Ideas - Why some women are saying 'I don't' to unequal marriages

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Marriage is on the decline in Canada. And in heterosexual unions, it’s women who more often initiate divorce, and wait longer to remarry. Why is marriage not working for women? *This episode originally aired on Feb. 21, 2024.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. I love you.

I love you. Just shut up. Just shut up. You had me at hello. You had me at hello. You had me at hello. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. As you wish. Oh, my sweet Wesley. What have I done?

There's a reason romantic comedies often end with a wedding. We want our heroine to remain forever quirky and sweet, and her man to stay tuned in and in love. I just need 30 seconds with this woman. Nobody wants to watch the charmed couple descend into resentment and anger. But wherever you are in the world, that's where I belong. But in the real world, the story after the rom-com Fade to Black

is getting really fraught. They met great. I love rain. Essays and books, podcasts and columns are talking about how marriage between men and women isn't doing too well. House, car, boy, girl, puppy, kitty. The poor bastard's never had a chance.

Women aren't just tired. They're mad as hell, and they don't want to take it anymore. When I watch you eat, when I look at you lately, I just want to smash your face in. Smash my face. Yes. This is not live, right? No, no, it's recorded.

You're facing. Smash my face. Yes. This is not live, right? No, no. It's recorded. Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa wants to know what's up at the heart of women's discontent with men and marriage. And to see if there's any way marriage can redeem itself. We're calling this episode Marriage and the Modern Woman.

As you speak live. I just wanted to make sure. As you speak live. I've been married more than half my life. In my friend group, that's a norm. We didn't think of marriage as a maybe. Like a lot of women of my age and background, Gen X daughters of immigrants, marriage was an expectation. Of course we'd get married. Of course we'd have children.

Daughter or son, it's what you did. I knew marriage was hard work. My mom had virtually zero leisure time. She worked full-time outside the home and inside the home. And that was true for all my mom's friends. Sure, there was always that one uncle, a friend of my dad's or the husband of one of my mom's friends, who shared in maintaining the household. He cooked, did dishes, shopped for groceries.

Heck, he'd even buy feminine hygiene products. But he was a unicorn. None of us really thought he was real. Or maybe we just thought a man like that couldn't be real for us. Despite all this, opting out of marriage never crossed our minds. That, we were told, would be selfish. Fast forward 30-ish years. I have a lot of women in my life, including two adult daughters.

Most of my close friends have grown daughters too. I work with a number of very smart young women. I'm also chronically online and pay a lot of attention to what women are talking about. And I've felt a great disturbance in the marriage force. One thing I hear over and over, it just ain't worth the trouble. The number of women on TikTok and Instagram talking about marital discontent are legion. They're resentful about the mental load and the second shift of work inside the home. They also talk about weaponized incompetence,

husbands acting clueless so their wives will just give up and do the chores themselves. These women say it's easier to be alone than to be in an institution, heterosexual marriage, that asks more of them than their male partners. Of course, these conversations aren't new. My grandmother used to say the same thing. So did my mother-in-law and my mom. But there's an intensity to these conversations that I haven't seen before. And they seem to resonate across race, class, and ethnicity. So I figured, what better way to talk about what's going on than to invite two of my close friends. My name is Farishtah Hashemi.

My name is Sobia Sayed. And take stock. Say it and take stock. So, firstly, when I first proposed this idea to you, and I said, this is what I want to do, and I want you and Sophie to come in and have this conversation with me, and you responded with, that sounds horrible. Can you tell me why it sounds horrible? Maybe I wasn't in such a good mood that day and I was thinking horrible things about marriage. I was thinking, what can I possibly say that's positive? No.

Yeah, it just feels like it's a very weighty subject and it affects a lot of people. And you have to be careful what you say. Those were my first thoughts. And I was like, why would I want to get into this? Maybe in a little private conversation where I know people are holding confidences and I can say whatever I want. But to say things publicly feels heavy. I mean, that's part of the challenge, right? It's the challenge of talking about a system within which we exist.

