Is Your Marriage 'Good Enough'?
I find myself thinking a lot about marriage these days. I think there are a few reasons for this. First, I am knee-deep in the drafting of my second book which deals, as Life After Yes did, with questions of commitment. Second, I have several friends and acquaintances who are experiencing, and exploring, tumult in their own unions. Third, it seems there has been much media attention focused lately on the question of marriage.
Fourth, I am married. I think I have a very good marriage. I want to keep it that way.
My best friend M - whom I have mentioned several times on this blog - sent me a text a few weeks ago about an article she had read in The Atlantic about the "marriage market." Well, I finally got around to reading it just this week and I found it fascinating. If you have a little time, please click here and read this article by Kate Bolick entitled All the Single Ladies. It's worth it. It will have you thinking for days. And then. Then there was a follow-up piece on the NYT Motherlode blog wherein Judith Warner played off the aforementioned Atlantic piece in her own musing called Is the 'Good Enough' Marriage Good Enough for the Kids?
Warner asks a host of important questions at the end of her post, questions that are hard to answer. But these are also questions that deserve our thought, I think. Her questions:
Is, indeed, the message that we should marry for love passionate, soul-fulfilling love and never settle for less now outdated? Is it the lesson we ought to pass on to our children? Do, in fact, most people compromise; do we, in the end, inevitably appear compromised to our kids, particularly by the time theyre teenagers? And can social factors really change the ways of the human heart?
I told you. These are biggies. Hard to answer. I could write dozens of posts on these questions and the topics they implicate. And you know what? Maybe I will. Because, clearly, as a married woman, as a modern woman, as a mother, as a writer, as a thinker, I am interested, and deeply, in these questions.
I imagine many of you are, too?
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What does 'good enough' mean when it comes to marriage? Did you read The Atlantic article? If so, what did you think? Do you think it is better for children to be the product of divorce or a deeply unhappy union? Are you interested, personally and intellectually, in questions about marriage in the modern world? Do you have a good marriage? A 'good enough' one?