"The 'welcome to the club sweetie' narrative normalizes marital misery"
Lyz Lenz says it doesn't have to be this way
If you’re alive and have access to the internet, you’ve probably noticed that marriage is having a MOMENT. Maybe you read this essay, or maybe you read this one, or maybe you read that one, but chances are, you had an opinion about all of them, particularly if you’ve ever been married.
Marriage has been held up as the foundational glue of American culture for as long as American culture has existed. It enables capitalism, bolsters white supremacy, and maintains class divides and income inequality. Because of this, marriage is (rightfully) an object of intersectional feminist criticism.
has written one of those critiques, This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage And Started My Life, and it’s necessary reading for anyone who has been married, is considering getting married, or anyone who’s divorced or considering getting divorced. In the book, tells her own marriage/divorce story, which is, of course, specific to her, but in doing so, she reveals how the structure of marriage itself harms some people, protects others, and forces all of us to confront a system of “love” that is often a mechanism for oppression, even if we’re happily married and not feeling particularly oppressed. joins writers like , , Leslie Jamison, , , , and many, many others in showing how divorce is not failure, but the decision to choose oneself and create a life one wants (and deserves!) rather than a life one believes is “right.”I devoured This American Ex-Wife and my conversation with Lyz is SO juicy - I left it feeling energized and inspired and I hope you do too.
Sara
I really want to talk about last names. I have several dear friends and family that chose to change their names. It’s really hard to articulate why the decision to change (or not change) a last name feels emotionally fraught.
Lyz
It's hard to talk about because it's so personal. I feel conflicted about myself. I changed my name. And I wanted to tease out the way we talk about women's choices in our culture. There’s this idea that like, Oh, if you're a feminist, you can't criticize other women's choices. Yes you can! Some of the least feminist people I know are other women. I think our culture reinforces a lot of these patriarchal norms under the language of feminism. If everything is “equal” now and we’re all “liberated,” why are we still changing our names? Researchers (who famously never state things in a straightforward way) straightforwardly blame patriarchy.
One of the reasons I can tell the truth about my relationship in this book is because the relationship is over. I think if I was still in the relationship, I’d be like, Noooooo, I’m not oppressed! Right? But now that I’m out of it, I realize I took his name because he threw a little fit about it. And because I was afraid of what other people would think and because my idea of what a family was relied on everyone having the man’s name. Which is just coverture.
And you know, like with all hard conversations I wanted to implicate myself and I didn't want to be pointing the finger at anyone else. I'm a part of this system, too. It’s never been a law that women have to take their husbands’ last names, but it’s been enforced all the same. In the book I talk about Lucy Stone not taking her husband's last name and not being able to vote because of it. I talk about this woman in Wisconsin, who tried to get her husband on her insurance but was denied by a judge because she didn’t have his last name. This was forty years ago. The judge was like, If you’re gonna have children, you need to have the same last name. That is not a law!
Sara
That one got overturned, right?
Lyz
Yes - with a brief appearance from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Sara
I mean, I've heard girlfriends say, like, I don't really care about the name and it'll make him so happy if I change it. But like, why? Why will it make him so happy?
Lyz
Women are trained to give up the things they want. And trained to sacrifice their happiness to make the relationship work. And the name change can often be one of the first tiny little compromises. Like, Oh, it’s just a name. We’re equals. So this doesn’t matter. But it does matter. It really, really does. And yes, like, the question is, why would it make him so happy? What is going on there? I think it’s like - my family will have my name on it - it's a primal patriarchal thing. Next thing you know, it’s five years later, and you’re home during a pandemic with a four-year-old and a two-year-old trying to work in a closet wondering why this equal partner who's so good and so kind is locked in his office telling you to shut the kids up while he's on a Zoom.
Sara
It feels a lot like claiming to want to find out a baby’s sex so you can buy the right baby clothes or decorate the nursery or whatever. Like, if you believe gender is a construct . . .
