The piece, "A More Perfect Union," is writer Elizabeth Weil's attempt to improve her marriage. Her marriage, mind you, is good; she and her husband are both writers living in San Francisco's Bernal Heights, with "two kids, two jobs, a house, a tenant, a huge extended family." But.

The idea of trying to improve our union came to me one night in bed. I've never really believed that you just marry one day at the altar or before a justice of the peace. I believe that you become married - truly married - slowly, over time, through all the road-rage incidents and precolonoscopy enemas, all the small and large moments that you never expected to happen and certainly didn't plan to endure. But then you do: you endure. And as I lay there, I started wondering why I wasn't applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseam, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this. Dan, too, had worked tirelessly - some might say obsessively - at skill acquisition. Over the nine years of our marriage, he taught himself to be a master carpenter and a master chef. He was now reading Soviet-era weight-training manuals in order to transform his 41-year-old body into that of a Marine. Yet he shared the seemingly widespread aversion to the very idea of marriage improvement. Why such passivity? What did we all fear?

So, they start the marriage-improvement project, "But how to start? What would a better marriage look like? More happiness? Intimacy? Stability? Laughter? Fewer fights? A smoother partnership? More intriguing conversation? More excellent sex?" To find out, she starts a round of self-help and classes (which, in the Bay Area, would appear to be thick on the ground) and therapy, both sexual and emotional. And through this, they realize there are Underlying Problems.

We spent far more money on food than we did on our mortgage. Sure, we ate well. Very well. Our refrigerator held, depending on the season: homemade gravlax, Strauss organic milk, salt-packed anchovies, little gem lettuces, preserved Meyer lemons, imported Parmesan, mozzarella and goat cheese, baby leeks, green garlic, Blue Bottle coffee ($18 a pound), supergroovy pastured eggs. On a ho-hum weeknight Dan might make me pan-roasted salmon with truffled polenta in a Madeira shallot reduction. But this was only a partial joy. Dan's cooking enabled him to hide out in plain sight; he was home but busy - What? I'm cooking dinner! - for hours every evening. During this time I was left to attend to our increasingly hungry, tired and frantic children and to worry about money. That was our division of labor: Dan cooked, I tended finances. Because of the cooking, in part, we saved little for retirement and nothing for our children's college educations.

When she admits that "I garnered no sympathy from our friends," we feel them (despite the passive-aggression of acts like "slipping crispy fried pigs' ears" into her salads). She and her husband start to fight, although whether from the stress of the "project" or the result of self-discovery is unclear. "What if my good marriage was not floating atop a sea of goodness, adrift but fairly stable when pushed? What if my good marriage was teetering on a precipice and any change would mean a toppling, a crashing down?"

Ultimately, she finds that the project was either effective or ineffective. It's hard to say - because marriage is complicated. In a review of Jane Gardam's new novel The Man in the Wooden Hat, Louisa Thomas writes that

In Gardam's hands, marriage can be the stuff of comedy, especially farce. One minute Betty is despairing, still feeling trapped in her marriage, and the next she's pressing her face against her husband's shirt, thinking how much she loves him. Over the course of their 50 years together, the complexity of their relationship only intensifies. They keep some secrets and confess others; they act generously but also with passive aggression, sometimes in the span of a single moment.

Gardam is a writer who evokes marital intimacy with special vividness, probably because of a willingness to acknowledge these obvious ebbs and flows and the inherent drama of longevity. I couldn't help but think of that, and of the classic Monogamy (which Weil should, perhaps, have read and saved herself a lot of money), in which Adam Phillips writes, "Growing old together, or growing young together? There is always something to resist, or defy." He's right; the difference is, most people don't need to manufacture it.

A More Perfect Union [NY Times]

Anna N.'s post title earlier today, 5 Tips for Dating Your Family, was just a joke, of course, but in the Home and Garden section (of course!) of the New York Times this weekend, the practice of American cousins marrying each other is a trend a serious matter.

The gist of the piece is that while marriage between first cousins is widely practiced, and even favored, in many cultures throughout history, here in the U.S. it's still seen as a trashy, hillbilly practice that results in inbred babies. Texas banned cousin to cousin marriage in 2005, though it was part of a larger law banning polygamy. Aside from the cultural stigma of cousin marriage, even doctors who are generally not against it admit that there are higher risks for the offspring of such unions that vary from couple to couple.

