Marriage is for Men

If you grew up in the 90s or earlier, you were sold a singular story about what it means to be a woman. That story tethered a woman’s worth and happiness to love, marriage, and family. Nearly every TV show, song, and movie told this story; we were sold this narrative from thousands of different angles, but make no mistake – it is the same story.

It’s the cliché Hallmark movie where the heroine, despite her myriad accomplishments, is woefully unfulfilled until – at last – she finds a love so big it justifies abandoning her previous life altogether. It can be found in sad warning tales of the shamed spinster: never married, never made into a mother, riding out her days in a state of longing. It’s buried in the lyrics of every love song that combines “love” and some version of “complete” in the same sentence. You can find it in the fact that every female lead actor fell in love (and maybe did some other stuff on the side) while the male leads were heroes, or at least on an interesting journey (and fell in love on the side).

They also sold us stories about men and marriage: that it was the end of freedom! He was “settling down,” getting the old “ball and chain,” living with his “old lady” (women immediately turn into old ladies upon the exchange of wedding vows, apparently).

Collectively, we seemed to have agreed upon this imagery of a woman desperate to marry, and a man doing his best to hold her off. It’s why the book “The Rules” (instructions for women on how to manipulate a man into marriage) became a bestseller.

The only problem is, it’s all a lie.

When I was 17, upon hearing news of my college acceptance, my high school boyfriend spontaneously, but earnestly, proposed to me in a parking lot.

“Do you really want to get married?” I asked.

“No. Of course not. But I don’t want to break up.”

We broke up. I wanted to marry him about as much as I wanted to run barefoot over the train tracks that separated his small Texas town from my Houston suburb.

But it got me thinking. Wasn’t I supposed to want a husband? Wasn’t I supposed to want one more than anything? And shouldn’t he loathe the idea of a teenage wedding, terminating his freedom before it had even begun?

Four years later as I sat in the office of my college advisor, I was surprised to hear her say, “well look at that, you’re on track to finish with a double minor!”

“How? I majored in political science with a minor in speech communication.”

“Women’s studies. You have almost enough credits for a minor.”

Without intending to, I had taken half a dozen classes in what would now be called gender studies. The itch to unravel the stories we tell about women, the stories we live as women, simply refused to go unscratched.

I needed only one more honors class and one more women’s studies class to graduate with honors and a double minor. The only class that satisfied both (and that fit into my generous party schedule) was an honors sociology seminar entitled “Marriage.”

During the first lecture I found myself standing – red faced – and shouting at a fellow student who had said these words: “Look, all of society’s problems can be traced back to the fact that both parents work now. God gave women boobs, making it clear where he wanted them.”

As I strutted out of class, my body tense with a rage I was determined not to show, I muttered under my breath, “how the hell do I live in Texas?”

In the end, that class unchained me from the narratives of our culture. I learned that married women reported lower levels of happiness and satisfaction than their single counterparts, across all age groups. Married men reported higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than their unmarried counterparts. Indeed, women file for divorce in 70- 80% of cases!

Everything we had been told was wrong. Every idea I had been sold about my future happiness was upside down. I had to know more. Somewhere deep and solid, I was starting to realize that I already knew.

A few years later, I sat in a small, ornate classroom of an Ivy League law school, leaning forward eagerly to sop up every morsel the professor offered. The class was titled “Law and Economics of Work and Family,” and it would tell me the rest of the story about why marriage agreed with men more than it agreed with women.

This knowledge is common enough today that it might land with an unimpressive thud. But to us, having just rounded the bend into the 21st century, it was enlightening. In egalitarian household (homes where both spouses had college degrees, considered themselves equals, and both worked outside the home), women did an approximate 65%-80% of the housework and child rearing. Moreover, she was more likely to do the thankless tasks (changing diapers, doing laundry, and cleaning bathrooms) while her husband took the more rewarding jobs (bath time, feeding the kids, playing catch in the backyard). These couples also prioritized the husband’s career – even when her salary and earning potential were higher! She handled nearly 100% of the emergencies that required missed work (a sick or injured child, rides to and from daycare, etc.) Women also took on almost the entirety of family planning and organization (vacation planning, bill paying, getting cars registered and insured, managing the dry-cleaning, keeping in touch with both extended families, buying family gifts, and planning parties).

After a decade of building a life together, his career usually soared! He climbed higher and faster than his single counterparts because he had someone running his home life. Hers faltered below that of her single colleagues, who were able to prioritize work and volunteer for time-consuming and unpredictable projects.

If we had any doubts about whose work we prioritize – even in 2021 - we don’t anymore! We need only look at workforce statistics during the current pandemic: (1) four times as many women as men dropped out of the workforce, and (2) mothers with young children have reduced their hours five times as much as their husbands. It’s no secret that, as a society and within the confines of intimate relationships, we value the labor of men more, and consider women’s work outside the home more disposable.

As if that weren’t enough, enter the midlife crisis and the divorce threat. A divorced woman with children and a flat-lined career stands to fare poorly on the re-marriage market. Though MILFs were popularized in culture, the data shows that divorced middle-aged moms take a long time to remarry, if they ever do. Meanwhile, a middle-aged man with a successful career and children is considered more marriageable than a never-married man. Her baggage is his asset!

To add insult to injury, society values women for their youth and beauty, while it values men for their earning potential and experience. He gets more attractive as he ages, she less. Together, this means that as couples age, with each passing year she stands to lose more in a divorce than her husband will.

This reality goes largely unspoken between married couples, but it subtly underlines arguments, negotiations about whose career to prioritize, and every tension-filled stalemate. Because he stands to lose less than she does were they to divorce, he can overtly or subtly threaten divorce – knowing what it would cost her – to gain the upper hand in the relationship. Her choices dwindle with time; his expand.

Now, I know this is cynical. I know that not every relationship involves a couple coldly waging war by leveraging culturally-assigned gender traits and expectations. Hell, we’ve finally accepted that gender is a spectrum and there are brave mavericks in there elbowing out their own space and self-definition on that spectrum.

But as long as men and women in heterosexual relationships get such disparate benefits out of the institution of marriage, we must continue to confront the inequities where we see them. And we must tell the truth about what we see:

Marriage is for men.

As for me, I tangoed through a handful of relationships, always earning more than my partner and yet also doing more of the housework and life organization. I did this despite already knowing all of the above! It turned out, knowing wasn’t enough to save me from the fate I most dreaded. Like Oedipus, I was drawn straight into the thing I most sought to avoid.

My male partners brought their own expectations, skills, and entitlements to the table and were largely unbendable. I was faced with the choice of bending to them, or leaving.

And so, I eventually found a bendable man. He didn’t immediately exhibit this flexibility; far from it. But he was open to it just enough to consider our reality through a different lens. It clicked for him suddenly, like a snapped rubber band, and now he too sees it everywhere.

Still, I could not bring myself to marry. I am not a wife. Instead, we became registered domestic partners – all the benefits of marriage, with none of the baggage. We are forever, just on our own terms.

I’m a professional arguer by trade. And it still took me two decades of dating, negotiating my role within relationships, and drawing boundaries so big you could see them from space, to finally arrive at something resembling an egalitarian relationship. What hope do other (hetero) women have?

Their freedom begins with our collective acknowledgement: Marriage is for men.