Q&A with "Marriage Confidential" Author Pamela Haag
What inspired you to write Marriage Confidential?
As happens with many nonfiction books, I was inspired by the things closest to my life—my own marriage, and my friends’ and acquaintances’ marriages. I noted in conversations with friends an undertow of wistfulness, or disappointment, around marriage that’s rarely discussed out loud. Their marriages weren’t awful, nor were they all that vibrant or fulfilling. I wanted to learn more about why this would be so. How and why do marriages end up “semi-happy” in our times, when we have such freedom to make marriage in our own image?
I have a Ph.D. in history, so I was also interested in taking stock of marriage, for the generation that was born during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, grew up in the “family values” retrenchment of the 1980s, and got married in the 1990s or 2000s. I wanted to create a collective, big portrait of our views on children, sex, career, money, expectations, and the other basic elements of marriage.
What has been the response from readers?
I’ve gotten a few pieces of fan mail, based on interviews related to the book, and people have found it thoughtful. We’ll see if the book sparks conversation---between husbands and wives, and between friends. I hope that it does. As people read my book, they sometimes have “A Ha” moments of recognition. They recognize elements of their own or their friends’ marriages. A few women have described marriages to me, not yet having read my book, that are ripped from its chapters (“…I have a friend, whose husband isn’t pulling his load…” and so on).
I think it’s a useful and consoling thing, to know that if you have a marital issue, you’re not alone. Others have problems, too—even couples who look as if they have it all together!
What has been the response from family, friends and your husband?
My husband is brave to let me write about this theme, and he supports me. Oddly, it really does feel like a huge act of “outing,” just to write about the reality that some of us struggle with the idea of marriage, or are living with ambivalence.
How did researching and writing the book affect (positively and/or negatively) your relationship with your husband and/or your marriage? Was he bothered by your candid talk about your marriage melancholy?
My husband is interested in the same questions that I am, and our feeling of marital ambivalence is mutual, even though this book is told from my perspective. Both of us have experienced in our lives how devastating shame can be, and I think he was comfortable with this book because we’re both rather tired of shame, and tired of feeling as if we can’t “confess” that we don’t have a picture-perfect, ideal marriage.
While I wanted to respect discretion, much of that secrecy around marriage feels fueled by shame to me, rather than a desire for privacy. For as often as this question gets asked, you’d think that I was confessing that we were ax murderers or pirates, when all I wrote about was the not-uncommon reality that there are marriages today—measured in rates of divorce and separation, infidelity, or plain marital burn-out—that aren’t as functional or fulfilling as they could be, and where spouses are wistfully confused. We see these couples every day, yet it seems daring to discuss. Ultimately, however, I was more interested in the world “out there” than the world in here, in my own marriage, and I didn’t opt to write a memoir.
What did you learn about your own marriage?
I came out of this with a renewed appreciation for the many aspects of my marriage that do work really well. I learned this by measuring it against some of the stories that I heard, or saw. I also learned that marriages are changing, and that more is possible within a marriage than I would have thought before. I also developed a less passive view of my marriage as a “take it or leave it” proposition. We always have more options, even within a formally traditional marriage, and we can always exercise more tolerance, compassion, forgiveness, and flexibility. It’s okay not to toss out a spouse because she or he has made a mistake, or stumbled. It’s okay to reject that “zero tolerance” bravado. Finally, I ditched the whole concept of “a real marriage.” What I have in my marriage works, for now, and for us.
What do you hope readers learn or take away from the book?
I hope that my book helps readers stretch their imaginations about marriage. My sense is that we live in a judgmental age about marriage, divorce, and non-marriage, and I hope my readers come away from my book with enlarged sympathies for those who divorce, who never marry, or who are only semi-happily married. These people aren’t “whiners,” or “selfish.” They’re not necessarily suffering from psychological or moral flaws when their marriages fail, or when they just “can’t” get married. I hope that a reader might begin to think that maybe the problem isn’t you. Maybe it’s not your spouse. Maybe it’s Marriage instead—the ways we live in marriage, and what we expect.
True, marriage really works with all its familiar rules for many couples. But we still have a high divorce rate, a growing rate of non-marriage, a large percentage (40%) of Americans who feel that marriage is “becoming obsolete,” and a significant problem with infidelity and covert cheating. Under the circumstances, isn’t it time to start thinking about how to change marriage to fit us, rather than how to change ourselves to fit into marriage??
You mention Facebook treachery. In your opinion, what is the best defense against Facebook and other forms of social media?
In Britain in 2010, 1 in 5 online divorce petitions actually mentioned Facebook, which really surprised me. Maybe the best defense is simply to be alert, and mindful. The most important thing is to be honest with ourselves about what we’re up to. Online communities and conversation can seem innocent enough, but sometimes we have ulterior motives or impulses that we’re not even admitting to ourselves. It’s those sneaky impulses within us that we need to guard against, because things can “slide” easily into more intimate feelings online.
If the book offered advice, would you advise couples to avoid Facebook and the like?
My book is definitely not an advice book, so I don’t know that I have an opinion. I did observe that Facebook “gift wraps” temptation, and a spouse’s past romantic life, right to your doorstep, but just avoiding Facebook entirely seems like an extreme (and probably impossible) response. I think that as Facebook and other social media become even more common, we’ll devise new awareness of these risks, and probably a new etiquette to handle the fast temptations that online media can create.
In the book, you discuss the fact that although we have the freedom to change marriage, we don’t, why do you think that is?
There are many reasons. Some Americans see marriage as an article of religious faith, and a sacrament, that should be lived according to timeless commandments. Granted, many of these marriages still stumble into affairs, divorce or marital failure. But they’re not couples who are easily inclined to change the rules of marriage. Other marriages in the United States are doing just fine with the way that marriage is defined in the romantic style: They sincerely want it to be a lifelong, monogamous commitment, defined by the achievement of the American dream and upward mobility for the family.
But these marriages aren’t the focus of my book. For the rest of us, I think a lot of couples would fear being thought “weird” if they broke the script. I also think we tend to be hardened skeptics about marital change. We’ve heard that doing things differently just “never works”. So, we end up breaking the rules more often than we condone trying to change them. I think the semi-happy marriage is deterred from trying something other than divorce mostly by social pressure, fear, shame, and judgment. Many an okay marriage gets lost in the process, because it feels like there are no alternatives to divorce. The baby is thrown out with the bath water, as the saying goes.
Pamela Haag earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1995, after attending Swarthmore College. She has worked as director of research for the American Association of University Women and as a speechwriter, and has published in the American Scholar, the Christian Science Monitor, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and NPR, among others. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Brown University.
