Marry Me a Little
Married people are acting up online
A month ago, I talked about the rise of polyamory in American pop culture. We now have: a reality show about couples seeking thirds, a critically adored movie about a queer poly man, a well reviewed book about an open marriage, and article after article discussing how people are beginning to have questions about the institution American culture has exalted for the last sixty years.
(As I was outlining this piece, Vox wrote a very well researched article about marriage, so I'll avoid retreading the same ground.)
On TikTok, my theory was two pronged: people are questioning many, many institutions in their lives right now. College is increasingly unaffordable for many Americans and every day we hear about highly educated white-collar workers getting laid off. The housing market is garbage. Inflation is up, people can’t afford food, or gas, or cars, or houses, or weddings. It’s not surprising that as faith in all institutions drops, marriage would be next in line.
Secondly, the nature of marriage has evolved: it went from transactional to an act of love, and most recently, has gone from a rite of passage to adulthood to a victory lap for people who have Made It. (It’s interesting to be writing about this six years after my graduate research on this very topic in 2018—the rising rates of cohabitation among couples is directly tied to both how expensive weddings have become and the depressed job market for the middle class).
On top of marriage now being seen as a final stepping stone into adulthood, our cultural expectations of marriage have changed: the expectation is now that your spouse should be your business partner, your best friend, your confidant, your trusted companion, your everything. I’ve always felt it was unsustainable, and queen Esther Perel mentions these expectations regularly when she discusses infidelity and the rising rates of loneliness among heterosexual couples: your partner cannot be your only friend, and your partner should not be your bestest friend in the whole world.
You can see where I’m going with this. Crumbling faith in institutions plus rising rates of loneliness plus an extreme expectation that one relationship is going to fulfill every single need? It’s easy to understand why married couples would be interested in different ways of being married. Isn’t the Millennial dream that we’ll be able to do it all better than the generation before us? And if we fail, we can always blog, tweet, post, or write about it.
One of the most interesting parts of the New Yorker article (that caused a lot of flack online) was the idea of the gentrification of polyamory. It made sense to me: originally, swinging and polyamory were the purview of quirky suburban couples or the weirdest people you’ve ever met. The subcultures slowly moved to places like Portland and San Francisco, and some teachings of the poly lifestyle survived the cultural transition from hippie/weirdo SF to tech bro SF, as discussed in both Future Sex and Uncanny Valley. Of course we’re suddenly seeing a boom in poly content as it becomes more “acceptable” to the holders of cultural capital. The coastal elites have discovered a new lifestyle and now we all have to hear about it (this is mostly me being sarcastic, but it does hold a grain of truth—the founder class in SF, crunchy vegans in Portland, gay men all over the country, and deeply annoying cishet men in Brooklyn have all been toting around copies of The Ethical Slut for decades).
While some brownstone dwellers have chosen to open up their marriages, others chose to end them. Or almost end them, in one case. In one week, we got an “I almost got divorced” piece that caused a meltdown on Coastal Elite Twitter and two separate divorce memoirs.
In This American Ex-Wife, author Lyz Lenz discusses how she married a guy who was kind of awful and how she absolutely hated being married to him. The New York Times called it “clever, well argued, and thoroughly joyless”, and Lenz spent the better part of Valentine’s Day seething about being mentioned in Gould’s piece.
The Lure of Divorce, while amazing clickbait (between this, the woman who got scammed out of $50K and Jamison’s excerpt, The Cut was on one that week), seems to be an excerpt to a forthcoming book about writer Emily Gould’s almost divorce and her late-in-life diagnosis of Bipolar disorder.
As a Millennial who grew up online, I instantly recognized Gould’s name: she raised eyebrows when she started a GoFundMe to leave her husband a few years ago (this turned out to be part of her mental health crisis, but was unknown at the time and was thoroughly mocked in certain Twitter circles and on Page Six) and famously defended the Gawker Stalker page to Jimmy Kimmel on CNN in 2007. The piece was fascinating, and spawned a vortex of discourse: who gets to be messy in public? Who gets to be myopic? Who gets to admit horrifying, deeply embarrassing stories about themselves and have it be cute, or quirky, or worthy of a book deal?
While Lenz offered up a polemic and Gould delivered a lesson in solipsism, an excerpt from Leslie Jamison’s Splinters made me weep. Full disclosure: I am a Jamison stan. I talked about The Empathy Exams to anyone who’d listen in 2015 and I think about both the Morgellons essay and 52 Blue once a week. Jamison has the ability to fully reify experiences in her writing, transforming even the most uncanny or alien subjects into deeply felt portraits of humanity. In the piece, Jamison writes about her divorce as a portal into a new version of herself. The image of her Tinder matches being a kaleidoscope of new lives, a 2024 version of Plath’s infamous (and oft-quoted on TikTok) fig tree metaphor chilled me.
It’s fascinating to contrast these portraits of modern marriage. Lenz is furious about the state of gender inequality, Jamison is ashamed to be dating again in her late thirties, Gould is getting pilloried online, and the poly folks in Brooklyn are sending cal invites to schedule dates with their paramours. I don’t know what the answer is—famously, I’ve never been married—but I’m good at spotting trends, and I know that whatever it is, it has to be more than this.
Neat Little Morality Slogans
A roundup of further reading.
I read a lot of books about marriage, dating, cohabitation, divorce, and America when I was in grad school. The following were indelible and I cite them whenever we talk about dating, marriage and class:
Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, Moira Wegel
Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, Kate Bolick
All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister
Books that talk about the deep weirdness of San Francisco:
Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love, Emily Witt
Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener
Middle class marriage is declining/marriage is becoming the domain of the wealthy + The Atlantic published its own “gentrification of polyamory” piece similar to that of The New Yorker wondering if polyamory was simply the latest fad of the easily distracted upper class. Spicy!!
As someone who is living and attempting (poorly) to date in San Francisco I can confirm: marriage and polyamory are for the wealthy. I’m not poly, but being on the apps the people who call themselves poly tend to fit a specific profile. It’s basically yuppies who already have everything: money, a partner/spouse, nice housing, and lifestyles that allow them to be indulgent. To me, it seems like a lot of people who have “made it” and just want “more”. It comes across like an expansion of class-based entitlement into the arena of romance.
I saw another creator state they see poly taking off in Millennials and Gen Z due to cost of living crisis. Poly, to them, is an attempt to consolidate resources and get romance. It’s the opposite IMO. A lot of Millennials and Gen z are increasingly single and lonely.