But that is also so intensely personal that it's all sort of wrapped up in each other, right? You know, one of the questions that people are asking is that, you know, all of these adjustments that you make, whether it's about how do you do conflict, how do you figure out family rituals, that these are not questions that people really want to grapple with anymore. Because the benefit of marriage is outweighed by the cost of marriage, of that particular kind of union, which is steeped in a long history of tradition and has a very religious sensibility to it, even if you're not a religious person. And those things, by design, have a particular understanding of the role of men and the role of women. And sometimes we can't help but to get caught up in that. What do you think about that? Pass that to you. Well, for sure, I think, what do I think about that? If you're asking the question if marriage is needed these days, I would say

it isn't. Yeah, I would say it's not. For those traditional purposes of what marriage was about, you know, that you have to get married from a cultural or religious point of view, that it's an expectation. I actually don't think there's anything that dictates like why people should get married anymore. And there's a lot of that happening within our society, I think within our kids even. And I've heard this from the younger generation is why do we need to get married? You know, and I'm talking about South Asian young women actually are the ones asking this question is why do we need to get married? But I'm more of a traditionalist that way. You know, I have three kids. They're all adults. By the time I was their age, I had like several kids already. They are interested

in finding a relationship, but it's not pressing on them. And it's certainly not pressing on them from me. I mean, the kind of pressure that I was under, which was not unlike, I mean, it was exactly the same kind of pressure all of my friends were under to get married, to settle down. And this started when we were like in our, you know, in our late teens, maybe even 20. And part of that is cultural. Part of that is the immigrant experience. But I think so many of the things that the three of us talk about when we're together is not unlike exactly the kinds of things that women in other demographics are talking about. There's a kind of universalism to it. So what that leads me to think about is this idea that

marriage in and of itself presents a challenge to women today who are raised up with this idea that our ambition matters, our choices matter, our desires matter for ourselves as individuals. But maybe marriage as an institution just isn't compatible with women's individual ambition. It isn't about my marriage or your marriage or your marriage. It is the institution itself. And so that's why a lot of younger women are saying, listen, I know it's going to be a choice between what I want and what we want. So I'm going to stick with what I want. Yeah, I feel that too, that I have three kids as well, you know, around the age that they should be thinking about marriage and they just don't, it's not a priority.

I think they would be interested at some point in having a relationship, maybe, but it's not a priority. Their careers are a priority. Their friends are a priority. Their own lives seem to be more and much more important. And marriage feels, it seems like it for them, it's kind of like, if it happens, it happens. It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. Yeah. It's kind of like, I don't know. It's very, I think even when I was growing up, marriage was not really something, I mean, everybody thought I would get married at some point. It wasn't really a lot of

pressure to get married, but it was kind of more of an expected. Definitely it was going to happen soon. But for them, it just seems like, yeah. And I find that interesting because I guess they feel fulfilled through their friendships and their careers and their relationships because if they really wanted it, wouldn't they chase it down? But they don't. Is that a problem? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe that's why they are not keen because they feel like they will need to make sacrifices because, I mean, kids learn from what they see, right? Not what we tell them. So maybe what they're looking at in the relationships around them and they're thinking

that's too much of a sacrifice. I don't want to do that. I'd rather be my own person and do what I want. Yeah. See, and I think it may be because they just haven't found the right person, right? Like that's how I see it. But you're also like a super romantic. I am. I am. I am. And I, yes, I am. I'll just leave it there. I am. I always find my cynicism crashing up against your romance. I'm like, Sylvia's got such a beautiful worldview and here I am.

It's all dark and smoky. No, but I honestly feel that, you know, they will find their person. And when they do, those things that they think that they may have to sacrifice or the word sacrifice won't be that negative word anymore. Because I think right now, the way we talk about sacrificing sometimes is there's a negative connotation to it that you have to give up something or something about you or something that you love. But when you truly do it for a person who you love, it's not a sacrifice. So they will not see it as that. And I'm sure when they find the right person, they'll be like, okay, this person is worth it.

Whatever that may be, this person is worth it. That's very romantic. I do. That's very romantic. I truly believe that. I want to light a scented candle right now. I truly believe that. I don't even know if my kids believe that. I want to light a scented candle right now. I truly believe that. I don't even know if my kids believe that. Really?

