Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  The constitutional right to gay marriage brings the institution into its viable future. To many people at the tail end of my generation, and to much of the generation that follows, it may already seem incomprehensible that gay couples once did not have the right to marry—as incomprehensible as it feels to me when I imagine not being able to apply for a credit card on my own. This is an era in which marriage is generally understood not as the beginning of a partnership but as the avowal of that partnership. It’s an era in which women graduate from college in greater numbers than men, and often outearn men in their twenties; an era in which women are no longer expected to get married to have sex or to build a stable adulthood, and are consequently delaying marriage, sometimes forgoing it altogether. Today, only around 20 percent of Americans are married by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960. Marriage is becoming more equal on every front. “In part, that’s because when we delay marriage, it’s not just women who become independent,” Rebecca Traister writes in All the Single Ladies. “It’s also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes and iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.”

  Many of the weddings I’ve been to have reflected this shift. The fetishization of virginal purity has been largely removed from the picture: even in Texas, among religious conservatives, it is often implicitly acknowledged that the engaged couple has prepared for a life together in ways that include having sex. Thankfully, I can’t remember the last time I saw a bouquet toss. Often, both parents walk the bride down the aisle. One ceremony featured the bride and groom’s daughters as flower girls. One of my Peace Corps friends proposed to her male partner on a beach in Senegal. While writing this, I went to a wedding in Cincinnati where, post-kiss, the officiant proudly announced the couple as “Dr. Katherine Lennard and Mr. Jonathon Jones.” A few weeks later, I attended another wedding, this one in Brooklyn, where the couple entered the ceremony together, and the bride, the writer Joanna Rothkopf, delivered her vows in two sentences, one of which was a Sopranos joke. (“I love you more than Bobby Bacala loves Karen, and luckily I can’t cook so you’ll never have to eat my last ziti.”) A few weeks after that, I drove upstate for another wedding, where my friend Bobby was preceded down the aisle by the four women in his wedding party, and he and his husband, Josh, walked to the altar holding hands.

  On the whole, though, the “traditional” wedding—meaning the traditional straight wedding—remains one of the most significant re-invocations of gender inequality that we have. There is still a drastic mismatch between the cultural script around marriage, in which a man grudgingly acquiesces to a woman salivating for a diamond, and the reality of marriage, in which men’s lives often get better and women’s lives often get worse. Married men report better mental health and live longer than single men; in contrast, married women report worse mental health, and die earlier, than single women. (These statistics do not suggest that the act of getting married is some sort of gendered hex: rather, they reflect the way that, when a man and a woman combine their unpaid domestic obligations under the aegis of tradition, the woman usually ends up doing most of the work—a fact that is greatly exacerbated by the advent of kids.) There’s an idea that women get to Scrooge-dive in heaps of money after divorce proceedings, but in fact, women who worked while married see their incomes go down by 20 percent on average after a divorce, whereas men’s incomes go up by more than that.

  Gender inequality is so entrenched in straight marriage that it persists in the face of cultural change as well as personal intentions. A 2014 study of Harvard Business School alumni—a group of people primed for high ambitions and flexibility—showed that more than half of men from their thirties to their sixties expected that their careers would take priority over their spouses’ careers: three quarters of these men had their expectations fulfilled. In contrast, less than a quarter of their female peers expected their spouses’ careers to take precedence over theirs, but this nonetheless happened 40 percent of the time. Biology plays a role here, obviously—we have not yet cracked the situation in which people whose bodies are consistent with female biology have to have the children, if children are to be had—but social convention and public policy produce a thicket of unforced problems. The study of Harvard Business School graduates showed that the younger female respondents, in their twenties and early thirties, were on track for a similar mismatch between outcome and desire.

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  There is a harbinger of this inequality in marriage, and a symbol, in the way that straight women are still often expected to formally adopt the identities of their husbands. In Jane Eyre, which Charlotte Brontë published in 1847, the narrator feels a sense of dislocation when, on the eve of her wedding, she sees “Mrs. Rochester” on her luggage tags. “I could not persuade myself to affix them, or have them affixed. Mrs. Rochester! she did not exist,” Jane thinks. “…It was enough that in yonder closet, opposite my dressing-table, garments said to be hers had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock and straw bonnet: for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment….I shut my closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained.” In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, published in 1938, Rebecca feels the same sense of self-estrangement at the prospect of marriage. “Mrs. de Winter. I would be Mrs. de Winter. I considered my name, and the signature on cheques, to tradesmen, and in letters asking people to dinner.” She repeats the name, dissociating. “Mrs. de Winter. I would be Mrs. de Winter.” After a few minutes, she realizes that she has been eating a sour tangerine, and that she has “a sharp, bitter taste in my mouth, and I had only just noticed it.” Mrs. Rochester and Mrs. de Winter both end up near-fatally embroiled in their husbands’ previous problems, which themselves stem from marriage; it’s notable that Brontë and du Maurier restore a sort of balance in these novels by burning both husbands’ estates to the ground.