The story features several couples with varying degrees of community acceptance. Kimberly and Shane Winters are comfortable enough to display in their home a photo of themselves embracing with the word "cousins" on top and the phrase "the most important thing in life is family" along the bottom, which makes Kimberly's mother uncomfortable but is a pretty funny joke if they did it as a joke (another hint that the Winters might have a sense of humor about their unusual union: Kimberly calls Shane her "cusband.") But another couple, Bob and his wife from upstate New York, have a more heartbreaking tale:

They now have two daughters, 13 and 14, who are in good health, he said, but her parents - his aunt and uncle - refuse to speak to them.

The couple, who live on a military base, have advised their daughters not to tell friends that their parents are cousins.

"We don't typically tell folks," Bob said. "We told our daughters, ‘It's not something to be ashamed of, but if you tell your friends, your friends may trust you today, you may be good friends, however, roll the clock forward, people are fickle, and preteens and teens can be downright cruel.' "

Shaking Off the Shame [NYT]

And yet, because of the wish for more opportunities in the west, women continue to enter into the marriages - in many cases, the parents spend all their savings to raise the traditonal dowry. As one women's rights activist estimates, "There are 15,000 to 20,000 abandoned brides in India."

Tracking down the men is complicated and expensive. The Indian government has, says the BBC, "set up a department to provide assistance to the thousands of women who live in hope of being reunited with their husbands." But the odds aren't good. As a Canadian report found, "Exasperated police, faced with hundreds of such cases, were resorting to a mix of threats and family counseling sessions to reunite couples or at least get some of the dowries back."

Indian 'Holiday Brides' Abandoned By British Husbands On The Rise [BBC]
Abandoned Brides: A Province Special Investigation [Canada.com]
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Indian Brides, Marrying to Go Abroad, Often Find Themselves Abandoned at Home [VOA]

Gay marriage opponents in Maine used the same strategist who got the job done in California, and the same bullshit. The Associated Press reports that the organization "Stand for Marriage based many of its campaign ads on claims - disputed by state officials - that the new law would mean 'homosexual marriage' would be taught in public schools." Apparently, not enough voters asked the obvious question: What the fuck does that even mean? They just heard "homosexual" and "schools" and decided it was worth showing up to take a stand against equality. Again.

National Organization for Marriage director Brian Brown "was elated by Tuesday's result, saying it shows that 'that even in a New England state, if the voters have a chance to have their say, they're going to protect and defend the commonsense definition of marriage.'" Which is exactly the problem. The states that have legalized gay marriage have done so "through legislation or court rulings, not by popular vote," while all 31 states that have put it to a popular vote have shot it down. Opponents of marriage equality see this as evidence that legislators are out of touch with the people and have no business telling folks what should and shouldn't be legal, conveniently forgetting that actually, that's what we elect them to do. Also, that when it comes to securing rights for an oppressed minority, if the majority would rather just keep on with the oppressing, our elected representatives and courts have a duty to stand up and protect more vulnerable citizens.

In The Daily Beast, Linda Hirshman lays out a persuasive argument for getting gay marriage off the ballots. Noting that the ostensibly liberal "Bow Out" movement opposing federal court involvement in gay marriage was founded by people who thought the Supreme Court overstepped its bounds when it insisted that public schools be racially integrated — and p.s., they've also got a big beef with Roe v. Wade — Hirshman underscores the absurdity of their position. "Painful as it is to them, as sincere supporters of abortion rights/gay marriage/your issue here, these wise ones think the federal courts should follow the election returns. Only when a majority of states have legalized something should the federal courts find that it was a fundamental constitutional right all along." If that seems even the tiniest bit logical to you, try this: "Imagine what the law would look like if the Brown court had waited until a majority of states were ready to pass the Civil Rights Acts."

