"Moderately Bad Men"

     [This piece first appeared at Eternity Road on August 28, 2008 – FWP]

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     This extraordinary bit of whining by Ellen Tien has been getting a fair amount of play in Blogdom:

     I contemplate divorce every day. It tugs on my sleeve each morning when my husband, Will, greets me in his chipper, smug morning-person voice, because after 16 years of waking up together, he still hasn't quite pieced out that I'm not viable before 10 a.m.

     It puts two hands on my forehead and mercilessly presses when he blurts out the exact wrong thing ("Are you excited for your surprise party next Tuesday?"); when he lies to avoid the fight ("What do you mean I left our apartment door open? I never even knew our apartment had a door!"); when he buttons his shirt and jacket into the wrong buttonholes, collars and seams unaligned like a vertical game of dominoes, with possibly a scrap of shirttail zippered into his fly.

     It flicks me, hard, just under the eye when, during a parent-teacher conference, he raises his arm high in the air, scratches his armpit, and then --then! -- absently smells his fingers.

     It slammed into me like a 4,000-pound Volvo station wagon one spring evening four years ago, although I remember it as if it were last year.

     He had dropped me off in front of a restaurant, prior to finding a parking spot. As I crossed in front of the car, he pulled forward, happily smiling back over his left shoulder at some random fascinating bit (a sign with an interesting font, a new scaffolding, a diner that he may or may not have eaten at the week after he graduated from college), and plowed into me. The impact, while not wondrous enough to break bodies 12 ways, was sufficient to bounce me sidewise onto the hood, legs waving in the air like antennae, skirt flung somewhere up around my ears.

     For one whole second, New York City stood stock-still and looked at my underwear.

     As I pounded the windshield with my fist and shouted -- "Will, Will, stop the car!" -- he finally faced forward, blink, blink, blink, trying, yes, truly trying to take it all in. And I heard him ask with mild astonishment, very faintly because windshield glass is surprisingly thick, "What are you doing here?"

     In retrospect, it was an excellent question, a question that I've asked myself from altar to present, both incessantly and occasionally. What am I doing here?

     Don't misunderstand: I would not, could not disparage my marriage (not on a train, not in the rain, not in a house, not with a mouse). After 192 months, Will and I remain if not happily married, then steadily so. Our marital state is Indiana, say, or Connecticut -- some red areas, more blue. Less than bliss, better than disaster. We are arguably, to my wide-ish range of reference, Everycouple.

     Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man, the kind of man who will leave his longboat-sized shoes directly in the flow of our home's traffic so that one day I'll trip over them, break my neck, and die, after which he'll walk home from the morgue, grief-stricken, take off his shoes with a heavy heart, and leave them in the center of the room until they kill the housekeeper. Everyman.

     Still, beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriage -- Everymarriage --runs the silent chyron of divorce. It's the scarlet concept, the closely held contemplation of nearly every woman I know who has children who have been out of diapers for at least two years and a husband who won't be in them for another 30. It's the secret reverie of a demographic that freely discusses postpartum depression, eating disorders, and Ambien dependence (often all in the same sentence) with the plain candor of golden brown toast. In a let-it-all-hang-out culture, this is the given that stays tucked in.

     There's lots more, but this is about all your Curmudgeon can stand. It's your turn, Gentle Reader:

• Do you think it likely that Miss Tien is a stunningly perfect woman, sterling of character and exquisite of manner, who would never upset her husband Will with a poor choice of words or a poorly timed remark?
• Do you envision Will as a neglectful, abusive cad, who confines her to their home, deprives her of all but the bare necessities of life, and barks menacingly at her slightest hint of displeasure? Would you find plausible the suggestion that Will has even worse character flaws and behaviors than the ones Miss Tien has described here, or do you think it likely that she's "shot her wad?"
• Might it be possible that Will has a few criticisms to make of Ellen, but is too much the gentleman and dutiful husband to voice them in public?
• Were Will the writer of this article, and Ellen its subject, would it be received as readily by the Oprahfied audience to whom it was first presented?
• If Will were to sue Ellen for divorce, presenting her rant as evidence of spousal abuse, do you think the court would free him of all obligations to her, or is it more likely that he'd be tied to her by bonds of alimony for years to come?

     But enough about poor Will. Will, by the Gospel According To Ellen Tien, isn't a Very Bad Man, just a Moderately Bad Man: "like every other male I know." Your Curmudgeon doesn't go in for a lot of self-disclosure, but he will say this: if Will's worst faults are on record in the column above, the C.S.O. would trade your Curmudgeon for Will in a heartbeat. She'd probably throw in some cash, a couple of draft picks, and a player to be named later, at that.

     But enough about that benighted woman. It's her shrieky column that matters -- and not because it's particularly unusual of its kind. It's standard fare in Oprahfied Women's America. That's the truly disturbing thing about it.

     Oprahfied Women have been taught, mostly by innuendo and implication, that men are low creatures by nature, that the very best of them barely deserves a woman's attention, much less her respect, and that anything and everything men do for their women, or for women in general, is either a move in an exploitative game or a stroke in a campaign to "keep them oppressed." A fair percentage of American women have internalized that message. Because the sexes need one another, it puts a lot of men in a quandary about how to deal with the women in their lives, and renders a lot of women so badly conflicted that they cannot be happy no matter what they do.

     Whatever happened to the old motto, "To his virtues, be kind; to his faults, a little blind" -- ? Like most good advice, it doesn't really matter whether the advisee is male or female; the "his" pronouns could as easily be "her." We are none of us perfect, at least not in one another's eyes. No, not even your humble Curmudgeon; he snores, procrastinates about the yard work, and is provoked to profanity by the perversity of inanimate objects. (Customer-assembled furniture, anyone?) No marriage can be tolerable if one spouse insists that the other must conform to his standards at every waking moment.

     Yet American women have been fed large doses of Utopianism about romance and the married state. Many have come to believe that it's possible to find a "perfect" man. More, they believe a "perfect" man is their due...that if they don't get their due, they've been cheated and have a right to redress.

     Now and then, a commenter here or elsewhere will extol the superior femininity and agreeability of Asian women. Your Curmudgeon knows a few, and they do impress him. Given the porous state of the borders, American women had better look to their levees; the "coyotes" could as easily import Asian brides as unskilled Mexican laborers.