Yeah. It's not like they say, oh, yeah, mom, I'll get married one day when I find the right person. They just roll their eyes when I say stuff like that. They're not letting on to me that they have any romanticism in them. The response to that that I think my mother and maybe your mothers also is that marriage is always a work in them. The response to that, that I think my mother and maybe your mothers also, was that marriage is always a work in progress. It's hard work, it's hard work, it's hard work. But going back to what you talked about, that we emulate what we see around us. And for me growing up, what I always saw was that the hard work was coming from my mom,

right? I always say, if my mom had the opportunity, she'd be running IBM. Like, you know, just the discipline, the sort of the foresight, all of those amazing things. And this isn't to rag on their marriage. Their marriage is what they wanted it to be. But from my perspective, this is what I would think. I would think, there's no way I could do that. Like, and I don't want to. It's not even about could I. It's like, I didn't want to. And I suspect to some degree, my daughters look at my marriage and think, I don't want to do that. And maybe that's also the way of the world. But this whole idea of this particular institution, is it in and of itself amenable to the feminist ideal? The ideal that women have choice and women should be living a life that is one of self-actualization. This idea that women

should be able to have it all, which is a slogan we kind of all grew up with. You know, we're all kids of the 70s and 80s, and we grew up with that. And it was the promise of feminism that you can have it all. And not only can you, you should want to have it all. And then that crashes against the reality of being in a relationship that in many ways does ask more from women. And maybe men will say something completely different. But in my experience, in my own, but also the experience of my friends, it does seem to be asking more from women. And I don't know if it's a kind of institution

that's amenable to change that is different from what it could be just the individuals involved, like just finding a guy who's the guy, right? Or finding the woman who's the woman. The institution itself is not something that is worth it for a lot of women. It's not. I honestly think for the younger generation, I think it's not worth it. They would rather be individuals and work on themselves and be great in what they do instead of being married, or at least instead of being married now at a younger age, maybe later on in their life. Once they've become who they want to be and reached whatever goals they've set for themselves. Maybe at that point, they'll say, okay, now there's room for someone else to come in. I think nowadays, women have that choice. And I think that's fine. Hi, my name is Lisa Strohschein. I'm a professor in sociology at the University of Alberta.

And you study marriage. I study marriage. Yes, I do. I decided to reach out to Lisa and find out, with maybe a bit more rigor, if the big picture of marriage in Canada mirrored the things I've been talking about with my friends. So, is marriage in trouble? That depends on who you ask, right? So again, I would say that we often get confronted with headlines that try to convince us that marriage is on to find relationships, and it isn't necessarily marriage. But what we can say is that the ways in which people, the people seeking relationships is exactly the same today as it was 100 years ago. So if we look at 1921 and we ask, what are the proportion of people over the age of 15 who are in either a married or a cohabiting relationship, so that is in a couple relationship, the answer would be 58%. So fast forward to today, 2021,

the evidence suggests that it's 57% of those over the age of 15 who are either in a married or cohabiting relationship. So it's still important for people to find intimacy, to find a partner that they can settle down with, but it's also the case that not everybody is choosing marriage as the route to finding that relationship. What happened in September last year? He was very drunk, and he pushed me around. This is a divorce court. It's the end of the line for 900,000 Americans a year.

A line that begins in courtship and ends in the courthouse. You know, in the 1970s, feminists would say things like there was a his and her marriage, right? And the idea behind that was to suggest that women were essentially at a time where women were not really in the labor market, and so that they were only staying at home raising the children. And therefore, you know, if their family life was not good, they would be, you know, their life would be much rougher. they would be, you know, their life would be much rougher. Whereas for men, right, not only did they have all the comforts of home, someone who was looking after hearth and home, but also had the opportunity to be out in the labor market and fulfilling their career goals. The idea is, right, is that marriage benefited men much more than it did so for women. But again, that's a 1970s reality. Today,

both men and women need to work in order for the household to be at a level above, you know, a reasonable standard of living in order to put food on the table. Life is expensive these days. And so for that reason, women work to the same extent as men do. And so this idea of a his and her marriage, men and women have opportunities to feel fulfilled in both the relationships at home and also in the workplace. The broader cultural discourse, and it's always hard to kind of gauge cultural conversations because it also depends on where you're looking and who you're listening to. But certainly, I think that there's been a marked rise in women's, whether there's been a marked rise in women's actual anger or resentment about the quality of their marriage, but there's definitely been a rise in the conversation about it, the women effectively do feel there is still a his and her marriage, that even though both are pursuing material well-being together, that inside the home, the domestic space still exists as a his and hers, and that the hers demands far more than his does.

