The institution of marriage isn’t doing so hot. In the United States, fewer Americans are getting married than ever before, while many are getting married later in life, if at all. What’s to be done about it? According to journalist Lyz Lenz, blow it all up and start over.
In This American Ex-Wife, a blistering memoir-meets-manifesto about the fraught gender politics of marriage and divorce, Lenz details how the end of her marriage became the beginning of her life. Raised religious and married at a young age, Lenz walked away from an unsatisfying partnership to rebuild her life on her own terms, only to discover that happiness, liberation, and freedom lay on the other side. “I believed that I would be a sad sack single mom, like you see in all the movies, but when I got to the other side, I realized, ‘This is actually great,’” Lenz tells Esquire.
Courtesy of author
Weaving together a detailed history of marriage, sociological research, cultural commentary, and a frank dissection of her own personal experiences, Lenz paints a damning portrait of marriage in America: “an institution built on the fundamental inequality of women,” as she describes it. Yet the book is also a rousing and exuberant cry for a reckoning—one where couples can love freely, leave freely, and build meaningful partnerships based on the full and equal humanity of men and women alike.
Lenz Zoomed with Esquire to discuss the politics of divorce, the need to reimagine what makes a good relationship, and what to do if you’re “divorce-curious.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: You write, “Divorce is both personal and political. Our governments sponsor and prop up the institution of marriage with tax breaks and incentives, while making it nearly impossible to be a single parent.” In what ways is divorce political?
LYZ LENZ: Heterosexual marriage is the way we organize our society. It’s a political system, and you don’t have to look far to see policy solutions that rely on marriage as opposed to funding SNAP benefits, funding Medicaid, and so on. This isn’t just a Republican thing, either—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama have all promoted marriage programs in order to combat poverty and save the government from having to fund necessities like healthcare and childcare. Marriage also forms the foundation for our tax base; this is how we determine who gets tax breaks and who doesn’t, who’s contributing to society and who isn’t.
Divorce cuts at the heart of our social order. If you set up your society around heterosexual marriage, then women realize that society relies on their unpaid labor, that’s destabilizing. We’re living through a time of political backlash where states across America are trying to pass policies that make it harder to get divorced. The party line is, “We have to support the American family,” but if that was ever going to solve our problems, then we wouldn’t have problems as an American society. There are studies out there that say, “If you want strong relationships, if you want marriages to last longer, if you want to decrease the rates of domestic violence, if you want kids to stay in school, then you liberalize divorce laws.” When women have options, they make better choices, but that’s getting lost in this discourse. Right now, it’s incredibly hard to get a divorce—a 16-year-old has an easier time getting married in America than a 42-year-old woman does getting divorced. Divorce is political, but it’s also personal, because it’s where our politics meet the bedroom. It’s really hard to parse out.
I’m reminded of what you write in the book about how our social order essentially relies on the subjugation of women: “We need women to buy into romantic partnerships so that they will become the social safety net that our leaders and politicians refuse to create.”
We create all these fantasies of love and happiness and equal partnership to get women’s buy-in. Relationships are worth trying for—love is beautiful and valuable! But when it gets wrapped up into a political system, that’s a problem. I know so many couples who say, “We’re going to do this equally. We love each other and it’s going to be wonderful.” Then they get five years in, have two babies, wake up one day, and say, “Wait a minute, how did we get here?” In a society that makes it impossible to afford childcare, they were always going to reach this point. In a society with a wage gap, the person whose job takes the hit will always be the wife. None of this is an accident. We would love to believe that we could love our way out of fundamental inequality, but we can’t. We need to fundamentally rethink the system of marriage, and one of the best ways to do it is to liberalize divorce laws.
What makes getting divorced so hard, and what policy changes would make it easier?