  The first woman in America to keep her birth name after marriage was the feminist Lucy Stone, who wed Henry Blackwell in 1855. The two of them published their vows, which doubled as a protest against marriage laws that “refuse[d] to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.” (Stone was later barred from voting in a school board election under her maiden name.) Nearly seven decades later, a group of feminists formed the Lucy Stone League, agitating for the right of married women to check into a hotel, or open a bank account, or get a passport, in their own names. This fight for name equality dragged on until fairly recently: the oldest women in that Harvard Business School study would have been required, in some states, to take their husbands’ last names if they wanted to vote. It took until the 1975 Tennessee State Supreme Court case Dunn v. Palermo for the final law to this effect to be struck down. “Married women,” wrote Justice Joe Henry, “have labored under a form of societal compulsion and economic coercion which has not been conducive to the assertion of some rights and privileges of citizenship.” A requirement that a woman take her husband’s name “would stifle and chill virtually all progress in the rapidly expanding field of human liberties. We live in a new day. We cannot create and continue conditions and then defend their existence by reliance on the custom thus created.”

  Women began keeping their names in the seventies, when it became broadly possible to do so. In 1986, The New York Times began using the honorific “Ms.” to refer to women whose marital status was unknown, as well as to married women who wished to use their birth names. The trend of name independence peaked in the nineties, at a rather paltry 23 percent of married women, and today less than 20 percent keep their names. The decision “is one of convenience,” Katie Roiphe wrote at Slate in 2004. “The politics are almost incidental. Our fundamental independence is not so imperiled that we need to keep our names….At this point—apologies to Luc
y Stone, and her pioneering work in name keeping—our attitude is: Whatever works.”

  Roiphe’s laissez-faire postfeminist view remains common. Women believe that their names are personal, not political—in large part because the decision-making around them remains so culturally restricted and curtailed. A woman keeping her name is making a choice that is expected to be limited and futile. She will not pass the name down to her children, or bestow it upon her husband. At most—or so people tend to think—her last name will be crammed into the middle of her children’s names, or packed around a hyphen, and then later dropped for space reasons. (And in fact, a Louisiana law still requires the child of a married couple to bear the husband’s last name in order for a birth certificate to be issued.) We find it inappropriate for women to treat their names the way that men, by default, feel entitled to. On this front, as on so many others, a woman is allowed to assert her independence as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else.

  Of course, there are no clear-cut ways to navigate family names even with a presumption of gender equality: hyphenated names dissolve after a single generation, and generally speaking, one name has got to go. But there’s a flexibility with which queer couples approach the issue of naming children—as well as wedding-related conventions in general, particularly proposals—that is conspicuously absent from the heterosexual scene. In marriage, too, gay couples divide household work more equally than straight couples do, and when they adopt “traditional” gender roles, they “tend to reject the notion that their labor arrangements are imitative or derivative of those of heterosexual couples,” as Abbie Goldberg writes in a 2013 study. Instead, “they interpret their arrangements as pragmatic and chosen.” Gay couples are also more likely to find their division of labor to be fair than straight couples—a statistic that holds, crucially, even when the work is not divided evenly. (In other words, their hopes and their outcomes are more closely aligned.) The institution works differently without the power imbalance that historically defined it. Like any social construct, marriage is most flexible when it is new.

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  How is it possible that so much of contemporary life feels so arbitrary and so inescapable? Thinking about weddings has not been very useful to me: developing an understanding of the material conditions that produced the wedding ritual, its basis in inequality and its role in perpetuating that inequality, hasn’t really meant a thing. It doesn’t remove me from a culture that is organized through marriage and weddings; it certainly doesn’t make it any less sensible to do what all the affianced of the past, present, and future have done and are doing, which is taking these opportunities for ritual pleasure and sweetness whenever they can.

  And still I wonder how much harder it would be to get straight women to accept the reality of marriage if they were not first presented with the fantasy of a wedding. I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of their independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its most broadly celebrated—and that planning a wedding is the only period in a woman’s life where she is universally and unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her terms.

  The conventional vision of a woman’s life, in which the wedding plays a starring role, seems to be offering an unspoken trade-off. Here, our culture says, is an event that will center you absolutely—that will crystallize your image when you were young and gorgeous, admired and beloved, with the whole world rolling out in front of you like an endless meadow, like a plush red carpet, sparklers lighting up your irises and petals drifting through your lavish, elegant hair. In exchange, from that point forward, in the eyes of the state and everyone around you, your needs will slowly cease to exist. This is of course not the case for everyone, but for plenty of women, becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission: being prepared, through a rush of attention and a series of gender-resegregated rituals—the bridal shower, the bachelorette party, and, later, the baby shower—for a future in which your identity will be systematically framed as secondary to the identity of your husband and kids.