The idea that we should just be patient until hateful bigots naturally come around to accepting the full equality of all citizens, and not rush into any crazy measures like writing that equality into law, is almost certainly not, despite the claims of said hateful bigots, what the founding fathers had in mind. On the output of legal scholars waving the Bow Out flag, Hirshman writes:

What these academic treatises ignore is the concern that Madison and others had that what they called the tyranny of the majority was legitimate. A majority, Madison predicted, often whipped up by demagogues, would oppress a helpless minority, a group so naturally small it could never hope to protect itself at the polls alone-using the government to deprive them of those aspects of life fundamental to a free society. No kidding.

According to the AP, "Richard Socarides, who was an adviser on gay-rights issues in the Clinton administration, said the loss in Maine should prompt gay-rights leaders to reconsider their state-by-state strategy on marriage and shift instead to lobbying for changes on the federal level that expand recognition of same-sex couples." At this point, it looks like he may be right. The fear, of course, is that it will backfire and leave the whole country farther behind, instead of just 31 states with a slight bigot majority. But given how successful demagogues have been at whipping those majorities up, and that — as Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, put it — "lies and fear can still win at the ballot box," waiting for reason and compassion to prevail among voters doesn't seem like the way to go.

Defeat In Maine A Harsh Blow To Gay-Marriage Drive [AP]
Get Gay Marriage Off The Ballot [Daily Beast]

Related: Washington Post Does Puff Profile Of NOM's Executive Director

Watson begins by acknowledging that the words "good wife" are saddled with centuries of baggage: "In a postfeminist world, the word 'wife' on its own sounds quaint enough," she writes, "and 'good wife' conjures up images of blissed-out 1950s housewives admiring their hostess trollies. Good wives are what women had to be before we fought for the right to be good at something else." Still, she argues, there's a difference between being a subservient wife and being a "good wife," and she offers a four part charter to help women separate the idea of being a "good wife" from being a Stepford one, pushing women to make their husbands a priority, to find time for sex, to "beware resentment" and to "be kind and supportive."

Watson's argument, backed by authors Lionel Shriver and Ayelet Waldman, is that women often treat their husbands poorly, putting them last in line when it comes to attention and affection: "Even women who would never call themselves feminists have bought into the idea that men are bottom of the list after their personal fulfilment, fitness routine and, of course, the kids," she writes. Watson's charter is filled with tips and tricks from the likes of Waldman, who claims that couples should create "who does what?" questionnaires to get a sense of how the domestic chores are split, or from Shriver, who says she has to remember to "to remember to treat my husband as well as I treat other people."

The "Good Wife Charter" itself seems to be steeped in marital stereotypes: women withhold sex from their husbands, women put their kids above their spouses, etc. It's meant to be a piece that celebrates healthier partnerships, I suppose, but something feels a bit off about it. She's trying to prove to women that being a good wife is more about being an engaged, caring partner than adhering to the 1950s relationship playbook, but it reads as though marital roles are still centered around a lazy, chore-inept husband and a frazzled, overworked wife.

In fairness, a "How To Be A Good Husband" piece, written by a man, is tacked on to the end of Watson's article, but that's steeped in stereotypes as well: "Talking is important. Talking and listening. I know it can be excruciating, but wives need conversation. They cannot exist on grunts alone. You must save that for the pub. If you don't, you will be nagged. And nagging, as we all know, is the marital equivalent of waterboarding." Yikes.

Overall, Watson's piece offers advice that could really apply to either partner in a relationship: be kind, be involved, be willing to help out. I'm not sure it's entirely helpful to continue to strive to be a "good wife," as much as it would be helpful for both partners to try to bring as much as they can to the relationship. "We have become socialised and media-ised to think it's all about us," Watson writes, "Ask yourself, why did I marry this guy in the first place? But the other questions to ask are, why is he married to me? What's he getting out of it?" Perhaps a better question would be "Why did we marry each other? How can we help each other out?" A "good wife" or a "good husband" is really no match for a "good partnership."

The Good Wife Charter, And How To Be A Good Husband [TimesOnline]

"I married you because you're cute and you're smart," Michelle told the President when he first announced that he intended to run for the Illinois State Senate. "But this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do." Fourteen years later, she might think differently about her husband's political career, but it took a while to get there. And you can't blame her for being irritated along the way when she mentions that "This is the first time in a long time in our marriage that we've lived seven days a week in the same household with the same schedule, with the same set of rituals. That's been more of a relief for me than I would have ever imagined." Prior to their moving into the White House, they hadn't lived together full-time since before Malia was born.

