The public discourse right now is being hijacked by one of those periodic temper tantrums over the existence of unmarried women. Mainstream media churns out a seemingly endless number of articles complaining that women allegedly refuse to get married, and pitying men left alone by those stubbornly single ladies. Republicans have started to question the longstanding tolerance of no-fault divorce laws, arguing that it's wrong to let women end marriages because they're unhappy. Pop star Taylor Swift has become a hate object on the right simply by being publicly happy while single in her 30s.
So there's no better time for a book like "This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life," by feminist author Lyz Lenz. In this breezy but thought-provoking book, Lenz demolishes the standard view that divorce is a tragedy, especially for women. Instead, she shares the dirty little secret many ex-wives come to know: Divorce can be freedom. The harried and sexless divorced mother stereotype is used to scare women, Lenz argues, but for many, reality looks much different with more free time, more control over life, and, blessedly, a cleaner house.
"We've been here before. If forcing women to get married solved our social problems, we wouldn't be here again."
Lenz spoke to Salon about her new book, how she came to learn divorce is a beautiful thing, and why we shouldn't be afraid of it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The timing on your book is fortuitous because we're in the middle of a media pressure campaign, demanding that more women get married. Even the Washington Post editorial board begged women to get married, even to men who voted for Donald Trump.
I love the piece you wrote on that, by the way. Brad Wilcox now has this book coming out. David Brooks is on it. Everybody's like, just get married. It's fine.
There are a lot of cultural factors at play here. This isn't the first time, right? You can go back to Jimmy Carter and the Moynihan report. Even in the 1920s, there were high-profile flapper divorces and, everybody's like, oh my God, society is crumbling. Women just need to get married. We've been here before. If forcing women to get married solved our social problems, we wouldn't be here again. But there are a growing number of women opting out of marriage altogether, and even opting out of the dating pool. It's highly destabilizing to people who make policy and look at trends. And it's like, my dude, just fund a social safety net.
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One of the biggest segments of divorce is gray divorce. All these retirees who were told if you just stick it out, then you'll be happy in the end. They're getting to the end and they're not happy. They're saying, this is not how I'm gonna spend my one wild and precious life. We were also forced to see it in the pandemic. All those Rube Goldberg contraptions we used to make our marriages equal, like hiring a house cleaner, the nanny, and family who lives close by, were stripped away. All of a sudden women were forced to stay in their homes with their kids and their partner who supposedly loved them. But he was like locking himself in the office, doing Zoom work, while you're doing homeschooling and managing the kids and, like, also doing your own work and also cooking for everybody.
Instead of reckoning with inequality, we're trying to push women back into a position of servitude. You see that with like the rollback of reproductive rights. It's also tied to the gender reactionary politics that says a trans woman is not a woman. We want to shove women back into a box, and that box is a heterosexual lifestyle. We know that that just doesn't work.
"Marriage is where the personal hits the political in a way that's hard to avoid."
Ironically, if we were truly serious about marriage, we would be making divorce easier to access. Studies show in societies where divorce is easier, family life gets better. Women make more money. Kids are more likely to stay in school. There are lower rates of domestic violence. If you wanted better relationships and a better society, you would give women a choice.
But that's not what we're doing, right? We're telling women that men are sad and nobody's having babies. So just get married.
On your podcast, you interview women about getting divorced or being an ex-wife. You also play phone calls and letters from women telling their divorce story. Anecdotally, how much did the pandemic break up people's marriages?
It's actually hard to get good data on divorces. We're just bad at tracking it. But, anecdotally, talking to divorce lawyers and talking to women: It broke a lot of women. Even for women for whom marriage is traditionally a fine institution — upper middle class white women, they're marrying upper middle class white men, they have money — even those women hate every minute. People are also realizing we don't have a lot of time on this Earth.
We're just now starting to see the ripple effects. People who were unable to move out in 2020 are finally moving out. A lot of people who message me say the pandemic made them see they were always gonna be unequal. That their hopes and dreams were never gonna be as important as his.
A lot of your book is focused on the issue of housework and the unequal sharing of it. Your ex-husband frankly sounds like a slob. Why does housework weigh so heavily on marriages?
It's one of those little things that we think we can make equal. Then you get into the marriage and realize, oh, this was not equal at all. It's a good example of the dishonesty of pro-marriage rhetoric. You're told marriage is just two people building a home and a life together. But the work of the home is a stark example of the inequality in what was supposed to be a partnership.
Being married to a man adds seven hours of labor to a woman's week. That's seven hours of labor that he is not doing. It's just such a stark statistic. Marriage is where the personal hits the political in a way that's hard to avoid. We think that we're so egalitarian. A man will say he's a feminist and he doesn't wipe the counters. You can say you support women, but you've never picked up a f—king vacuum. It doesn't matter what you say, because in your home, you're still benefiting from the unpaid labor of a woman.
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I've had so many discussions over the years with men who just refuse to take this seriously. They write it off like petty bullshit, to worry about who does more vacuuming. But there's so much psychic damage that it does to women.
It's a loss of time if you're constantly picking his socks out of the couch. I write about in my book how my ex would take the trash from the trash can, and instead of taking the trash outside to the bins, he would leave it on this bench in the kitchen. He would claim he'd get to it late. He would never get to it later. So who does that work when he "forgets?" It was me, always me, coming in and being hit with the smell of rot and garbage. Sometimes it would fall, and there would be trash on the floor. We would have these fights and he would say, it's just a bag of trash, let it go. I cannot let it go. You show complete disregard for me as a person because you're not thinking about who has to do this.
"He was like locking himself in the office, doing Zoom work, while you're doing homeschooling and managing the kids and, like, also doing your own work and also cooking for everybody."
