Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

During our last week in Luang Prabang, we met a young man named Keo.

Keo was a friend of Khamsy, who ran the tiny hotel on the Mekong River where Felipe and I had been staying for some time already. Once I’d fully explored Luang Prabang both on foot and bicycle, once I’d exhausted myself spying on the monks, once I knew every street and every temple of this small city, I finally asked Khamsy if he might have an English-​speaking friend with a car, who could perhaps take us around the mountains outside the city.

Khamsy, thereafter, had generously produced Keo, who had in turn generously produced his uncle’s automobile-and away we went.

Keo was a young man of twenty-​one years who had many interests in life. I know this to be a fact, for it was among the first things that he told me: “I am a young man of twenty-​one years who has many interests in life.” Keo also explained to me that he had been born very poor-the youngest of seven children in a poor family in the poorest country in Southeast Asia-but that he had always been foremost in school on account of his tremendous mental diligence. Only one student a year is named “Best Student in English” and this Best Student in English was always Keo, which was why all the teachers enjoyed calling on Keo in class because Keo always knew the correct answers. Keo also assured me that he knew everything about food. Not only Laotian food, but also French food, because he was once a waiter in a French restaurant, and therefore he would happily share his knowledge with me on these subjects. Also, Keo had worked for a while with the elephants at an elephant camp for tourists, so there was a great deal that he knew about elephants.

To demonstrate how much he knew about elephants, Keo asked me, immediately on meeting me, “Can you guess how many toenails an elephant has on its front feet?”

At random, I guessed three.

“You are false,” said Keo. “I will permit you to guess again.”

I guessed five.

“Unfortunately you are still false,” Keo said. “So I will tell you the answer. There are four toenails on an elephant’s front feet. Now, how about the back feet?”

I guessed four.

“Unfortunately you are false. I will allow you to guess again.”

I guessed three.

“You are still false. There are five toenails on an elephant’s back feet. Now, can you guess how many liters of water an elephant’s trunk can hold?”

I could not. I could not even imagine how many liters of water an elephant’s trunk could hold. But Keo knew: eight liters! As he also knew, I’m afraid, hundreds of other facts about elephants. Therefore, spending a whole day driving through the Laotian mountains with Keo was certainly an education in pachyderm biology! But Keo knew about other subjects, too. As he explained carefully, “It is not only facts and explanations about elephants about which I shall inform you. I also know a great deal about fighting fish.”

For that is exactly the sort of young man of twenty-​one years that Keo was. And that is the reason Felipe elected not to join me on my day trips outside of Luang Prabang-because one of Felipe’s other flaws (although he did not mention it on his list) is that he has a very low level of tolerance for being quizzed relentlessly about elephant toenails by serious young men of twenty-​one years.

I liked Keo, though. I have an inherent affection for the Keos of the world. Keo was naturally curious and enthusiastic, and he was patient with my curiosity and my enthusiasms. Whatever questions I asked him, no matter how arbitrary, he was always willing to attempt an answer. Sometimes his answers were informed by his rich sense of Laotian history; at other times his replies were more reductive. One afternoon, for instance, we were driving through an immensely poor mountain village, where the people’s houses had dirt floors, no doors, and windows cut roughly out of corrugated steel. And yet, as with so many of the places I’d seen in rural Laos, many of these huts had expensive television satellite dishes tacked onto their roofs. I pondered in silence the question of why somebody would choose to invest in a satellite dish before investing in, say, a door. Finally I asked Keo, “Why is it so important to these people that they have satellite dishes?” He just shrugged and said, “Because TV reception is really bad out here.”

But most of my questions to Keo were about marriage, of course, that being the theme of my year. Keo was more than happy to explain to me how marriage was done in Laos. Keo said that a wedding is the most important event in a Laotian person’s life. Only birth and death come close for momentousness, and sometimes it’s hard to plan parties around them. Therefore a wedding is always a huge occasion. Keo himself, he informed me, had invited seven hundred people to his own wedding, just last year. This is standard, he said. Like most Laotians, Keo has, as he admitted, “too many cousins, too many friends. And we must invite them all.”

“Did all seven hundred guests come to your wedding?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he assured me. “Over one thousand people came!”

Because what happens at a typical Laotian wedding is that every cousin and every friend invites all their cousins and all their friends (and guests of guests sometimes bring guests), and since the host must never turn anybody away, things can get out of hand quite quickly.

“Would you like me to instruct you now with facts and information about the traditional wedding gift of a traditional Laotian marriage?” Keo asked.

I would like that very much, I said, and so Keo explained. When a Laotian couple is about to get married, they send invitation cards to each guest. The guests take these original invitation cards (with their names and addresses on them), fold the cards into the shape of a small envelope, and stick some money inside. On the wedding day, all these envelopes go into a giant wooden box. This immense donation is the money with which the couple will begin their new life together. This is why Keo and his bride invited so many guests to the wedding: to guarantee the highest possible cash infusion.

Later, when the wedding party is over, the bride and groom sit up all night and count the money. While the groom counts, the bride sits with a notebook, writing down exactly how much money was given by each guest. This is not so that detailed thank-​you notes can be written later (as my WASP-​y mind immediately assumed), but so that a careful accounting can be kept forever. That notebook-which is really a banking ledger-will be stored in a safe place, to be consulted many times over the coming years. Such that, five years later, when your cousin down in Vientiane gets married, you will go check that old notebook and confirm how much money he gave to you on your wedding day, and then you will give him back the exact same amount of money on the occasion of his marriage. In fact, you will give him back a tiny bit more money than he gave you, as interest.

“Adjusted for inflation!” as Keo explained proudly.

The wedding money, then, is not really a gift: It’s an exhaustively catalogued and ever-​shifting loan, circulating from one family to the next as each new couple starts a life together. You use your wedding money to get yourself going in the world, to buy a piece of property or start a small business, and then, as you settle into prosperity, you pay that money back slowly over the years, one wedding at a time.

This system makes brilliant sense in a country of such extreme poverty and economic chaos. Laos suffered for decades behind the most restrictive communistic “Bamboo Curtain” in all of Asia, where one incompetent government after another presided over a financial scorched earth policy, and where national banks withered and died in corrupt and incompetent hands. In response, the people gathered together their pennies and turned their wedding ceremonies into a banking system that really worked: the nation’s only truly trustworthy National Trust. This entire social contract was built on the collective understanding that, as a young bride and groom, your wedding money doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to the community, and the community must be paid back. With interest. To a certain extent, this means that your marriage doesn’t entirely belong to you, either; it also belongs to the community, which will be expecting a dividend out of your union. Your marriage, in effect, becomes a business in which everyone around you owns a literal share.

The stakes of that share became clearer to me one afternoon when Keo drove me far out of the mountains of Luang Prabang to a tiny village called Ban Phanom-a distant lowland community populated by an ethnic minority called the Leu, a people who had fled to Laos from China a few centuries earlier, seeking relief from prejudice and persecution, bringing with them only their silkworms and their agricultural skills. Keo had a friend from university who lived in the village and was now working as a weaver, just like every other Leu woman around. This girl and her mother had agreed to meet with me and talk to me about marriage, and Keo had agreed to translate.

The family lived in a clean square bamboo house with a concrete floor. There were no windows, in order to keep out the ferocious sun. The effect, once you were inside the house, was something like sitting in a giant wicker sewing basket-which was fitting in this culture of gifted weavers. The women brought me a tiny stool to sit on and a glass of water. The house was almost empty of furniture, but in the living room were displayed the family’s most valuable objects, lined up in a row in order of importance: a brand-​new loom, a brand-​new motorcycle, and a brand-​new television.

Keo’s friend was named Joy, and her mother was Ting-an attractive, roundish woman in her forties. While the daughter sat in silence, hemming a silk textile, her mother bubbled over with enthusiasm, so I directed all my questions at Mom. I asked Ting about the traditions of marriage in her particular village and she said that it was all fairly simple. If a boy likes a girl, and the girl likes the boy in return, then the parents will meet and talk over a plan. If all goes well, both families will soon find themselves visiting a special monk, who will consult the Buddhist calendar to find an auspicious date for the couple to marry. Then the young people will marry, with everyone in the community lending money. And those marriages last forever, Ting was eager to explain, because there is no such thing as divorce in the village of Ban Phanom.

Now I had heard remarks like this before in my travels. And I always take it with a grain of salt, because nowhere in the world is there “no such thing as divorce.” If you dig a bit, you will always find a story buried somewhere about a marriage that failed. Everywhere. Trust me. It all reminds me of that moment in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth when a gossipy old society lady observes: “There is a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.” (And the “case of appendicitis,” by the way, was polite old Edwardian code for “abortion”-and that happens everywhere, too, and sometimes in the most surprising circles.)

But yes, there are societies where divorce is extremely rare.

And so it was in Ting’s clan. When pressed, she owned up that one of her childhood friends did have to move to the capital because her husband had abandoned her, but that was the only divorce she could think of in the last five years. Anyway, she said, there are systems in place to help keep families bonded together. As you can imagine, in a tiny impoverished village like this, where lives are so critically (and financially) interdependent, urgent steps must be taken to keep families whole. When problems arise in a marriage, as Ting explained, the community has a four-​tiered approach to finding solutions. First of all, the wife in the troubled marriage is encouraged to keep peace by bending to her husband’s will as much as possible. “A marriage is best when there is only one captain,” she said. “It is easiest if the husband is the captain.”

I nodded politely at this, deciding it was better to just let the conversation slide as quickly as possible on to Stage Number Two.

But sometimes, Ting explained, not even absolute submission can solve all domestic conflicts, and then you must outsource the problem. The second level of intervention, then, is to bring in the parents of both the husband and the wife to see if they can fix the domestic problems. The parents will have a conference with the couple, and with each other, and everyone will try as a family to work things out.

If parental supervision is unsuccessful, the couple moves on to the third stage of intervention. Now they must go before the village organization of elders-the same people who married them in the first place. The elders will take up the problem in a public council meeting. Domestic failures, then, become civic agenda items, like dealing with graffiti or school taxes, and everyone must pull together to solve the issue. Neighbors will toss out ideas and solutions, or even offer relief-such as taking in young children for a week or two while the couple works out their troubles without distractions.

Only at Stage Four-if all else fails-is there an admission of hopelessness. If the family can’t fix the dispute and if the community can’t fix the dispute (which is rare), then and only then will the couple go off to the big city, outside the realm of the village, to secure a legal divorce.

Listening to Ting explain all this, I found myself thinking all over again about my own failed first marriage. I wondered whether my ex-​husband and I might have saved our relationship if only we’d interrupted our free fall sooner, before things turned so completely toxic. What if we had called in an emergency council of friends, families, and neighbors to give us a hand? Maybe a timely intervention could have righted us, dusted us off, and guided us back together. We did attend six months of counseling together at the very end of our marriage, but-as I’ve heard so many therapists lament about their patients-we sought outside help too late, and put in too little effort. Visiting someone’s office for one hour a week was not enough of a fix for the massive impasse we had already reached in our nuptial journey. By the time we took our ailing marriage to the good doctor, she could do little beyond offering up a postmortem pathology report. But maybe if we’d acted sooner, or with more trust…? Or maybe if we’d sought help from our family and community…?

On the other hand, maybe not.

There was a lot wrong with that marriage. I’m not sure we could have endured together even if we’d had the entire village of Manhattan working on our collective behalf. Besides, we had no cultural template for anything like family or community intervention. We were modern, independent Americans who lived hundreds of miles away from our families. It would have been the most foreign and artificial idea in the world for us to have summoned our relatives and neighbors together for a tribal council meeting on matters that we had deliberately kept private for years. We might as well have sacrificed a chicken in the name of matrimonial harmony and hoped that that would fix things.

Anyhow, there’s a limit to how far you can go with such musings. We must not allow ourselves to get trapped in eternal games of second-​guessing and regret about our failed marriages, although such anguished mental contortions are admittedly difficult to control. For this reason, I’m convinced that the supreme patron of all divorced people must be the ancient Greek Titan Epimetheus, who was blessed-or, rather, cursed-with the gift of perfect hindsight. He was a nice enough fellow, that Epimetheus, but he could see things clearly only in reverse, which isn’t a very useful real-​world skill. (Interestingly, by the way, Epimetheus was a married man himself, although with his perfect hindsight he probably wished he’d chosen another girl: His wife was a little spitfire named Pandora. Fun couple.) In any case, at some point in our lives we must stop beating ourselves up over bygone blunders-even blunders that seem so painfully obvious to us in retrospect-and we must move on with our lives. Or as Felipe once said, in his inimitable manner, “Let us not dwell on the mistakes of the past, darling. Let us concentrate instead on the mistakes of the future.”

