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[kar3ning]

Freak posted this link on his Facebook, but I wanted to elaborate a little bit. I read Sandra Tsing-Loh's piece in the Atlantic about the demise of marriage a while ago. I was annoyed, but couldn't really put my finger on it. Sort of a low-level irked. Then found this article today that's basically a rebuttal. It's certainly funnier than Loh

Comments

[tablesaw]

Quick sleepy thoughts. Read the article but didn't hear the interview.

First, a nitpick. That's not the "passive voice."

Second, there's some gender-gap issues. Loh addresses, indirectly, that's she's not in the Ozzie-and-Harriet mode, because Ozzie and Harriet were her parents. But her article doesn't give any thought to what Ozzie and Harriet's grandchildren (viz. us) are experiencing. Oversight or focus, you make the call.

Third, overall, I'm more sympathetic to Loh's view that sometimes (and perhaps for couples of a certain age) there just isn't any amount of useful work that can be done to salvage the "marriage." More importantly, I'd argue that there's no reason to demand that the narrative be about finding the point at which things could have been fixed.

Fourth, class issues up the wazoo all over these pieces. I feel like I saw that discussed somewhere, but I didn't care enough at the time to remember it.

[angeldye]

she's choking on a might big ass bitter pill there!

[darknessorlight]

I'm sick of marriage bashing too.

I heard a lot of it at school, given divorce cases are a source of work for those in the numbers field.

[dietcokeofevil5]

Yeah, I identified much more with Traister's article than Tsing-Loh's. It seems like Sandra's main problem with her marriage was that they were never around each other (always being gone for work). Hard to sustain a relationship that way. (And the fact that she confesses to not liking men that much in general doesn't help things, I'm sure). Doesn't seem like she's that much into being a decent mother, either, but maybe that's just "comic" exaggeration.

I, too, get tired of the marriage-bashing. While, yes, there are marriages not worth saving, there are also many that can stay happy for a long period of time. Lifetimes? Maybe. Decades? Certainly.

[thefreak]

Could you ask her to please stop the Loh Down on Science. For us?