How do you see that in terms of the work that you're doing? Yes, that's absolutely true. So while we are in a different space than we were in the 1970s, it's also the case that we really haven't caught up to the modern era. And so when we look at the gender division of labor, it is clear to see that while men are doing far more today than they did in the past, the bulk of the work still falls on women. So despite that narrowing gender gap in the gender division of labor, it's women who are still caring for kids and doing the household chores to a far greater extent than are men. And certainly then there is that cause for resentment

among women who feel that men aren't pulling their fair share of the load. And so how do you think about that as a scholar of marriage when you see this kind of rise in this articulation that marriage is still an unequal endeavor? And some going as far as to say that marriage itself is a system that is inherently unequal, that it's going to demand something more of women by default than it's demanding of men.

How do you think about that in terms of the things that you're studying and how you've seen that play out over history? Well, in actual fact, right, the gender division of labor is still unequal, whether you're in a married relationship or a cohabiting relationship. So at the end of the day, the choice is not whether, you know, marriage is such a bad thing or marriage is such a good thing, like it could solve problems or not solve problems. I think that's kind of extraneous. We do live in a world where people often try to moralize and say, you know, the solution to the problems of living is to, you know, make people or incentivize people to get married. And, you know, that's really not the solution.

I think what we need to think about is how we get to a stage where there's a more gender equal relationship between men and women. And the problem is, is that we live in a system, a society where the structures around men and women make it difficult for that to happen. There's all kinds of ways, right, in which women have the expectation that they're the ones who are going to step in, right, do the child care, take care of sick children, for example, when they need to be picked up from school, the pressures are really still falling on women and that requires a social change. It's not necessarily that marriage in and of itself has a role to play here. Most women are raised to believe their true role is that of wife and mother, but some women are questioning whether this is so. Is this the true role? Do I have to get married? Do I have to get pregnant? Do I have a

choice? There are a variety of trends in the conversation that women are having about marriage, but I suppose by extension, it can also apply to cohabitation. You know, everything from this idea of like, we should return to domesticity and traditionalism, all the way to the idea that marriage itself is systemically not good for women and they should just absolutely opt out. As a scholar, how are you contextualizing these various ways of pushing back against the state of marriage or the state of, I guess, cohabitation? I think what it reflects is that people are increasingly feeling free to choose the kinds of relationships that they want. And so it makes sense to us, you know, as family demographers to think that on one hand,

you're going to have women expressing the idea that they want this traditional relationship. They want someone who's going to take care of them, and they don't mind being economically dependent on their spouse or partner. And on the other hand, right, it also makes sense that you're going to have women who are going to express the exact opposite viewpoint that in fact, they want as much freedom as possible, and they are going to demand that their partners do as much work as they do. I wonder if some of that is also a reflection of, I mean, possibly a reflection of a lack of solutions to problems. I mean, you've alluded to some of it before, you know, marriage is a prescription for, you know, whatever ails you, you know, alienation or difficult economic circumstances. Hey,

just get married and then you'll have kind of a built-in partner to alleviate your loneliness. You'll have a built-in partner to kind of help you with the financial stuff. You'll all be better off. We see some of that messaging coming out in books, in lectures. We see some of it coming out in media through various, you know, typically conservative commentators, especially in the United States. What do you make of that? Like, is that something that we've seen before in terms of this kind of broader social messaging or incentivizing to, you know, couple up and marry up? Yeah, so we can look back to the young George Bush, George Bush Jr., when he became president, one of the policies that he tried to implement in his

country was this idea of marriage promotion. And it was the idea that marriage is good for you, and marriage will make you be healthier, happier, wealthier. And so because of that, there was this push to encourage people to get married and to make it more difficult for them to leave marriages that they might be unhappy in. And, you know, 20 years later, the net result of that, all of the policies that were implemented during the time that he was president, have come to naught. Because in the United States, the marriage rate is even lower than it was. Divorces are just as high as they were. And families are just as fragile as they were when he first implemented them. So there are times where people in Canada try to pick up on that messaging, but it doesn't

go so far. And I think that's because I think the recognition that there are structural issues that make a difference that matter more than people's individual choices about whether to get married or not have to be seen in the context, again, of those structural constraints. So allowing people to pursue the kinds of lives that they want. You know, one of the things that we haven't talked about yet is about having kids. So we know that the fertility rate in this country has now plummeted to its lowest levels ever. It's at 1.3 children per woman. That's far below replacement. And what we're becoming is a country that essentially is defined as having ultra low fertility. And there's concern, right, that in the future that we're going to fall into a fertility trap. We're going to be unable to boost the population size. We're not going to grow as a country. And instead, we're going to contract,