Lyz
Right, gender is a construct but also “I’m a boy mom.”
Sara
EXACTLY. We’ve discussed the Ballerina Farm extended universe before, and I found myself thinking about pageantry as I read your book. In the world of pageantry, women can compete as “the best virgin” (in the case of Miss pageants) OR “the best wife.” There is no pageant for “the best adult woman.” The idea of “the best” in any of these categories is obviously silly at best and harmful at worst, but I do think pageant life very clearly illustrates America’s preoccupation with marriage. Miss contestants are judged (implicitly if not explicitly) as future mommies and wives, while Mrs. contestants are judged for their ability to look as much like Misses as possible. It’s messy!
Lyz
I was at the Miss America pageant in 2019 before the world shut down, and it was one of my favorite writing assignments. But yeah, Miss American contestants still can’t date. They have to appear virginal, they can’t talk about sex. I don’t think they can talk about abortions. It’s very much based on an idea of purity, which of course, is deeply white supremacist. You have to be a woman who is touchable but look untouched, right? For Mrs. America, you have to be a woman who can produce children, but look as if you have never produced a child in your entire life. Showing the cracks of the double standard is not rewarded. I mean, hashtag she's so real if a mom shows us a tiny little stretch mark on her thigh, right? We're in a time of cultural contraction, a backlash. And so I think the reason Ballerina Farm is such a lightning rod is because she’s popular during a time when women's choices are being reduced, and women are being forced back into the home. As a model, she communicates, See ladies, It's not so bad! But she has a ton of wealth and privilege most women aren’t afforded - on any level. And she represents an impossible, beautiful ideal. This conversation would really shift if Hannah Neeleman was Black and had the same number of children. Right? Hannah has to be the perfect woman which means she’s white, she’s blonde, her body “snaps” back to “normal” after producing children for a man. There’s no equivalent model for husbands, you know? Sure, we talk about “dad bods,” which I think is wonderful, but where’s the equivalent grace for mothers? Melinda Wenner Moyer wrote a piece that shocked me - a study found that when dads compare themselves to other dads, they compare themselves to the worst dads they know, while mothers compare themselves to the best mom they know.
This is why so many American dads are so pissed at Bluey’s Dad. Like, one good dad comes along, and they’re all like, This is an unattainable standard! And it’s like, Oh, really? Oh really, it’s so hard for you to live with the unattainable standard of parenthood? I can’t imagine!!!!!
Sara
That finding is so chilling. But it's not shocking at all. And I feel like there's this whole epidemic of like, At least I'm not that dad. And you know, You could have it a lot worse! You write about women country artists often singing about personal anger and resentment towards men, but how they reflect other genres (and societal structures) in their reticence to highlight systemic issues. It’s very akin to wives sharing stories about their inept husbands and laughing - as a way to feel less alone - rather than actively interrogating the roots of shitty behavior and demanding better. How do you think the culture of “welcome to the club honey!” has protected husbands and numbed wives?
Lyz
Yeah, like where is the bar for dads? I mean, I think humor is great and can be a radicalizing force but it can also be a normalizing force, right? When you see these TikToks of women complaining that their husbands don’t know how to find a bottle of ketchup in the grocery store, and he’s like forty-fucking-five, right? I can’t even handle if my 10-year-old son is like, Where are the socks?
Sara
My 11-year-old son asked where we kept the ladle the other day and I similarly spiraled.
