The Unmade Bed

by Stephen Marche

  The bleeding of the private into the public and of the intimate with work and power was the most radical force of the second half of the twentieth century. It altered and keeps altering human nature. But perhaps what is most surprising about the intertwining of the intimate and the political over the past fifty years is how natural it has felt. We have learned that patriarchy is as artificial as any other mode of life. The assumptions that have crumbled have left new insights in their place, insights that nobody could have predicted. It would not have seemed possible that working mothers would be as attentive and responsive and satisfied in their family lives as stay-at-home mothers, but they are. It would not have seemed possible that fathers would fight to spend more time with their kids, but they do.

  Our ancestors left a few buried hints of these possibilities. In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” Chaucer tells the story of a knight on a quest to discover what women want. He crosses the earth and hears hundreds of answers from hundreds of women, but when he is asked for a one-word conclusion, he doesn’t hesitate: “Sovereignty.” Women want power. And as for the tenderness of new fatherhood, one of the most touching scenes in the whole of The Iliad is when the great hero Hektor has a last visit with his son Astyanax before heading to certain death in battle against Achilles.

  Hektor held out his arms

  To take his baby. But the child squirmed round

  On the nurse’s bosom and began to wail,

  Terrified by his father’s great war helm—

  The flashing bronze, the crest with horsehair plume

  Tossed like a living thing at every nod.

  His father began laughing, and his mother

  Laughed as well. Then from his handsome head

  Hektor lifted off his helm and bent

  To place it, bright with sunlight, on the ground.

  When he had kissed his child and swung him high

  To dandle him, he said [a] prayer.

  In the ancient martial epic, a story of mass slaughter, the warrior takes off his helmet to cuddle his infant son.

  * * *

  Predictions are messages that writers send to the future so the world will know how blind and arrogant they are now. But any serious consideration of the trends as they appear at the moment has to be more than optimistic; it should be delirious with hope. Equality is coming, bumpily but surely. Women’s economic and political clout is constantly increasing; violence against women is constantly declining; family roles are constantly broadening; the housework gap is constantly narrowing. These trends are deep and of a piece and decades old. They are transforming business and politics and daily life.

  The forces altering the lives of men and women have little to do with ideas. The rise of women in the workplace, the emerging diversity of family values—they didn’t happen because people suddenly came to their senses under the impetus of a grand enlightenment. Hope is born in the marketplace and under covers and behind closed doors; it isn’t spearheaded by movements or Twitter. Economic and technological change has blazed a crooked path, and we are playing intellectual catch-up, poorly. The often invisible processes blithely transform who we are, unimpeded by debate, and an invisible triumph rolls underneath a pointless, aestheticized rage. The time has come to recognize that the current we are riding is taking us to a fuller humanity for men and women, to a deeper intimacy and more equal sharing of power. We are getting what we want. We are becoming who we are supposed to be.

  Simone de Beauvoir begins The Second Sex with a clear vision of the whole of humanity, not just of women: “Every individual concerned with justifying his existence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to transcend himself.” The situation of women, de Beauvoir saw, was the denial and restriction of the capacity for transcendence and self-determination that men took for granted. “She discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other. An attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence.”

  Doomed to immanence—such a precise phrase. Doomed to belong to others. Doomed to be of the earth and of blood and bone. Doomed to be rooted. The half-distinct shuffling of the house beneath me—that is the immanence to which I am doomed. My daughter and my son and my wife in the house, the minor ecology of family life, hands crossed behind the back just like the dead great-grandfather in a photograph, elbows skinned to the same roughness thirty years apart, the shared flutter of eyelashes, the mutual moods that flash up like birdcalls, wild urgings that race past the horizon, the underground caverns hollowed out by long-forgotten histories, disappointments half tucked away, and the geological pressures of money, the glare of outsiders looking in, and all the inexplicable and inconceivable wave and ebb we give the name of family. That is bodily love, the doom of immanence. The faint odor of toddler shit—utterly abject and succulent at once—means you must go upstairs and change her. The angry curl of hunger means you must feed him. The wail in the night means you must rise to comfort the wailer. The easing of the day and the leavening exhaustion means that you must sleep.

  De Beauvoir imagined the achievement of equality as women escaping immanence. But we have learned since the rise of women that we’re all doomed to immanence, men and women both. And not only that, but we need our immanence. We crave it. Each of us, one by one, will have to ride the turbulence between the body and dreams, between desire and justice, between the world as it has always been and the world as it might turn out to be.

  * * *

  “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” This is true. But the fish and the bicycle still fall in love. The fish and the bicycle still sleep together. The fish and the bicycle make coffee for each other in the morning and chat and pick out furniture together. The fish and the bicycle have children.