which is a really undesirable situation, unless women start choosing to have more children. And so again, what are the kinds of contexts that can help women to decide to get married, to choose a partner, and then to have children. All of those things, right, tend to be uncertain in this country. And I can point out things like the housing market, right? So it's really hard to get into a relationship if you can't even live together with your partner. And even if you are living together with your partner, and you're talking about whether you should have children, you know that your housing situation is likely to be changed. But young couples today are having a really hard time trying to get into the housing market to purchase that

first house that's going to give them the kind of security that they might want in order to, you know, decide to have children or even have more children. in order to, you know, decide to have children or even have more children. I want to come back to the question of sort of this emotional space that marriage is in. I'm wondering what you're seeing on the men's side, because I don't hear a similar resentment coming from men. What I actually hear from men is more bewilderment at women's resentment. So that's an interesting question. So, you know, you can think about, you know, the incel movement, right? The involuntary celibate movement, which is about men who feel rage towards women for not giving them the kinds of things that

they want, right? Sexual fulfillment, right? They're just angry at women. So I think there is anger there on the side of men. It just doesn't get expressed in the same way, right? So in relationships, right, men often are bewildered by the fact that women complain about the lack of work that they do, because of course, they feel like they're doing lots of work and they have up to their game. They're doing more than they ever have. But of course, they feel like they're doing lots of work, and they have up to their game, they're doing more than they ever have. But of course, you know, and I would point again to, you know, the kind of the structural constraints that it's very difficult to, you know, make modern life work, there are huge time pressures on both men and women. And so navigating these things can be very difficult. And when you factor in, you know, this kind of resentment on the part of women, it does leave men feeling bewildered.

I wonder if the problem isn't marriage, it's modernity. Well, I think that's kind of what I would agree with. idea that, you know, we live in a time where people expect to be fulfilled, to be able to pursue the life goals that they want, are able to create their own identities. These things become hard to do when, you know, reality comes to roost. This is your life. Everything you own is beautiful perfectly constructed ideally manufactured everything you possess feels thinks and responds as if you had it made just for you. Isn't it time you had the ultimate imperfection? For the man who has everything.

The Stepford Wives. For the man who has everything. The Stepford Wives. Make one. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities.

Short Sighted from CBC's Personally, available now. His and her's marriage comes out of his and her hers points of view, experiences, culture. There's always been some iteration of this. Remember the 1992 book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus? But there is actual data to back up the idea that men's and women's views on a range of topics are moving further apart. Hello, I'm Dr. Alice Evans. I'm a senior lecturer at King's College London. So I'm writing a book on the great gender divergence, which is about how the entire world has become more gender equal and why some societies are more gender equal than others.

Alice Evans' work shows that a strong job-creating economy is a driver of gender equality, which makes sense. When men and women are doing well together, demonstrating equal competence, building friendships and forging solidarity, they'll also criticize unfairness and inequality together. But times right now are tough. We're being squeezed from all sides.

We have fewer resources, less help, and the cost of living keeps going up. Everything feels precarious. And all that can turn solidarity into competition. We are seeing across much of Europe, especially in Southern Europe, when men are really struggling with temporary jobs, still living at home with their parents, really having a tough time. Those kinds of people tend to vote for more populist parties, whether it's the far right in Spain, Greece, Italy, and also express what we call hostile sexism.

And hostile sexism isn't confined to Southern Europe, of course. We see it all over, and it results in women and men moving even further apart. One thing that researchers have shown is that there's a rise, especially among young people, of zero-sum mentalities. So people who grow up during a period of economic mobility where they don't see progress, they tend to see the world as zero sum, that your success is my loss. So other people's advances are a threat. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you lean right or left.

It can be on both sides, like progressives have it and also conservatives. But increasingly, you know, when people feel that sense of competition, resentment, that's where the social media filter bubbles and the cultural entrepreneurs come in to blame not just women, but also foreigners. This zero-sum thinking and blaming women has men and women trending in opposite directions when it comes to political and cultural questions. Women are more sensitive to gender and racial

inequality. They also have more liberal attitudes about immigration. We don't see that uptick in progressive values among men. So why don't we see that uptick? Because men have historically dominated the labour market, they may feel more entitled to status. So a fundamental feature of patriarchy is that men feel that they are high status. So they expect to have that kind of dominance, whereas women are not so insulted or feel aggrieved when they're not getting the status they deserve, because we've never had that high status. So I call this patriarchal nostalgia. Add to that nostalgia, algorithms, filter bubbles, echo chambers, and cultural influencers, and you'll soon have a recipe for political division. You know, debate is so important for understanding the truth. It's only by sharing ideas and debating

