This is another in a series of pieces on the role of love in contemporary American life. Hope you like it. —Jim
By the end of the 20th century, matrimony was merely one lifestyle option among many for most young Americans. But for those who did choose it, there was really one practical model: the companionate marriage. Long gone were the days (my parents had caught the tail end of them) when a couple could reasonably expect to live on a husband’s earnings, and that husband could expect that his wife would have responsibility for running a household. The new reality was that both partners would have to work outside the home, and as a result, there would necessarily be some negotiation about where that household would be, as well as a division of labor that would not be ordained, but pragmatic.
This growing sense of the necessity for an egalitarian partnership was not only rooted in economic realities. In truth, a woman’s prerogative in choosing her mate, while never unlimited, had always been at least as great in English North America as elsewhere in the Western world. In the second volume of his famous masterwork Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that American women in the early nineteenth century were far more independent and practical (if in his view less charming) than European women, and yet he noted their fierce devotion to their families once they married. This seeming paradox was rooted in that sense of choice: with power came responsibility. It is of course possible to make too much of this—a vast body of women’s history scholarship has emphasized the many barriers facing females of all kinds in U.S. history—but the very basis of criticism and protest against these realities was rooted in the underlying ideal, however sexist in its expression, that “all men are created equal.” Abigail Adams’s injunction to her husband in 1776 to “remember the ladies” has endured: as much as some men might like to, it has proven increasingly impossible to forget the ladies (or girls, females, women, or womyn—take your pick).
By the time I got married, it was certainly impossible for me to forget. Like all men—all people—I was a product of my time and place, as well as the collective memory of what had preceded me, and harbored conscious and unconscious ideas that I needed to unearth and revise to function not only as a husband but also as a normal adult in the approaching twenty-first-century world. So it was presumed at the outset of my marriage that my wife’s professional ambitions and prospects were of equal standing to mine. This was less a matter of enlightenment than the governing reality of our world. Like all young educated people, we faced uncertainties in launching our careers, an enterprise made all the more so by the fact that 1) we sought entry into academia, where jobs were scarce; and 2) we were doing so as a two-career couple, adding a geographic complication into the mix. It quickly became apparent that she was a more valuable employment commodity than I was. While I flailed around trying to land interviews, she was invited as a finalist for a series of appointments in Iowa, West Virginia, and upstate New York, all of which were near misses. There were a number of discernible reasons for her better prospects, among them her intrinsic merit as a scholar, the fact that she came out of a traditional discipline (she was a historian, while my doctorate was in American Studies), and that as a woman she had an advantage as an Affirmative Action candidate, competing for slots vacated by an aging cohort of white male scholars.
After a couple of years of uncertainty as she finished her degree and I trod water, we were able to align an attractive situation: I got a one-year replacement position at the University of New Hampshire, while she landed a multi-year appointment at Harvard, about two hours away (we rented an apartment at the midpoint between them). I rode her coattails and was hired into her program the following year. This scenario for temporary bliss was disrupted when, after turning down an invitation to interview for a tenure track appointment at Sarah Lawrence College, she was chased down by the president, who flew up to convince her to take the job, which, we agreed, was too good to pass up. For the next few years, we juggled the not-uncommon experience of a long-distance academic relationship, in which I was on the road from Monday to Thursday, returning to spend weekends, summers, and vacations at what would be our enduring base in suburban Westchester County, where the security of her appointment led us to buy a house.
We sustained this scenario (which included a couple of unpaid leaves) for seven years. I might have been able to string it along a little longer, but my job, unlike hers, was a dead end: eventually I would have to move on. When domestic complications proved too great—more on this to come—I applied for a job at a prestigious private school a few miles from the college where she worked. I was offered the position, and, with some reluctance, I took it. It turned out to be a good fit, and remained there for almost two decades. In some ways, it was an even more attractive job than my wife’s (better food, some better benefits, etc.) But she’s the professor, and I’m merely a teacher, and while neither of us spent much time dwelling on it, she has more social status than I do. Our incomes have fluctuated relative to each other, but have always been comparable.
That said, this factual account of my domestic life is at best incomplete and at worst deeply misleading. For there’s another dimension to this equation that I have purposely left out in my attempt to isolate and trace the strands in modern love: the reproductive one.
Next: Childish behaviors