It’s hard culturally. People treat you like a pariah without even meaning to. I have wonderful friends, but I had to have some tough conversations with some of my coupled friends. I had to say, “You stopped inviting me to stuff and that really hurt my feelings. I miss you and I miss our friendship.” Being vulnerable and rebuilding those relationships was really difficult. A lot of them said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I thought you would be uncomfortable around couples.” So culturally, it gets really uncomfortable. So many women have asked me, “Why? What happened?” They wanted to know how bad it got in case they ever needed to leave. It becomes this destabilizing thing where you have to walk through people’s insecurities while you’re also going through your own tough stuff. Politically, it’s hard to get divorced, too. Even if it’s amicable, there are waiting periods and laws. It takes a long time. It’s expensive. You can roll into a courthouse to get a marriage certificate and roll back out, but with a divorce, you have to wait.
We would love to believe that we could love our way out of fundamental inequality, but we can’t.
I’m sure you’ve seen the wave of op-eds advocating for more people to prioritize marriage; it all started with a David Brooks piece titled, “To Be Happy, Marriage Matters More Than Career.” What do you think of this wave of discourse?
I’d love to fight David Brooks in the street over this column. He’s basing this on some really flawed data from The Institute for Family Studies, which is a group that admitted to messing with their data during the gay marriage debate. They released all this data arguing that gay parents were bad for children, which was used in public policy discussions—then they later admitted that the data was flawed, and intentionally so. Journalists should think more critically about the data that they use. I’m an English major from a mid-tier college and even I can think more critically about this data than a New York Times opinion columnist.
That said, I think it’s very telling that these cultural commentators latch onto flawed data. It makes them feel more comfortable. Nothing makes our society more uncomfortable than a liberated woman. We can’t forget that 2017 was a huge year for women—we elected women at unprecedented levels and the #MeToo movement got a lot of men fired. That was deeply destabilizing, so it’s not shocking to see this rollback. Marriage is a conservative institution that upholds social order, so whenever I see someone saying, “People just need to get married,” or, “Marriage is hard work,” my challenge is, “Who are you asking to sacrifice?” You make it sound egalitarian, but what you’re asking is for women to give up their careers and take on additional labor.
The average man adds seven hours of labor to a woman’s weekly workload. So what are you actually asking? “Marriage is hard work”—hard work for who? Who’s making the therapy appointments? Who’s hiring the babysitter? Who’s cleaning the house and making dinner? I don’t like to be gender essentialist, but when people say, “Marriage makes you happy,” I do think it’s important to ask, “Who? Why? How? Who is being made happy, and who’s actually being made miserable?” A happy marriage makes you happy, but happy singlehood makes you happy, too. The whole discourse is so anti-intellectual. I just wish we would think harder and have smarter conversations about it, but this isn’t anything new. If shoving people into the institution of marriage fixed our society, we would have a fixed society. It’s not about empowering people to be happy; it’s about men being happy and women existing to support that happiness. I want better for my life. I want better for my children’s lives. I was not put on this earth to be the crutch for someone else. I don’t think you need a romantic relationship to live a full, happy life; you can find connection and joy in so many other ways.
The other thing we often hear in the op-ed industrial complex is that men are increasingly single and lonely, and apparently women should do something about that. What’s your response to that discourse?
Women’s bodies are always the solution for male problems. Get a therapist like the rest of us! Women are also sad and lonely—we had a worldwide pandemic, millions of people died, everyone is sad and lonely, and somehow we’re confused about why. If the requirement for your happiness is that someone else be miserable and make you food, is that real happiness? Your freedom should not rest on other people’s unfreedoms. Your happiness should not rest on someone else’s unhappiness. Men will feel alienated by that. Female liberation is always blamed for male alienation, but I refuse to believe that this is true. Again, the data shows that when women have freedom, everybody benefits. I hate this discourse because it’s designed to shame women for being free. I think being happy is the most radical thing you can do. Fighting for a happy life, that shit is hard—it’s harder than being married!
There’s a whole industry designed to make women feel less miserable. I keep joking that if we liberalized divorce laws, the scented candle industry would tank, because women would suddenly be happy and wouldn’t need all these products anymore. Men, have you tried reading a self-help book? Have you tried going to therapy? Have you tried texting your buddies and saying, “Hey, I feel sad. Anybody want to grab a beer?” There are very simple solutions for alienation. They should involve community; they shouldn’t involve my inequality.
