OBSESSED (#6): I Now Pronounce You, Uh, Freakin’ Exhausted!
Plus, Meghan Thee Stallion, New York comedy recs, and a gutting essay out of Gaza.
New format alert! Last week, I told y’all I needed to make OBSESSED more sustainable (translation: less time consuming). And thoughtfully about three things each week hasn’t left me much time to write anything else during the week.
So! From now on, OBSESSED will look like this:
Quick little “hello!” to my OBSESSED babies up top.
Fun stuff from friends and people I admire.
Two short & sweet recommendations. Like, a song and an article.
The main essay on something I can’t stop thinking about.
Muah! Thanks so much for reading.
Hello, my gorgeous obsessed babies. How are we feeling this week?
All in all, I’d say this week has been … uh, pretty good? And you wouldn’t necessarily think that if I told you what this week entailed (with the major exception of seeing Maggie Winters’ very good show at Union Hall on Monday!). Because after Monday came an evening spent working late, followed by an evening spent working late, and as of Thursday afternoon, we’re looking at … an evening spent writing late! But there have also been plenty of lovely moments this week. One lovely thing? We have four mice living in our kitchen, but their squeaks are soooo cute!
In the meantime, check this stuff out:
Jonathan Appel’s wonderful piece, “A Concession Speech by a Candidate Who Just Lost To a Dog Mayor,” ran in McSweeney’s! I saw Johnathan perform it at Rejected Shorts, a really great humor reading show hosted by Michelle Cohn.
Speaking of Rejected Shorts — next show is on Dec. 5 at Caveat!
Speaking of really fun shows — check out Fuck It Fest this Monday at Halyards! True Walters and Caitlin Hollis, two huge sweetie pies, just started it. They’re going to screen around nine or so short films based on a specific theme.
I am unfortunately unable to attend Fuck It Fest — because I’ll be competing in Citizenship Live (at Caveat at 7 o’clock)! I’m very pumped; not only is it hosted by Taylor Kay Phillips and Felipe Torres Medina, but … I’ll say it. I’ve admired it for many years from afar in Chicago! Buy tickets!
Speaking of Chicago, home to many cute honeybees: Jennie Egerdie, alongside illustrator Sólveig Eva Magnúsdóttir, had a wonderful piece in The New Yorker! It’s called “How to Save the Bees,” and it’s about how to drown the fireflies.
Get tickets to Garrett & Allison’s Big Night. It’s at Union Hall next Thursday at 10 o’clock, which is what they invented Red Bulls for, you child!
OK, I think that’s it.
LISTEN TO THIS: Cobra, by Megan Thee Stallion. It’s not what you think it’s about! And if it was about honkin’ huge dicks, that'd be swell, too. Big Megan fan over here.
READ THIS: “The Agony of Waiting for a Ceasefire That Never Comes,” an essay in The New Yorker by Mosab Abu Toha. It’s short and devastating. Toha wrote at least part of it on her phone while in the Jabalia refugee camp, which the IDF bombed in late October.
I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT: “The Return of the Marriage Plot”: Why everyone is suddenly so eager for men and women to get hitched, by Rebecca Traister for The Cut.
I Now Pronounce You, Uh, Freakin’ Exhausted!
(I am too sleepy to think of a less insane title.)
Living in New York after being born and raised in Houston, I’ve never felt less cool being married. Half the time, when I tell somebody (specifically women) I’m married, I detect a small vibe shift as she wonders what kind of married I am: the cool kind, with a progressive hottie who respects my autonomy — or the squishy kind, due to my being religious or traditional or having been a child bride. They picture somebody named Trevor who watches football with his hand in his pants.
My husband doesn’t experience this phenomenon. And when people meet John, they understand why I married him! But our very different experiences in this scenario says a lot. For lots of reasons, women are more aware than ever of the disproportionate labor they assume in relationships with men. That’s why the vibe shifts, when women find out I’m married — it’s as if they’re asking, “You good, girl?” while bracing for the jackass in the dry-fit polo to come introduce himself and gawk at a waitress. That’s when I say something to indicate John isn’t watching football with his hand in his pants — he prefers high-fantasy, thanks! — they smile, and we continue discussing fine art and commerce.
This is all to say that women, especially progressive women, are approaching marriage with more thoughtfulness than ever before, in large part because they no longer have to marry for financial stability. What a wonderful thing! Because of that, and for the first time ever, more middle-aged adults are single than married. Naturally, conservatives are freaking the fuck out.
That’s the hook for Traister’s piece, which explores the myriad social ills that conservatives think more marriages would fix, including declining happiness, housing crises and child poverty. (Let’s not even bother listing the ways those ills could benefit from policies conservatives oppose.)
These aren’t just empty calls for more people to get hitched. It’s getting spooky: Traister notes that, earlier this year, sadistic Texas Republicans stopped sneaking into nursing homes and smothering patients to call for a ban on no-fault divorces. And remember when bloated corpse Steven Crowder said that his ex-wife “decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore, and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted” ???
