It seems like everywhere you look at the moment, there’s a book detailing someone’s marriage falling apart. There’s This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz. No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce by Haley Mlotek. Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul. Liars by Sarah Manguso. And then, one of the most buzzed-about novels of 2024: All Fours by Miranda July.
Bit by bit and then all at once, the concept of leaving one’s spouse has become, for women, almost fetishized—a rite of passage on the way to meeting one’s true self. As Lenz describes her experience in This American Ex-Wife, “I wanted to remove myself from the martyr’s pyre and instead sacrifice the roles I had been assigned at birth: mother, wife, daughter. I wanted to see what else I could be.”
I can certainly understand that point of view. Growing up, I figured out quickly that marriage was a tricky business. My single mother avoided it like a contagious disease, her attitude being, Why would you want to be confined? Who wants to sign up for one man, one outcome? It was the 1970s, the era of the Pill, and men represented opportunity and adventure. She was okay with ambiguity, didn’t automatically rule someone out who may have had a wife tucked away somewhere. It was all about the hunting, not the keeping. “People are meant to be enjoyed in small doses,” she liked to say.
As I watched an assortment of “small doses” fall in and out of favor with my mother, I didn’t want to replicate her patterns. But I did—and it started early. I chafed at rules, obligations; when I was given a difficult assignment in high school, my first thought was, Do I have to do this?
The same applied to love. My first husband and I met in a yoga class, and in quick succession I was pregnant, married, and then a mother. But as the wedding approached, I felt panicked. I longed to settle down, but felt emotionally ill-equipped for the burdens and discomforts that came with it. Being trapped in a house with a spouse I couldn’t get along with, while caring for a young baby, became unbearable. There was never any question that I would leave—it was only a matter of when. (I would later write about that period and its aftermath in a divorce novel of my own, called Synchronized Breathing; at the end of the book, the protagonist has taken steps to find out who she is without a man, throwing herself into creative work. There is the possibility of love on the horizon, but nothing’s wrapped up in a bow.)
