Can [this] marriage be saved?

[lolaraincoat]

I forget which women's magazine of my childhood, back in the early 1970s, used to run a monthly column titled "Can This Marriage be Saved?" but I remember reading it while my mother did the grocery shopping, and I remember that the answer was always yes! it can be saved! with just a little more feminine self-abnegation! etc. Even as a cranky

Comments

[elgoose]

I know I was thinking the same thing.

It was Ladies' Home Journal. Alas that I know this. The other thing that I remember about that magazine is that the ads in the back always included one for breast enhancing products of one sort or another (maybe a cream?) and some type of weight-loss-encouraging candy called Ayds.

My mind, the steel trap.

[lolaraincoat]

Oh, what a fabulous brain you have! Yes it was Ladies Hoe Journal! and I remember those ads!

Your memory wins!

[tiferet]

That's a great typo, Ladies' Hoe Journal.

I remember it too.

Oh yes. I know I was thinking what you were thinking, and while I have been married (3 times) I have never been married long. I bail when it starts to seriously suck.

[ellid]

Mark Eden Bust Developing Cream.

[cordelia_v]

Um. Not quite yet.

The article is based on statistics that define "adult women" as age 15 and up. So, all those teenagers living with their parents (or in dorms) still count. But to me, a 16 year old living at home isn't quite the same thing (in terms of showing a social change) as a 40 year old woman who has chosen to remain single.

Also, you'd really have to take out those adult women who are living, by choice, with another woman. I mean, lesbians are invisible here. And yet, again, not quite the same thing.

So, if you deduct all teenage women (and I think you should) and all women who are happily partnered (to another woman) . . . you're still not at a majority of adult women living without a male spouse. Not yet.

Also. Not to rain on anything (because I share many of your sentiments), but many many of the adult women I know who have remained single? Did not do so by choice, at all. The pressure on men to marry is much less than it used to be.

[lolaraincoat]

The article is based on statistics that define "adult women" as age 15 and up. So, all those teenagers living with their parents (or in dorms) still count. But to me, a 16 year old living at home isn't quite the same thing (in terms of showing a social change) as a 40 year old woman who has chosen to remain single.I'm not sure what you mean by "still count" here. The statistic that changed is % of women over age 15 living with a man to whom they are married. Women over 15 who are not living with a man to whom they are married are, obviously, not all single; that was true in 1950 and it is true now. It's not a very satisfactory binary, but the Times is at least making an apples-to-apples comparison and probably the best one possible, given how the census divvies up the data and the kinds of questions it was asking in 1950

[tekalynn]

I loved that column. Usually I thought the husband was more to blame, but I got a kick out of reading all the dysfunctions (on both sides) so easily fixed in the therapist's airy handwave in the last two paragraphs.

I preferred them snarling and dysfunctional. More fun to read.

[lolaraincoat]

Definitely more fun to read the "before" part than the "after" portrait!

[iibnf]

I'm glad we don't have to marry any more. Even if we can only earn 80% of a male wage, there's no way in hell I'd ever want to sell myself into domestic prostitution. Horrible. The only way I could ever get married would be if we had seperate residences, living with someone, having to do all the 'wife' things for them, would make me nuts. I'd sure make his life a misery, too.

[lolaraincoat]

Do you know, that 80% figure is no longer true in the US? It's dropped in recent years, back down to something like 77% -- or so I read in some newspaper the other day.

And yet, yes, marriage, Just Say No, that's what I say. Despite living quite happily with a man and doing all the damn dishes.

[goseaward]

Someone else (catrinella?) also made the point that this figure includes women in prison--a number which has, also, certainly gone up from 1950. Still interesting, though.

My parents apparently used to worry/wonder when I was younger because I'd cheerfully chatter about my future house and my future job and my future children with no words about my future husband...:D

But, yeah. The more weddings I go to the more I feel marriage is just...weird. I mean, I know weddings ≠ marriage, but the whole thing seems to be a collection of behaviors which have no meaning now other than "everybody else does it," and that just doesn't bode well for the institution as a whole for me.

[goseaward]

Also, dude, seriously, I forgot the main part of my comment, which was: just a few weeks ago at the gyno's office I read a women's magazine with the "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" column. No shit.

and that reminds me of a true-life story that really happened to me

[lolaraincoat]

Years ago when we were first dating and both living in a very small town, Fishwhistle took me to an appointment in a nearby city for an outpatient gyn procedure. While waiting for me, he picked up a copy of Cosmo in which he encountered an article titled, no kidding, "Set His Thighs on Fire! Here's How!"

He still asks me about it once in a while -- "Lola," he says, shyly, "you wouldn't ever set my thighs on fire, would you?"

"Not even if you asked me to," I assure him. "It's probably not even legal here."

And the moral of the story is, magazines can ruin your relationship.