Marriage
Story Stream
Reader, I Divorced Him February 20, 2025
YEARS AGO, not long after ending a marriage, I was having coffee with two women, new acquaintances, when we discovered that we were all divorced. “Yay!” one cried. “Hot Divorcées Club!” Something shrank and recoiled in me. Why must we be hot? Couldn’...
The Sexual Renaissance February 12, 2025
A new era dawns?There’s an old New England ballad called “The New Bundling Song,” about the custom of “bundling” a young couple side-by-side in bed before marriage. The aim was to afford potential spouses a night together that would test their compat...
Writer's Diary February 10, 2025
It's harder to communicate now that people don’t read. One way to look at books is as shorthand—summarizing vast swaths of human experience. Reading a great book is like memorizing all the moves of chess grandmasters, like memorizing Fischer versus B...
An Unusual Cultural Artifact of Religious Revival February 04, 2025
Religiosity in America, measured in denominational affiliation and church attendance, has never been lower. Over the past decades, a growing culture of atheism (and non-denominationalism) has spread across the country and permeated into our art, trad...
Life Lessons From My Correspondence with Lee McCarthy November 22, 2024
Like many middle-aged women I know, I spent my summer parsing the rallying calls of personhood and artmaking ringing out from the new roster of divorce books—books like All Fours by Miranda July, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and Splinters by Leslie Jamiso...
The Moral Muscle of the Great Rafael Nadal November 20, 2024
These days, one of the few areas of life where I share a genuine interest with the high school seniors I teach, is collegiate and professional sports.I am almost fifty years old. My students are only seventeen. I have been married for over twenty-fiv...
Reclaiming Ted Hughes November 19, 2024
Before preparing this essay, I began where many Americans seem hesitant to tread: with the poetry. I read and reread every poem I could find by Ted Hughes, as well as the slender oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, taking notes and contemplating both deeply. I r...
A Sex Strike isn't Going to Work November 18, 2024
4B is a fringe South Korean feminist movement advocating the rejection of marriage, childbirth, dating and sex.The “B” in 4B comes from the word “bi” in Korean, which means “no.”...
Is Technology Destroying Marriage? November 13, 2024
I am a happily married man who’s been with the same woman since college. I am a devout Christian who tries every day to abide by the scriptural injunction to sanctify our family with self-sacrificial devotion. My wife and I have two beautiful childre...
No Man Is an Island November 13, 2024
In the last weeks of 1623 London was in the throes of one of those infectious disease outbreaks characteristic of the era. A “spotted fever,” most likely typhus, was cutting a swath through the city’s tightly packed neighborhoods, and in late Novembe...
The Exploitation of Compassion November 08, 2024
For a book about the perils of empathy’s excesses, Allie Beth Stuckey’s newly released Toxic Empathy (2024) is rife with respect for empathy itself.Christian compassion, Stuckey acknowledges, is a positive force in our daily lives. When we see a frie...
America’s Anti-Family Turn August 29, 2024
On his post-presidential tour of Europe in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt raised eyebrows when he delivered his “Man in the Arena” speech in Paris, equating “the chief of blessings for any nation” with the willingness of the “average man” and the “average ...
This Couple Reign in Russian Literature August 27, 2024
The first time Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated a Russian novel together, it felt as though another man had joined their marriage: Dostoyevsky.“It was a mariage à trois,” Volokhonsky said over coffee at her and Pevear’s rambling apar...
House of the Draggin’ August 27, 2024
Watching House of the Dragon is like watching professional soccer. The pacing is slow, and most episodes are devoted to world-building and character development. And, like a soccer match, most of the game consists of setup, which is periodically punc...
How Gena Rowlands Redefined the Art of Acting August 21, 2024
Gena Rowlands, who died last Wednesday, at the age of ninety-four, is, of all the actresses I’ve ever seen onscreen, the greatest artist. She’s the one whose performances offer the most surprises, the most shocks, the most moment-to-moment inventiven...
What Ever Happened to Dating? August 16, 2024
Emerging adulthood is a time of life characterized by decision-making in romantic relationships. Most emerging adults (18 to 29-year-olds) utilize this time for romantic and sexual exploration with ambitions and expectations for marriage (see Millenn...
How to Respond to Tradwife Envy August 15, 2024
Recently a number of hit pieces and critiques of the cultural phenomenon known as “tradwives” seem to suggest that progressive feminists are beginning to have a change of heart. Although their stated intention is to detract from the phenomenon, the ...
The Lost Arts August 09, 2024
There were both too many metal guitarists for a stately ceremony on the Seine, and yet, too few. When the broadcast cut to a wide shot of the Conciergerie, it revealed nothing, nothing—a vast expanse of beige wall with a few ant-like figures crawling...
Sarah Manguso and the Rage Plot August 02, 2024
On the first page of Sarah Manguso’s electrifying, devastating novel Liars, the narrator warns her reader that she has “got enmeshed in a story that’s already been told ten billion times.” Liars follows the 15-year relationship between Jane and John ...
The Hidden Marriage Market July 15, 2024
“Incidentally, the marriage market is probably the strongest reason to pay for expensive private schools. Going to Harvard may not get you a better job but almost certainly puts you in an exclusive dating pool for life.”This is a quote from Bryan Cap...
How Charles Williams Indirectly Saved Lord of the Rings July 15, 2024
J. R. R. Tolkien blamed two events for the end of his intimate friendship with C. S. Lewis: “We were separated first by the sudden apparition of Charles Williams, and then by his marriage [to Joy Davidman],” he explained. While Tolkien was well aware...
Against ‘Women’s Writing’ July 01, 2024
In Outline, the first book in Rachel Cusk’s astonishing trilogy of novels, the narrator, Faye, has dinner in Athens with a celebrated feminist author. Angeliki apologizes for arriving late: She has only just escaped from a reception plus a quick deto...
Does Divorce Make You Hotter? June 03, 2024
Five years ago, all my girlfriends suddenly decided to abandon their husbands en masse.That is how it seemed at the time, at least. It all started when one woman blew up her marriage with one of those affairs so indiscreet that getting found out seem...
Embracing the American Family May 24, 2024
Early in my former career as a faculty member, I was teaching at a large public university and cultivated a reputation as a professor who actually knew his students’ names. I couldn’t help but notice, then, when a promising young African American wom...
Mimetic Polyamory May 23, 2024
Polyamory is in the air. In the last few months on a seemingly weekly quota, the literary world has been churning out pieces on this topic, culminating in the publication of Molly Roden Winter’s memoir, More. And there’s that recent Zendaya threesome...