Lyz
But yeah, the “welcome to the club sweetie” narrative normalizes misery. We tell women they should want marriage but also that it’ll make you miserable and that’s to be expected. We set the bar really, really, really low. So many women think that, like, Oh it’s not like he’s hitting me. So it’s not that bad. Or like, He doesn’t have a second family in Germany. He's not Charles Lindbergh. So it's fine. Right? And the position of the bar is set at the wedding shower. I remember at my wedding shower, friends of my mom telling stories about giving birth and having their husbands return home drunk. And it’s like, Do you need help? Are you OK? Kelsey McKinney told me about hearing similar stories at her wedding shower, and saying to the women who told those stories, It shouldn't be that hard. And I wish I had the sense of self and force of personality to know that at the time, but I didn’t. I didn’t know that until I got out. We need to set the bar somewhere else. All these men set the bar at Ballerina Farm for their wives, and now they're all sad and lonely because they don't know how to handle a normal woman. But women need a bar higher than “But he’s a good man.” What about you deserving to be happy, regardless of what you mean when you say he’s a “good man?” Like, what, he ascribes to the standards of masculinity? Those are fucked standards!
Sara
The “good man” construct is built up of negatives. Like, He doesn’t do this bad thing, and he doesn’t act like this bad guy.
Lyz
I also think we need to talk about personal choice. I hear this all the time in the comments in my newsletters, where people will say, If you had chosen a better partner, you would not be mad about marriage. Nine times out of ten, even if a woman would lay down in traffic for her husband, she will tell you she would say no thank you to getting married again. They would not do it again because marriage is a legal system predicated on the inequality of women. It was built on laws to make us less human in the eyes of society. We see the grim statistics all the time. Women are doing more of the household labor. Men are adding 7 hours of labor a week in cis-hetero marriages (labor they’re not doing). And sure, you can have a good marriage within a bad system. But women will tell you all the time, like, I love my husband, but I would never get married again because this shit is hard.
Sara
You write:
Our culture views divorce as a failure. One that requires a personal solution rather than a cultural one. Most divorce books focus on personal healing and self-help to get the divorcee back to dating and remarriage. But what if it’s the whole system that is broken? Can you self-help your way throughout fundamental inequality? Can you meditate and manifest your way out of a culture and a politics that is continuing to strip you of your rights?
I think folks can very clearly see inequity in (for example) the lack of federal paid leave, the costs of childcare, the attack on reproductive justice, and the gender wage gap, but I think the systemic inequity baked into marriage is less obvious. Can you tease that out for us a bit? And like, for folks who ARE happy in their marriages, how is the system failing them?
Lyz
We have to ask who benefits from the system. In my second book, Belabored, I wrote about the unequal systems of birthing, and one interviewer was like, Oh, my birth was fine. And I was like, Because you're a wealthy white lady! I think it's important to say, Sure, you might be happy in your relationship, but also, you need to understand that marriage should not be a systemic political solution. Because marriage is not granted equally. We love to think that marriage is this thing that anybody can access if only you slap on enough lipstick and hit the dating apps. But who is seen as most desirable? Who gets forgiven for being a single mother and who doesn’t? Which people in the dating field have access to wealth?
This is a white lady feminism problem - when you say, I benefit from this, therefore, it's fine. But it is not fine. Marriage is used as a tool of oppression, which you can see politically, like when people cut SNAP benefits, when they cut welfare, when they cut Medicaid. In Iowa, when you go on SNAP benefits, you get a pamphlet in the mail about how to make your marriage stronger, which is basically saying, You wouldn't be so broke if you stayed married. When we look at the rates of domestic violence and abuse, and then SHAME people for using a system which is supposed to exist to prevent kids from going hungry, that's unconscionable.
There’s a correlation between how we use marriage politically and who benefits from marriage. If a beauty queen was like, I like pageants because I win them, it’s like, Congratulations, I’m so happy for you. But that doesn't make the system any less awful for the rest of us. I'm not against relationships. I’m a very relational person! And I think relationships are the foundation of a happy life. But what I am critiquing is a political system that relies on our inequality to fund our country.
Sara
I’m thinking about how low marriage rates are held up as the cause of all manner of social ills. Like, just pay for a social safety net!