"Barack doesn't belong to you," a friend told Michelle around the time he was in Bali writing Dreams from My Father, and not long before he started going on the road constantly. The narrative here builds toward her acceptance of that fact — or at least, that he only belongs to her in certain ways. The rewards of her letting him go, of not insisting that he give up politics and find a job that brought him home for dinner every night, are obvious. But then, so are the sacrifices. She was essentially a single mom who also worked outside the home — not entirely by choice, when the girls were little — for much of his early political career, since his time-consuming work wasn't bringing in enough to support the family. She had to bring baby Sasha to her job interview at the University of Chicago Medical Center, because her sitter canceled at the last minute and Dad was somewhere else. Says the president, "Michelle would say, ‘Well, you're gone all the time and we're broke? How is that a good deal?'" He wrote about their frequent conflict over their long-distance marriage in The Audacity of Hope ("he may have been wise to raise the issue before anyone else," Kantor notes), but says, "There was no point where I was fearful for our marriage. There were points in time where I was fearful that Michelle just really didn't - that she would be unhappy." And, frankly, she was.

All those sacrifices she made leading up to his election as president make a great backstory, but Kantor is smart enough to recognize that the story's far from over. She asks the Obamas point blank "how any couple can have a truly equal partnership when one member is president." Said president hems and haws a bit before responding.

"My staff worries a lot more about what the first lady thinks than they worry about what I think," he finally said, to laughter around the room.

The question still unanswered, his wife stepped back in: "Clearly Barack's career decisions are leading us. They're not mine; that's obvious. I'm married to the president of the United States. I don't have another job, and it would be problematic in this role. So that - you can't even measure that."

Can I just tell you how much I love that Michelle doesn't let him get away with turning it all into a joke? (Especially a hoary old, "Oh, really, my wife's the one with all the power!" joke. For fuck's sake, you're the president of the United States. That joke is annoying when regular guys make it to avoid directly addressing the actual inequality in their marriages, and off-the-charts annoying when you do it.) Michelle's gotten heaps of praise for being an Ivy League-educated lawyer with a high-powered professional background, yet dutifully taking on the role of traditional First Lady, never overstepping her bounds — unlike certain other Ivy League-educated lawyer wives of youngish Democratic presidents in recent memory. But people are so eager to applaud her for knowing her place, they don't seem willing to consider how, you know, it kind of sucks that after all the support she's given her husband, the end result is that she can't even have a job of her own. Barack doesn't belong to her — but for the time being, she belongs to Barack. And the media. And the American People. And the world. Just not so much to herself.

Oh, and about that other ivy league-educated lawyer wife — not to mention her husband. Clinton comparisons abound here, for reasons I can't quite grasp. Sure, there are some superficial similarities, but also — as the comparisons inevitably demonstrate — so many differences, it's hard to see why Kantor doesn't compare them to Bushes or Kennedys or Roosevelts or Jolie-Pitts. In fact, it's not even clear who's who in the Clinton/Obama analogy.

As a first-time candidate, Barack could be stiff; friends remember him talking to voters with his arms folded, looking defensive. Michelle warmed everyone up, including her husband. "She is really Bill, and he is really Hillary," one friend recently put it. But like Hillary Clinton - and countless other political wives - Michelle sometimes took on the role of enforcer.

Which raises the obvious question: If Michelle has both Bill's charisma and Hillary's ovaries of steel, why the hell is she not our president?

That question occurred to me again while reading the passage where Kantor gets into Michelle's "vital role in heading off the most promising female [presidential] candidate in United States history."

It was essential for the Obama campaign to present some sort of accomplished female counterweight to Hillary Clinton, to convince Democratic women that they could vote for Barack Obama and a powerful female figure besides. Consciously or not, Michelle made herself into an appealing contrast to the front-runner. She was candid; Hillary was often guarded. Michelle represented the idea that a little black girl from the South Side of Chicago could grow up to be first lady of the United States; Hillary stood for the hold of the already-powerful on the political system. And Michelle seemed to have the kind of marriage many people might aspire to; Hillary did not.