In that vein, it did cross my mind that day in Laos that maybe Ting and her community were on to something here about marriage. Not the business about the husband being the captain, of course, but the thought that perhaps there are times when a community, in order to maintain its cohesion, must share not only money and not only resources, but also a sense of collective accountability. Maybe all our marriages must be linked to each other somehow, woven on a larger social loom, in order to endure. Which is why I made a little note to myself that day in Laos: Don’t privatize your marriage to Felipe so much that it becomes deoxygenated, isolated, solitary, vulnerable…

I was tempted to ask my new friend Ting if she had ever intervened in a neighbor’s marriage, as a sort of village elder. But before I could get to my next question, she interrupted me to ask whether perhaps I could find a good husband in America for her daughter, Joy? The one with the university education? Then Ting showed off one of her daughter’s beautiful silk weavings-a tapestry of golden elephants dancing across a wash of crimson. Maybe some man in America would like to marry a girl who could make something like this with her own two hands, she wondered?

The whole time Ting and I were talking, by the way, Joy was sitting there sewing in silence, wearing jeans and a T-​shirt, her hair clipped in a loose ponytail. Joy alternated between politely listening to her mom and at other times-in classic daughterly manner-rolling her eyes in embarrassment at her mother’s statements.

“Aren’t there any educated American men who might want to marry a nice Leu girl like my daughter?” Ting asked again.

Ting wasn’t kidding, and the tension in her voice signaled a crisis. I asked Keo if he could gently probe at the problem, and Ting quickly opened up. There had been some big trouble in the village lately, she said. The trouble was that the young women had recently started making more money than the young men, and had also started getting themselves educated. The women of this ethnic minority are exceptionally gifted weavers, and now that Western tourists are coming to Laos, outsiders are interested in buying their textiles. So the local girls can make a fair bit of cash, and they often save that money from a young age. Some of them-like Ting’s daughter, Joy-use their money to pay for college, in addition to buying goods for their families, like motorcycles, TVs, and new looms, whereas the local boys are all still farmers who hardly make any money at all.

This hadn’t been a social problem when nobody made money, but to have one gender-the young women-now thriving, everything was getting thrown out of balance. Ting said that the young women in her village were growing accustomed to the idea of being able to support themselves, and some of them were delaying marriage. But that wasn’t even the biggest problem! The biggest problem was that when young people did get married these days, the men quickly got used to spending their wives’ money, which meant that they didn’t work as hard anymore. The young men, developing no sense of their own worth, drifted away into lives of drinking and gambling. The young women, observing this situation unfold, didn’t like it one bit. Therefore, many girls had decided lately that they didn’t want to get married at all, and this was upending the whole social system of the tiny village, creating all kinds of tensions and complications. This was why Ting was afraid that her daughter might never marry (unless perhaps I could arrange a match with an equally well-​educated American?), and then what would happen to the family line? And what would become of the boys in the village, whose girls had outgrown them? What would become of the village’s entire intricate social network?

Ting told me that she referred to this situation as a “Western-​style problem,” which meant she’d been reading the newspapers, because this is entirely a Western-​style problem-one that we’ve been watching play out in the Western world for several generations now, ever since avenues to wealth became more available to women. One of the first things that changes in any society when women start to earn their own income is the nature of marriage. You see this trend across all nations and all people. The more financially autonomous a woman becomes, the later in life she will get married, if ever.

Some people decry this as the Breakdown of Society, and suggest that female economic independence is destroying happy marriages. But traditionalists who look back nostalgically on the halcyon days when women stayed at home and tended to their families, and when divorce rates were much lower than they are today, should keep in mind that many women over the centuries remained in wretched marriages because they could not afford to leave. Even today, the income of your average divorced American woman still drops 30 percent after her marriage has ended-and it was much worse in the past. An old adage used to warn, accurately enough: “Every woman is one divorce away from bankruptcy.” Where would a woman leave to, exactly, if she had small children and no education and no way to support herself? We tend to idealize cultures in which people stay married forever, but we must not automatically assume that matrimonial endurance is always a sign of matrimonial contentment.

During the Great Depression, for instance, American divorce rates plummeted. Social commentators of the day liked to attribute this decline to the romantic notion that hard times bring married couples closer together. They painted a cheerful picture of resolute families hunkering down to eat their sparse meals together out of one dusty bowl. These same commentators used to say that many a family had lost its car only to find its soul. In reality, though, as any marriage counselor could tell you, deep financial trouble puts monstrous strains on marriages. Short of infidelity and flat-​out abuse, nothing corrodes a relationship faster than poverty, bankruptcy, and debt. And when modern historians looked closer at the lowered divorce rates of the Great Depression, they discovered that many American couples had stayed together because they could not afford to separate. It was hard enough to support one household, much less two. Many families elected to ride their way through the Great Depression with a sheet hung in the middle of their living rooms, dividing husband from wife-which is a greatly depressing image, indeed. Other couples did separate but never had the money to file for legal divorce through the courts. Abandonment was epidemic during the 1930s. Legions of bankrupted American men just got up and walked away from their wives and kids, never to be seen again (where do you think all those hobos came from?), and very few women made the effort to officially report their missing husbands with the census takers. They had bigger things to worry about, like finding food.

Extreme poverty breeds extreme tension; this should surprise nobody. Divorce rates all over America are highest among uneducated and financially insecure adults. Money brings its own problems, of course-but money also brings options. Money can buy child care, a separate bathroom, a vacation, the freedom from arguments over bills-all sorts of things that help stabilize a marriage. And when women get their hands on their own money, and when you remove economic survival as a motivation for marriage in the first place, everything changes. By the year 2004, unmarried women were the fastest growing demographic in the United States. A thirty-​year-​old American woman was three times more likely to be single in 2004 than her counterpart in the 1970s. She was far less likely to become a mother, too-either early, or at all. The number of households in America without children reached an all-​time high in 2008.

This change isn’t always welcomed by society at large, of course. In Japan these days, where we find the highest-​paid women in the industrial world (as well as, not coincidentally, the lowest birth rates on earth), conservative social critics call young females who refuse to get married and have children “parasite singles”-implying that an unmarried, childless woman helps herself to all the benefits of citizenship (e.g., prosperity) without offering up anything (e.g., babies) in return. Even in societies as repressive as contemporary Iran, young women are choosing to delay marriage and child rearing in increasing numbers in order to concentrate instead on furthering their education and careers. Just as day follows night, the conservative commentators are denouncing the trend already, with one Iranian government official describing such willfully unmarried women as “more dangerous than the enemy’s bombs and missiles.”

As a mother, then, in rural developing Laos, my new friend Ting carried a complicated set of feelings about her daughter. On one hand, she was proud of Joy’s education and weaving skills, which had paid for the brand-​new loom, the brand-​new television, and the brand-​new motorcycle. On the other hand, there was little that Ting could comprehend about her daughter’s brave new world of learning and money and independence. And when she looked into Joy’s future she saw only a puzzling mess of new questions. Such an educated, literate, financially independent, and frighteningly contemporary young woman had no precedent in traditional Leu society. What do you do with her? How will she ever find parity with her uneducated farmer-​boy neighbors? Sure, you can park a motorcycle in your living room, and you can stick a satellite dish on the roof of your hut, but where on earth do you park such a girl as this?

Let me tell you how much interest Joy herself had in this debate: She got up and walked out of the house in the middle of my conversation with her mother and I never saw her again. I didn’t manage to get a single word out of the girl herself on the subject of marriage. While I’m sure she had strong feelings on the topic, she certainly didn’t feel like chatting about it with me and her mom. Instead, Joy wandered off to do something else with her time. You kind of got the feeling she was going around the corner to the deli, to pick up some cigarettes and then maybe go see a movie with some friends. Except that this village had no deli, no cigarettes, no movies-only chickens clucking along a dusty road.

So where was that girl going?

Ah, but therein lies the whole question, doesn’t it?

By the way, have I mentioned the fact that Keo’s wife was pregnant? In fact, the baby was due the very week that I met Keo and hired him to be my translator and guide. I found out about his wife’s pregnancy when Keo mentioned that he had been especially happy for the extra income, on account of the baby’s imminent arrival. Keo was enormously proud to be having a child, and on our last night in Luang Prabang, he invited Felipe and me to his house for dinner-to show us his life and to introduce us to pregnant young Noi.

“We met at school,” Keo had said of his wife. “I always liked her. She is somewhat younger than me-only nineteen years old now. She is very pretty. Although it’s odd for me now that she is having the baby. She used to be so tiny that she barely weighed any kilos at all! Now it appears that she weighs all the kilos at once!”

So we went to Keo’s house-driven there by his friend Khamsy the innkeeper-and we went bearing gifts. Felipe brought several bottles of Beerlao, the local ale, and I brought some cute gender-​neutral baby clothes that I’d found in the market and now wanted to present to Keo’s wife.

Keo’s house stood at the end of a rutted dirt road just outside Luang Prabang. It was the last house on a road of similar houses, before the jungle took over, and it occupied a twenty-​by-​thirty-​foot rectangle of land. Half of this property was covered by concrete tanks, which Keo had filled with the frogs and fighting fish he raises to supplement his income as an elementary school teacher and occasional tour guide. He sells the frogs for food. As he proudly explained, they go for about 25,000 kip-$2.50-a kilo, and on average there are three to four frogs in a kilo because these frogs are quite hefty. So it’s a good little side living. In the meantime, he also has the fighting fish, which sell for 5,000 kip each-fifty cents-and which are breeding happily. He sells the fighting fish to local men who bet on the aquatic battles. Keo explained that he had begun raising fighting fish as a young boy, already looking for a way to make some extra money so he would not be a burden to his parents. Though Keo does not like to boast, he could not help but reveal that he was perhaps the best breeder of fighting fish in all of Luang Prabang.

Keo’s house took up the rest of his property-that which was not overrun by tanks of frogs and fish-which meant the house proper was about fifteen feet square. The structure was made of bamboo and plywood, with a corrugated metal roof. The one original room of the house had recently been divided into two rooms, to make a living area and a sleeping area. The dividing wall was just a plywood separation that Keo had wallpapered neatly with pages from English-​language newspapers such as the Bangkok Post and the Herald Tribune. (Felipe told me later that he suspects Keo lies there at night, reading every word of his wallpaper, always working to better his English.) There was only one lightbulb, which hung over the living room. There was also a tiny concrete bathroom with a squat toilet and a basin for bathing. On the night of our visit, however, the basin was filled with frogs, because the frog tanks out front were at capacity. (Here is a side benefit of raising hundreds of frogs, as Keo explained: “Among all our neighbors, we alone do not have a problem with the mosquitoes.”) The kitchen was outside the house, beneath a small overhang, with a dirt floor, tidily swept.

“Someday we will invest in a real kitchen floor,” Keo said with the ease of a suburban man predicting that he will someday build a winterized deck off the family room. “But I will need to make some more money first.”

There was no table anywhere in this house, nor chairs. There was a small bench outside in the kitchen, and underneath that bench was the family’s tiny pet dog, who’d just had puppies a few days earlier. Those puppies were about the size of gerbils. The only embarrassment Keo ever expressed to me about his modest lifestyle was that his dog was so very small. He seemed to feel that there was something almost ungenerous about introducing his honored guests to such an undersized dog-as though the petite stature of his dog did not match Keo’s station in life, or at the very least did not match Keo’s aspirations.

“We are always laughing at her because she is so small. I’m sorry she is not bigger,” he apologized. “But she really is a nice dog.”

There was also a chicken. The chicken lived in the kitchen/porch area, with a bit of twine tying her to the wall so that she could wander but not escape. She had a small cardboard box and in this box she laid her one egg a day. When Keo presented us with his hen and her cardboard box, he did so in the manner of a gentleman farmer, with a proudly outstretched arm: “And this is our chicken!”