Lyz
It's a bipartisan poverty solution that people can get behind - except of course - it’s not a solution. So the Moynihan report was commissioned during the Johnson administration to better understand why so many Black families struggled with poverty. And they essentially decided that, like, Black families are poor. And that's bad. And it’s because Black people don't have strong marriages. Like, if only couples could stay together, then the kids wouldn't be so poor. That conclusion fundamentally ignores how Black people have been excluded from the system of marriage since the foundation of our country. We prevented enslaved people from marrying or being able to maintain marriages. We also continue to prevent those marriages through high incarceration rates and systemic police violence. Politicians love to say, We’ve got to strengthen the American family, which yes we do! People should have the right to strong relationships and the state should not impede those relationships. But it’s easier to “focus on the family” than to say, Hey, maybe let's just create a really strong social safety net because then all people hear is “let’s spend a lot of money.”
Studies show that if you want to reduce rates of domestic violence, help women earn money. Help kids stay in school. Liberalize divorce laws! Data shows that when you empower women’s choices, everyone wins. Spain used to have really restrictive divorce laws and almost overnight switched to pretty liberal ones. And there was a night and day difference in rates of domestic violence, kids staying in school, and women being able to earn more money.
The answer is always to give women more autonomy. The answer is always to empower people. A universal basic income standard, a strong welfare system, subsidized school lunches. These are all things that would strengthen the American family, rather than criminalizing divorce. It's easier for a 16-year-old to get married than it is for a 42-year-old woman to get divorced in America.
Sara
I recently read Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, and she writes very movingly about the heartbreak of missing her child after her divorce, but ALSO it’s crystal clear (from the text) that her divorce was the right decision in every way. I’m not sure if this a question so much as an observation that I want your thoughts on - but I think there’s almost this reticence to talk about like - yeah it will suck in many ways to miss your kids and to really let that sadness take up space - while also showing that the grief is only one part of a much bigger puzzle. Like - in all things “adult relationship” there’s a shying away from pain, when in fact, shining light on pain (and the ability to MOVE THROUGH PAIN) might free people. I hope this makes sense! Basically I just see the URGENT need for more people to speak their divorce truths.
Lyz
There’s so many incomplete statistics when it comes to families and divorce. There’s a dip for women in terms of earnings post-divorce, but there’s also a jump after those five years. I literally lived this. But nobody talks about the jump, you know? And like, where’s the data that shows what happens to a kid who grows up with a lot of conflict in a married home? Our cultural bias tends to suggest that divorce ruins your children. And when I got my divorce, I thought this bias was right. I was so miserable. But also, I grew up in a home that was full of conflict and anxiety, and my parents stayed together. For a long time, I wanted to stay married because I thought it was best for the children, but as a kid I would stay awake at night listening to my parents scream at each other. And that's also not good. Once, my ex and I were fighting (when we were still married), and it was after the kids had gone to bed and our voices were lightly raised. I looked up and saw my daughter watching us on the stairs. We can’t hide conflict from our children. They know. She still remembers that.
That moment breaks my heart far more than the day we told them they were splitting. In America, we tell mothers we have to do everything for our children, be everything for our children, and sacrifice everything for our children. If necessary, be miserable for our children. And that’s the only way you can be a good mom. It requires a real mind shift to view leaving a marriage and choosing your own happiness as something you can do for your children. It’s great to model autonomy and self-respect and dignity for our kids!
Sara
And also - to just do that for ourselves.
Lyz
Exactly. And listen, in our marriage, I was the primary caretaker. Before that, I was a college RA, and before that I was the second oldest in a family of eight kids. I never experienced life not caring for another person until I was 36 and divorced. I’d have these days without my kids and it was heartbreaking. I didn’t know what to do.
But on the other side, I realize that I'm a better person. I'm a better mom. We treat parenting as this zero sum game. If you're not there for every single moment, you’re a failure. I remember hearing an interview with Maria Shriver talking about her divorce where she said something to the effect of, My kids deserve to have a relationship with their father. One that is not mediated by me.
