejected the column, was well-taken. (When I had my first magazine column in Mademoiselle, under my own name, my mother said “Well, lucky for you to have the name Dalma. It could be a man.”)

“She’s right,” says the wonderful master improvisation performer and teacher, Holly Mandel. Holly, like Elizabeth (above) cares deeply about women’s evolution–hence, the name of her program, “Improvolution.” She insists that everyone in her classes go to the mat for each other–no matter how disastrously they may fail. In fact she wants them to fail–in a safe, caring, collaborative setting. “Women risk everything when they do stand-up, and the last thing they need is to take the huge risks they have to take, fall flat on their faces–as male comedians have long said they would–and then have other women turn away from them. I tell them, While you’re here, we have each others’ backs completely–or don’t be in my class.”

Look, we’re trained to be wary of each other. We’re trained to think we’re after each other’s men; we’re after each other’s jobs; we’re after each other’s friends, money, lives. Let’s make history. Let’s consciously bury the fear and envy that Patriarchy (yes, I know, but there it is) instilled in us centuries ago, and tell our colleagues and our friends, whether they succeed (and everyone attacks) or fail (and everyone attacks): You did good, sister. And don’t worry, whatever they say about you, I’m here. I have your back.”

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Now I find the same problem exists in the ebook publishing world. I’ve written a novel with my husband, Richard. It’s a love story for grownups, not for teens or tweens or twenty-something (, although reading about different age groups shouldn’t be a problem for anyone). But it’s not, strictly speaking, a Romance. Nor, although it’s literate, is it  Literary Fiction. It’s adventurous but not Adventure, nor, in any way, Political. It’s a novel, a story– but not a short story and not one in a collection of stories. And so it goes. Oh, and what about the otherworldly presence–Cupid, the God of Love–whom we use for fun….does that mean it’s should be under the category of   “Magical Realism” or “Sprituality”?  No, not either.  As Yul Brynner once put it, speaking as the King of Siam in his own love story with Anna, “Is a puzzlement.”  

      Well, just for fun, check it out. On Amazon you can find our book (A Godsend: A Love Story for Grownups)  under a bunch of headings, but I hope you will take a leap and spend the $2.99 to download it onto your Kindle or Ipad (using the Kindle APP) and just enjoy this love story, whatever genre they want to put it in!

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NO! You mean….men have FAILINGS?  YES! says this study! And they are really really horrible ones, too, like “failing to make an effort with their partner’s friends, criticizing their driving and….” get this killer of a flaw: “ the inability to multi-task.”

Oh, but women, there’s more dismal unhappiness and disappointment for you ahead. “Leaving the toilet door open, watching too much sport and poor personal grooming.” Can you imagine living with such a creature? Welcoming such a man into your life? Accepting this merely-two-thirds-perfect ambulatory creature who watches Late Night Sports into your BED?

The last time I saw such dumb studies is when I was studying the Conduct Books of the 19^th century for my book, Marriage Shock. Then, the word “perfection” was reserved exclusively for women. Then, it was men who were looking for the “perfect girl,” or the “perfect wife” and women judged one another according to this completely fake standard of perfection being divined by a culture trying to get women to be happy as exclusively domestic beings.  Conduct books stipulated how to become that perfect girl and perfect wife, listing not only skills(“She must know how to truss a turkey; clean a chimney; wire a lamp,” it says here in one book) but “feminine” attributes (“She must be cheerful at all times, and welcome home her man with a smile every night”). Then, though, punishment for falling short was severe: A girl might not win a mate. At that time, not marrying meant becoming, oh, a prostitute or a governess, since women couldn’t make their own money in the workplace.

But what’s going on here, now that women are assessing men according to a similarly ridiculous list of attributes? What does this mean, that the top characteristic of the supposedly “perfect” guy is “A good personality”? Sound familiar, ladies? And why are we whipping out this mythical notion of perfection, this tailored-for-women kind of guy, NOW? Are we seeing a kind of centuries-long retribution? I’m sure if I looked carefully into the study, some of this would be simply cynical consumerism.

