How To Pick Mr. Right
For Women Who Want More From Their Marriage Then A Victorian Lobotomy
I have this friend. She’s dear to me. Two years ago, in a dim restaurant somewhere in the Lower East Side, she told me, “I’d never be with a man who didn’t graduate from college.” She spoke of the women in her family. How they cleaned, cooked, and contracted themselves into nothingness while their husbands enjoyed the fruits of their wives’ domestic and emotional labor. Parasitic, these men were. Uneducated in the progressiveness and work ethic of men in the West. We were raised by immigrant mothers whose memories of back home were ever-present in their nurturing of us. We, fortunate adopted daughters of America, who, despite our Western upbringing, found ourselves confronted with a singular truth each time we spoke to our mothers, “It’s about time you marry, no?”
The Education of a Man
In our conversation of women who end up living half lives with no traces left of their former, spirited selves, the question of education emerges as the core tension. An educated man wouldn’t allow his wife to do all the labor. An educated woman wouldn’t find herself in such a situation to begin with. In these absolute truths, I find that what is often missed is how quickly life shows us that what we believe we know, we don’t really know at all. But when you’re a twenty-something, certain of your omniscience due to the remarkableness of your chief adolescent achievement—a Harvard College acceptance with no legacy connections to lean on; no money to fall back on; and no manual on how to thrive in the class warfare of our campus—there’s nothing no one can tell you. You’re certain you know what it means to live, die, and thrive. The prestige paths you walk, the ivory towers you got drunk in, and the final club punches you have secret crushes on leave a lasting imprint: the assumption that an educated man is the only man worth his weight in gold. In this conformity, collective beliefs are formed, similar paths are taken, and trajectories are set.
In our world, money is great, but status is everything. I saw it laced in conversations with my peers, and no one had bothered to hide it amongst my former colleagues. Miserable, the whole lot; but well-compensated in their misery. Each time the elevator doors opened to the 63rd floor, I’d ask myself, “Is this the value of a Harvard education? The pain of a prestigious but misaligned path?” My answer came in the form of an exit wound. “What they did to you was cruel and unusual,” my mother told me in the stunning aftermath. “But send a thank you email. To those who had taken the time to make time.” I cried as I typed. As my wound cauterized, what became clear to me was how much status had become a proxy for the worth of a human life to everyone around me.
Thus, I was surprised when my friend told me she’d never marry a man without a college education. She, who had seen the level of duplicity status-seeking behavior had manifested in our peers, and had endlessly critiqued it with me. “That statement does not align with the values we know you to hold,” our mutual friend quipped. We misunderstood her, she insisted. She began speaking of her mother. A brilliant pharmacist whose competence America would not accept because it came in the form of a Libyan degree. 2008 had not been kind to her parents. Her father’s blue-collar business faltered, and her mother promptly sought work outside of the home to stave off the family’s impending homelessness. The years passed, and her father never pushed himself to help his wife outside or inside the home. Thus, her mother’s life became a statistical case of double duty: she’d take care of the rearing, nurturing, and feeding of the children as well as the sustenance of the household as the breadwinner. Not unlike the story of my own mother.
For my friend not to repeat the cycle, she felt she needed an educated man: one who would not make her suffer as her mother had. The education of a man, in the realm of making a woman happy, is not conceived nor refined in the lecture halls of an Ivy League university. It must begin in his own heart. So, I told her, “You’re using the wrong proxy.” Seeking to ascertain from an “elite” college degree what you can only gauge from a man’s character. An Ivy League educated man is great; a man who would do anything for you is even better. I said this out loud and my words dissolved in the air. Ignored by all. In the four years we had spent in that institution, each of us—immigrants, native-born, and legacies—had infused with the institution. One had to try, a lot harder than one should, to discern which values were our own and which we had been conditioned to uphold.
To Love A Woman
There’s this idea that those who are book smart are very rarely street smart. My mother hinted at my own shelteredness when, in sharing my desire to be married three years ago, she told me, “You haven’t lived.” It’s funny how that same woman continues to hint that if I don’t “hurry up” and have children early, I’ll “miss my chance.” Mothers, am I right?
Yet again, the wrong proxy is being used. A college education does not make the ideal partner, nor does age reveal readiness for marriage or children. I won’t even bring up finances, as it should be clear that doing this without a steady financial ground is a recipe for resentment and exhaustion. Assume money is not the issue. Assume the man is an upstanding gentleman. What’s the issue, then? The issue remains that even at our most radical, materialistic, and educated, the current idealized heterosexual romance still reeks of a Victorian lobotomy. A household with a rich husband of good breeding and a beautiful, educated wife of equally good breeding. Healthy children, as many as the husband can afford. That’s where the story stops. What becomes of the wife when the music stops, the guests retire, the children are put to bed, and the house is asleep? What becomes of the wife when her body changes, her mood is affected, and she reclines from her husband?
