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Over the next week he hand-delivered a birch-bark note to me in my mailbox every day, and halfway through that week we started fucking and didn’t stop for almost fifteen years.
Nothing but mothering and housewifery. I felt as if I’d let my car drift slowly off the road and into a snowbank. The airbag popped out. In big pink letters it said, Congratulations! You’re forty years old and completely financially dependent on your husband!
More than any sexual scenario by far, I fantasized about buying a house, building up our savings, paying off my husband’s school loans and tax debt from the years before we were married, and making regular payments to our retirement accounts.
But qualified women aren’t likable; likable women aren’t qualified. The only way to get the job is to be ten times better than the best man and likable, which means willing to absorb any amount of misogyny in any form from anyone with a smile on your face, forever.
You must be attractive but not too attractive; men don’t want to look at an unattractive woman all day long, but they won’t feel comfortable working with a woman much more attractive than their own wives. If you marry a man or have children you will automatically be perceived as not committed enough to the job, while married men with children will be perceived as even more committed, with the assumption that their wives will manage all domestic responsibilities, including child-rearing. Finally, assume no allies, since the other women are competing with you for the few token positions
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I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.
John and I both caught the child’s cold. John stayed in bed for two days; I took the new kitten to the vet and bought groceries and did dishes and laundry and planned all the meals and took the child to school and so on. I took one nap but otherwise kept everything up. And that is a mother’s cold.
I decided not to initiate interaction with John and respond minimally to his initiations. That’s how we’d avoid conflict. My marriage took on the color of sleet.
So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, workaholic, narcissistic bully with middlebrow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought.
Romance is nothing but a cheap craft-store decoration made to sanitize a desire to fuck.
It’s time to stop finding deficits endearing, Marni said.