I really loved the chapter of the book about good men, and about the pervasive belief among not just men, but also the women in their lives, that they are “one of the good ones.” What’s your response to men who might read this book and think, “But I’m one of the good ones”?
If you have to insist upon your goodness, you do not have it. What’s the bar for being a good man? We’ve got a really fucked up set of requirements for what it means to be “good,” so if you’re checking off all the masculinity boxes, that’s not great. I have a newsletter and I’m always a little surprised when subscribers get defensive with me. I turn it back on them and ask, “Why are you insisting on your goodness to an internet stranger? What is it about what I’ve said that’s made you feel so defensive?” Look at the statistics: there’s a ton of data showing that even if you love your wife, you’re still not doing the work you need to do, so go do it! If you’re feeling defensive, go ask your wife, “Do I contribute?” If she says, “Thank you so much for asking—actually, you don’t,” then get better.
My publisher has been fantastic, but there was a conversation about how the title and cover of my book would make men feel. I said, “I’m done bending and pleading and trying not to step on the landmine of male feelings.” I want men to feel uncomfortable when they see this book. I want them to feel on blast and on notice. Men’s good feelings are not my job. My job is my liberation, and you can either get on board or not. I’m glad you liked the “not all men” chapter, because it was really important for me to write it. I actually don’t care if you’re good or not; I’m not always good! I don’t think that life requires our goodness. We just have to be human, and I want to be just as human as any man is. To me, it’s really not about the goodness of men—it’s about the liberation and full humanity of women.
You do such a wonderful job of capturing why people fear and avoid divorce; I thought it was especially poignant when you wrote about how getting divorced means publicly saying to your community, “I was wrong,” and how hard that can be. How do you suggest that we as a culture reframe the way we think about divorce?
It requires reframing what we think of as a good relationship. We still have this cultural bias toward believing that a good relationship is a long relationship, and that’s not always true. You can have a good, short relationship. We need to rethink, “What does success look like? What does happiness look like?” If we learned one thing from 2020, it’s that life is to be enjoyed, but we don’t tell women to enjoy themselves. As a mother and as a wife, you always have to be nailing yourself to the cross or you’re not good enough. My job is to get women off that cross. We need to rethink what a good relationship is and separate it from the idea of longevity, because not everything lasts forever, and that’s okay. It’s okay to quit and it’s okay to change your mind. It’s okay to say, “This was great, but it’s not what I want anymore.”
We need to rethink what a good relationship is and separate it from the idea of longevity.
What would you say to anyone out there who’s divorce-curious?
I think there are a lot of people who are divorce-curious, and for a lot of them, the question is, “How bad does it have to be before I can leave?” I identify with that; I write about how I was looking at other people’s miserable marriages and thinking, “I’m not as miserable as Shirley Jackson, so I can stay.” I always say what my friend Anna told me; she said, “Your life is not a game of chicken. You don’t have to wait for someone else to blink first before you swerve. Your happiness is enough of a reason.” Your partner doesn’t have to be a villain for you to be unhappy. That’s why I wanted to write about the system of marriage, rather than making it an individual problem.
To the divorce-curious, I say: you’re in a system that doesn’t serve you, so of course it feels hard and of course you’re unhappy. There are better ways to live. When I left my marriage, it’s not because I thought being a single mom would be so fun. It was because I was so miserable that I couldn’t stay. I believed that I would be a sad sack single mom, like you see in all the movies, but when I got to the other side, I realized, “This is actually great.” According to a Pew study, 43% of Americans think that single motherhood is ruining our society, but being a single mom is the best thing I’ve ever done. Your happiness is not frivolous. You don’t have to wait for someone else to blink first. And I promise you, it’s great on the other side. If you’re divorce-curious, that’s already telling you something about where you are and what you feel. I think that’s a lot of people in America, and I wish them luck.
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