[PREVIEW] What's The Deal With Our Collective Marriage Anxiety?

It was sometime last year that it started to feel like Big Conversations about marriage and divorce were *everywhere.* David Brooks was lecturing young people to “obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage” because marriage rates have been falling. Emily Gould was contemplating leaving her husband and then not over on The Cut. High-profile writers like Lyz Lenz, Leslie Jamison and Maggie Smith were all releasing memoir (or memoir-adjacent) books about their respective divorces. And then… there were the trad wives. The trad wives, who it felt like were following us around TikTok and Instagram, homesteading and baking in dresses and posting about the failures of feminism. Even on reality television, it feels like there’s been a distinct uptick in storylines involving the dissolution of longterm relationships. On Bravo we’ve been watching a spate of splits and their aftermaths unfold: Ariana and Sandoval, Tom and Katie (VPR), Jax and Brittany, Michelle and Jesse (The Valley), Lindsay and Carl (Summer House). As we dive headfirst into wedding season, marriage — and the end of it — is on the brain. And after our last episode about Grazie Sophia Christie’s viral essay in The Cut urging college-aged women to marry older and richer stat, we realized we had a whole lot more to say on the subject.For this episode, we looked at some of the major research that has come out in the last year about marriage and its correlation to self-reported happiness. Claire read Lenz’s divorce-as-liberation polemic, “This American Ex-Wife,” and Emma watched way too many lectures by Brad Wilcox, author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.” (Yes, his book title does indeed sound extremely fascist-coded.) We brought our own lived experiences as a married person and a not-married-but-partnered person into the conversation.And we asked ourselves a bunch of questions: How should we be thinking about marriage and divorce? Is it okay to want marriage? Is divorce the only logical answer to marriage’s gender inequities? What sorts of policies could transform the boundaries of these conversations altogether? And what would a world look like with marriage as an option rather than a central organizing principal? Hope you enjoy our winding conversation. XoFurther Reading + Listening:“Take A Wife… Please!,” Olga Khazan, The Atlantic“Is (Heterosexual) Marriage A Diet?,” Virginia Sole-Smith, Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith “Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure Of Divorce,” Emily Gould, The Cut“To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career,” David Brooks, New York Times“The All-Or-Nothing Marriage,” Eli J. Finkel, New York Times“Blue Marriage And The Terror Of Divorce,” Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study “Splinters: Another Kind Of Love Story,” Leslie Jamison“This American Ex-Wife,” Lyz Lenz “What’s So Great About Marriage?,” Plain English with Derek Thompson“The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals,” The Ezra Klein Show“What Relationships Would You Want, If You Believed They Were Possible?,” The Ezra Klein ShowShare Rich TextIf you liked reading this, click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Patreon!Give us feedback or suggest a topic for the pod • Subscribe • Request a free subscription