At that moment, I caught a glimpse of Felipe out of the corner of my eye, and watched as a series of emotions rippled across his face: tenderness, pity, nostalgia, admiration, and a little dose of sadness. Felipe grew up poor in southern Brazil, and-like Keo-he’d always been a proud soul. In fact, Felipe is still a proud soul, to the point that he likes to tell people he was born “broke,” not “poor”-thereby conveying the message that he’d always regarded his poverty as a temporary condition (as though somehow, as a helpless babe in arms, he had been caught just a little short on cash). And, as did Keo, Felipe leaned toward a scrappy entrepreneurship that had expressed itself at an early age. Felipe’s first big business idea came to him at the age of nine when he noticed that cars were always stalling out in a deep puddle at the bottom of a hill in his town of Porto Alegre. He enlisted a friend to help him, and the two of them would wait at the bottom of that hill all day long to push stalled cars out of the puddle. The drivers would give the boys spare change for their efforts, and with this spare change many American comic books were purchased. By the age of ten, Felipe had entered the junk metal business, scouring his town for scraps of iron, brass, and copper to sell for cash. By thirteen, he was selling animal bones (scavenged outside the local butcher shops and slaughterhouses) to a glue manufacturer, and it was partly with this money that he bought his first boat ticket out of Brazil. If he had known about frog meat and fighting fish, trust me: He would have done that, too.

Until this evening, Felipe had had no time for Keo. My guide’s officious nature, in fact, bugged him immensely. But something shifted in Felipe as soon as he took in Keo’s house, and the newspaper wallpaper, and the swept dirt floor, and the frogs in the bathroom, and the chicken in the box, and the humble little dog. And when Felipe met Noi, Keo’s wife, who was tiny even in her advanced all-​the-​kilos-​at-​once pregnancy, and who was working so hard to cook our dinner over a single gas flame, I saw his eyes moisten with emotion, though he was too polite to express anything toward Noi but friendly interest in her cooking. She shyly accepted Felipe’s praise. (”She speaks English,” Keo said. “But she is too timid about practicing.”)

When Felipe met Noi’s mother-a minuscule yet somehow queenly lady in a worn blue sarong, introduced only as “Grandmother”-my husband-​to-​be followed some deep personal instinct and bowed from the waist to this diminutive woman. At this grand gesture, Grandmother smiled just the slightest bit (just around the corners of her eyes) and responded with an almost imperceptible nod, telegraphing subtly: “Your bow has pleased me, sir.”

I loved Felipe so much at that moment, perhaps the most that I have ever loved him anywhere or at any time.

I must clarify here that even though Keo and Noi had no furniture, they did have three luxuries in their home. There was a television with a built-​in stereo and DVD player, there was a tiny refrigerator, and there was an electric fan. When we entered the house, Keo had all three of these appliances working full tilt, to welcome us. The fan was blowing; the refrigerator buzzed as it made ice for our beer; the television blasted cartoons.

Keo asked, “Would you prefer to listen to music or to watch television cartoons during dinner?”

I told him that we would prefer to listen to music, thank you.

“Would you prefer to listen to hard-​rock Western music?” he asked, “or soft Laotian music?”

I thanked him for his consideration, and answered that soft Laotian music would be fine.

Keo said, “That is no trouble for me. I have some perfect soft Laotian music that you will enjoy.” He put on some Laotian love songs, but he played them at an extremely loud volume-the better to demonstrate the quality of his stereo system. This was the same reason Keo directed the electric fan right into our faces. He had these lavish comforts, and he wanted us to benefit from their greatest possible application.

So it was a pretty loud evening, but this was not the worst thing in the world, for the loudness signaled a festive air, and we duly followed that signal. Soon we were all drinking Beerlao and telling stories and laughing. Or at least Felipe, Keo, Khamsy, and I were all drinking and laughing; Noi, in her extreme pregnancy, seemed to be suffering from the heat and did not drink the beer but just sat quietly on the hard dirt floor, shifting every once in a while in search of comfort.

As for Grandmother, she did drink beer, but she did not laugh so much with us. She only regarded us all with a pleased and quiet air. Grandmother was a rice farmer, we learned, who came from up north, up near the Chinese border. She came from a long line of rice farmers, and she herself had borne ten children (Noi the youngest), each one delivered in her own home. She told us all this only because I asked her directly the story of her life. Through Keo’s translation, she told us that her marriage-at the age of sixteen-was somewhat “accidental.” She married a man who was just passing through the village. He had stayed at her family’s house for the evening and fallen in love with her. A few days after the stranger’s arrival, they were married. I tried to ask Grandmother some follow-​up questions about her thoughts on her marriage, but she revealed nothing more than these facts: rice farmer, accidental marriage, ten children. I was dying to know what “accidental” marriage might be code for (many women in my family, too, had to get married because of “accidents”), but no more information was forthcoming.

“She is not accustomed to people finding interest in her life,” Keo explained, and so I let the subject drop.

All night long, though, I kept stealing glances at Grandmother, and all night long it appeared to me that she was watching us from a great distance. She exuded a shimmering otherworldliness, marked by a demeanor so silent and reserved that she really at times did almost disappear. Even though she was sitting right across the floor from me, even though I could’ve touched her easily at any moment with an outstretched hand, it felt as though she was residing somewhere else, viewing us all from a benevolent throne set someplace high up on the moon.

Keo’s house-though tiny-was so clean that you could eat off the floor, and that is precisely what we did. We all sat down on a bamboo mat and shared the meal, rolling balls of rice in our hands. In keeping with Laotian custom, we all drank from the same glass, passing it around the room from the oldest person to the youngest. And here is what we ate: wonderfully spicy catfish soup, green papaya salad in a smoky fish sauce, sticky rice, and-of course-frogs. The frogs were the proudly offered main course, since these were Keo’s own home-​grown livestock, so we had to eat quite a few of them. I had eaten frogs in the past (well, frogs’ legs) but this was different. These were giant frogs-huge, hefty, meaty bullfrogs-chopped into big parts like a stew chicken and then boiled, skin and bones and all. The skin was the hardest bit of the meal to deal with, since it remained, even after cooking, so obviously a frog’s skin: spotted, rubbery, amphibian.

Noi watched us carefully. She said little during the meal except at one point to remind us, “Don’t just eat the rice-also eat the meat,” because meat is precious and we were valued visitors. So we ate all those slabs of rubbery frog flesh, along with the skin and the occasional bit of bone, chewing through it all without complaint. Felipe asked not once but twice if he could have another serving, which made Noi blush and smile at her pregnant belly in uncontainable pleasure. Though I personally knew that Felipe would rather eat his own sauteed shoe than swallow another hunk of boiled bullfrog, I loved him overwhelmingly again at that moment for his great goodness.

You can take this man anywhere, I thought with pride, and he will always know how to comport himself.

After dinner, Keo put on some videos of traditional Laotian wedding dancing, to entertain and educate us. The videos showed a group of stiff, formal Laotian women dancing on a disco stage, wearing fancy makeup and glittering sarongs. Their dance involved pretty much standing still and twirling their hands, smiles cemented on their faces. We all watched this for half an hour in attentive silence.

“These are all excellent, professional dancers,” Keo finally informed us, breaking the strange reverie. “The singer whose voice you can hear in the background music is very famous in Laos-exactly like your Michael Jackson in America. And I myself have met him.”

There was an innocence to Keo which was almost heartbreaking to behold. In fact, his entire family seemed pure beyond anything I’d ever encountered. Television, fridge, and electric fan notwithstanding, they remained untouched by modernity, or at least untouched by modernity’s cool slickness. Here were just some of the elements missing in conversation with Keo and his family: irony, cynicism, sarcasm, and presumptuousness. I know five-​year-​olds in America who are cannier than this family. In fact, all the five-​year-​olds I know in America are cannier than this family. I wanted to wrap their entire house in a sort of protective gauze to defend them from the world-an endeavor that, given the size of their house, would not have required very much gauze at all.

After the dancing exhibition finished, Keo turned off the television and guided our conversation once more to the dreams and plans that he and Noi shared for their life together. After the baby was born, they would clearly need more money, which is why Keo had a plan to increase his frog-​meat business. He explained that he would like to someday invent a frog-​breeding house with a controlled environment that would mimic the ideal frog-​breeding conditions of summertime, but year-​round. This contraption, which I gathered would be some kind of greenhouse, would include such technologies as “bogus rain and bogus sun.” The bogus weather conditions would trick the frogs into not noticing that winter had arrived. This would be beneficial, as winter is a difficult time of year for frog breeders. Every winter Keo’s frogs fall into hibernation (or, as he called it, “meditation”), during which time they do not eat, thereby losing much weight and rendering the frog-​meat-​by-​the-​kilo business a not very good business at all. But if Keo were to be able to raise frogs year-​round, and if he were the only person in Luang Prabang who could do so, his would become a booming business and the whole family would prosper.

“It sounds like a brilliant idea, Keo,” Felipe said.

“It was Noi’s idea,” Keo said, and we all turned our attention again to Keo’s wife, to pretty Noi, only nineteen years old and so damp-​faced from the heat, kneeling awkwardly on the dirt floor, her belly all full of baby.

“You’re a genius, Noi!” exclaimed Felipe.

“She is a genius!” Keo agreed.

Noi blushed so deeply at this praise that she almost seemed to swoon. She was unable to meet our eyes, but you could tell that she felt the honor even if she could not face it. You could tell that she fully felt how well-​regarded she was by her husband. Handsome, young, inventive Keo thought so highly of his wife that he could not help himself from boasting about her to his honored dinner guests! At such a public declaration of her own importance, shy Noi seemed to swell to twice her natural size (and she already was twice her natural size, what with that baby due any moment). Honestly, for one sublime instant, the young mother-​to-​be seemed so elated, so inflated, that I feared she might float away and join her mother up there on the face of the moon.

All of this, as we drove back to our hotel that night, got me thinking about my grandmother and her marriage.

My Grandma Maude-who recently turned ninety-​six years old-comes from a long line of people whose comfort levels in life far more closely resembled Keo and Noi’s than my own. Grandma Maude’s family were immigrants from the north of England who found their way to central Minnesota in covered wagons, and who lived through those first unthinkable winters in rough sod houses. Merely by working themselves almost to death, they acquired land, built small wooden houses, then bigger houses, and gradually increased their livestock and prospered.

My grandmother was born in January 1913, in the middle of a cold prairie winter, at home. She arrived in this world with a potentially life-​threatening impairment-a serious cleft-​palate deformity that left her with a hole in the roof of her mouth and an uncompleted upper lip. It would be almost April before the railroad tracks thawed enough to allow Maude’s father to take the baby to Rochester for her first rudimentary surgery. Until that time, my grandmother’s mother and father somehow kept this infant alive despite the fact that she could not nurse. To this day, my grandmother still doesn’t know how her parents fed her, but she thinks it may have had something to do with a length of rubber tubing that her father borrowed from the milking barn. My grandmother wishes now, she told me recently, that she had asked her mother for more information about those first few difficult months of her own life, but this was not a family where people either dwelled on sad memories or encouraged painful conversations, and so the subject was never raised.

Though my grandmother is not one to complain, her life was a challenging one by any measure. Of course, the lives of everyone around her were challenging, too, but Maude carried the extra burden of her medical condition, which had left her with lingering speech problems and a visible scar in the middle of her face. Not surprisingly, she was terribly shy. For all these reasons, it was widely assumed that my grandmother would never marry. This assumption never had to be spoken aloud; everyone just knew it.

But even the most unfortunate destinies can sometimes bring peculiar benefits. In my grandmother’s case, the benefit was this: She was the only member of her family who received a really decent education. Maude was allowed to dedicate herself to her studies because she really needed to be educated, to provide for herself someday as an unmarried woman. So while the boys were all pulled out of school around eighth grade to work in the fields, and while even the girls rarely finished high school (they were often married with a baby before their schooling was completed), Maude was sent to town to board with a local family and to become a diligent student. She excelled in school. She had a special fondness for history and English and hoped to someday become a teacher; she worked cleaning houses to save money for teachers’ college. Then the Great Depression hit, and the expense of college grew far out of reach. But Maude kept working, and her earnings transformed her into one of the rarest imaginable creatures of that era in central Minnesota: an autonomous young woman who lived by her own means.

Those years of my grandmother’s life, just out of high school, have always fascinated me because her path was so different from everyone else’s around her. She had experiences out there in the real world rather than settling right into the business of raising a family. Maude’s own mother rarely left the family farm except to go into town once a month (and never in the winter) to stock up on staples like flour and sugar and gingham. But after graduating from high school, Maude went to Montana all by herself and worked in a restaurant, serving pie and coffee to cowboys. This was in 1931. She did exotic and unusual things that no woman in her family could even imagine doing. She got herself a haircut and a fancy permanent wave (for two entire dollars) from an actual hairdresser, at an actual train station. She bought herself a flirty, kicky, slim yellow dress from an actual store. She went to movies. She read books. She caught a ride back from Montana to Minnesota on the back of a truck driven by some Russian immigrants with a handsome son about her age.