This whole passage makes me sad. That's partly because I voted for Clinton in large part because I regarded her as long-overdue proof that a little girl from the Chicago suburbs could grow up to be president, and it still irritates me to see her held up primarily as a symbol of the establishment, rather than a swift kick in the establishment's shriveled white nuts. (I think she and Obama are both about 50/50 there.) But it's also because the false equivalence continues to go unquestioned, just as it did in the campaign — we're meant to accept that becoming First Lady is basically just as momentous for a woman as becoming president would be. Which... you remember that Hillary Clinton is one of the people in this equation, right? And seriously, every time I heard that shit about a little girl from the South Side growing up to be First Lady, all I could think was, "What little girl dreams of being married to the most powerful person on the planet?" I don't know, maybe some still do in the twenty-first century, but I certainly didn't in the late twentieth. I was heartbroken when I learned in elementary school that being born in Canada makes me ineligible for the presidency; it took many more years before it fully sunk in that my vagina does, too. And sadder still is the fact that little African-American girls are faced with even less evidence to suggest they could ever scale those heights. Michelle may have Bill's charisma, Hillary's toughness and Barack's brains, but with racism and sexism both working against her, she couldn't have made it as far as any of them if she'd wanted to.

Fortunately for her, if not for little girls in desperate need of role models in politics, Michelle doesn't seem to want to. And being the wife of a cute, smart president who clearly adores her is not such a bad gig, even if it means her personal ambitions have to wait another three to seven years. Despite my focus on the First Lady's sacrifices and the inequality of the marriage here (I am a humorless feminist, after all), Kantor's portrait of the Obama's marriage is really quite sweet, warts and all. They joke. They flirt. They go on dates and ignore the conservatives who flip out about our tax dollars going toward dinner and a show. That's just not the whole picture, and Michelle herself believes revealing the warts has a higher purpose.

"If my ups and downs, our ups and downs in our marriage can help young couples sort of realize that good marriages take work. . . ." Michelle Obama said a few minutes later in the interview. The image of a flawless relationship is "the last thing that we want to project," she said. "It's unfair to the institution of marriage, and it's unfair for young people who are trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn't exist"

The First Marriage [NY Times]

The study was published in the European Journal of Operational Research, which makes marriage sound like a matter of bolts and widgets. And this is essentially how the research — or at least the coverage thereof — treats it. After interviewing 1,000 couples whose relationships had lasted five years or more, the researchers found that while the man being at least five years older reduced the chances of divorce, when the woman had five years on her partner, divorce was more than three times as likely. Couples were also more likely to split if they'd been divorced before, but, interestingly, the effect was less if both couples had a divorce behind them. As a model of good marital decisions, the Telegraph and the BBC both held up Jay-Z and Beyonce — he's 11 years older than her, and unlike him, she graduated from high school.

Obviously this research has some fairly big problems. For one, the scientists seem only to have studied straight partners — gay couples, good luck figuring out which one of you is supposed to be older. Also, while the researchers say that people choose their mates "on the basis of love, physical attraction, similarity of taste, beliefs and attitudes, and shared values" (awww), they also advise that using "objective factors" like age and education "may help reduce divorce." Their advice has a certain think-with-your-head-not-your-heart appeal — it's probably smart to think about, say, whether you hate each others' families and whether you're going to fight a lot about money before you get hitched. But even these semi-objective factors seem to fall into the "shared values" category, and ticking off boxes about age and educational attainment frankly seems like how a robot chooses its bride.

But some of the blame for the study's obnoxiousness rests not with the scientists, but with the way Ian Johnston of the Telegraph and an unnamed journalist at the BBC have chosen to cover their work. Pretty much every time a study on marital success comes out — and this is not the first — journalists frame it as a referendum on who readers should marry. The Telegraph is the worse offender in this case, with the headline, "Men should marry young, smart women, say scientists," and subhead, "Men should marry a woman who is cleverer than they are and at least five years younger, if they want the relationship to stand the best chance of lasting, according to new research." Both of these make it sound like the success of a relationship rests on men's choices alone, and also conflate intelligence with education — the study itself doesn't seem to say anything about who's "cleverer," just who stayed in school longer. More than that, they turn a descriptive study of what worked for some couples into a prescription of what will work for "men."

