couple getting married 300x300 Is a Lasting Marriage Really About Accepting Mediocrity?In a recent Huffington Post piece, Iris Krasnow – author of “The Secret Lives of Wives: What It Really Takes To Stay Married” – shared a few revelations gleaned from the hundreds of interviews she conducted with married women for her book. Her findings – taken directly from the mouths of wives-in-the-trenches (as it were) – paint a fairly unappealing picture of what ’til death do us part’ is really like for many married couples.

For the sake of brevity, a few thrust-distilling excerpts:

The biggest shocker is the number of wives in stable unions who frequently contemplate fleeing their marriages. These are not abused wives; they are women with nice husbands who give them orgasms and jewelry and stability. Yet many of these settled midlife women admitted they were slightly jealous of Tipper Gore who gets to have a fresh start after 40 years of matrimony with the same guy.

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Wives who counted on a spouse for fulfillment and sustenance were often angry and lonely. And the happiest wives don’t spend a whole lot of time with their husbands.

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Who stays married and who doesn’t is a question not always about commitment or deep abiding love — it’s about endurance.

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…the wives with the highest marital satisfaction have a tight circle of wild women friends with whom to drink, travel and vent about their husbands.

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Yes, my work on this book has been quite surprising and enlightening. I now know that acceptance of mediocrity in a marriage relationship is more prevalent than you would imagine. I know that sometimes the only reason women stay with a spouse is because they have divorced friends who may have more sex than they do with new husbands but they also have cranky step-kids who hate them. Other women stay in lackluster marriages because they don’t want to give up their swanky lifestyles, and divorce is expensive, really expensive.

I’m not sure how we’re supposed to feel about all of this. Good for those people? Hooray for sticking it out in mediocrity? Kudos on having other dissatisfied women friends with whom you can regularly drown your sorrows and bitch about your husbands to?

The portrait painted of modern marriage by way of Krasnow’s research certainly isn’t a triumph of love, happiness, fulfillment, or even meaningful, emotionally substantive couplehood. At bottom, marriage for many seems instead to be about bowing to the status quo, duty-bound endurance, accepting mediocrity, and in many cases, the fear of not being able to maintain the level of lifestyle one has as a couple.

Does this make anyone else really, really sad?

But… I can’t say I’m surprised. Because here’s the truth that many married people I know dare not give voice to: it’s true. And I’m not just saying this because the research supports it, but because it also jibes with my own experience and what I know of other people’s marriages. Anecdotal? Perhaps. But for every truly loving, good, healthy marriage I’ve ever seen over the course of my entire forty-one year lifespan, I can point to ten terrible, awful, completely dysfunctional ones. And since roughly half of all marriages end in divorce, that actually means there are a whole lot of very unhappily married people out there who are, in fact, staying married. There’s a lot of people lowering the bar on their life, accepting mediocrity, “enduring,” and talking crap about their spouses behind their backs to friends as a form of release, because they’re just that unhappy.

Do I feel sorry for those people? Yeah, of course. It’s hard not to, when you think about what resigning yourself to that kind of life must be like in realistic, day-to-day terms. And, in their more honest-with-themselves-moments, I’m betting those people probably feel pretty sorry for themselves, too.

Sure, there are some who’d point to the decision to stick-it-out-in-misery as a badge of courage (some of those people have commented on this blog, in fact). They’d argue that, well, you SAID “til death do us part” and “for better or worse” so now you’re stuck. These same people are the ones who, of course, believe that staying in it for the kids is always the best thing for the kids, despite loads of evidence and individual testimony (also in comments here) indicating that isn’t always the case. But I’m not here to argue with those people, or disuade them of their belief that divorce is always “bad” and staying married no matter what is always “good.” Binary, black-and-white good/bad thinking isn’t interesting, and since I believe neither is in fact inherently good or bad – each being made negative or positive only by the adults interacting within the precepts of those arrangements – I’m not personally picking up the flag for divorce here by any stretch of the imagination. No, I’m not pro-divorce OR pro-marriage. I’m pro-happiness. I’ve never been much of a flag-waver, but if I ever flew a flag in support of any cause, it would be in support of THAT. And if the results of Krasnow’s research truly reflect of the state of our union’s unions, personal happiness is in dire need of some supportive flag-waving and RAH-RAHing – heck, maybe even a pride parade or a telethon.

Why do YOU think people who are genuinely unhappy stick it out? Would you agree that a lasting marriage is, as Krasnow suggests, about endurance and accepting mediocrity? Do you see her findings reflected in the lives of married people you know? What do you make of all this?

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Read more from Tracey Gaughran-Perez at her personal blog Sweetney.com

 

Is a Lasting Marriage Really About Accepting Mediocrity?