I wish people read their own texts before posting:
“My marriage failed, so here’s my advice on how to have a healthy marriage.” Do people hear themselves?
A Self-own
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
I wish people read their own texts before posting:
“My marriage failed, so here’s my advice on how to have a healthy marriage.” Do people hear themselves?
Clarissa's Blog 
You’re imagining things. She’s talking about parenting, not marriage, and isn’t giving any advice.
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Unless you believe that wives should parent their husbands, the quoted discussion is absolutely about husband-wife relationships. Charlotte’s position leads directly to divorce, as she herself made clear.
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and she feels superior about it, too. Trainwreck.
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Such complete lack of self-awareness is actually quite shocking.
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It’s spring break, so I spent the last two days entertaining Klara while simultaneously working. My husband didn’t take the position of, “you are her mother, you are supposed to be entertaining her, what’s the big deal” Instead, as an intelligent person and a loving husband, he told me I’m wonderful, I’m a hero, I’m the best mom ever. Today, he’s entertaining her. I’m going to tell him he’s amazing and I’m so grateful for everything he does. That’s how normal, loving couples behave. They don’t take each other for granted. Anything else is the road straight to a divorce, which is exactly what happened to Charlotte.
I can’t believe I have to explain such basic things to an adult anon commenter.
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Adults need to be thanked and praised too! My husband and I could not remotely be accused of high emotional intelligence, but dang, this is really basic stuff, and yes we do it: it’s important.
If you don’t, then the only communication your spouse receives about your relationship/family/household is “you’re doing it wrong”. Because when they’re doing it right the feedback is zero. All communication is then negative, and it’s a relationship disaster.
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Tangential: Spent some time catching up with my big-city relatives, and now, more than before, I despair for the current crop of twentysomethings (I don’t think it’s just the jet lag). Watched an attractive, intelligent, amiable, competent young lady in a long-term live-together relationship with an attractive, intelligent, responsible young man… fantasize out loud about getting a puppy and carrying it around in a baby carrier. And then later the subject of “babies” just sort of tumbled out of her mouth in a convo with the young man’s mother– and then she had to backtrack into the “maybe, hypothetical” realm. So painful to watch: these guys are in their late twenties, they’ve been together for years already, potential inlaws like them both. And they’re ‘focusing on their careers’.
I’m trying to think if there’s any way to leverage our mutual relatives and give the young man a violent elbowing: he needs to marry the young lady and have babies with her, sooner rather than later, or she’s gonna find someone who will.
And they were the only ones out of the group who were even *in* a relationship. Couple more were not even trying, and another maybe doing the sugar-baby gig??? It was like watching the live-action version of everything you’ve covered in Neoliberal Relationships 101. Reminded me why it’s important to get out and talk to people outside my smaller-town, religious, working-class milieu. Among my local acquaintance, for example, I only know *one* middle-aged woman who’s had ill-advised “work done” on her face. But at the obligatory family gathering… at least four or five of those, either unrecognizable since the last time I saw them, or verging on Joan-Rivers level stiff alien face-stretching.
It’s bleak out there.
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I hear you. I asked my friend if her 28yo daughter is planning to marry her live-in boyfriend of 5 years, and she says no, the daughter doesn’t like him enough. It boggles the mind why she’d live with him for 5 years if she doesn’t like him. It’s all so weird.
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If there’s any silver lining: it makes me grateful that we are not well-off, that we do not live in an urban culture, and that we are deeply embedded in a religious community. Not being able to afford a house is definitely not the worst that could happen. My kids are growing up in a culture where it’s still normal to settle down, get married, raise kids, and get old together. I think I have as good a chance as anybody of having grandkids instead of grand-dogs.
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Clarissa, I think you’re still European in your judgment and you misread this Charlotte Lee.
For many (most?) American women, a husband is like a car: there is always a better model round the corner. However, even after you’ve got yourself a newer, better model, the older one might still be serviceable, for example if you need to run some errands, or, as in this case, with children.
What this woman is saying is, “This man was a failure as a husband – and I did well to get rid of him – but he’s still good to go as a father, and that’s great, because I don’t want to encumber the new model with this task as it might depreciate under this burden.”
What you can’t get into that pea-sized brain of hers is that it’s meaningless to call someone the father of your children who is not also your husband at the same time. But this she will never understand.
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I strongly believe that this behavior should be stigmatized and socially shamed. That’s the only way we have out of this mess.
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“the older one might still be serviceable”
Trust me, in Europe…. let’s say East of Germany, the idea of trading in a husband for a newer, better model is very far from foreign.
What’s alien is the idea of keeping the old one around for child-minding or other chores, they prefer that the husband… no longer exist. That’s one reason for the popularity of the Ukrainian invasion in russia… lots of women get to exchange unsatisfactory husbands (no shortage of those in russia) for a cash payout and then look around for a new one (and maybe a second payout). Apparently they discuss this pretty openly on social media.
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Hi Avi…what do you mean by ” it’s meaningless to call someone the father of your children who is not also your husband at the same time”
People get divorced, for better or worse, for all sorts of reasons. The father doesn’t stop being the father as a matter of biological fact. What is it you are trying to say?
-YZ
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Well done for spotting my aporia. It’s difficult for me to articulate cogently. Of course, when a couple divorces, the father is still the father, and the mother is still the mother. However, they are such in relation to the children and no longer to each other. The expression “my children’s father” is, relationship-wise, empty.
Perhaps an example will make it easier for me to explain it. When I talk to my mother about my father, I don’t call him “your husband”, even though that is what he is for her.
These terms are not merely objective descriptors, they have a complex emotional element to them that creates a reticular effect: this is lost when people use the same terms in isolation from the relational universe that produced them.
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“The expression “my children’s father” is, relationship-wise, empty”
Like “my baby daddy”… which implies no ongoing (or maybe any) relationship beyond a brief physical one.
Very odd that she chooses such a torturous way of expressing it… why not “my ex-husband loves being a father”…. maybe because that prompts the thought “so it’s you he couldn’t stand being around”…. or the question “then why did you dump him”
She’s trying to frame the end of her marriage as something impersonal that just happened and not the result of determined efforts by at least one of them.
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And it’s particularly weird in a post about relationship dynamics in a marriage. It’s as if I lectured people on positive relationships with aging parents and referred to my mom as “my child’s grandmother.”
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