This conversion from description to prescription is a huge problem in science journalism — it also rears its ugly head a lot in relation to weight studies, which reporters frequently frame as "thinner people are healthier, so you should be thin." Some editor somewhere has clearly decided that readers like advice about their lives more than they like science, and reporters both here and in the UK have set about turning the latter into the former. I'm not one to discount the legitimate findings of scientists — as David Roberts said in response to a recent poll that found only 57% of Americans "believe" in global warming, "if peer-reviewed science has no special status, then every aspect of human or ecosystem health is partisan." But peer-reviewed science can only tell us so much — it can reveal something about what has worked for other couples, but, fortunately or unfortunately, it can't say what will work for "you."

Men Should Marry Young, Smart Women, Say Scientists [Telegraph]
'Younger Wife' For Marital Bliss [BBC]

I know of several couples who, after amicable breakups, met for lunch and agreed that when they got back to the office, they both would simultaneously change their relationship status from "In a Relationship" to "Single" in one, smooth, sane move, and devote the rest of the afternoon to explaining to curious friends that they were just ready to move on. But in a Salon piece today on the way Facebook is affecting the lives of those going through divorces — and their lawyers — makes that kind of levelheadedness seem rare, at least among an older, less savvy generation.

It seems that every social networking feature that helps keep us connected can also be an irresistible temptation for those who feel wronged by their former spouses. The piece centers on Lauren (fake name), a mother of two who took to Facebook to air her dirty laundry and diss her ex:

"During the month that followed, as the marriage continued to unravel and her grief intensified, Lauren began chronicling her divorce via status updates. "Lauren would cry, but then he wins," she wrote. "There isn't enough Kleenex in the world." "My house is a mess. My life is a mess." "Lauren is facing the aftermath.""

And forget about trying to sneak in status updates aimed directly at your ex's hopefully-jealous heart (and everyone knows when someone's doing that anyway!):

"When she began to write about her new relationship, her husband finally lost it. "I wrote that I was ‘Going to pizza night and beyond,'" Lauren said, "and he was offended by it. I thought it was vague enough.""

Then Lauren expanded her multi-platform revenge empire to the photo-tagging feature:

"Lauren, for example, "tagged" her ex-husband in a photo of their two boys and a coral snake — she gave the snake her husband's name."

Okay, that one is just plain funny. But in their attempts to express their frustration in an increasingly isolated world, some divorcees are accidentally getting creepy:

"Chad Post was expunged by his wife after he posted about chopping down trees in preparation to sell their house. "I wrote that I was probably not in the best mental state to be using a chain saw," he told me. "My wife didn't say anything, but then she defriended me. She just wasn't there anymore. It was super-surreal in a 21st century-meets-third grade sort of way.""

And as if looking nutty to your friends (and high school rivals, and former Sunday School teacher, etc) and sacrificing a bit of your self-respect forever, revealing too much about your post-breakup life on Facebook can have real legal consequences as well, like the possibility of losing custody if your pictures show you drinking or smoking (!), or this kind of thing (which sounds quite far-fetched):

"If, for instance, photos surface online of you and your new paramour toasting each other at a pricey restaurant, you could be found to have committed "marital waste" (spending marital funds on another person)."

Apparently all of this is so common that it's now a just a regular formality in the family law industry:

"Many lawyers, in fact, advise clients not to get on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter at all during a divorce, and some firms require that clients suspend their accounts."

Good plan! The lesson here is not a new one: always remember that nothing you put online can ever be taken back, and that nobody, but nobody, has ever won a breakup or divorce by being less than graceful about it, even before social networking. The article advises regular people to act like celebrities (or, I'd add: pre-Twitter celebrities) and keep your insecure, spiteful, and vulnerable quips close to the vest, no matter how cathartic you think it'll feel to broadcast them. I'd add something to that as well: why not just not answer the relationship part of your Facebook profile? After all, unless you keep your Facebook page as a dating tool, it's really nobody's business, and you can avoid some serious heartache later. Think of it as a social networking pre-nup: reveal nothing, and later have nothing to take back.