And that really stuck with me. This man is not my man anymore, but he is still their father. And he deserves and they deserve to have unmediated time together. Because when we were married, I was always the buffer. I was always planning the activities and being the grease on the wheel, and they deserve to have access to this man who loves them, and who wants to parent them and wants to be in their lives. And so I stopped thinking of time as this zero sum endeavor. Parenting is a journey. When I have them, I am a better parent. Because I'm a better person! Because I'm happy and I'm not miserable. I mean, just in general, even if you're not going to get divorced, we have to stop thinking of parenting as this all-encompassing thing because children will leave you one day! You being okay can’t be predicated on them being okay. At some point, they won’t be okay. And you have to find a way to be a person in the midst of all of that. I have so many friends now who have children going through crises and we talk about how to stay strong and be okay while our kids experience their own journeys.
Sara
It’s so hard. But yeah, I think we’re trained to view sharing custody as a tragedy, both for ourselves and for our kids.
Lyz
Right! I love my parents so much. But my dad doesn't call me. I don’t get a lot of one-on-one time with him. It's all mediated through my mom. I know that they love me, but my kids will get a chance at a relationship with their dad in a way that I never got.
It’s also healthy to give up control. I was feeling frustrated early on in the divorce about like, the foods my ex was feeding my kids or something. And I had a friend who was like, You don't make perfect meals every night at your house. And he deserves to fuck up just like you deserve to fuck up. It doesn't matter what they're eating. It matters that they're having a relationship with their other parent. That was a real reset for me. I need to let go of control because that makes me a better parent and makes me a better human being. The bars for mothers and fathers are different, but mothers need to learn to drop the ropes of control. It’s so hard! Because our whole sense of self and wellbeing feel dependent on them. But the ancillary argument is that if our senses of selves and wellbeing is no longer dependent on relationships like motherhood and wifehood (because life is long and complicated and full of tragedy, we could live happier lives.
Sara
And like - do it now!
Lyz
And do it now! The area of divorce that’s growing the most is “gray divorce” - all these people getting to the end of their lives who stayed together for the kids. They get there thinking happiness is promised to them, and then they’re like, This is it? I’m still unhappy.
Sara
I love love love how you focus on the stories we tell ourselves about marriage, our own marriages, and the marriages of others. Narrative seems so central to the makeup of marriage. This line really got me: “I have no wedding advice. I simply say, ‘It doesn’t have to be miserable. It shouldn’t be miserable.’ I wonder how I’d tell the story if it didn’t end in divorce. How honest can any story of a marriage be if we still find ourselves loyal to the magic we are trying to believe in?” I MEAN. This could just as easily be written about motherhood, right? Why are so many woman-specific identities sold and packaged via story?
Lyz
For so long, our stories have not been part of the dominant cultural narrative, and we know that so much wisdom and knowledge comes from storytelling. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. We also just don’t study women - think of women’s health and all we don’t know! When I was writing this book, sometimes my editor would ask, Can we back up this claim with statistics? And sometimes, of course, I could, but a lot of the time I couldn’t. It’s like, No I don’t have hard data about midwestern bridal showers but that doesn’t mean I don’t know something very real about midwestern bridal showers! I think storytelling is powerful when it becomes a collective. But I think there’s a danger in isolating an experience and making it a YOU problem when it’s actually a societal problem.
Second-wave feminists did these consciousness-raising groups where women would get together and tell their stories, and they would all realize they're experiencing the same types of oppression, that they were not alone. I was inspired by their work to add interstitial stories from other women’s lives to the book - not just my own. I didn’t want my story to seem isolated and I wanted people to see that this is a systemic rather than a personal problem. For the longest time, I stayed in my marriage because of the story I was telling myself. The story of a happy marriage when in fact it was actually miserable. But I used that story to sustain me for a long time. It doesn’t have to be that way.
For my thoughts on the most recent round of discourse on “divorce lit” (and my thoughts on the phrase “divorce lit” !!!) plus a roundup of excellent manifestos, love stories, and radical retellings relevant to today’s interview, read on, brave sailor!