them and listening to different perspectives that we can improve our understanding. If people are getting shut into these little cocoons where we're all being deluded, then no one can, you know, become aware of differences and start thinking more critically about their prior beliefs. Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa explores this fraught territory in her documentary, Marriage and the Modern Woman. My name is Liz Lenz. I am a journalist and author. I write the newsletter Men Yell at Me about personhood and politics in red state America. And I am also the author of This American Ex-Wife. Tell me about This American Ex-Wife. That's coming out pretty soon. Tell me what it's about.

It is a book that talks about my own marriage and also examines the gender dynamics of marriage in our modern era. But my argument is that marriage, like any other political system, is a political system. It's based on inherent inequality and the unpaid labor of women. And so I'm talking about how we can argue for our freedoms in our personal lives and find equality in our relationships. So we'll dig in a little bit more. Can all of this, this freedom and liberation and personhood happen inside of marriage? I think you can have good relationships in a bad system, but I fundamentally think the way that marriage is practiced and the way that it is treated, just like on a systemic level, makes it really hard to have an equal partnership. But I do believe you can have good relationships in a bad system, but that requires a lot of heavy lifting. And I think there are other ways to look at marriage and look at relationships than just this one way.

So you've come to this issue through your own marriage, and a lot of your writing is autobiographical. How did you make that jump thinking about marriage as a personal endeavor, as an individual endeavor, to really looking at this larger system? So I was married for 12 years to a very good man, right? Like to the kind of person that everybody says you should get married to. So this is not like a villain story, right? We're not like coming out at the end being like, well, it didn't work because he was so terrible. And we went into our marriage thinking it would be a marriage of equals. And then somewhere along the line, you know, we had two children. And I realized that my career was on the back burner when it didn't have to be. I mean, his sure wasn't. And, and it not only was

my career on the back burner, but like all that equality we had been trying to work so hard for was just not present. You know, I was the primary caretaker for our two young children. I was trying to juggle that with a bunch of like low paying jobs while I was trying to write my first book. You know, the only reason I was able to do some of this was because we hired a housekeeper, right? And like, meanwhile, he's able to get up every day, grab his little lunch that I packed him and head on off to work. And so I broke. I eventually left that marriage. And but it wasn't until I got out. And, and I was on the other side, and I was a single mother. And I had thought, you know, that single motherhood was this like, disaster of a situation to be in, you know, that single motherhood was this like disaster of a situation to be in,

you know, that like every cultural depiction of single mothers, you know, makes them look stressed out, a little sweaty, always looking for a man to help save them. And I kind of thought that's where I would be. So I didn't divorce thinking like, oh, this is going to be great. I divorced because I was so miserable that I saw no other way out. And then I got to the other side and I was like, wait a minute, hold on a second. I have more free time now than I ever had before. My house is cleaner. Like I have more time to work. I'm suddenly making more money because now I can work in a way that I'd never been able to before. And I am a journalist. So I started researching, right? I was like, what's happening here? even if they are the primary caretakers of their children, have more free time, more leisure time, more time to sleep than their married counterparts. And it was a shock to my system to realize that like, I had been sold on this idea of partnership, but it was really a trap,

right? Like it was actually like, it was a place where I was doing more work. And then, you know, there's like the mental and emotional labor of like that relationship too. And so when I got to the other side, I started researching and realizing, oh, this is a systemic problem. This isn't a personal problem. And then the pandemic hit. And then, you know, we, and then I think as a culture, we started having these conversations about the ways in which we built society on the backs of women's unpaid labor. And so that's how I came to the topic. And so, I mean, a lot of people will say, and maybe reasonably, that any relationship is only as good as the two people that are willing to make it good. Just like marriage, just like relationships with our

families of origin or our friends, it's only as good as the commitment of the two people involved. But you're saying that the institution itself is not amenable to this kind of equality. institution itself is not amenable to this kind of equality. No, and I think that, you know, we normalize the misery of women in these relationships, right? So we like normalize the misery of women and wives, especially in motherhood, although I think a lot of the rage of motherhood is a rage of wifedom you know that we like translate onto the children but like our culture just presumes the wife as the primary laborer in a relationship and it and and so i think that like when you, that's just the system of marriage. And historically, marriage is a political and legal system built on the loss of a woman's rights.