But one thing it shows is that women don’t need men as much as they once did, or such nonsense wouldn’t make headlines. Women wouldn’t be in the position of judging. “Perfection” wouldn’t be a legitimate term.  I’m sorry for these guys, as I was sorry for those turkey-trussing, smiling wives of yore.  Something weird is going on. Creating a male character that doesn’t exist is as frightening as  that smiling, cookie-baking perfect woman we all tried to emulate, and who also never existed.   

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I’d expected some resistance to the pleasure option, since, if marriage isn’t sobering, sanctified, and serious, what is? Ever since the Puritans turned the pursuit of happiness into a frenzy of righteous self-improvement, Americans have opted for betterment over pleasure. We are suspicious of enjoyment for its own sake (pleasure has to improve our blood sugar levels). It’s as though what’s good for you long ago won out over what feels good. But what was special about these readers who chose what we called “The Pleasure Marriage” is that, when I interviewed them individually some time later, they were still having fun. Their marriages, of the ones I was able to find out about, were the happiest.

Often the busiest couples made fun the highest priority. An Oregon woman wrote, “Yes, we work. Yes, we have a little girl. Yes, we care about her. But yes, we go away together, without her, as long as a week.” The price this wife pays for fun with her husband is the criticism of friends and family. “It’s as if,” wrote another Oregon woman who did the same, “having kids is incompatible with having a terrific time without them. Our friends who have spent the last fifteen years putting their children first every second feel very righteous about it–and outraged at us–but we see they’re not so happy now. We are.”

At the risk of sanctifying fun the way we’ve sanctified marriage itself,  let’s face it: people are fleeing marriage. And women are leading this flight. So, if more women married for fun (and risked the family’s and the culture’s censure) is it possible that more women would want to stay married? If more women had a great time with their husbands, would divorce stats—way over half of all divorces are initiated by wives—change?  If pleasing wives were put first on a list of Things to Do, would “wife” become a sexier word?

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 “Men tend to move on a fairly predictable path to achievement. Women transform themselves only after an awakening. And that awakening is identifiable only in hindsight.”  

 When I wrote about women who had had extramarital affairs, the awakening that transformed these women was not, as you might guess, sexual. (It’s not as if an affair is all about sex, anyway. It can be entirely emotional.) The awakening had to do with their no longer being eligible for the goodness award that was expected of wives, an award they’d all expected to win….until that fateful trip into the lawless land of badness,  at which point they had to rethink everything. Not only had their vision of marriage changed, but of society, of who is good and who is bad and what that means, anyway; and of themselves. Their internal lives changed as profoundly as their external ones, regardless of whether they left their marriages or stayed in them; whether they told their partners about the affair or didn’t. The awakening that occurred, identifiable only in hindsight, was a profound transformation that allowed them to move forward more authentically and with more compassion and less judgment of everyone and everything.  In departing so drastically from the trajectory they’d expected to follow forever, they excavated another person inside, a person they may have never imagined before, or only glimpsed. They saw someone who might be scorned by the world, but who was just another part of themselves, and entirely human. The trick was to keep their humanity while viewing her, not to step outside and judge and censor, while she incorporated her into the woman she thought she knew so well. That’s one kind of achievement, acknowledging your full self, and for these women it took a long time to get there. 

 Almost every woman I know is reinventing herself. She’s looking at her past achievements and wondering what lies next—and exhilarated, or terrified. She’s struggling with money and/or with love—will either be in her life anymore? This reinvention process is hard. It takes enormous patience and kindness toward oneself to get through it.  It takes the same kind of humanity it took for the women who had affairs. “Can I proceed with my life and still be me? Can I make money when my skills are no longer valued, or even paid for? Am I too old, too unskilled, too….whatever? Is the real me acceptable in this world of shrinking options?  Do I have to pretend to be something I’m not (younger, smarter, more energetic) in order to achieve? Can I cop to all that has happened to me, and all that I’ve done, and not disown even one moment of it? 