  The paradox at the heart of the wedding comes from the two versions of a woman that it conjures. There’s the glorified bride, looming large and resplendent and almost monstrously powerful, and there’s her nullified twin and opposite, the woman who vanishes underneath the name change and the veil. These two selves are opposites, bound together by male power. The advice book chirping “You are privileged to have all eyes center on you” and Anne Hathaway snapping “Sometimes it’s about me, okay?” at her maid of honor are inextricable from the laws that required women to take their husband’s name if they wanted to vote in elections and the fact that the post-marriage benefit package of health, wealth, and happiness is still mostly distributed to men. Underneath the confectionary spectacle of the wedding is a case study in how inequality bestows outsize affirmation on women as compensation for making us disappear.

  It is easy, so easy, to find all of this beautiful. I recently pulled up an archive of Martha Stewart Weddings to see if I could find the issue that I pored over in Kyrgyzstan almost a decade ago. I spotted the cover immediately: the peach backdrop, the redhead with a huge smile and bright lipstick—like a Disney princess, with butterflies alighting on the tulle skirt of her strapless white dress. “Make It Yours,” the cover commands. I bought it, and read through it one more time, remembering the tea-length skirts, the bouquets of anemones and ranunculus, the apricot champagne sparklers, these things I had mentally surrounded myself with when all I wanted was for something good to last.

  The woman on the cover reminded me of Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery’s thoughtful, talkative, carrot-headed heroine. I couldn’t remember when in the series she got married, or how, or what it looked like—even though I had, of course, nurtured a crush on her boy-next-door sweetheart Gilbert Blythe. I looked up Anne’s House of Dreams, the fifth book in the series, and found the wedding scene. It’s a September day, full of sunshine, and the chapter opens with Anne in her old room at Green Gables, thinking about cherry trees and wifehood. Then she descends the stairs in her wedding dress, “slender and shining-eyed,” her arms full of roses. In this pivotal moment, she does not think or speak. The narration passes to Gilbert. “She was his at last,” he thinks, “this evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting. It was to him she was coming in the sweet surrender of the bride.”

  It’s such a natural scene. It’s lovely. It’s so perversely familiar. It occurs to me that I crave independence, that I demand and expect it, but never enough, since I was a teenager, to actually be alone. It’s possible that, just as marriage conceals its true nature through the elaborate ritual of the wedding, I have been staging this entire production to hide from myself some reality about my life. If I object to the wife’s diminishment for the same reason that I object to the bride’s glorification, maybe this reason is much simpler and more obvious than I’ve imagined: I don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment, but whenever I want.

  This seems true, but I still feel that I can’t trust it. Here, the more I try to uncover whatever I’m looking for, the more I feel that I’m too far gone. I can feel the low, uneasy hum of self-delusion whenever I think about all of this—a tone that gets louder the more I try to write and cancel it out. I can feel the tug of my deep and recurring suspicion that anything I might think about myself must be, somehow, necessarily wrong.

  In the end, the safest conclusions may not actually be conclusions. We are asked to understand our lives under such impossibly convoluted conditions. I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to. Here, as in so many other things, the “thee” that I dread may have been the “I” all along.

  For my parents

  Acknowledgments


  Though all of these essays were written for this book, several of them influenced my work at The New Yorker, and vice versa. A few of them build on things I wrote at Jezebel and The Hairpin. I am thankful to have started writing inside the Awl family: thank you to Logan Sachon and Mike Dang, the first editors to publish me; to Jane Marie, my dreamy first Hairpin editor; to Choire Sicha and Alex Balk, who used to confuse me when they would bitch about the internet—lol.

  I’m thankful to the Repentagon for the lasting education, and for the friends, too—Lauren, Rachel, Annabel, Lara, thanks for seeing it all. Robert, I’m as glad for you now as I was when we saw the construction angels.

  At my beloved University of Virginia: thank you to the Jefferson Scholars Foundation for the lifetime of student debt freedom, to Michael Joseph Smith, to Caroline Rody, to Walt Hunter, to Rachel Gendreau. Kevin, Jamie, Ryan, Tory, Baxa, Juli, and Buster Baxter: thank you for the permanent spiritual home.

  It was during my short time in the Peace Corps that I started considering the unlikely possibility of writing for a living. Lola, Yan, Kyle, thank you for letting me cry when my laptop was stolen, and Akash, thank you forever for lending me yours so that I could start writing again. David, you’re the best kuya. Dinara Sultanova, you’re the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met.

  I owe so much to the funding and space provided by the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Thank you to Nicholas Delbanco for encouraging me immediately, and to Brit Bennett, Maya West, Chris McCormick, and Mairead Small Staid for your easygoing brilliance. Rebecca Scherm, Barbara Linhardt, Katie Lennard: see you at the barre, etc.