Happiness in Marriage

There was a bizarre and annoying "Valentine-themed" op-ed in yesterday's Times, somehow accusing "attachment parenting" of causing divorce. I am not a fan of Valentine-themed anything, and it's amazing to me how pundits will try to blame divorce rates and bad marriages on the darnedest things:

With the widespread acceptance of "attachment parenting" - family beds, long-term breast feeding and all the rest - the physical boundaries between parents and children have worn away. Marital romance has dried up. Real intimacy has gone the way of bottle-feeding and playpens. In fact, the whole ideal of marriage as a union of soul mates, friends and lovers that's as essential to a happy family life as, say, unconditional love for the children, has taken a direct hit. And in its place has come the reality of a utilitarian relationship dedicated to staying afloat financially and child-rearing of a sort we tend to associate with frontier marriages, arranged marriages, marriages of convenience - marriages far removed, in time and place, from our lives, our parents' lives and even our grandparents' lives.

The Wikipedia entry on attachment parenting is a bit of a caricature of it -- describing a parenting style in its maximal forms and with all the other cultural choices that are more-or-less associated with it. I would lean more toward the minimal description: raising your children secure in the knowledge that too much love won't hurt them. Lots of parents who "do attachment parenting" are anxious, rigid, and obsessive about the rules they follow, about what they must do for their kids, about, generally, doing everything right. So, for that matter, are lots of other parents. There are all kinds of 'systems' out there, and they do make parents crazy. Lots of families involved in "attachment parenting" end up with a rigid division of labor in which the mother is basically completely responsible for the kids and must be incredibly available to them, and the father is busy at work all the time. So, too, do lots of families who don't "attachment parent". Parental anxiety and preoccupation with their kids is real, and no doubt it does put a real strain on some marriages, but my own observations (anecdotal of course, but I didn't see any hard citations in Ms. Warner's essay, either) lead me to believe that parents become preoccupied with their kids because their marriages aren't so great to begin with, not vice-versa. If a husband works 80-hour weeks and the wife is busy with kiddie activities all the time, or if both work all the time and spend their little spare time in a "quality" way with the kids, then yeah, I'll bet the marriage is going to suffer. And it'll suffer whether the toddlers are still nursing and sleeping in the parents' bed.

Our kid sleeps in our bed. And he's going to be two soon, and he's still nursing. We can't imagine going on a vacation without him. We parent this way not because we think we have to, but because we like it, and it works for us. We laugh when people ask us "But if he's in your bed, how do you have sex?" People who have to ask this are neither especially imaginative nor realistic about how much parents of very young children feel like fucking at 11 pm at night, regardless of where their kid is sleeping. There are other times and places to screw, and we manage just fine, thanks. As for including our kid in most of the stuff we do (um, not talking about sex anymore people, okay!), we do that because, amazingly, we like to hang out with him. We don't plan our lives around doing things we think would be good or fun for him. We just include him in what we're already doing anyway. Last weekend we took him with us to Cambridge to go look at some chairs we were buying from a Portuguese couple who were returning home ("What," I said to them facetiously, "you don't want to stick around here?" "Amazingly,no" they said.). We bought the chairs. We gave the man some money, and he helped us fit the chairs into our car. The kid has not yet stopped talking about this transaction. "Man." he says, pointing at the chairs. "Money." "Car.""Many." "Daddy" And we nod: "Yes, we bought the chairs from the man. We gave him money, and he helped daddy put the chairs in the car. There are six of them." If we spent our weekend days sitting around with other parents waiting for our kids to be done with their playdates, or music classes, or whatever, perhaps we'd feel resentful and like we don't get enough time to ourselves.

We certainly appreciate the time that we do get to spend alone with one another. But that time is not what makes our marriage a "union of soul mates, friends and lovers". I'm not exactly sure what does. Luck, I suspect. Perhaps I sound awfully maudlin myself, but I never expected such happiness in marriage. I never expected marriage at all. Max and I were lucky to meet one another, and luckier still to recognize a good thing when we had it, to continue to recognize this good thing we have together. Our love for our child is not, as Ms. Warner would have it, "sucking the emotional life out of our marriage." On the contrary, it enlarges it. I am sorry for those who have had a different experience with marriage and children. But I don't think that Ms. Warner's unbelievably silly advice will help them. She suggests that such couples "leave work early and go on a date with your grown-up Valentine." Because, if your marriage is sexless, loveless, and utilitarian, obviously, a fancy dinner out in a restaurant where everyone else is also dutifully involved in romantic consumption is definitely going to save it. The best that can be said about such advice is that it is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Valentine's Day, for which we have nothing but scorn.