  The fish and the bicycle still get married. The ideal of marriage has survived the rearrangement of intimate life. Only 12 percent of unmarried Americans say they want to stay that way, and 93 percent of married Americans believe that love is the most important reason to get married. At the same time, marriage is becoming more select, a decision made after careful consideration of all the options. Increasingly it is a privilege for those with money and education and experience. The marrieds keep getting older and older: in 2013 only 24 percent of Americans between eighteen and thirty-two were married; the rate was 36 percent in 1997, 48 percent in 1980, and 65 percent in 1960. Since 1970 marriage rates have declined steadily among the less affluent, but not among top income earners. “Assortative mating,” as the sociologists call it, is one of the major engines of America’s exploding income inequality: rich people increasingly marry other rich people, whom they meet at college, where rich people get sexually sorted. Being marriageable is no longer a sign that you’re ordinary; it’s a sign of elite membership, of being a winner. They should change the wedding vows from “To have and to hold, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part” to “For richer and hopefully much richer, in healthy mutual exchange, to kick the shit out of the world together till it is mutually inconvenient.”

  These more considered marriages are not colder marriages; they are more connected. Of all the numbers swirling through this book, the most hopeful and the most vital is this: more than 80 percent of Americans feel their family is as close as or closer than the family they grew up in, and only 5 percent feel that their family is less close.

  Here is the hope under that hope: equality more accurately reflects the nature of our being, so we may more accurately reflect each other. A relationship is a series of negotiated contracts, of happy or unhappy exchanges, but ultimately two mutually incompatible desires are at play when a self-possessed person wants to lose himself or herself in another. “The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent person, or that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete,” Hegel wrote in Outlines of the Philosophy of Right two hundred years ago. “The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I
count for something in another, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it.”

  A good marriage is a transcendent miracle, according to Hegel. “Marriage so far as its essential basis is concerned, is not a contractual relationship. On the contrary, though marriage begins in contract, it is precisely a contract to transcend the standpoint of contract, the standpoint from which persons are regarded in their individuality.” The rearrangement of the twenty-first century, the future of men and women, will rewrite all contracts between the genders, but it will not change our hunger to pass beyond them. We need better contracts mainly in order to forget they were there in the first place.

  * * *

  During wedding ceremonies in the nineteenth century bride and groom remained separate, distinct, and the bride’s veil was removed only after the completion of the legal and religious business. After the conclusion of contracts intimacy began. The signed documents, the oral agreements in front of witnesses, were prolegomena to the revelation of the face, a man and woman looking at each other, into each other. Then the mystery.

  I know very little about marriage, less and less every year. My mother once told me that the point of marriage is to grow ugly together. I used to think that’s why so many romantic comedies end with a wedding, to keep everyone young and beautiful. I’m starting to understand that the reason writers stick to the territory before marriage is that it’s easier to figure out.

  What nobody tells you about marriage and children is that they make life weirder and weirder. They are not a state of normal complacency, of happily ever after. Take breasts. When you’re a kid, breasts can just be breasts. Nobody told Sarah or me that the oxytocin released in sex is the same hormone that causes a letdown of milk during breastfeeding. The first time in bed after the birth of our son, I lay there, coated in small rivers of the world’s loveliest but least erotic fluid, while Sarah ran off, giggling, to collect the precious dew of her body in a bottle.II Every drop spilling on me was nourishment not going to the boy. Later he went through a period when he stopped shitting. It was three days, then it was five, then it was ten, then we went to a doctor, who explained that when a baby is exclusively breast-fed, the hormonal cycle between the breast and the child sometimes becomes so complete, so absolutely in sync, that the baby stops needing to excrete for stretches of time. Miraculously the feedback from the saliva in the child’s mouth communicates so precisely the needs of his body to the breast it sucks that there is no waste.

  The meaning of breasts will change after the intimate revolution. I understand that there are some men, and some women too, who believe that such familiarity drains away the erotic. I could not disagree more. It is better to love breasts than to love décolletage. It is better to love a woman than to love a woman who disguises herself as a woman. The revolutionary moment of men crossing into the delivery room, of men crossing into the biological world of the species, pulling down the many veils the world has put up, has an erotic meaning that extends to the horizon. We get to find out what bodies are really like.

  The revolution of intimacy is possible only because men and women crave intimacy. At the bottom of all the rage and sorrow lies the urge for recognition and for tenderness. Tenderness resists theory. Tenderness embarrasses, mocking accomplishment. Tenderness relishes the embarrassments of the business of living: the piss on the floor, the tears on cheeks that only you can kiss away, hot blood, drool on the pillow, the nest of the shoulder and armpit, the curve of the hip raked by the splurge of infants.