It's built on the laws of coverture. So can you break that down a little bit, the institution itself? What are you seeing about the institution that, as you've put it, really is predicated on women giving up their rights? Well, child care is the biggest one. It's so unaffordable and hard to access. And that becomes a wife's responsibility. And why does it become the wife's responsibility? Because of the pay gap, right? So when couples sit down and they say, well, you earn less, so you should take the hit in your work. Well, you don't earn less by accident. And also there's a lot of great research that points to women are primed to think of their

careers as more flexible. Even if a woman is a lawyer and her husband's a doctor, she'll say her career is more flexible, but flip it. She's the doctor, he's the lawyer. She'll still say her career is more flexible. So it's both legally and culturally where we have primed women to sacrifice themselves onto this pyre of marriage. If you think about it, statistically, women are more likely to do hourly wage jobs, jobs that are not tied to healthcare or benefits or paid sick leave or anything like that, right? And so you put that into a marriage, right? And then it's like, then she becomes reliant upon a husband for those benefits for that relief. And it's about like seeding your autonomy.

And so you're forcing, you're economically forcing people into marriages that then it's hard to get out of because by the way, divorce is really hard to access. It's easier for a 16 yearold to get married in some places than it is for a 42-year-old woman to get divorced. Something that I think has shifted is the intensity of these conversations. Women are just done. They just don't have it in them anymore to say, well, maybe I need to work a little bit harder. Maybe I just need to give up a little bit more, be a little bit more flexible. It's really not working.

And, you know, I see this among young women. I see this among older women. Granted, there's probably a bit of a, you know, self-selection in terms of whom I'm around. But what do you make of this? Like, what do you make of this ramping up of this intensity around this conversation? I think there's a lot of things that's happening. When the economy is hard, it's harder to get those things that make marriage a little easier. It's harder to access the therapy. It's harder to pay for the therapy, the house cleaners that maybe you hire to compensate for your partner's lack of wiping the counters. In the pandemic,

for your partner's lack of wiping the counters. Like in the pandemic, people weren't able to like rely on their families in the same ways that they were. And so all of a sudden, all those support systems were cut and you're face-to-face with that one person who's supposed to love you and be your partner in this. And they're walking into their office,

shutting the door and letting you take care of Zoom homeschool while also doing your schoolwork while also making dinner, right? And so I think that there is something happening in our culture where women, where if we were able to ignore the inequality before because of economic well-being and all these kinds of things, it's really, really hard to ignore now. And something about pandemic has taught us like we only have this one wild and precious life. And it could be taken from us at any moment. And why would you want to spend it training somebody to care for you? Right? Like, I would just rather go hang out

with my friends who already care for me without being forced to be like, no, you should ask me how my day was. We've normalized female misery and there's a whole industry, right? Like there's a whole capitalist enterprises based around women not feeling so bad in their marriages. There are self-help books, there's scented candles, there's the whole self-care industry. I'll tell you, I stopped spending so much money on lotions once I got a divorce because I didn't need to feel good about myself because I didn't feel bad about myself anymore. And so I always joke like the scented candle industry would go out of business if women were allowed to be happy. You know, a lot of people listening to this

are going to say, you know, listen, marriage, it's always been tough, but building something together is tough. The mission is not for the faint of heart and that marriage requires a sacrifice, a compromise, and that it's something that doesn't work with the individualistic culture that we're all surrounded by. And you have to go outside of yourself in order to please other people so that we can all be happy together. But I sense that that's not going to be your response. Listen, I grew up Baptist. I've heard that before. First of all, I don't think it has to be that hard. And I think I used to think it was that hard because I'd never seen a happy couple. I think it's, I mean, if a listener is saying like, oh, you know, this is just what you got to do.

And I would say like, think of like thinking your mind, do you know any like truly happy couples? And if you do like ask the wife, like, but like then ask the wife, but you know, and I think, you know, so I had this idea in my mind, I mean, I was married for 12 years and, and, and that's what I had was like, you just work hard, you sacrifice. But then at some point I started thinking, wait, who's working hard? Because it's not, we are working hard. It's I, Because it's not we are working hard. It's I. I am working hard.