Once home from her Montana adventure, she got a job working as a housekeeper and secretary to a wealthy older woman named Mrs. Parker, who drank and smoked and laughed and enjoyed life immensely. Mrs. Parker, my grandmother informs me, “was not even afraid to curse,” and she threw parties in her home that were so extravagant (the best steaks, the best butter, and plenty of booze and cigarettes) that you might never have known a Depression was raging out there in the world. Moreover, Mrs. Parker was generous and liberal, and she often passed her fine clothes along to my grandmother, who was half the older woman’s size, so unfortunately she couldn’t always take advantage of this literal largesse.

My grandmother worked hard and saved her money. I need to emphasize this here: She had her own savings. I believe you could comb through several centuries of Maude’s ancestors without ever finding a woman who had managed to save money on her own. She was even squirreling away some extra money to pay for an operation that would have rendered her cleft palate scar less noticeable. But to my mind, her youthful independence is best epitomized by one symbol: a gorgeous wine-​colored coat with a real fur collar that she bought for herself for twenty dollars in the early 1930s. This was an unprecedented extravagance for a woman from that family. My grandmother’s mother was rendered speechless by the notion of squandering such an astronomical amount of money on… a coat. Again, I believe you could pick your way through my family’s genealogy with tweezers and never find a woman before Maude who’d ever bought something so fine and expensive for herself.

If you ask my grandmother today about that purchase, her eyes will still flutter in absolute pleasure. That wine-​colored coat with the real fur collar was the most beautiful thing Maude had ever owned in her life-indeed, it was the most beautiful thing she would ever own in her life-and she can still remember the sensuous feeling of the fur brushing against her neck and chin.

Later that year, probably while wearing that same fetching coat, Maude met a young farmer named Carl Olson, whose brother was courting her sister, and Carl-my grandfather-fell in love with her. Carl was not a romantic man, not a poetic man, and certainly not a rich man. (Her small savings account dwarfed his assets.) But he was a staggeringly handsome man and a hard worker. All the Olson brothers were known to be handsome and hardworking. My grandmother fell for him. Soon enough, much to everyone’s surprise, Maude Edna Morcomb was married.

Now, the conclusion I always drew from this story whenever I contemplated it in the past was that her marriage marked the end of any autonomy for Maude Edna Morcomb. Her life after that was pretty much unremitting hardship and hard work until maybe 1975. Not that she was any stranger to work, but things got very tough very fast. She moved out of Mrs. Parker’s fine home (no more steaks, no more parties, no more plumbing) and onto my grandfather’s family’s farm. Carl’s people were severe Swedish immigrants, and the young couple had to live in a small farmhouse with my grandfather’s younger brother and their father. Maude was the only woman on the farm, so she cooked and cleaned for all three men-and often fed the farmhands as well. When electricity finally came to town through Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration program, her father-​in-​law would spring for only the lowest wattage lightbulbs, and these were seldom turned on.

Maude raised her first five-of seven-babies in that house. My mother was born in that house. The first three of those babies were raised in one single room, under one single lightbulb, just as Keo and Noi’s children will be raised. (Her father-​in-​law and brother-​in-​law each got a room to himself.) When Maude and Carl’s oldest son Lee was born, they paid the doctor with a veal calf. There was no money. There was never money. Maude’s savings-the money she’d been collecting for her reconstructive surgery-had long since been absorbed into the farm. When her oldest daughter, my Aunt Marie, was born, my grandmother cut up her cherished wine-​colored coat with the real fur collar and used that material to sew a Christmas outfit for the new baby girl.

And that has always been, in my mind, the operative metaphor for what marriage does to my people. By “my people” I mean the women in my family, specifically the women on my mother’s side-my heritage and my inheritance. Because what my grandmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all the women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. They repatterned what was theirs and shaped it for others. They went without. They were the last ones to eat at supper, and they were the first ones to get up every morning, warming the cold kitchen for another day spent caring for everyone else. This was the only thing they knew how to do. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle in life: They gave.

The story of the wine-​colored coat with the real fur collar has always made me cry. And if I were to tell you that this story has not shaped forever my feelings about marriage, or that it has not forged within me a small, quiet sorrow about what the matrimonial institution can take away from good women, I would be lying to you.

But I would also be lying to you-or at least withholding critical information-if I did not reveal this unexpected coda to the story: A few months before Felipe and I were sentenced to marry by the Homeland Security Department, I went out to Minnesota to visit my grandmother. I sat down with her while she worked on a quilting square, and she told me stories. Then I asked her a question I’d never asked before: “What was the happiest time of your life?”

In my heart, I believed I already knew the answer. It was back in the early 1930s, when she was living with Mrs. Parker, walking around in a slim yellow dress and a barbershop hairdo and a tailor-​fitted wine-​colored coat. That had to be the answer, right? But here’s the trouble with grandmothers. With all that they give away to others, they still insist on maintaining their own opinions about their own lives. Because what Grandma Maude actually said was “The happiest time in my life were those first few years of marriage to your grandfather, when we were living together on the Olson family farm.”

Let me remind you: They had nothing. Maude was a virtual house slave to three grown men (gruff Swedish farmers, no less, who were usually irritated with each other) and she was forced to cram her babies and their sodden cloth diapers into one cold and badly lit room. She became progressively sicker and weaker with each pregnancy. The Depression raged outside their door. Her father-​in-​law refused to run plumbing into the house. And so on, and so on…

“Grandma,” I said, taking her arthritic hands in mine, “how could that have been the happiest time of your life?”

“It was,” she said. “I was happy because I had a family of my own. I had a husband. I had children. I had never dared to dream that I would be allowed to have any of those things in my life.”

As much as her words surprised me, I believed her. But just because I believed her did not mean that I understood her. I did not, in fact, begin to understand my grandmother’s reply about her life’s greatest happiness until the night, months later, that I ate dinner in Laos with Keo and Noi. Sitting there on the dirt floor, watching Noi shift uncomfortably around her pregnant belly, I had naturally begun to formulate all sorts of assumptions about her life as well. I pitied Noi for the difficulties she faced by marrying so young, and I worried about how she would raise her baby in a home already overtaken by a herd of bullfrogs. But when Keo boasted to us about how clever his young wife was (what with all those big ideas about greenhouses!) and when I saw the joy pass over the face of this young woman (a woman so shy that she had barely met our eyes the entire night), I suddenly encountered my grandmother. I suddenly knew my grandmother, as reflected in Noi, in a way I had never known her before. I knew how my grandmother must have looked as a young wife and mother: proud, vital, appreciated. Why was Maude so happy in 1936? She was happy for the same reason that Noi was happy in 2006-because she knew that she was indispensable to somebody else’s life. She was happy because she had a partner, and because they were building something together, and because she believed deeply in what they were building, and because it amazed her to be included in such an undertaking.

I shall not insult either my grandmother or Noi by insinuating that they really ought to have aimed for something higher in their lives (something more closely approximating, perhaps, my aspirations and my ideals). I also refuse to say that a desire to be at the center of their husbands’ lives reflected or reflects pathology in these women. I will grant that both Noi and my grandmother know their own happiness, and I bow respectfully before their experiences. What they got, it seems, is precisely what they had always wanted.

So that’s settled.

Or is it?

Because-just to confuse the issue even more-I must relay what my grandmother said to me at the end of our conversation that day back in Minnesota. She knew that I had recently fallen in love with this man named Felipe, and she’d heard that things were getting serious between us. Maude is not an intrusive woman (unlike her granddaughter), but we had been speaking intimately, so perhaps that’s why she felt free to ask me directly, “What are your plans with this man?”

I told her that I wasn’t sure, other than that I wanted to stay with him because he was kind and supportive and loving and because he made me happy.

“But will you…?” She trailed off.

I didn’t finish the sentence for her. I knew what she was digging for, but at that point in my life I still had no intention of ever getting married again, so I said nothing, hoping the moment would pass.

After a bit of silence, she tried again. “Are the two of you planning to have…?”

Again, I didn’t supply the answer. I wasn’t trying to be rude or coy. It’s just that I knew I was not going to be having any babies, and I really didn’t want to disappoint her.

But then this nearly century-​old woman shocked me. My grandmother threw up her hands and said, “Oh, I might as well ask you outright! Now that you’ve met this nice man, you aren’t going to get married and have children and stop writing books, are you?”

So how do I square this?

What am I to conclude when my grandmother says that the happiest decision of her life was giving up everything for her husband and children but then says-in the very next breath-that she doesn’t want me making the same choice? I’m not really sure how to reconcile this, except to believe that somehow both these statements are true and authentic, even as they seem to utterly contradict one another. I believe that a woman who has lived as long as my grandmother should be allowed some contradictions and mysteries. Like most of us, this woman contains multitudes. Besides, when it comes to the subject of women and marriage, easy conclusions are difficult to come by, and enigmas litter the road in every direction.

To get anywhere close to unraveling this subject-women and marriage-we have to start with the cold, ugly fact that marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. I did not invent this fact, and I don’t like saying it, but it’s a sad truth, backed up by study after study. By contrast, marriage as an institution has always been terrifically beneficial for men. If you are a man, say the actuarial charts, the smartest decision you can possibly make for yourself-assuming that you would like to lead a long, happy, healthy, prosperous existence-is to get married. Married men perform dazzlingly better in life than single men. Married men live longer than single men; married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men excel at their careers above single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression than do single men.

“A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1813, but he was dead wrong, or at least with regard to male human happiness. There doesn’t seem to be anything, statistically speaking, that a man does not gain by getting married.

Dishearteningly, the reverse is not true. Modern married women do not fare better in life than their single counterparts. Married women in America do not live longer than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women (you take a 7 percent pay cut, on average, just for getting hitched); married women do not thrive in their careers to the extent single women do; married women are significantly less healthy than single women; married women are more likely to suffer from depression than single women; and married women are more likely to die a violent death than single women-usually at the hands of a husband, which raises the grim reality that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person in the average woman’s life is her own man.

All this adds up to what puzzled sociologists call the “Marriage Benefit Imbalance”-a tidy name for an almost freakishly doleful conclusion: that women generally lose in the exchange of marriage vows, while men win big.

Now before we all lie down under our desks and weep-which is what this conclusion makes me want to do-I must assure everyone that the situation is getting better. As the years go by and more women become autonomous, the Marriage Benefit Imbalance diminishes, and there are some factors that can narrow this inequity considerably. The more education a married woman has, the more money she earns, the later in life she marries, the fewer children she bears, and the more help her husband offers with household chores, the better her quality of life in marriage will be. If there was ever a good moment in Western history, then, for a woman to become a wife, this would probably be it. If you are advising your daughter on her future, and you want her to be a happy adult someday, then you might want to encourage her to finish her schooling, delay marriage for as long as possible, earn her own living, limit the number of children she has, and find a man who doesn’t mind cleaning the bathtub. Then your daughter may have a chance at leading a life that is nearly as healthy and wealthy and happy as her future husband’s life will be.

Nearly.

Because even though the gap has narrowed, the Marriage Benefit Imbalance persists. Given that this is the case, we must pause here for a moment to consider the mystifying question of why-when marriage has been shown again and again to be disproportionately disadvantageous to them-so many women still long for it so deeply. You could argue that maybe women just haven’t read the statistics, but I don’t think the question is that simple. There’s something else going on here about women and marriage-something deeper, something more emotional, something that a mere public service campaign (DO NOT GET MARRIED UNTIL YOU ARE AT LEAST THIRTY YEARS OLD AND ECONOMICALLY SOLVENT!!!) is unlikely to change or to shape.

Puzzled by this paradox, I brought up the question by e-​mail with some friends of mine back in the States-female friends whom I knew were longing to find husbands. Their deep craving for matrimony was something I had never personally experienced and therefore could never really understand, but now I wanted to see it through their eyes.

“What’s this all about?” I asked.

I got some thoughtful answers, and some funny answers. One woman composed a long meditation on her desire to find a man who might become, as she elegantly put it, “the co-​witness I have always longed for in life.” Another friend said that she wanted to raise a family with somebody “if only to have babies. I want to finally use these giant breasts of mine for their intended purpose.” But women can build partnerships and have babies these days outside of matrimony, so why the specific yearning for legal marriage?

