Dimensions
158 x 236 x 30mm
Pamela Haig's transgressive thesis is this: Our ideas about marriage no longer work in the post-romantic age in which we find ourselves. Some of us have established old-school romantic marriages and these may work just fine but a significant number of people are living in what the author calls the "half-hearted marriage." These couples are mired in marriages that are low-conflict and even ostensibly fine on the surface but they are not what either partner would call happy. Neither miserable nor fulfilled, these spouses ask themselves routinely, "is this all there is?" This kind of marriage is not unusual; in fact, it is shockingly common, even prevalent, among couples in their 30s, 40s, 50's, particularly when children are involved. Yet this reality is not something we talk about, not until now.
As Haig explains, in our pro-marriage "settle for good enough" age, spouses hide this melancholy, or they dismiss it as whining, or they let their friends dismiss it as a selfish desire for more than anyone should want.
Cutting against the grain, this book takes the melancholy seriously, and posits that perhaps a little selfishness isn't such a bad thing, even if you're married. It digs beneath to surface to understand why we end up discontented. Some melancholy is timeless - the half-hearted marriage you always have with you. Some of it is specific to stressful times in a marriage's life cycle, and that, too, is timeless. Some of the melancholy, however, comes out of the cultural moment in which we find ourselves.
The research for this book was eclectic and quirky. It entailed covert ops such as joining an online affair-finding site, taking out a personals ad in the New York Review of Books to hear an unvarnished view from would-be cheaters, attending a "wedding merchants" convention and doing a great deal of eavesdropping, in addition to formal interviews with women and men - sometimes face to face, sometimes through email correspondence, all of this reported professionally and with a sense of humour. It also involved some personal contemplation and Haag weaves her own story and her own marriage issues into the mix.
And while not all less-than-joyous couples will take steps to reinvent the institution in their own lives, reading about what is happening on the frontlines and letting in some of the breezes of change, can make a difference at home. More significantly, it makes for a mesmerizing and sometimes salacious read.