In the sex survey chapter of Catherine Hakim’s Erotic Capital, there’s a mention of a sex therapist from Australia who asked his patients to keep a journal of their intimate moments. More of a log, and less of a diary. His findings were that wives, for the most part, had little desire to be sexually intimate with their husbands. “Do it anyway,” was his suggestion. Push past the unwillingness and discomfort. For the sake of the marriage. But what about the sake of the woman? Surely there’s a reason she feels no sexual desire towards her husband. And if it’s not hormonal, could it be addressed with patience and play? This was not the position of the sex therapist. Nor do I believe it would be the majority opinion today. The easy option would be sought. In the name of female marital duty or societal fearmongering about another woman coming in and easing his burden—after all, “all men cheat” is conventional heterosexual colloquialism. But again, who’s thinking of the woman? Who considers themselves, intimately, with why she has lost all sexual desire to begin with?
Would a college-educated man buy an aphrodisiac cookbook on his way home from work and read it on the train while he mentally prepares a list of groceries? Would he diligently prepare the meals and run an experiment to capture which ingredients, if any, produced a cosmic change in his wife? Perhaps. I reckon this devotion, this fealty, wouldn’t be because he was educated in the greatness of Hegel, Faulkner, and Keynes in Harvard Hall or Memorial Hall. The favorable education of a man is not simply an Ivy League degree with high honors from the economics department, but his dependability, consciousness, and diligence in our care and well-being. Take it from me, none of this is taught in Harvard’s Ec10A course.
The Liberation of a Woman
Seeing the failures of the feminists in the decade before us and the exploitation of our mothers at the hands of our fathers, it’s easy to understand our collective trepidation towards marriage. It’s only worth doing if it’s with a rich man. Money helps wash everything down, after all. However, as I alluded to in The Disillusioned Heterosexual Woman To Political Lesbian Pipeline, the money will not save us. Our disillusionments will simply find new hosts. In our domestic staff; our teenage children; our tyrannical bosses; our unrealized or abandoned or even failed dreams; or maybe even our husbands. A spirit oriented towards negativity will always seek it out.
To combat that outcome, we need to cultivate a rich inner world. Worlds our husbands must cross in order to reach us. The barrier to entry being good intentions and the resourcefulness to never get lost, even in our moods. A man needs not money or college education to make this journey, but the willingness to never stop trying to reach us. So that, when the time comes where our aging bodies, evolving hormones, or some unforeseen circumstance betray our lust for the men who have stayed by our side all these years, our husbands will be the kind of men who pick up an aphrodisiac cookbook on their way home from work and read it on the train while they mentally prepares a list of groceries. Our husbands will be those who diligently prepare the meals and run experiments to capture which ingredients, if any, produced a cosmic change in us. A man uninterested in my cellular cosmos, unmoved by my unhappiness, and unencumbered by my self-adandonment is a man I’d never marry, regardless of his elite educational attainment or financial status. That kind of man would rather I die than ruin his plans.
From a feminist historical perspective, the fear-mongering around marriage and heterosexual men is understandable. But fear does not provide solutions to the problems it identifies; faith does. The American mystic, Florence Scovel Shinn, wrote that “Fear is faith inverted; it is faith in evil instead of good.” Here’s the good news: I believe marriage can be a portal to even more pleasure; a place for you to become even more of yourself and pursue your dreams. It simply requires marrying a man who wants that for you, too. I understand it’s hard, in our modern era, to have enough time to find the right path for us; to know it as intimately as we do all other predetermined, high status paths available to us; but we must commit to that process. Our heroine’s journey. Everything flows downstream of us being intimately in touch with ourselves. When the winds of conformity and societal pressure come knocking at your door, you need a reason not to open the door. Let that reason be the rich inner world you’ve cultivated for yourself. As lonely as it might be to feel unrelatable to those around you, it’s important you live your own life. Exit wounds and all.
Discernment, at this point of the essay, emerges as the key link in all these themes. It’s one thing to recognize when we’ve been using the wrong proxies, and another thing to understand what to use instead. What to test for; look for; and trust in a man. Intuition, in fewer words.
On Wednesday, April 15th at 6:30 pm Eastern Standard Time, I’ll be hosting a conversation in my Diouana Woman Salon where we’ll go further into how to trust your own intuition over status, and when status, in all its quick social legibility, can be useful to us. When our future daughters speak about us to their friends somewhere in a dim restaurant in the Lower East Side, let it be because we were the first women in our lineage to finally get it right.
Sweet dreams,
A Diouana Woman
A Nightcap Before You Go…
If you enjoyed the mood and tone of this essay, these essays may be up your alley:
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