The Endless Hunt to Make Meaning of Marriage

I was a walking pile of red flags when I started dating my now-husband—and I made sure to point out each and every one to him. I’d just gotten out of a long-term relationship, and my ex was still sleeping on my couch. I’d cheated before, on the ex, years ago. Also, I have a very messy relationship with my mother, which is not entirely my fault but seemed worth mentioning. Telling someone you like all the reasons to not date you might sound counterintuitive, but to me, it was rational: I was trying to control the narrative around any eventual demise. If the relationship went south, I thought, I’d warned him; he would have only himself to blame.

One could, I suppose, argue that this habit of mine is uniquely annoying, but the impulse to create a story out of a relationship—and one’s role within it—is not unusual. People write romance novels and breakup ballads. They publish short stories about when they first realized their marriage was doomed and poems highlighting the absurdity of being married to a psychoanalyst. Throughout The Atlantic’s history, writers have interrogated their marriages (and divorces), and by putting themselves in control of what others hear, they try to make meaning of the life they’ve chosen.

Being a wife in the Army, for instance, requires tying yourself to the travels of your husband, as Beatrice Ayer Patton wrote in 1941. She recalls a friend who, after announcing her engagement to an Army officer, was encouraged not to marry him because “she would merely be the tail of the kite.” But Patton, whose husband was General George S. Patton, argues that the Army wife is crucial to her husband’s successes and failures—by providing key services such as tailoring, and by presenting a good face to all of his colleagues, whom she sees every day. Patton ends the essay with a response from her friend’s fiancé: “How high can a kite soar without its tail?”

In 1905, another woman, who goes unnamed, discovered that in middle age, her marriage had become dull and flat. She is shocked when she meets the new wife of a widower friend, who appears vibrant and youthful despite being about the same age as her. The writer laments: “The first wife worked hard, went without things, saved every penny possible, and then died, and her husband was happier with a new wife, who reaped where the first had sown.” Then the writer has “a revelation”: She just needs to reframe how she sees herself—and behave as if she’s a second wife in a first-wife marriage. Nearly 20 years later, in an essay about becoming the breadwinner in her marriage, the writer Jane Littell mused on the importance of not depending on her husband at all. “The wage-earning wife meets her husband on an equality basis. She is no longer a dependent. She is an equal partner,” Littell wrote in 1924. “The chances for domestic happiness seem greater than in the old-fashioned marriage where a woman could be nothing but what her husband made her.”

But the only thing more important than extolling one’s good choices in a marriage is assigning blame when it ends. Often, in heterosexual marriages, the problem is considered to be both the institution and the men. In 1947, the writer David L. Cohn was frank in assessing the “chief factor” in the country’s “appalling divorce rate”: “The United States is the only country where the husband often is not—and does not want to be—a man, but a Boy. He wants, poor thing, not to be wived but to be mothered.” The idea that wives suffer has endured; writers in 1961 and in 2024 have likened marriage to a form of female captivity.

Although any of those reasons for divorce may be true in the aggregate, diagnosing the issues of any one individual relationship will always be more complex. In a recent review of Haley Mlotek’s memoir, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, the writer Rachel Vorona Cote notes that Mlotek refuses to provide the details of her divorce because she rejects the notion that you can create a narrative around your life. Nobody, Mlotek argues, can fully know their own mind. It’s a conclusion that the writer Burnham Hall might have found relatable in 1924. In an essay debating whether he should grant a divorce to his wife, who wishes to be with a lover, he writes: “I doubt if anyone is ever completely honest with himself in such a situation; but one may keep on trying.”