  For Sarah and me the rearrangements of our lives—birth and death and jobs and changing cities—matter only because we love each other. I have known Sarah since I was nineteen and she was twenty; we have fallen down around and into each other. Memories grow from their own mush: the constellation of the unpredictable family, the hands of the high school boys, a photograph of her looking out at the sea, a photograph with garbage in Jerusalem, the fact that cats hate her, the occasional longing for pickled herring, the adored teacher who slept with the boys in his class and fascinated her forever. And then there is me, with my unkempt hair and my distraction and the way I cannot help but stare or interrupt, the boy with his hand out. These million subtleties, a million million conservations—long distance, in bed, over sushi, over and in between the chattering children—have not managed to exhaust.

  The lives of men and women are filling with a radical hope that remains half-hidden: we might actually find out what being a man and being a woman means. The attempt of men and women to live with each other is an indefinite, never-ending struggle, infinitely complicated. Intimacy complicates. The contracts fall apart: less than entitlement and more than deserving. The primitive golden idol glows in the cave no matter how civilized we become—stupid, stupid love in its idiotic omnipotence.

  Meanwhile the primordial crisis is rising for the first time, the crisis that has been lurking for us all, men and women both, from the beginning of the species. What does it mean to be a mammal who wants to change the world?

  * * *

  I. It’s 7:51 a.m. and I’ve locked myself in the bathroom to write this note. I haven’t showered yet. My son is finishing up his homework; my daughter is creating a fortress with her Magformers. All our beds are unmade. I need to shower and get into an outfit that will make me look like a capable grown-up. I need to grab Steve for two minutes before I leave to discuss who is picking up whom after school and what they’re going to have for dinner before my mom arrives to babysit the kids. The to-do list is epic. And yet I wouldn’t want it any other way. Before I had kids I read several books about Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman. They said that feminism and motherhood were incompatible. They said that working and taking care of kids was too exhausting to be handled. They were wrong. You can make it work, and even love your life, if (1) you find a partner who, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously says, values your career as much as his own, and (2) you give up on the 1980s myth of being the always-perfect-at-everything supermom. I lucked out on 1 and I’m working on 2.

  II. Oh my God, that was so messy and so weird and so surprising and so fun.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SEVERAL early drafts of this book have appeared in various magazines and newspapers. The Atlantic published a version of chapter 1 under the title “The Masculine Mystique.” The New York Times Sunday Review published a version of chapter 7 under the title “The Case for Living in Filth.” Esquire has published stuff about the death of my father and the new fatherhood, which later turned into chapters 2 and 6. Chapter 3 about straight camp also came from work I did for them. The chapter on pornography emerged out of an essay that Matter magazine commissioned and then never ran. Still they edited it beautifully, so I should thank them, I guess.

  I am truly grateful to all the men and women who have helped me: at the New York Times, Matt Sullivan and Trish Hall; at the Atlantic, Scott Stossel and Kate Julian; at Esquire, Richard Dorment, Tyler Cabot, Ross McCammon, and David Granger. David Granger was more than an editor; he showed me how I could become the writer who could write this book. Then there are the book people, who have forced this to become something more than another bunch of essays cobbled together: PJ Mark at Janklow & Nesbit; my female editor, Jennifer Lambert, at HarperCollins Canada; and my male editor, Jofie Ferrari-Adler at Simon & Schuster. Gabe Gonda gave me the title.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © DAVE GILLESPIE

  Stephen Marche is a contributing editor at Esquire magazine. He also writes regular features and opinion pieces for the Atlantic, the New York Times, and elsewhere. His books include three novels, The Hunger of the Wolf, Raymond and Hannah, and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, and two works of nonfiction, The Unmade Bed and How Shakespeare Changed Everything. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

  StephenMarche.com | @StephenMarche | Stephen.Marche

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  Also by Stephen Marche

  The Hunger of the Wolf

  Love and the Mess We’re In

  How Shakespeare Changed Everything

  Shining at the Bottom of the Sea

  Raymond + Hannah

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  WHERE THE NUMBERS COME FROM

  How Much Should a Man Speak?

  Mansplaining: Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (New York: Haymarket, 2014).

  On women talking more than men: Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain (New York: Broadway Books, 2006); Matthias Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairan Ramirez-Esparza, Richard B. Slatcher, and James W. Pennebaker, “Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?,” Science 317 (2007): 82; Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Benjamin N. Waber, Alex Pentland, Sebastian Schnorf, and David Lazer, “Using Sociometers to Quantify Social Interaction Patterns,” Scientific Reports 4 (2014): 5604.