The Facebook Divorce [Salon]

According to David Allison, the head of Resolution, a UK group comprised of 5,700 lawyers, "There's been a tenfold increase in 'pre-nups'. I'm doing considerably more now than I have ever done before and that experience is mirrored around the rest of the country. People are doing it because they want to be able to sort this stuff out now rather than later on."

Lawyers argue that high profile celebrity divorces, such as the divorce of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, which cost McCartney roughly 30 million pounds, have contributed to the rise in prenups as they have allowed couples to view the financial and emotional toll of a messy divorce on a large scale. Though most people don't have McCartney's money, the lack of a prenup in his divorce still serves as a reminder that when things can get very ugly if a couple splits without a plan of sorts in place.

Though I personally have no plans to sign a prenup (mostly due to the fact that I don't think anyone is going to fight me for possession of my very chic 8th grade wardrobe or collection of Ramona Quimby books), I can see the benefits behind one, as cold and unromantic as it may be. Marriage is a contractual agreement on many levels, and with half of all marriages ending in divorce, protection set up to avoid a nasty, drawn out divorce battle might be worthwhile. The romantic in me hates them and finds them dreadful and tacky, but the realist in me can understand why many people feel the need to sign them.

So what say you, commenters? Are prenups necessary in a time when half of all marriages fail? Can you still be romantic while being practical? Or are prenups total romance killers?

More Couples Signing Pre-Nuptials [BBC]
Lamar Wants Prenup—But There's A Problem [TMZ]
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The novel follows four moms: Rebecca, who's self-absorbed and nasty; Melora, who's self-absorbed and a Hollywood actress; Lizzie, who's lost and sad; and Karen, who's straight-up crazy. Doree Shafrir wrote that the book heralded a "new narrative of the New York woman," and Sohn herself commented, "There's so much anxiety around finding a mate that no one really thinks about the actual marriage when they're trying to find someone." But if her book is about "the actual marriage," I'm joining a nunnery.

Few of the couples in the book seem to have married because they actually liked each other. Rebecca married Theo because "she had slept with every smart artistic cutie south of Fourteenth St and was beginning to wonder how she was going to meet anyone new," while Karen wed Matty so she could move to Park Slope. Lizzie does seem to feel love and lust for her husband Jay, but she took up with him only after finding out her long-term girlfriend didn't want children. Marriage in Prospect Park West seems largely a vehicle for procreation — but procreation isn't all that much fun either. Rebecca's jealous of her kid, Lizzie doesn't know what to do with hers, Melora's son is raised by nannies, and Karen just wants more.

It's no accident that having children in Prospect Park West, like buying real estate, often seems more about status than about love. Sohn is clearly aiming to create a biting comedy of manners, a beach-read version of Edith Wharton. And the novel does succeed in sending up a competitive culture of upper-middle-class mothering. The characters' ambivalence about their kids and their stay-at-home lives feels authentic, as does the atmosphere of anxiety and overprotection that pervades Park Slope. I didn't believe any mom would make her kid play in kneepads, like Karen does — until I saw it in Prospect Park.

But "new narrative?" Is it really new to say that middle-class parents overprotect their children? That parents in general don't have enough sex? That yuppies are self-absorbed and obsessed with real estate? Sohn seems confident that her characters reflect the real Park Slope — she told Shafrir "It's a very undersexed neighborhood" — but this observation too feels like a stereotype. To give us a new narrative of Park Slope you'd have to show us parents fucking wildly while their toddlers drink real Coke and watch television. Which might actually be more satisfying than Prospect Park West.

The novel is an absorbing read, thanks mainly to the totally batshit Karen, who basically blackmails Melora into being her famous friend. And it's true that Sohn seems to be tapping into a vein of ennui and insecurity that may darken the lives of even the most privileged moms. But I still got the feeling that Prospect Park West was a book written to make its readers feel superior to its characters. Their marriages are so bad, their values so screwed up, their gestures at liberalism so laughable in light of their venality, that I felt like I'd been invited to a party just to make fun of the guests.