When I posed the question again, another single friend replied, “Wanting to get married, for me, is all about a desire to feel chosen.” She went on to write that while the concept of building a life together with another adult was appealing, what really pulled at her heart was the desire for a wedding, a public event “that will unequivocally prove to everyone, especially to myself, that I am precious enough to have been selected by somebody forever.”

Now, you could say that my friend had been brainwashed by the American mass media, which has been relentlessly selling her this fantasy of womanly perfection forever (the beautiful bride in the white gown, wearing a halo of flowers and lace, surrounded by solicitous ladies-​in-​waiting), but I don’t entirely buy that explanation. My friend is an intelligent, well-​read, thoughtful, and sane adult; I do not happen to believe that animated Disney features or afternoon soap operas have taught her to desire what she desires. I believe she arrived at these desires entirely on her own.

I also believe that this woman should not be condemned or judged for wanting what she wants. My friend is a person of great heart. Her enormous capacity for love has all too often been left unmatched and unreturned by the world. As such, she struggles with some very serious unfulfilled emotional yearnings and questions about her own value. That being the case, what better confirmation of her preciousness could she summon than a ceremony in a beautiful church, where she could be regarded by all in attendance as a princess, a virgin, an angel, a treasure beyond rubies? Who could fault her for wanting to know-just once-what that feels like?

I hope she gets to experience that-with the right person, of course. Thankfully, my friend is mentally stable enough that she has not run out and hastily married some deeply inappropriate man in order to bring to life her wedding fantasies. But surely there are other women out there who have made that exchange-trading in their future well-​being (and 7 percent of their incomes, and, let us not forget, a few years off their life expectancy) for one afternoon’s irrefutably public proof of worth. And I must say it again: I will not ridicule such an urge. As someone who has herself always longed to be regarded as precious, and who has often done foolish things in order to test that regard, I get it. But I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.

I think of my friend Christine, who realized-on the eve of her fortieth birthday-that she had been postponing her real life forever, waiting for the validation of a wedding day before she could regard herself as an adult. Never having walked down an aisle in a white dress and a veil, she, too, had never felt chosen. For a couple of decades, then, she had just been going through the motions-working, exercising, eating, sleeping-but all the while secretly waiting. But as her fortieth birthday approached, and no man stepped forward to crown her as his princess, she came to realize that all this waiting was ridiculous. No, it was beyond ridiculous: It was an imprisonment. She was being held hostage by an idea she came to call the “Tyranny of the Bride,” and she decided that she had to break that enchantment.

So this is what she did: On the morning of her fortieth birthday, my friend Christine went down to the northern Pacific Ocean at dawn. It was a cold and overcast day. Nothing romantic about it. She brought with her a small wooden boat that she had built with her own hands. She filled the little boat with rose petals and rice-artifacts of a symbolic wedding. She walked out into the cold water, right up to her chest, and set that boat on fire. Then she let it go-releasing along with it her most tenacious fantasies of marriage as an act of personal salvation. Christine told me later that, as the sea took away the Tyranny of the Bride forever (still burning), she felt transcendent and mighty, as though she were physically carrying herself across some critical threshold. She had finally married her own life, and not a moment too soon.

So that’s one way to do it.

To be perfectly honest, though, this kind of brave and willful act of self-​selection was never modeled for me within my own family’s history. I never saw anything like Christine’s boat as I was growing up. I never saw any woman actively marrying her own life. The women who have been most influential to me (mother, grandmothers, aunties) have all been married women in the most traditional sense, and all of them, I would have to submit, gave up a good deal of themselves in that exchange. I don’t need to be told by any sociologist about something called the Marriage Benefit Imbalance; I have witnessed it firsthand since childhood.

Moreover, I don’t have to look very far to explain why that imbalance exists. In my family, at least, the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-​sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love. As the psychologist Carol Gilligan has written, “Women’s sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women is to see themselves in a relationship of connection.” This fierce instinct for entwinement has often caused the women in my family to make choices that are bad for them-to repeatedly give up their own health or their own time or their own best interests on behalf of what they perceive as the greater good-perhaps in order to consistently reinforce an imperative sense of specialness, of chosenness, of connection.

I suspect this may be the case in many other families, too. Please be assured that I know there are exceptions and anomalies. I myself have personally witnessed households where the husbands give up more than the wives, or do more child rearing and housekeeping than the wives, or take over more of the traditional feminine nurturing roles than the wives-but I can count those households on exactly one hand. (A hand that I now raise, by the way, to salute those men with enormous admiration and respect.) But the statistics of the last United States Census tell the real story: In 2000, there were about 5.3 million stay-​at-​home mothers in America, and only about 140,000 stay-​at-​home dads. That translates into a stay-​at-​home-​dad rate of only about 2.6 percent of all stay-​at-​home parents. As of this writing, that survey is already a decade old, so let’s hope the ratio is changing. But it can’t change fast enough for my tastes. And such a rare creature-the father who mothers-has never been a character anywhere in the history of my family.

I do not entirely understand why the women to whom I am related give over so much of themselves to the care of others, or why I’ve inherited such a big dose of that impulse myself-the impulse to always mend and tend, to weave elaborate nets of care for others, even sometimes to my own detriment. Is such behavior learned? Inherited? Expected? Biologically predetermined? Conventional wisdom gives us only two explanations for this female tendency toward self-​sacrifice, and neither satisfies me. We are either told that women are genetically hardwired to be caretakers, or we are told that women have been duped by an unjustly patriarchal world into believing that they’re genetically hardwired to be caretakers. These two opposing views mean that we are always either glorifying or pathologizing women’s selflessness. Women who give up everything for others are seen as either paragons or suckers, saints or fools. I’m not crazy about either explanation, because I don’t see the faces of my female relatives in any of those descriptions. I refuse to accept that the story of women isn’t more nuanced than that.

Consider, for instance, my mother. And believe me-I have been considering my mother, every single day since I found out I would be marrying again, since I do believe that one should at least try to understand one’s mother’s marriage before embarking on a marriage of one’s own. Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family’s history. It’s almost as though we have to look at the story in 3-D, with each dimension representing one unfolding generation.

While my grandmother had been a typical Depression-​era farmwife, my mother belonged to that generation of women I call “feminist cuspers.” Mom was just a tiny bit too old to have been part of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. She had been raised to believe that a lady should be married and have children for exactly the same reason that a lady’s handbag and shoes should always match: because this was what was done. Mom came of age in the 1950s, after all, during an era when a popular family advice doctor named Paul Landes preached that every single adult in America should be married, “except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective.”

Trying to put myself back into that time, trying to understand more clearly the expectations of marriage that my mother had been raised with, I ordered online an old matrimonial propaganda film from the year 1950 called Marriage for Moderns. The film was produced by McGraw-​Hill, and it was based on the scholarship and research of one Professor Henry A. Bowman, Ph.D., chairman of the Division of Home and Family, Department of Marriage Education, Stephens College, Missouri. When I stumbled on this old relic, I thought, “Lordy, here we go,” and I set myself up to be fully entertained by a bunch of tacky, campy, postwar drivel about the sanctity of the home and hearth-starring coiffed actors in pearls and neckties, basking in the glow of their perfect, model children.

But the movie surprised me. The story begins with an ordinary-​looking young couple, modestly dressed, sitting on a city park bench, talking to each other in quiet seriousness. Over the image, an authoritative male narrator speaks about how difficult and terrifying it can be “in the America of today” for a young couple even to consider marriage, given how rough life has become. Our cities are haunted by “a social blight called slums,” the narrator explains, and we all live in “an age of impermanence, an age of unrest and confusion, under the constant threat of war.” The economy is troubled, and “rising living costs vie against flagging earning power.” (Here, we see a young man walking dejectedly past a sign on an office building reading NO JOBS AVAILABLE, DO NOT APPLY.) Meanwhile, “for every four marriages, one ends in divorce.” It’s no wonder, then, that it’s so difficult for couples to commit to matrimony. “It is not cowardice that gives people pause,” the narrator explains, “but stark reality.”

I could not quite believe what I was hearing. “Stark reality” was not what I had expected to find here. Hadn’t that decade been our Golden Age-our sweet national matrimonial Eden, back when family, work, and marriage were all sanctified, straightforward ideals? But as this film suggested, for some couples, at least, questions about marriage were no simpler in 1950 than they have ever been.

The film specifically highlights the story of Phyllis and Chad, a recently married young couple trying to make ends meet. When we first meet Phyllis, she’s standing in her kitchen, washing dishes. But the voice-​over tells us that only a few years earlier, this same young woman “was staining slides in the pathology lab at the university, making her own living, living her own life.” Phyllis had been a career girl, we are told, with an advanced degree, and she had loved her work. (”Being a bachelor girl wasn’t the social disgrace it was when our parents called them spinsters.”) As the camera catches Phyllis shopping for groceries, the narrator explains, “Phyllis didn’t marry because she had to. She could take it or leave it. Moderns like Phyllis think of marriage as a voluntary state. Freedom of choice-it’s a modern privilege and a modern responsibility.” Phyllis, we are told, volunteered for marriage only because she decided that she wanted a family and children more than she wanted a career. That was her decision to make, and she stands by it even though her sacrifice has been a significant one.

Soon enough, though, we see signs of strain.

Phyllis and Chad had apparently met in math class at the university, where “she had gotten better grades. But now he’s an engineer and she’s a housewife.” Phyllis is shown dutifully ironing her husband’s shirts at home one afternoon. But then our heroine finds herself distracted when she stumbles on the plans her husband has been drawing up for a big building competition. She takes out her slide rule and starts checking up on his figures, just as she knows he would want her to. (”They both know she’s better at math than he is.”) She loses track of time, becoming so engaged in her calculations that she leaves the ironing unfinished; then she suddenly remembers that she’s late for her appointment at the health clinic, where she’s going to discuss her (first) pregnancy. She had entirely forgotten about the baby inside her because she was so captivated by her mathematical calculations.

Sweet heavens, I thought, what kind of 1950s housewife is this?

“A typical one,” the narrator tells me, as though he had heard my question. “A modern one.”

Our story continues. Later that night, pregnant Phyllis the math wiz and her cute husband Chad sit in their tiny apartment, smoking cigarettes together. (Ah, the fresh nicotine taste of 1950s pregnancies!) Together, they are working on Chad’s engineering plans for the new building. The phone rings. It’s a friend of Chad’s; he wants to go to the movies. Chad looks to Phyllis for approval. But Phyllis argues against it. The competition deadline is coming up next week and the plans need to be completed. The two have been working so hard on this! But Chad really wants to see the movie. Phyllis holds her ground; their whole future rests on this work! Chad looks disappointed, almost childishly so. But he relents in the end, sulking a bit, and allows Phyllis to literally push him back to the drawing table.

Our omniscient narrator, analyzing this scene, approves. Phyllis is not a nag, he explains. She has every right to demand that Chad stay home and complete a business project that could advance them both mightily in the world.

“She gave up her career for him,” says our sonorous male narrator, “and she wants to see something come of it.”

I felt a strange combination of embarrassment and emotion as I watched this film. I was embarrassed that I’d never before imagined American couples of the 1950s having conversations like this. Why had I unquestioningly swallowed the conventional cultural nostalgia, that this era had somehow been a “simpler time”? What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it? Also, I was touched that the filmmakers were defending Phyllis in their own small way, trying to get across this vital message to the young grooms of America: “Your beautiful, intelligent bride just gave up everything for you, buster-so you’d damn well better honor her sacrifice by working hard and giving her a life of prosperity and security.”

Moreover, I found myself moved that this unexpectedly sympathetic response to a woman’s sacrifice had come from somebody as clearly male and authoritative as Dr. Henry A. Bowman, Ph.D., Chairman of the Division of Home and Family, Department of Marriage Education, Stephens College, Missouri.

That said, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen to Phyllis and Chad about twenty years down the road-when the children were older and the prosperity had been achieved, and Phyllis had no life whatsoever outside of the home, and Chad was starting to wonder why he’d given up so much personal pleasure over the years to be a good and faithful provider, only to be rewarded now with a frustrated wife, rebellious teenage children, a sagging body, and a tedious career. For wouldn’t those be the very questions that would explode across American families in the late 1970s, running so many marriages off the rails? Could Dr. Bowman-or anybody else back in 1950, for that matter-ever have anticipated the cultural storm that was coming?

Oh, good luck, Chad and Phyllis!

Good luck, everyone!

Good luck, my mother and father!

