Marriage is an escape room
Marriage is an escape room
The riddles of the nuclear family, mid-life sex portals, and the multi-chambered room of love.
We were at swim lessons first-thing Saturday morning, sitting in the bleachers with a parent friend talking about our plans for the day as children splashed in the pool. C. explained that we were about to drive an hour away to an escape room with our kid. The three of us would be solving riddles and puzzles in a multi-chambered room with an enchanted forest theme.
It had been my idea—just a novel kid-friendly thing to do. After browsing the less kid-friendly rooms, though, I’d realized that I also wanted to do it for real, without my kid. There was one room in particular that stood out.
“I think our next date night will have to be the escape room modeled after a suburban living room,” I said to our friend, while keeping an eye on our kid kicking his way across the pool. “I like the realism, you know?”
“Yes,” C. laughed. “It’ll be a perfect symbol of our attempt at breaking out of domesticity.”
“Yeah,” I said, narrating like it was a movie trailer. “Can we escape the suffocating constraints of the nuclear family… together?”
We all laughed at the absurdity of us using a rare and precious date night to trade the confines of our actual living room for the confines of a fake living room, just so that we could collaborate on how to get out of it. It was also a perfect metaphor for what marriage—and parenting, especially—often feel like to me: a collaborative attempt at finding shared pleasure and freedom within a complex set of circumstances that are really, truly designed as a trap.
There are domestic demands (work, childcare, household labor) that compete with personal desires (friendship, creativity, connection, independence, novelty, eroticism). As Madeline Lane-McKinley wrote, “Households are capitalism’s pressure cooker.” Then you throw in norms and systems around gender roles, monogamy, nuclear family isolation, parental exhaustion, the privatization of care, the gender-sorting of hetero suburban parental life, and so on.
At times, the pursuit of shared pleasure and freedom inside of all that can feel like an impossible riddle; and I consider us to be pretty free of the domestic inequities typically found in heteronormative marriages, but even still. “All of us are seduced, or at least disciplined,” writes the feminist critic Sophie Lewis in the polemic Abolish the Family. “We can’t escape it, even when we individually reject it.”
Sometimes, though, it really does feel like we escape, together.
“This portal opened,” I told a friend several weeks ago. “A mid-life sex portal.”
One night, it was like, without even trying, we put the right set of numbers into a combination lock and a door opened into another room in our house that we didn’t know was there. Oh. We hadn’t been looking for a hidden door. Over a decade into marriage, we already had this sex thing very well figured out—but the portal wasn’t about particular acts, moves, or techniques. It was a mood and mentality; a paradigm shift.
The next morning, we ran into each other in the kitchen making coffee, packing lunch for school, and we could barely look each other in the eye. There was a bashfulness, a sense of “funny seeing you here,” as though the last place we would expect to see the person from the night before was in this stock domestic setting.
I mean, really, we burst out laughing.
It made me think of Silvia Federici, who wrote, “No matter how many screams, sighs, and erotic exercises we make in bed, we know that it is a parenthesis and tomorrow both of us will be back in our civilized clothes (we will have coffee together as we get ready for work),” she wrote. There is embarrassment in “the morning after, when we are already busy reestablishing distances” and “pretending to be completely different from what we are during the rest of the day.”
She argued that sexuality is “the release we are given from the discipline of the work process,” one that gives us “license to ‘go natural,’ to ‘let go,’ so that we can return more refreshed on Monday to our jobs.” I think that applies equally to the unpaid work of parenting and domesticity. Sex promises the “possibility for intimate, ‘genuine’ connections in a universe of social relations in which we are constantly forced to repress, defer, postpone, hide, even from ourselves, what we desire,” she wrote.
I think this is true; I also think that sex can be radicalizing and horizon-expanding, and that it truly can be a source of connection in a world of alienation.
I’ve been reading Annie Ernaux’s The Use of Photography, which features images she and her lover Marc Marie took the morning after having sex, along with their respective musings on said photographs. There are no bodies in the images, just the evidence of their past movements: rumpled clothes, unmade beds, discarded shoes, knocked over papers, dinner left out from the night before.
In Ernaux’s words, these are “invisible” and “metaphysical” scenes of passion, aliveness, and abandon, all underscored by a stark backstory: she was going through treatment for breast cancer during their affair. It bears mentioning: Ernaux, a divorced mother of two, took many of these photographs in hotel rooms, as opposed to more domestic settings.
Moving through the book, it becomes clear that Ernaux and Marie weren’t just capturing sex after the fact; they were making something to be captured. It was painting through fucking. The affair, and their documentation of it, became an artistic statement about sex and mortality.
When her cancer treatment ended, the affair stopped.
Later, C. and I scrutinized the portal, which stayed open for several weeks. It became its own kind of performance against domesticity. We tried to figure out the combination—seeing as it was entered unknowingly. What was it that unlocked that door?
There were competing theories but consensus on one part of the code: we stepped out of our routine and roles, shrugging off the feeling of being co-workers and business partners. I think we allowed each other to be strange, mysterious, and not fully known.
We escaped the constraints of “wife” and “husband,” “mom” and “dad,” all these flattening identities that act upon us even when we don’t realize it, even when we explicitly recognize their false constraints.
Then the portal seemed to close. All those competing demands and desires got in the way. “I think we’ll open it again,” I said, and we did.
Marriage often turns couples against each other; maybe the best you can hope is that it turns you both against marriage.