Early in the novel, Rebecca and Lizzie are sitting in Park Slope's Tea Lounge making fun of the other mothers:

"God, they're old," said Rebecca, pointing to the mothers arranged in a circle around a coffee table [...]
"They spent their lives making an effort," Lizzie said, "and now they have the kid so they don't have to."
"It's not like this in Tribeca," Rebecca said. "I once took Abbie to the Washington Market playground, and I saw a hot woman pushing her kid on the swings. She turned out to be Christy Turlington. I felt so bad for the normal mothers in Tribeca. They must have such low self-esteem."
"In Park slope we're Christy Turlington," Lizzie said.

Prospect Park West feels like one long "we're Christy Turlington," a fun but empty fuck-you to a bunch of people we don't really know.

Women's Lit: Chick Lit Gets An Update [Publisher's Weekly]
Prospect Park West [Amazon]

It strikes me as fairly weird that we're conditioned to pick apart the relationships of both strangers and friends based on their public displays of affection—or lack thereof. I don't think there's any way Carey and Cannon could win in this situation; when Cannon came on stage, he gave Mariah a peck on the cheek- a fairly normal hello, I think, from a husband to a wife.

But Oprah wasn't satisfied: "'Oh you did that "We've been married a long time kiss'," she said, "You didn't give the real kiss, come on." This, of course, led to an awkward exchange between Mr. and Mrs. Carey-Cannon, with Mariah bending away from her husband as he tried to lay a smooch on her. Now, of course, people will speculate that the awkwardness is a sign that the marriage is in trouble, but really, the awkwardness is there because Oprah forced the two of them to give a public display of affection that Mariah wasn't comfortable with.

If Cannon had come out and started making out with Carey, people would be saying that they were "trying too hard" or attempting to "prove something." So he gave her a dumb peck on the cheek. Big deal, Oprah! It doesn't mean they aren't in love—it just means they choose to keep their makeout sessions private. Why isn't that okay?

I suppose all we know about the romantic lives of others is what they choose to show us, and as a culture that is inherently nosy, we often try to pick up on things that may or may not be there, based solely upon how people choose to act in public. So what say you, commenters? Do you judge people on their PDAs? And do you limit or exaggerate your own public displays of affection for fear of being judged by others...or Oprah?

Don't Drop Me! Mariah Carey Shares Awkward Kiss With Husband Nick Cannon [Daily Mail]

The secret to a long and happy marriage could be having separate beds, an expert on sleep claims.Not only will a couple escape arguments over duvet-hogging and fidgeting, but they will have a proper night's rest. This will have a huge impact on both their health and the relationship as poor sleep increases the risk of stroke, heart disease and divorce, said Dr Neil Stanley.

The good doctor, in case you were wondering, "follows his own advice and sleeps in a different room to his wife." Good sleep, he says, is crucial: and if your partner's snoring is keeping you up, screw Breathe-rite and hit the couch. After all, quoth Stanley, single beds were a necessity of smaller urban dwellings, not some nod to romance. Sounding increasingly fervent, he goes on:"You then put in this person who makes noise, punches, kicks and gets up to go to the loo in the middle of the night, is it any wonder you are not getting a good night's sleep?"

On the one hand, separate beds evokes sit-com twin prissiness. And there's always the Royal Sex issue. Kings went to their wives' rooms, but what are the rules with two beds? Rolling off and hopping back into your virginal bier seems kind of bloodless. On the other hand, I get it: I love sleeping alone, and frequently slip onto the couch in the middle of the night, which boyfriends have found strange and "distant." It's not even the issues of snoring or rolling or blanket-hogging; sometimes you just want the luxury of your own space. Giving us a little too much insight into a conversation I'm guessing he's had with his wife a time or two, Dr. Stanley sums it up thusly:

We all know what it is like to sleep in a bed with somebody and have a cuddle. But at one point you say, "I'm going to go to sleep now".
Why not at that point just take yourself down the landing? Intimacy is important for emotional health. But good sleep is important for physical, emotional and mental health.

So's sharing, so, you know, that's good.

Want The Dream Marriage? Then Sleep In Separate Beds [Daily Mail]