Because, while my mom may have defined herself as a 1950s bride (despite having married in 1966, her assumptions about marriage hearkened back to Mamie Eisenhower), history dictated that she grow into a 1970s wife. She had been married only five years, and her daughters were barely out of diapers, when the big wave of feminist turbulence really hit America and shook every assumption about marriage and sacrifice she’d ever been taught.

Mind you, feminism did not arrive overnight, as it sometimes seems. It’s not as though women across the Western world just woke up one morning during the Nixon administration, decided they’d had enough, and took to the streets. Feminist ideas had been circulating through Europe and North America for decades before my mother was even born, but it took-ironically-the unprecedented economic prosperity of the 1950s to unleash the upheaval that defined the 1970s. Once their families’ basic survival needs had been met on such a wide scale, women could finally turn their attention to such finer-​point topics as social injustice and even their own emotional desires. What’s more, suddenly there existed in America a massive middle class (my mother was one of its newest members, having been raised poor but trained as a nurse and married to a chemical engineer); within that middle class, labor-​saving innovations such as washing machines, refrigerators, processed food, mass-​manufactured clothing, and hot running water (comforts that my Grandma Maude could have only dreamed about back in the 1930s) freed up women’s time for the first moment in history-or at least freed up women’s time somewhat.

Moreover, because of mass media, a woman didn’t have to live in a big city anymore to hear revolutionary new notions; newspapers, television, and radio could bring newfangled social concepts right into your Iowa kitchen. So a vast population of ordinary women had the time now (as well as the health, the interconnectedness, and the literacy) to start asking questions like “Wait a minute-what do I really want out of my life? What do I want for my daughters? Why am I still putting a meal in front of this man every night? What if I want to work outside the home, too? Is it permissible for me to get myself an education, even if my husband is uneducated? Why can’t I open up my own checking account, by the way? And is it really necessary for me to keep having all these babies?”

That last question was the most important and transformative of all. While limited forms of birth control had been available in America since the 1920s (to non-​Catholic married women with money, anyhow), it wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century-and the invention and wide availability of the Pill, that the entire social conversation about child rearing and marriage could finally change. As the historian Stephanie Coontz has written, “Until women had access to safe and effective contraception that let them control when to bear children and how many to have, there was only so far they could go in reorganizing their lives and their marriages.”

Whereas my grandmother had borne seven children, my mother bore only two. That’s a massive difference within just one generation. Mom also had a vacuum cleaner and indoor plumbing, so things were a little easier for her all around. This left a sliver of time in my mother’s life to start thinking about other things, and by the 1970s, there were a lot of other things to think about. My mother never identified herself as a feminist-I do want to make that clear. Still, she was not deaf to the voices of this new feminist revolution. As an observant middle child from a large family, my mother had always been a keen listener-and believe me, she listened very carefully to everything that was being said about women’s rights, and a good deal of it made sense to her. For the first time, ideas were being openly discussed that she had been silently pondering for a good long while.

Foremost among these were issues relating to women’s bodies and women’s sexual health, and the hypocrisies intertwined therein. Back in her small Minnesota farming community, my mother had grown up witnessing a particularly unpleasant drama unfold year after year, in household after household, when inevitably a young girl would find herself pregnant and would “have to get married.” In fact, this was how most marriages came to pass. But every time it happened-every single time-it would be treated as a full-​on scandal for the girl’s family and a crisis of public humiliation for the girl herself. Every single time, the community behaved as though such a shocking event had never before occurred, much less five times a year, in families from every possible background.

Yet somehow the young man in question-the impregnator-was spared disgrace. He was generally allowed to be seen as an innocent, or sometimes even as the victim of seduction or entrapment. If he married the girl, she was deemed lucky. It was an act of charity, almost. If he didn’t marry her, the girl would be sent away for the duration of the pregnancy, while the boy remained in school, or on the farm, carrying on as if nothing had happened. It was as though, in the community’s mind, the boy had not even been present in the room when the original sexual act had occurred. His role in the conception was strangely, almost biblically, immaculate.

My mother had observed this drama throughout her formative years and at a young age arrived at a rather sophisticated conclusion: If you have a society in which female sexual morality means everything, and male sexual morality means nothing, then you have a very warped and unethical society. She’d never attached such specific words to these feelings before, but when women began to speak up in the early 1970s, she heard these ideas vocalized at last. Amid all the other issues on the feminist agenda-equal employment opportunity, equal access to education, equal rights under the law, more parity between husbands and wives-what really spoke to my mother’s heart was this one question of societal sexual fairness.

Empowered by her convictions, she got a job working at Planned Parenthood in Torrington, Connecticut. She took this job back when my sister and I were still quite young. Her nursing skills got her the job, but it was her innate managerial ability that made her such a vital part of the team. Soon my mother was coordinating the whole Planned Parenthood office, which had started out in a residential living room but quickly grew into a proper health clinic. Those were heady days. This was back when it was still considered renegade to openly discuss contraception or-heaven forbid-abortion. Condoms were still illegal in Connecticut back when I’d been conceived, and a local bishop had recently testified before the state legislature that if restrictions on contraceptives were removed, the state would “be a mass of smoldering ruin” within twenty-​five years.

My mother loved her job. She was on the front lines of an actual health-​care revolution, breaking all the rules by talking openly about human sexuality, trying to get a Planned Parenthood clinic launched in every county across the state, empowering young women to make their own choices about their bodies, debunking myths and rumors about pregnancy and venereal disease, fighting prudish laws, and-most of all-offering options to tired mothers (and to tired fathers, for that matter) that had never before been available. It was as though through her work she found a way to pay back all those cousins and aunts and female friends and neighbors who had suffered in the past for their absence of choices. My mom had been a hard worker her whole life, but this job-this career-became an expression of her very being, and she loved every minute of it.

But then, in 1976, she quit.

Her decision was sealed the week that she had an important conference to attend in Hartford, and my sister and I both fell sick with the chicken pox. We were ten and seven years old at the time, and of course we had to stay home from school. My mom asked my father if he would take off two days from work to stay home with us so she could attend the conference. He wouldn’t do it.

Listen, I don’t want to chastise my father here. I love that man with all my heart, and I must say in his defense: Regrets have since been expressed. But just as my mother had been a 1950s bride, my father was a 1950s groom. He had never asked for, nor had he ever expected, a wife who would work outside the home. He didn’t ask for the feminist movement to arrive on his watch, and he wasn’t particularly passionate about women’s sexual health issues. He wasn’t all that excited about my mother’s job, when it all came down to it. What she saw as a career, he saw as a hobby. He didn’t object to her having this hobby-just as long as it didn’t interfere with his life in any measure. She could have her job, then, as long as she still took care of everything else at home. And there was a lot to be taken care of at our home, too, because my parents were not just raising a family but also running a small farm. Somehow though, until the chicken pox incident, my mother had managed to do everything. She had been working full-​time, keeping the garden going, tending to the housework, making the meals, raising the children, milking the goats, and still being fully available to my father when he got home every night at five-​thirty. But when the chicken pox hit and my dad would not give up two days of his life to help out with his kids, suddenly it was too much.

My mother made her choice that week. She quit her job and decided to stay home with my sister and me. It wasn’t like she would never work outside the home again (she would always have some part-​time job or another while we were growing up), but as for her career? That was finished. As she explained to me later, she came to feel she had a choice: She could either have a family or she could have a calling, but she couldn’t figure how to do both without support and encouragement from her husband. So she quit.

Needless to say, it was a low point in her marriage. In the hands of a different woman, this incident could have spelled out the end of the marriage altogether. Certainly a lot of other women in my mother’s circle seemed to be getting divorced around 1976, and for similar sorts of reasons. But my mother is not one for rash decisions. She carefully and quietly studied the working mothers who were getting divorces, and tried to gauge whether their lives were any better off. She didn’t always see tremendous improvement, to be honest. These women had been tired and conflicted when they were married, and now, divorced, they still seemed tired and conflicted. It appeared to my mother that they had maybe only replaced their old troubles with a whole new set of troubles-including new boyfriends and new husbands who perhaps weren’t such a big trade-​up anyhow. Beyond all this, though, my mother was (and is) at her core a conservative person. She believed in the sanctity of marriage. What’s more, she still happened to love my dad, even though she was angry at him and even though he had disappointed her deeply.

So she made her decision, stuck with her vows, and this is how she framed it: “I chose my family.”

Am I making far too obvious a point here if I say that many, many women have also faced this kind of choice? For some reason, Johnny Cash’s wife comes to mind: “I could’ve made more records,” June said, later in her life, “but I wanted to have a marriage.” There are endless stories like this. I call it the “New England Cemetery Syndrome.” Visit any New England graveyard filled with two or three centuries of history and you will find clusters of family gravestones-often lined up in a neat row-of one infant after another, one winter after another, sometimes for years on end. Babies died. They died in droves. And the mothers did what they had to do: They buried what they had lost, grieved, and somehow moved on to survive another winter.

Modern women, of course, don’t have to deal with such bitter losses-at least not routinely, at least not literally, or at least not yearly, as so many of our ancestors had to. This is a blessing. But don’t necessarily be fooled into thinking that modern life is therefore easy, or that modern life carries no grieving and loss for women anymore. I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried-in neat little rows-the personal dreams they have given up for their families. June Carter Cash’s never-​recorded songs rest in that silent graveyard, for instance, alongside my mother’s modest but eminently worthy career.

And so these women adapt to their new reality. They grieve in their own ways-often invisibly-and move on. The women in my family, anyhow, are very good at swallowing disappointment and moving on. They have, it has always seemed to me, a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept. They are mighty in their malleability, almost to the point of a superhuman power. I grew up watching a mother who became with every new day whatever that day required of her. She produced gills when she needed gills, grew wings when the gills became obsolete, manifested ferocious speed when speed was required, and demonstrated epic patience in other more subtle circumstances.

My father had none of that elasticity. He was a man, an engineer, fixed and steady. He was always the same. He was Dad. He was the rock in the stream. We all moved around him, but my mother most of all. She was mercury, the tide. Due to this supreme adaptability, she created the best possible world for us within her home. She made the decision to quit her job and stay home because she believed this choice would most benefit her family, and, I must say, it did benefit us. When Mom quit her job, all of our lives (except hers, I mean) became much nicer. My dad had a full-​time wife again, and Catherine and I had a full-​time mom. My sister and I, to be honest, hadn’t loved the days when Mom worked at Planned Parenthood. There were no quality day-​care options in our hometown back then, so we’d often find ourselves having to go to the houses of various neighbors after school. Aside from happy access to our neighborhood televisions (we didn’t have the stupendous luxury of TV in our own house), Catherine and I always hated these patched-​together babysitting arrangements. Frankly, we were delighted when our mother gave up her dreams and came home to take care of us.

Most of all, though, I believe that my sister and I benefited incalculably from Mom’s decision to stay married to our father. Divorce sucks for kids, and it can leave lingering psychological scars. We were spared all that. We had an attentive mom at home who met us at the door every day after school, who supervised our daily lives, and who had dinner on the table when our dad got home from work. Unlike so many of my friends from broken homes, I never had to meet my father’s icky new girlfriend; Christmases were always in the same place; a sense of constancy in the household allowed me to focus on my homework rather than on my family’s heartache… and therefore I prospered.

But I just want to say here-to lock it forever in print, if only to honor my mother-that an awful lot of my advantages as a child were built on the ashes of her personal sacrifice. The fact remains that while our family as a whole profited immensely from my mother’s quitting her career, her life as an individual did not necessarily benefit so immensely. In the end, she did just what her female predecessors had always done: She sewed winter coats for her children from the leftover material of her heart’s more quiet desires.

And this is my beef, by the way, with social conservatives who are always harping about how the most nourishing home for a child is a two-​parent household with a mother in the kitchen. If I-as a beneficiary of that exact formula-will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives-instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble”-be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women having to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do it?

Excuse me for the rant.

This is just a really, really big issue of mine.

Maybe it is precisely because I have seen the cost of motherhood in the lives of women I love and admire that I stand here, nearly forty years old, feeling no desire whatsoever for a baby of my own.