We’ll keep looking outward, but also at ourselves, kindly and patiently, here in InHeynsight.  

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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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We said No Can Do when we saw the futility of trying to be as dutiful and selfless as tradition asked us to be—while having a career, too. We said We Can Do Without This, when facing a terminally unhappy relationship, because we knew we could manage to put a roof over our own heads. We  said, Why Can’t Men Be More Nurturing? and Why Can’t They Do Half The Housework?—when such questions would have been preposterous if husbands continued to be the sole financial providers, as they once were.  

 So now we can be the kind of imperfect wife history prohibited. And, we can leave. We can marry more nurturing, helpful men. We can still keep the contract stipulating the same permanence and fidelity it always did, or we can tailor our marriages to the couple we actually are, if we see ourselves as less upright and traditional. So when we mourn the loss of marriage, the happily-ever-after ideal  we’ve conjured in our heads, remember that we’re actually lamenting the loss of a wonderful fantasy that mostly never was.  We’re mourning the loss of safety and everlasting love that both didn’t necessarily exist in marriage, and didn’t make women happ anyway!  Scary as it is to give up the promise of perfect love forevermore, we can instead make a marriage that works for the couple we really are. If that means marrying men who don’t make very much money; or getting married later than we’d hoped; or not having a big wedding; or reimagining how we will or we won’t have a family; remember that the majority of women wanted it this way. Yes, we really did: The 65 percent of women who leave marriage and initiate divorce,  asked for something else. If that means they, and we, don’t get everything that once was comforting and “perfect,”  at least we’ll figure out a way to create marriage as a huge space, one massive enough for two thriving people to share their two vital lives: That alone is cause for celebration.  

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 You HAVE to do it in person. You just have to avoid these five pitfalls:

       1.   Don’t try to win his approval. You can’t reject a partner and simultaneously get his blessing. You’re here to do dirty work and you both know it. So do it without asking for reassurance.

         2.   Don’t ask “Can we just be friends?” Ick. You’re not in high school. Why pretend your offer of not sleeping with someone anymore is an exciting opportunity? Why pretend that cavalierly offering to take someone’s love but not his body is anything but a booby prize?  Have respect for your former lover’s comprehension abilities. You may end up friends, but it’ll be awhile if it happens.

          3.  Don’t hit below the belt.  This is no time for heavy artillery, just to justify your ending the relationship. “I don’t want to see you anymore,” is deadly enough. It’s also nonnegotiable, which any accusation you might hurl (“You have the morals of swine”) is (“So, if I mend my piggish morals, can we still see each other?”). Even if he tortures you to divulge the real reasons, don’t.  And remember the old couples’ therapy mantra: Stick to the word “I.” Share what you feel, not what you think: You want out without either dredging up old arguments or attacking him. You want to politely, simply, truthfully, respectfully, state your desire to get out of it.

          4.     Don’t pick a cozy spot.  Go to neutral territory. Not your bedroom (which is just a reminder of where neither of you will be together again);  not your special restaurant (where your favorite waitress will say, “How’s the cutest couple in the world this morning?”). Choose a public place, as it encourages civility. And morning is good, too: It gives him time to rally support from his friends. And also, if you break up at night, neither of you will sleep.  

          5.     Don’t–ever–call to see how he’s doing.  Once you tell him, leave him alone—and that means not asking his friends about him. The desire to check upon him is just an excuse to make sure he’s still catatonic without you, and an avoidance of your real task, which is to mourn being without him (and to let him mourn, too). And as promising as it may feel at 3AM to hear his (still adoring) voice, it’s egomaniacal and cruel. Because yes, he’ll come over. And yes, you’ll have sex. At which point, start reading this blog at #1 again,, and begin the whole thing all over.  And if you think Fear of Ending It is awful, try Fear of Ending It Twice!

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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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