In which we discover that Mybuggery is not gender-specific
We remind our readers that Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Form delivered himself of the comment that [B]y God, D.H. Lawrence was right when had said that there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?
(Rennet, who obviously does not actually listen to the words when he speaks, accepts at once and becomes mired in happy domestic anticipations, bless.)
Apparently, I see, on account of the lady is getting blown up on Twitter, there is a piece in The New York Times containing gems on the subject of Mattermoney such as Marriage requires amnesia, a mute button, a filter on the lens, a damper, some blinders, some bumpers, some ear plugs, a nap.
and (second para of actual article) When encountering my husband, Bill, in our shared habitat, I sometimes experience him as a tangled hill of dirty laundry. “Who left this here?” I ask myself, and then the laundry gets up to fetch itself a cup of coffee.
Apparently he is also given to holding forth at length on his extremely niche field of scholarship while his audience mentally enact that scene from Airplane in which people hang themselves from the luggage rack, throw themselves out of the window, etc.
There used to be a genre, maybe still is, in women's magazines, of the tribulations of Ye Ordinary Commonplace Housewife (dialled up to 11 by Jill Tweedie's Martha in Letters from a Faint-hearted Feminist) as well as what I once defined as the 'making lemonade' genre in which women create hilarity out of their circumstances as an alternative to being borne away screaming in a straitjacket (e.g. The Egg and I).
However, the spouse and any offspring may well not have ever glanced at the publications in which Mummy earned a modium of pin-money/Running Away Fund and to find them after their immediate heyday would have been somewhat of a task, had they even known of their existence. So they may well have gone on in happy ignorance of how Mummy was working off her aggro while keeping her Angel in the House visage turned towards them.
Not so in these days, eh?
We hope that 'the “Ask Polly” advice column, formerly for New York magazine and now on Substack' and the forthcoming book, “Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage”, are remunerative enough to pay for the therapy her children will need and quite possibly the divorce.+
I conclude by saying, if that's marriage, 37 years of Living In Sin has clearly been the way to go.
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