Of course this is a rather important question to discuss on the brink of marriage, and so I must address it here-if only because child rearing and marriage are so inherently linked in our culture and in our minds. We all know the refrain, right? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage? Even the very word “matrimony” comes to us from the Latin word for mother. We don’t call marriage “patrimony.” Matrimony carries an intrinsic assumption of motherhood, as though it is the babies themselves who make the marriage. Actually, often it is the babies themselves who make the marriage: Not only have many couples throughout history been forced into marriage thanks to an unplanned pregnancy, but sometimes couples waited until a successful pregnancy occurred before sealing the deal with matrimony in order to ensure that fertility would not later be a problem. How else could you find out whether your prospective bride or groom was a productive breeder except by giving the engine a test run? This was often the case in early American colonial society, in which-as the historian Nancy Cott has discovered-many small communities considered pregnancy to be a stigma-​free, socially accepted signal that it was now time for a young couple to tie the knot.

But with modernity and the easy availability of birth control, the whole issue of procreation has become more nuanced and tricky. Now the equation is no longer “babies beget matrimony,” or even necessarily “matrimony begets babies”; instead, these days it all comes down to three critical questions: when, how, and whether. Should you and your spouse happen to disagree on any of these questions, married life can become extremely complicated, because often our feelings about these three questions can be nonnegotiable.

I know this from painful personal experience because my first marriage fell apart-to a large extent-over the question of children. My then-​husband had always assumed that we would have babies together one day. He had every right to make that assumption, since I had always assumed it myself, though I wasn’t entirely sure when I would want babies. The prospect of eventual pregnancy and parenthood had seemed comfortably distant on my wedding day; it was an event that would happen sometime “in the future,” “at the right moment,” and “when we were both ready.” But the future sometimes approaches us more quickly than we expect, and the right moment doesn’t always announce itself with clarity. The problems that existed within my marriage soon made me doubt whether this man and I would ever be ready, truly, to endure such a challenge as raising children.

Moreover, while the vague idea of motherhood had always seemed natural to me, the reality-as it approached-only filled me with dread and sorrow. As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-​book shop.) Every morning, I would perform something like a CAT scan on myself, searching for a desire to be pregnant, but I never found it. There was no imperative there, and I believe that child rearing must come with an imperative, must be driven by a sense of longing and even destiny, because it is such a massively important undertaking. I’ve witnessed this longing in other people; I know what it looks like. But I never felt it in myself.

Moreover, as I aged, I discovered that I loved my work as a writer more and more, and I didn’t want to give up even an hour of that communion. Like Jinny in Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, I felt at times “a thousand capacities” spring up in me, and I wanted to chase them all down and make every last one of them manifest. Decades ago, the novelist Katherine Mansfield wrote in one of her youthful diaries, “I want to work!”-and her emphasis, the hard-​underlined passion of that yearning, still reaches across the decades and puts a crease in my heart.

I, too, wanted to work. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully.

How would I manage that, though, with a baby? Increasingly panicked by this question, and well aware of my then-​husband’s growing impatience, I spent two frantic years interviewing every woman I could-married, single, childless, artistic, archetypally maternal-and I asked them about their choices, and the consequences of their choices. I was hoping their answers might resolve all my questions, but their answers covered such a wide range of experience that I found myself only more confused in the end.

For instance, I met one woman (an artist who worked at home) who said, “I had my doubts, too, but the minute my baby was born, everything else in my life fell away. Nothing is more important to me now than my son.”

But another woman (whom I would define as one of the best mothers I’ve ever met, and whose grown kids are wonderful and successful) admitted to me privately and even shockingly, “Looking back on it all now, I’m not at all convinced that my life was really bettered in any way by the choice to have children. I gave up altogether too much, and I regret it. It’s not that I don’t adore my kids, but honestly, I sometimes wish I could have all those lost years back.”

A fashionable, charismatic West Coast businesswoman, on the other hand, said to me, “The one thing nobody ever warned me about when I started having babies was this: Brace yourself for the happiest years of your life. I never saw that coming. The joy of it has been like an avalanche.”

But I also talked to an exhausted single mom (a gifted novelist) who said, “Raising a child is the very definition of ambivalence. I am overwhelmed at times by how something can simultaneously be so awful and so rewarding.”

Another creative friend of mine said, “Yes, you lose a lot of your freedoms. But as a mother, you gain a new kind of freedom as well-the freedom to love another human being unconditionally, with all your heart. That’s a freedom worth experiencing, too.”

Still another friend, who had left her career as an editor to stay home with her three children, warned me, “Think very carefully about this decision, Liz. It’s difficult enough to be a mom when it’s what you really want to do. Don’t even go near child rearing until you’re absolutely sure.”

Another woman, though, who has managed to keep her vibrant career thriving even with three kids, and who sometimes takes her children with her on overseas business trips, said, “Just go for it. It’s not that hard. You just have to push against all the forces that tell you what you can’t do anymore now that you’re a mom.”

But I was also deeply touched when I met a renowned photographer, now in her sixties, who made this simple comment to me on the topic of children: “I never had ‘em, honey. And I never missed ‘em.”

Do you see a pattern here?

I didn’t.

Because there wasn’t a pattern. There was just a whole bunch of smart women trying to work things out on their own terms, trying to navigate somehow by their own instincts. Whether I myself should ever be a mother was clearly not a question that any of these women were going to be able to answer for me. I would need to make that choice myself. And the stakes of my choice were personally titanic. Declaring that I did not want to have children effectively meant the end of my marriage. There were other reasons I left that marriage (there were aspects of our relationship that were frankly preposterous), but the question of children was the final blow. There is no compromise position on this question after all.

So, he fumed; I cried; we divorced.

But that’s another book.

Given all that history, it should not be surprising to anyone that, after a few years alone, I met and fell in love with Felipe-an older man with a pair of beautiful, adult children, who had not one smidgen of interest whatsoever in repeating the experience of fatherhood. It is also no accident that Felipe fell in love with me-a childless woman in the waning years of her fertility who adored his kids but who had not one smidgen of interest whatsoever in becoming a mother herself.

That relief-the great thrumming relief that we both felt when we discovered that neither one of us was going to coerce the other into parenthood-still sends a pleasant vibrating hum across our life together. I still can’t entirely get over it. For some reason, I had never once considered the possibility that I might be allowed to have a lifelong male companion without also being expected to have children. This is how deeply the incantation of “first-​comes-​love-​then-​comes-​marriage-​then-​comes-​baby-​in-​the-​baby-​carriage” had penetrated my consciousness; I had honestly neglected to notice that you could opt out of the baby carriage business and nobody-not in our country anyhow-would arrest you for it. And the fact that, upon meeting Felipe, I also inherited two wonderful adult stepchildren was a bonus gift. Felipe’s kids need my love and they need my support, but they do not need my mothering; they had already been beautifully mothered long before I ever arrived on the scene. Best of all, though, by introducing Felipe’s children into my own extended family, I pulled off the ultimate generational magic trick: I provided my parents with an extra set of grandchildren, without ever having to raise babies of my own. Even now, the freedom and abundance of it all feels something close to miraculous.

Being exempted from motherhood has also allowed me to become exactly the person I believe I was meant to be: not merely a writer, not merely a traveler, but also-in a quite marvelous fashion-an aunt. A childless aunt, to be exact-which puts me in extremely good company, because here’s an astonishing fact that I discovered in the margins of my research on marriage: If you look across human populations of all varieties, in every culture and on every continent (even among the most enthusiastic breeders in history, like the nineteenth-​century Irish, or the contemporary Amish), you will find that there is a consistent 10 percent of women within any population who never have children at all. The percentage never gets any lower than that, in any population whatsoever. In fact, the percentage of women who never reproduce in most societies is usually much higher than 10 percent-and that’s not just today in the developed Western world, where childless rates among women tend to hover around 50 percent. In the 1920s in America, for instance, a whopping 23 percent of adult women never had any children. (Doesn’t that seem shockingly high, for such a conservative era, before the advent of legalized birth control? Yet it was so.) So the number can get pretty high. But it never goes below 10 percent.

All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies. Many of those women deliberately elected to skip motherhood, either through avoiding sex with men altogether or through careful application of what the Victorian ladies once called “the precautionary arts.” (The sisterhood has always had its secrets and talents.) Other women, of course, had their childlessness thrust on them unwillingly-because of infertility, or disease, or spinsterhood, or a general shortage of eligible males due to wartime casualties. Whatever the reasons, though, widespread childlessness is not quite so modern a development as we tend to believe.

In any case, the number of women throughout history who never become mothers is so high (so consistently high) that I now suspect that a certain degree of female childlessness is an evolutionary adaptation of the human race. Maybe it’s not only perfectly legitimate for certain women to never reproduce, but also necessary. It’s as though, as a species, we need an abundance of responsible, compassionate, childless women on hand to support the wider community in various ways. Childbearing and child rearing consume so much energy that the women who do become mothers can quickly become swallowed up by that daunting task-if not outright killed by it. Thus, maybe we need extra females, women on the sidelines with undepleted energies, who are ready to leap into the mix and keep the tribe supported. Childless women have always been particularly essential in human society because they often take upon themselves the task of nurturing those who are not their official biological responsibility-and no other group does this to such a large degree. Childless women have always run orphanages and schools and hospitals. They are midwives and nuns and providers of charity. They heal the sick and teach the arts and often they become indispensable on the battlefield of life. Literally, in some cases. (Florence Nightingale comes to mind.)

Such childless women-let’s call them the “Auntie Brigade”-have never been very well honored by history, I’m afraid. They are called selfish, frigid, pathetic. Here’s one particularly nasty bit of conventional wisdom circulating out there about childless women that I need to dispel here, and that is this: that women who have no children may lead liberated and happy and wealthy lives when they are young, but they will ultimately regret that choice when they reach old age, for they shall all die alone and depressed and full of bitterness. Perhaps you’ve heard this old chestnut? Just to set the record straight: There is zero sociological evidence to back this up. In fact, recent studies of American nursing homes comparing happiness levels of elderly childless women against happiness levels of women who did have children show no pattern of special misery or joy in one group or the other. But here’s what the researchers did discover that makes elderly women miserable across the board: poverty and poor health. Whether you have children or not, then, the prescription seems clear: Save your money, floss your teeth, wear your seatbelt, and keep fit-and you’ll be a perfectly happy old bird someday, I guarantee you.

Just a little free advice there, from your Auntie Liz.

In leaving no descendents, however, childless aunts do tend to vanish from memory after a mere generation, quickly forgotten, their lives as transitory as butterflies. But they are vital as they live, and they can even be heroic. Even in my own family’s recent history, there are stories on both sides of truly magnificent aunties who stepped in and saved the day during emergencies. Often able to accrue education and resources precisely because they were childless, these women had enough spare income and compassion to pay for lifesaving operations, or to rescue the family farm, or to take in a child whose mother had fallen gravely ill. I have a friend who calls these sorts of child-​rescuing aunties “sparents”-“spare parents”-and the world is filled with them.

Even within my own community, I can see where I have been vital sometimes as a member of the Auntie Brigade. My job is not merely to spoil and indulge my niece and nephew (though I do take that assignment to heart) but also to be a roving auntie to the world-an ambassador auntie-who is on hand wherever help is needed, in anybody’s family whatsoever. There are people I’ve been able to help, sometimes fully supporting them for years, because I am not obliged, as a mother would be obliged, to put all my energies and resources into the full-​time rearing of a child. There are a whole bunch of Little League uniforms and orthodontist’s bills and college educations that I will never have to pay for, thereby freeing up resources to spread more widely across the community. In this way, I, too, foster life. There are many, many ways to foster life. And believe me, every single one of them is essential.

Jane Austen once wrote to a relative whose first nephew had just been born: “I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible. Now that you have become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence.” Jane knew of which she spoke. She herself was a childless auntie, cherished by her nieces and nephews as a marvelous confidante, and remembered always for her “peals of laughter.”

Speaking of writers: From an admittedly biased perspective, I feel the need to mention here that Leo Tolstoy and Truman Capote and all the Bronte sisters were raised by their childless aunts after their real mothers had either died or abandoned them. Tolstoy claimed that his Aunt Toinette was the greatest influence of his life, as she taught him “the moral joy of love.” The historian Edward Gibbon, having been orphaned young, was raised by his beloved and childless Aunt Kitty. John Lennon was raised by his Aunt Mimi, who convinced the boy that he would be an important artist someday. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s loyal Aunt Annabel offered to pay for his college education. Frank Lloyd Wright’s first building was commissioned by his Aunts Jane and Nell-two lovely old maids who ran a boarding school in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Coco Chanel, orphaned as a child, was raised by her Aunt Gabrielle, who taught her how to sew-a useful skill for the girl, I think we would all agree. Virginia Woolf was deeply influenced by her Aunt Caroline, a Quaker spinster who devoted her life to charitable works, who heard voices and spoke to spirits, and who seemed, as Woolf recalled years later, “a kind of modern prophetess.”

