Blue marriage

[liv]

I have lots of stuff I want to talk about and I'm not getting started. So here, have someone else's article that I found interesting (thanks sfred for the link).

Anne Helen Petersen: Blue marriage and the terror of divorce. I don't know much about Petersen – seems she wrote that popular book about millennial burnout? – and the article is on Substack.

The reason I wanted to pass on this article is because Petersen has an explanation for something that has been bugging me about a trend in advice columns. The spectrum from Dan Savage's DTMFA and Captain Awkward's positioning as the Marie Kondo of breakups, to those widely parodied Reddit posts where someone (F) writes that her boyfriend / partner / husband (M) is constantly horrible and controls every aspect of her life but she can make some really twisted argument to show that he he doesn't technically meet the definition of "abusive".

She analyses these sorts of agony column letters in the light of some really interesting observations about class and race. She's talking about the US so the article doesn't completely generalize, and the "Blue" in her title is a reference to the Red State / Blue State model of how class in America doesn't exactly map onto money. For Petersen, the agony columns in the aggregate reflect the concerns of mostly white middle-class liberal women, whom she describes as progressive bourgeois. These white women are, in Petersen's view, in terror of divorce and singlehood, because that would represent a loss of their race-class privilege. Not just the financial loss, but loss of status and identity. Which of course is always a likely outcome of divorce, but Petersen has interesting observations about how white middle-class liberal women are outliers compared to the rest of American marriage and non-marriage behaviours.

It's a little bit heteropessimism, perhaps, some of what Petersen touches on is the concept that even liberal-identified men aren't deeply committed to marriage and childrearing as an equal partnership. But her analysis of why women who basically have a fair amount of economic and social power still end up trapped in bad relationships feels insightful. She's very sharp on both what constrains white women, and what harms they perpetuate as white women and white feminists.

Comments

[jenett]

I subscribe to her Substack, after a rec from someone in one of my librarian spaces early in the pandemic.

I don't always agree with her about everything (I mean, no one does), but she's consistently turning out thoughtful stuff on a regular basis that make me look at things a bit differently, and especially that gives me more language for talking about stuff in my life.

(And the Substack subscribers community is fantastic: she does regular threads on different stuff, like favourite soup recipes or advice, that have tons of great tidbits, and there's a Discord for subscribers that is just interesting and helpful.)

She was a journalist various places (including Buzzfeed on their more investigative stuff) before going completely freelance right before the pandemic: I think the public stuff on her Substack is a pretty good sense of what she's up to. (Also her Twitter.) She also does a good job of bringing in interviews and pieces by other interesting thoughtful people (and pays them decently for it.)

[ambyr]

Thanks for the link--it's an interesting read. As someone in that demographic who has chosen to eschew marriage, I'm acutely aware of how often (if subtly) this impacts my status and interpretations of my relationships in the eyes of others.

[ewx]

I don't know about the people writing letters to advice columns but an incredibly consistent theme in redditships and AITA is that people have not recognized that they are being abused[1]. It's a pattern that consistently pops up in romantic, platonic, practical[2] and familial relationships, and both short-term and long-term ones. Some of it is clearly the outcome of gaslighting; some of it (particularly for younger posters, but not exclusively so) is equally clearly a lack of awareness of what constitutes abusive behavior.

[1] Some are obviously looking for permission to recognise it, or support for their conclusions, particularly in AITA.
[2] e.g. flatmates or colleagues

There is sometimes a worry about the negative impacts of escaping the situation: e.g. both being on a lease that will last many months, children to care for, lack of money to go it alone. Petersen may be on to something in some of those cases but I don't think the theory that the superficially strange failure to recognize a hopelessly abusive situation is really about potential loss of class/status/etc finds much support the source material in a lot of cases (in redditships/AITA).

I think the reality is that an awful lot of people simply don't know what abuse is (and abusers are good at identifying those people).

[haggis]

I first came across her writing a series called "Scandals of Old Hollywood" on a website called "The Hairpin" (sort of a precursor to The Toast). That sounds potentially trashy but they were really insightful articles about how the image of early Hollywood stars were constructed (by themselves and others).

[crystalpyramid]

Gah, I feel like I have thoughts about this but I'm too busy with laundry/dishes/childcare/job to think them.

That thing about feeling like nobody else is divorced is real. Except my parents, of course, and it's part of the ways they failed as people. I think I'm unlikely to fail in similar ways or fall out of the upper middle class like my mom did, because I have an actual career, but the specter of failure is very real.

I also think the current American bourgeois norm I'm seeing of splitting custody so kids keep losing their homework and textbooks at the wrong house is not making divorce any less intimidating. (Not sure if that's more widespread than the kids I teach, but when I was growing up I basically only encountered that in media.)

[azurelunatic]

agonyaunt collects a number of advice column items for discussion, and it comes up there quite a bit too.

[antisoppist]

Whatever story you have told yourself about why you got married is what you need to let go of in order to get divorced. And that is hard whatever that story is. I left a month after an NHS therapist said "there is nothing feminist about your marriage".

[antisoppist]

50-50 shared care is the default in a lot of the UK as well and "I have realised my husband is abusive but if I leave, I will be leaving my children on their own half the time with someone who is abusive" comes up a lot online.

And that's aside from the whole who has the PE kit/washed the school uniform faff which is definitely a thing.

[flippac]

I'd say that when it is about losses, the losses in question are often more significant that "just" status - they tend to be about short-to-medium-term perceived survival needs or worse!

The US has a way of making almost everything a threat to those over some timeframe, admittedly.

[silveradept]

That's a useful thing, yes, and it helps to explain the differences of concept and what's important to the two different models, even if sometimes the solution is the same, regardless of what model is being used when it comes to getting rid of someone who is unhealthy and dragging the relationship down.

I now recognize that my ex was weaponizing the blue model concept against me to make me hang on to her longer. And she got what she wanted out of it at the very end all the same, because I didn't want to be that terrible person. I still am, I'm sure, because we split, but it gives me even more reason to be bitter at her manipulations and to wish that she would have been a better person all around.

[ewx]

Agreed - for Petersen's view to hold in the redditships context (and indeed in the Slate article she references, come to think of it) one would have to lean rather heavily on reading between the lines.

[(Anonymous)]

(CN: abusive behavior) https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/qaydcf/i_finally_got_to_medical_school_and_i_want_to/ is an example of what I mean.

She literally writes "he has never been obviously abusive to me" immediately followed by a long list of blatantly abusive behaviours. She already wants to leave him; her worry is not around loss of social or economic status but retaliation.

(I think this one is an example of looking for permission to recognize the behavior as abuse.)