I'm setting up the date nights. I'm hiring the babysitter. I'm calling the marriage therapist. I'm reading the self-help books about how to communicate with him, right? Like, I'm giving up my career to make this a priority. And at some point, I was like, when I think in our society, when we say, oh, marriage is just hard. You just have to work hard. My immediate question is, who are you asking to work hard here? Because it's always the wife. And if, again, if your idea of marriage is predicated on one partner working really, really hard while another partner occasionally vacuums

the rug, then that's not a partnership. That's servitude. What do you think needs to change about marriage to make it something that's more amenable to what young people want? Maybe the living arrangements of a marriage. Live separately? For real? We get married and live separately and just come together on the weekends. You know, we do our own thing in the sense of not when we say our own thing, like it's the career and all of that. What's that Stevie Wonder song? Part-time lover. Yes. There you go.

Well, it's like a lot of, like if you're a faculty member or if you, you know, a lot of people have jobs in different countries or different parts of the world. in different countries or different parts of the world. And if one of them is not willing to sacrifice or if they both value their careers as much as the other one and they're willing to do this, then sure, why not? Yeah. And yet here we are, people that have been married at least 66% of our lives. Yep. And chosen to stay in it for a variety of reasons.

I mean, often, you know, when things are challenging, often it comes down to, but think of the children. But there is obvious, I mean, I don't know, is it habit? Is it momentum? Is it the inertia of marriage? For me, you know, I have a lot of professional ambition. And because my professional ambitions developed at the same time as I got married and I had kids, my professional ambitions were very much shaped by the fact of my day-to-day responsibilities. And I often think about what would that ambition, because that ambition itself hasn't been quelled, But what's changed is the workability of following through on that ambition. It would require me to essentially put myself first constantly at all

times. And that's not something that I'm willing to do. And so maybe that's just about who I am. And that's not actually a problem with being married or being someone's mom. That's just who I am. And I just have to reconcile myself to this, that I'm not that person who was so ambitious that I could make those sacrifices. I'm this other person who likes to think that they have all these ambitions, but I'm actually more tempered about what I want. I think a lot of my life choices that I've made have been based on my role as a mother, my role as a wife, my role as a daughter, a daughter-in-law, for sure. Does that bother you?

Does it bother me? I think it may have at one point. I don't think it does anymore. If I think back, I made those choices for the right reasons, and I'm happy I made those choices. There was a time that it did bother me. Not anymore. I've come to terms with those choices. I feel like I really wanted to have children, and for me that was more important to me almost than marriage, is the children. I feel like that's focused my life. I don't feel like I'm a very ambitious person. I never, like for me, the kids and having kids and

raising kids was what I really wanted to do. And I put a lot of focus and emphasis on that. And I think I parented very intensely. And so now I'm exhausted. And so once it was done, it was done. So I'm, I am kind of doing my own thing now, but not in an ambitious way, get ahead with careers, just like relaxing and hanging out with friends and traveling and stuff like that. But for me, really, kids was the most important thing. Because you were on an academic tenure track. Yeah. Well, I was. Yeah, I could have

proceeded more along the academic path if I'd wanted to, but I had children, and that's what I wanted to focus on. And so that's what I did focus on. Is romantic love enough reason to get married? It's enough reason to get married and for the fun of it, but not to have children. I know this is radio, but the look on your face is priceless. Sorry, what did you say? I was going to say it's enough of a reason to get married for the fun of it. Like, I think marriage can also be like, sure, get married.

It's not a big deal. Just don't have children. Like, that, I think, is your big commitment in life is having children. Getting married, it doesn't feel as much of a commitment. Why else would you? Wealth? No, I'm kidding. Family honor? I wouldn't say. Why else would you get married? I think it's enough of a reason to give it a shot, but you better know it might not last. But you can't tell a nice young couple that, right? They're madly in love and

we're back here going, oh, babe, you don't know what's coming. You've been listening to Marriage and the Modern Woman, produced by Nahid Mustafa. Thank you to all of our guests. My name is Farishtah Hashemi. My name is Sobia Syed. Hi, my name is Lisa Strohschein. I'm a professor in sociology at the University of Alberta. My name is Liz Lenz. I am a journalist and author. is Liz Lenz. I am a journalist and author. Hello, I'm Dr. Alice Evans. I'm a senior lecturer at King's College London. If you want to check out more of her work on gender divergence,

visit ggd.world. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. Thank you. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.