In pitching marriage as a win-win answer to everything bad, conservatives are either ignoring, or cravenly rooting for, the many ways in which marriages boost men and break women. For the uninitiated, those ways include:
Among married couples today, more women are married to men who earn less money than they do, and have less education than they do.
Among married couples today, more men are married to women who earn more money than they do, and have more education than they do.
After divorce, most men’s financial pictures are relatively unchanged. For women, divorce often leads to a significant drop in their income. Many of them, especially mothers, fall into poverty.
Married men are “healthier, wealthier and happier” than single men, per Psychology Today. That’s flipped for single and married women.
That conservatives are pushing marriage as a moral imperative isn’t surprising. But, as I’m thinking about all this data, I’m surprised that automatically celebrating marriage is still the default take. We’ve got mountains of evidence showing marriage, in its most common iteration, might be pretty detrimental to women’s earning potential, health and happiness. Woof! So why does it still feel so damn taboo to question the worthiness of the institution itself?
I mean, just think about the stereotypical married couple in any movie you’ve ever seen. Usually, the stereotypical wife and mother is either…
replacing her passions with an encyclopedic knowledge of Juicy Juice’s sugar content,
hiding profound resentment behind a dutiful smile, or
frazzled. Just frazzled. Why? Don’t ask. She’s just frazzled.
As for the stereotypical husband or father? Well, typically, that fella’s either…
sitting down, relaxing in front of the TV while his wife’s hair is on fire in the kitchen;
well-rested and affable, wishing his harried wife would have more sex with him;
completely and unabashedly checked out of the family; or
like, concerningly stupid, but in no real danger.
For a long while, we didn’t ask ourselves why those stereotypes existed. Why have women taken on so much labor, and men have often let themselves benefit from that labor without fully returning the favor? Why do men seem to have it so damn good? Does it have to be this way? And thank goodness so many people looked at that couple — that dynamic, that expectation — and thought, “Yeah, no thanks. ”
That examination, I think, is thanks to decades of hard-fought progress on feminist and queer fronts. One thousand percent. Also, the 2 billion TikToks and Reddit threads about dunce husbands being absolute dunces!
More than anything else in human history, the internet allowed groups of people to connect, chat about shared experiences, swap information and commiserate over mutual hardships. In a pretty public display of that, women are constantly posting the ridiculous shit their husbands do; #dumbhusband has 19.6 million views on TikTok here (compared to 1.6 million for #dumbwife, a hashtag that should be outlawed). Meanwhile, #husbandfail has 156 million views, while #wifefail has 23 million views.
The vibes range from pretty funny to properly infuriating, but they’re all part of a growing mountain of evidence that lots of husbands are hardly pulling their weight, whether that be domestic, social or emotional (or all three).
Something else to consider: more women are in therapy than ever! This has to be partially thanks to the thousands of TikToks, essays and Twitter threads demystifying mental health care.
Ultimately, that’s why we’re here: with more women doing the gritty internal work needed to be an available partner, and men … not doing so as much, or as deeply. So of course a discrepancy between men and women’s emotional aptitudes yields noticeable behavioral changes. Women are changing the way they think, because they’re finally allowed to change the way they think.
Even still, it feels like a combative faux pas to openly question the point of marriage. Which is weird and gross. It’s good to question everything! But it’s also critical we question the point of our marriages — why we’re married, how it helps and hurts us, how we tend to it — to try and prevent one person losing a lot, and the other gaining untold riches and benefits.
Who knows! If men are up to, uh, doing as much work as their wives are doing, a stereotypical hetero marriage might look very different in 10 or 20 years! By that point, the world’s wives will have developed scoliosis from years of deep cleaning countertops, and husbands will have the proper bedside manner to care for her.
It’s admittedly strange to be writing this as a married person, let alone a married woman. On the one hand, I’m married to a man who’s shown continued commitment to growth and personal development. He’s profoundly helped my career by paying for writing classes, encouraging late nights working and literally moving with me to Chicago, and then to New York, pretty much solely to support my professional ambitions. He embodies the active act of partnership, and I love him very much. On the other hand, yes! Totally! I have absolutely taken on more domestic and emotional labor, more acutely at certain times than others. And that’s absolutely affected my health, overall well-being and professional output. Which is something that cannot be accepted as OK.
Thankfully, I’m with somebody who agrees, recognizes this disparity and puts in real work to make that gulf smaller and smaller. Who knows if it’ll ever disappear. But I suppose the data also tells us this: that, if you’re going to marry — and let’s be OK with the “if” — it’s vital that husbands work to take on as much of a load as their wives. It’s vital that both partners are comfortable talking about the disparity. And it’s absolutely essential that men not take any of this “personally.” That centers the issue on them, the challenges it poses to their self-image, and their discomfort with not being perfect. With love, get the hell over yourselves!
Also, it’s highly recommended that, after another exhausting but necessary conversation about all this, the loving husband prepares his flawless wife a huge hoagie, orders in a chocolate malt and rubs her feet until his hands are sore. Then, once his hands are too sore to do anything else, he rubs her feet a little longer.