It's these tiny violences. It's not the big things. I talked to so many women and, yes, big things can and do destroy marriages. But I wanted to write a book about how he wasn't violent. He wasn't Charles Lindbergh, with a second family in Germany. I wanted to write about the ways these small violences, like not paying attention to housework, leaving that bag of trash, really add up. The trap in the dishwasher doesn't empty itself. The laundry doesn't fold itself. That bag of trash doesn't get taken out to the trash can by itself. That is a person who does that, and I am that person. Like you said, it takes this psychic toll.
I am not going to spend my life training a man to see me as a human being. I'll talk to women and they'll say, my husband didn't do that either, but then I trained him after 20 years. And I'm like, he is a man, not a golden retriever. I want to do other things with my life than train a grown man to wipe the counters.
You know, being a single mom is great. Being divorced is amazing. When I went into it, I thought I was going to be miserable and hairy, but I had no other choice because I didn't want the rest of my life to be that trash bag on the bench. I got out and I realized I have more free time because I'm not doing all that labor. My house is cleaner. I have two dogs! One is a giant Alaskan Malamute who eats an entire box of shredded wheat and then shits on the floor. Still, my house is cleaner with this wolf in my house.
We're told marriage is hard work. But who's doing that work? If it was both doing the work, then maybe. But who's hiring the babysitter, hiring the therapist, reading the books about how to better communicate, making the date night plan, and making sure we have clean clothes for the date? I don't think any relationship should be predicated on my inequality. Call me crazy.
It's funny because there's a long tradition in American discourse of treating marriage like it's a burden on men. "Take my wife, please" jokes. Now that women can say no to marriage, everything has changed. Now we hear about the poor men being so lonely. We're asked to worry about what will happen to men without women.
I don't know, go to f—king therapy like the rest of us.
I always think about Batman. Gotham is low-key, like, "we hate you." But he like will not quit because his parents got murdered. If Batman was a woman, he would have just gone to therapy and been fine. Like, you wouldn't have to terrorize an entire city. Just get some help, Batman. Stop making everybody's life miserable.
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But yeah, there's this myth that women want marriage and the men don't. Like Toby Keith, saying he should have been a cowboy. Like a John Wayne man who refuses the pathetic woman who wants to make him settle down. And it's like, actually, women don't want that anymore. And now that, you know, women are like, no thanks, men are like, wait a minute. Who will wash my socks? I don't know. Make an app, my man. I truly don't care.
"We're told marriage is hard work. But who's doing that work?"
Women opting out, women being free, women being liberated, women saying, hey, this doesn't work for me and you can't make me choose it? It's deeply destabilizing. Our tax base is predicated on one man, one woman, two children, and a "Live Laugh Love" sign on your suburban house. That is how we have organized our society. When women say, "no, thank you," it it gets us where we hurt. Men say, "we're so lonely." Well, you might be lonely because you suck to be around.
I date occasionally and nothing destabilizes these men more than when I say, hey, really enjoying our time together, but I never wanna get married ever again. It just blows their f—king mind. They'll be like, what? I'm like, yeah, I'm the f—k boy now, buddies.
There was a conspiracy for centuries to not only make sure that men had wives, but we all had to pretend like they were doing us a favor by marrying us.
There is this idea that, well, I have to stick with this man because there's nothing better out there. It still permeates women's choices today. But you know what's better? Your bed, a vibrator and a glass of wine.
It's a source of fascination to me and, I can tell you from our readership interest, quite a few people: This whole trend online of "trad wives." What do you make of it?
Well, it's a reaction. Progress and backlash always happen hand-in-hand. Thank you, Susan Faludi. We're coming out of a time where women have made historic gains. 2017 was a watershed year for politics. We saw more women get elected. We saw women take to the streets. There was the growing #MeToo movement. Men were held accountable in a way that we had never seen before. So it shouldn't surprise us, when a few years later, women's rights are being taken away. That there's this movement in the culture to say, "Don't you want to be blonde and pretty and have seven children and bake bread all day?"
It's setting up this false idea of what is attainable and what is possible. It's making women feel that if they don't need it, they have somehow failed as a woman. It's also a reaction to LGBTQ politics. Like, queer people can't define what a woman is. A woman is a "Live Laugh Love" sign on the wall in a home in Waco, Texas with seven children. It sets up this false nostalgia for an idea of a wife that has never existed. If women were so happy with that life in the 1950s. we wouldn't have had the second wave of feminism. That way of life famously made women so miserable. We had huge societal upheaval because of it.
One question came to me while I was reading your book. You live in Iowa. I'm a native Texan, but I moved to New York many years ago and I live in Philadelphia now. When I lived in a red state, divorce was really common. I just knew so many people who were divorced. Now I live in a blue area, and I barely know anyone who's divorced. Statistics back this up — divorce is more prevalent in red states. Do you have thoughts on this?
You can't ideologically bootstrap your way out of bad marriages. That said, I don't think divorce is a sign of failure or a bad thing. I think it's a sign of success to say this is not working for me, and I don't want it anymore.
I think a huge part of it is people in blue states just don't get married in the first place and there's no need to get divorced.
That's the future liberals want: A taco truck on every corner and nobody getting married. I mean, I love that. But yeah, people wait until they're older to get married. When you make those choices out of a position of strength rather than a position of fear, of course, those relationships last longer. A girl in a red state who gets married because she got knocked up by some failson and then couldn't get an abortion? Of course, it's going to be a miserable marriage and of course they're gonna get divorced. Like, what did you think was gonna happen? But when a woman can come into a relationship with confidence, money, and options, she's more likely to make better choices in the long run. Men, too.
I imagine, too, that if women can divorce you pretty easily, men might act a little bit better in marriages.
Which kind of sucks. But if that's what it takes.
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