Remember that critical moment in literary history when Marcel Proust bites into his famous madeleine cookie, thereby becoming so overwhelmed by nostalgia that he has no choice but to sit down and write the multivolume epic Remembrance of Things Past? That entire tsunami of eloquent nostalgia was set off by the specific memory of Marcel’s beloved Aunt Leonie, who, every Sunday after church, used to share her madeleines with the boy when he was a child.

And have you ever wondered what Peter Pan really looked like? His creator, J. M. Barrie, answered that question for us back in 1911. For Barrie, Peter Pan’s image and his essence and his marvelous spirit of felicity can be found all over the world, hazily reflected “in the faces of many women who have no children.”

That is the Auntie Brigade.

But this decision of mine-the decision to join the Auntie Brigade rather than enlist in the Mommy Corps-does set me off as being quite different from my own mother, and I still felt there was something that needed to be reconciled within that distinction. This is probably why, in the middle of my travels with Felipe, I called my mom one night from Laos, trying to settle some last lingering questions about her own life and her choices and how they related to my life and my choices.

We talked for over an hour. My mom was calm and thoughtful, as ever. She did not seem surprised by my line of questioning-in fact, she responded as though she’d been waiting for me to ask. Waiting, perhaps, for years.

First of all, right off the bat, she was quick to remind me: “I don’t regret anything I ever did for you kids.”

“You don’t regret giving up the work you loved?” I asked.

“I refuse to live in regret,” she said (which did not exactly answer the question, but felt like an honest start). “There was so much to love about those years I spent at home with you girls. I know you kids in a way that your father will never know you. I was there, witnessing your growth. It was a privilege to see you become adults. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that.”

Also, my mother reminded me that she chose to stay married all those years to the same man because she happens to love my father dearly-which is a good point, and one well taken. It is true that my parents connect not only as friends, but also very much on a bodily level. They are physical in every way together-hiking, biking, and farming side by side. I remember phoning home from college late one winter’s night and catching the two of them out of breath. “What have you guys been up to?” I asked, and my mom, giddy with laughter, announced, “We’ve been sledding!” They had absconded with their ten-​year-​old neighbor’s toboggan and had been making midnight runs down the icy hill behind our house-my mom lying on my father’s back and shrieking with adrenalized pleasure while he steered the speeding sled through the moonlight. Who still does this in middle age?

My parents have always had a certain sexual chemistry, ever since the day they met. “He looked like Paul Newman,” my mom recalls of their first encounter, and when my sister once asked my father about his favorite memory of my mom, he did not hesitate to reply, “I have always loved the pleasing nature of your mother’s form.” He still loves it. My dad is always grabbing at my mom’s body as she walks by in the kitchen, always checking her out, admiring her legs, lusting after her. She swats him away with fake shock: “John! Stop it!” But you can tell she relishes the attention. I grew up watching that play out, and I think that’s a rare gift-knowing that your parents are physically satisfying to each other. So one big part of my parent’s marriage, as my mother was reminding me, has always been lodged somewhere beyond the rational, hidden someplace deep in the sexual body. And that degree of intimacy is something beyond any explanation, beyond any argument.

Then there is the companionship. My parents have been married for over forty years now. By and large they’ve worked out their deal. They live in a pretty smooth routine, their habits polished by time’s current. They orbit each other in the same basic pattern every day: coffee, dog, breakfast, newspaper, garden, bills, chores, radio, lunch, groceries, dog, dinner, reading, dog, bed… and repeat.

The poet Jack Gilbert (no relation, sadly for me) wrote that marriage is what happens “between the memorable.” He said that we often look back on our marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are “the vacations, and emergencies”-the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody-so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-​present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

Also, my mom had the grace to remind me that night, when I called her from Laos, that she is far from a saint, and that my dad has had to give up parts of himself, too, in order to stay married to her. As my mother generously admitted, she is not always the easiest person to be married to. My father has had to learn how to tolerate and endure the effects of being managed at every turn by a hyperorganized wife. In this regard, the two of them are horribly ill-​matched. My father takes life as it comes; my mother makes life happen. An example: My father was out working in the garage one day when he accidentally stirred a small bird from its nest in the rafters. Confused and afraid, the bird settled on the brim of my dad’s hat. Not wanting to disturb it any further, my father sat for about an hour on the floor of the garage until the bird decided to fly away. This is a very Dad story. Such a thing would never happen to my mother. She is far too busy to allow dazed little birds to rest on her head while there are chores to be done. Mom waits for no bird.

Also, while it’s true that my mother has given up more of her personal ambitions in marriage than my father ever did, she demands far more out of marriage than he ever will. He is far more accepting of her than she is of him. (”She’s the best Carole she can be,” he often says, while one gets the feeling that my mother believes her husband could be-maybe even should be-a much better man.) She commands him at every turn. She’s subtle and graceful enough in her methods of control that you don’t always realize that she’s doing it, but trust me: Mom is always steering the boat.

She comes by this trait honestly. All the women in her family do this. They take over every single aspect of their husbands’ lives and then, as my father loves to point out, they absolutely refuse to ever die. No man can outlive an Olson bride. This is simple biological fact. I’m not exaggerating: It has never happened, not in anyone’s memory. And no man can escape being completely controlled by an Olson wife. (”I’m warning you,” my dad told Felipe at the beginning of our relationship, “if you’re going to have any kind of life with Liz, you’ve got to define your space right now, and then defend it forever.”) My father once joked-not really joking-that my mother manages about 95 percent of his life. The wonder of it, he mused, is that she’s much more upset about the 5 percent of his life that he won’t relinquish than he is about the 95 percent that she utterly dominates.

Robert Frost wrote that “a man must partly give up being a man” in order to enter into marriage-and I cannot fairly deny this point when it comes to my family. I have written many pages already describing marriage as a repressive tool used against women, but it’s important to remember that marriage is often used as a repressive tool against men, too. Marriage is a harness of civilization, linking a man to a set of obligations and thereby containing his restless energies. Traditional societies have long recognized that nothing is more useless to a community than a whole bunch of single, childless young men (aside from their admittedly useful role as cannon fodder, of course). For the most part, single young men have a global reputation for squandering their money on whores and drinking and games and laziness: They contribute nothing. You need to contain such beasts, to bind them into accountability-or so the argument has always gone. You need to convince these young men to put aside their childish things and take up the mantle of adult-​hood, to build homes and businesses and to cultivate an interest in their surroundings. It’s an ancient truism across countless different cultures that there is no better accountability-​forging tool for an irresponsible young man than a good, solid wife.

This certainly was the case with my parents. “She whipped me into shape,” is my dad’s summation of the love story. Mostly he’s okay with this, though sometimes-say, in the middle of a family gathering, surrounded by his powerful wife and his equally powerful daughters-my father resembles nothing more than a puzzled old circus bear who cannot seem to figure out how he came to be quite so domesticated, or how he came to be perched quite so high up on this strange unicycle. He reminds me in such moments of Zorba the Greek, who replied when asked if he had ever married, “Am I not a man? Of course I’ve been married. Wife, house, kids, the full catastrophe!” (Zorba’s melodramatic angst, by the way, reminds me of the curious fact that, within the Greek Orthodox Church, marriage is regarded not so much as a sacrament, but as a holy martyrdom-the understanding being that successful long-​term human partnership requires a certain Death of the Self to those who participate.)

My parents have each certainly felt that restriction, that small sense of self-​death, in their own marriage. I know this to be true. But I’m not sure they’ve always minded having each other in the way either. When I once asked my father what kind of creature he would like to be in his next life, should there be a next life, he replied without hesitation, “A horse.”

“What kind of horse?” I asked, imagining him as a stallion galloping wildly across the open plains.

“A nice horse,” he said.

I duly adjusted the picture in my mind. Now I imagined a friendly stallion galloping wildly across the plains.

“What kind of nice horse?” I probed.

“A gelding,” he pronounced.

A castrated horse! That was unexpected. The picture in my mind changed completely. Now I envisioned my father as a gentle dray horse, docilely pulling a cart driven by my mother.

“Why a gelding?” I asked.

“I’ve found that life is just easier that way,” he replied. “Trust me.”

And so life has been easier for him. In exchange for the almost castrating constraints that marriage has clamped on my father’s personal freedoms, he has received stability, prosperity, encouragement in his labors, clean and mended shirts that appear as if by magic in his dresser drawers, a reliable meal at the end of a good day’s work. In return, he has worked for my mother, he has been faithful to her, and he submits to her will a solid 95 percent of the time-elbowing her away only when she comes a little bit too close to achieving total world domination. The terms of this contract must be acceptable to both of them because-as my mother reminded me when I phoned her from Laos-their marriage now endures into its fifth decade.

The terms of my parents’ marriage are probably not for me, of course. Whereas my grandmother was a traditional farmwife and my mother was a feminist cusper, I grew up with completely new ideas about the institutions of marriage and family. The relationship I’m likely to build with Felipe is something my sister and I have termed “Wifeless Marriage”-which is to say that nobody in our household will play (or play exclusively) the traditional role of the wife. The more thankless chores that have always fallen on women’s shoulders will be balanced out more evenly. And since there will be no babies, you could also call it “Motherless Marriage” I suppose-a model of marriage that my grandmother and mother obviously never experienced. Similarly, the responsibility of breadwinning will not fall entirely on Felipe’s shoulders, as it fell to my father and grandfather; indeed, the bulk of the household earnings will probably always be mine. Perhaps in that regard, then, we will have something like a “Husbandless Marriage” as well. Wifeless, childless, husbandless marriages… there haven’t been a whole lot of those unions in history, so we don’t really have a template to work with here. Felipe and I will have to make up the rules and boundaries of our story as we go along.

I don’t know, though. Maybe everyone has to make up the rules and boundaries of their story as they go along.

Anyway, when I asked my mother that night on the phone from Laos whether she has been happy in her marriage over the years, she assured me that she’d had a really nice time of it with my father, far more often than not. When I asked her what the happiest period of her life had been, she replied: “Right now. Living with your dad, healthy, financially stable, free. Your father and I pass our days doing our own thing and then we meet at the dinner table together every night. Even after all these years, we still sit there for hours talking and laughing. It’s really lovely.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

There was a pause.

“Can I say something that I hope doesn’t offend you?” she ventured.

“Go for it.”

“To be perfectly honest, the best part of my life began as soon as you kids grew up and left the house.”

I started laughing (Gee-thanks, Mom!) but she spoke over my laughter with urgency. “I’m serious, Liz. There’s something you have to understand about me: I’ve been raising children my entire life. I grew up in a big family, and I always had to take care of Rod and Terry and Luana when they were little. How many times did I get up in the middle of the night when I was ten years old to clean up somebody who had wet the bed? That was my whole childhood. I never had time for myself. Then, when I was a teenager, I took care of my older brother’s kids, always trying to figure out how to do my homework while I was babysitting. Then I had my own family to raise, and I had to give so much of myself over to that. When you and your sister finally left for college, that was the first moment in my life I hadn’t been responsible for any children. I loved it. I can’t tell you how much I love it. Having your father to myself, having my own time to myself-it’s been revolutionary for me. I’ve never been happier.”

Okay, then, I thought, with a surge of relief. So she has made her peace with it all. Good.

There was another moment of silence.

Then my mother suddenly added, in a tone I’d never heard from her before, “But I do have to tell you something else. There are times when I refuse to even let myself think about the early years of my marriage and all that I had to give up. If I dwell on that too much, honest to God, I become so enraged, I can’t even see straight.”

Oh.

Therefore, the tidy ultimate conclusion is…???

It was slowly becoming clear to me that perhaps there was never going to be any tidy ultimate conclusion here. My mother herself had probably given up long ago trying to draw tidy ultimate conclusions about her own existence, having abandoned (as so many of us must do, after a certain age) the luxuriously innocent fantasy that one is entitled to have unmixed feelings about one’s own life. And if I needed to have unmixed feelings about my mother’s life in order to calm down my own anxieties about matrimony, then I’m afraid I was barking up the wrong tree. All I could tell for certain was that my mom had somehow found a way to build a quiet enough resting place for herself within intimacy’s rocky field of contradictions. There, in a satisfactory-​enough amount of peace, she dwells.

Leaving me alone, of course, to figure out how I might someday construct such a careful habitat of my own.