I can never remember my wedding anniversary. Even writing this now, I’m not sure if it’s October 23 or 26. All I know is that one day last week was our 10-year wedding anniversary. It’s been a decade since Christopher and I walked down the aisle to the Mission Impossible theme song.
It made us laugh, that winking commentary about the impossibility of this thing called marriage. We knew the “failure rate,” as well as the unreasonableness of till-death-do-us-part as a measure of “success.” We talked about the pressures imposed by common conditions of marriage (nuclear family isolation, inequitable divisions of household labor, the moral mythology of monogamy, et-cetera).
It was an improbable, unrealistic, and oppressive institution that we still wanted to participate in, I guess.
Before committing to it, we’d asked ourselves why. We knew we wanted to make a commitment to each other, but why state-sanctioned matrimony? We could visit each other in the hospital more easily, should anything happen. Right? Or, like, what if we had a kid and then one of us died? This legal document would probably make that easier, somehow. And health insurance!
Health insurance.
Eleven years ago, I wrote a personal essay about our engagement—really, it was about how I was “supposed to end up alone.”
This was the era of Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough and Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both. My engagement felt like a victory over the narrative that hooking up ruined you for love. I disagreed with that narrative. I also feared that it was true.
In response to my engagement essay, a “red-pilled” manospherian blogger wrote about my journey from “ho to housewife,” as a commenter put it at the time. He documented my “descent into absolute sluttery” via links to a couple personal essays I’d written in my mid-20s about my experiences with hookups. Now, in my late-20s, I was using “the last of [my] fading feminine charms” to ensnare poor Christopher in marriage, he argued.
“To the guy marrying Tracy: RUN AWAY,” he wrote. “Run as hard and as fast as you can before you are legally bound to her.” He also made some predictions: “All that’s needed now is her complaints about how beta boy won’t divide the chores properly, followed by a story of how she’s falling out of love with him, followed by her divorce within the decade.”
Fast forward a decade: still married, love him more than ever, and the equitable division of chores in our household is an essential component of our marital happiness, actually. At the time of that blog post, this is exactly the outcome I expected—and yet there was a self-hating part of me that feared a smidge of truth in this blogger’s character assessment.
Maybe there was no ascent from “sluttery.”
Last week, in the midst of our anniversary, I happened to revisit the work of the sex worker activist Gail Pheterson, who wrote about the division of women into the categories of “wives” and “whores.” She theorized in the 1990s that “whore stigma” was a “social and legal branding of women who are suspected of being or acting like prostitutes.” This stigma is aimed at sex workers, but it “implicitly controls all women,” Pheterson explains. It is punishment for any woman who breaks with “the heterosexual-married-childbearing chain,” through anything from having premarital sex to being queer.
The threat of whore stigma strong-arms so many us into proving our belonging in the “virgin” or “wife” category. This is what Jill Nagle called “the privileged half of the good girl/bad girl binary,” although it’s really only available to certain women (white, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual). Marriage is a key component of that, as Pheterson points out. “Good women (wives and other women assumed to be possessed by individual men) are legitimized by the patriarchal system,” she writes. “Bad women (whores and other women assumed to be ‘loose’ or for hire) are stigmatized.”
Pheterson adds, “The legal difference between marriage and prostitution is a difference between private and public appropriation of women.” As soon as I came across that quote, I texted it to Christopher and wrote: “Happy anniversary bb!” He “hearted” it because he got it—and because, actually, there is some romance in the shared critique of this thing called marriage.
Ten years in, we still sometimes do air-quotes when using the terms “wife” and “husband.” We still occasionally look at each other and go: “Hahaha. Marriage.” There is an “us” within this institution. A laughing, winking, scheming “us.”
And that makes it feel possible, actually.
That’s cute what I just wrote. I believe it and I don’t. It has a strong whiff of neoliberalism in its notion of individual, or coupled, achievement despite broader systemic realities. I have an analysis of it. I question how finding happiness within—despite of—this institution has compromised my politics, softened my edges. Toward the end of my memoir, I wrote:
A relationship can feel like a safe haven, and it can feel like a trap, but neither is freedom. After years of feminist cogitation, I ultimately found security in a foundational institution of women’s protection and oppression. Marriage. Monogamous, heterosexual, procreative marriage.
I continued, “Women’s options are inherently constrained, their choices are not free. Until we change the context, young women will have to struggle to make sense of a world full of punishing contradiction, misdirection, and impossibility.” (There’s that word again: impossible.) Having read my one-star reviews on Goodreads, as one does, I can tell you that readers who did not like my book did not like that my sexual coming-of-age story ended with marriage. Neither do I.
Again: contradiction, misdirection, impossibility.
Quick comment: I love the inherent contradictions of your story. The book was made all the more touching because of the very real and human way that the story bent. We are our contradictions (partly truth and partly fiction)--we contain multitudes. Happy "anniversary".
I went to Duke and was in a writing seminar with one of the young women who was profiled in Unhooked. Certainly there was a lot of hooking up and not a lot of relationships when we were in college, and I hooked up a good bit through my early 20s in law school but my story also ends in marriage- we celebrated 9 years a few weeks ago. The safe haven and trap of marriage quote resonates strongly with me.