WHAT MUMS REALLY WANT
Forgotten when you last had sex? Argue all the time? Will Pavia meets the wife who went to extreme lengths — sessions with an FBI negotiator and an $800-a-pop therapist — to save her marriage.
Over the past year or so, quite a lot of women have told me that they are cross. They’re successful women; they’ve written a book or starred in a film and I’m interviewing them and asking them about society, groping around for some larger theme. This is when they would say the thing about women feeling angry. Sometimes I assumed they meant a righteous anger over wage inequality, or boardroom sexism, or America’s struggle to elect a female president. But it felt much more personal than that.
Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City, put it most plainly. “My sense is that women are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with men, and that men really don’t have a clue,” she said. “And in the sort of conversations when someone doesn’t feel like they’re being interviewed or whatever, I’d say, ‘You must be so happy you’re married,’ [and they would say], ‘No, let me tell you something: I hate my husband. I hate him all the time.’”
Well, it just so happens that there is a book that might help with this. The book is called How
Not To Hate Your Husband After Kids, by Jancee Dunn. It’s that rare kind of book — excruciatingly revealing about what’s really going on in many middle-class marriages.
The problem, it turns out, is simple. Men are not doing enough at home. We are better than our fathers. We believe in feminism and equal pay and equality in the workplace. It’s just that we are not very good at applying those principles to real life.
Hence the anger. A generation of women was led to expect more. In the playground, Dunn sometimes hears mothers discussing theoretical scenarios in which they must choose between saving the life of their husband or one of their kids. “It is never a real question; women would always save their child,” she says. The real question is why it comes up so often. “It is partly a way to reinforce that you would do anything for your child,” says Dunn. It’s not that mothers would like to see their husbands fall from a high bridge. They just like to consider the idea.
Dunn is 50 and has the kind of regular features that will get you on television. She was once a presenter on an MTV channel; she has also been a writer for Rolling Stone and for Oprah Winfrey’s
O Magazine, an interviewer of actors and rock stars.
She lives with her husband of 16 years, another writer named Tom Vanderbilt, and their 6-year-old daughter, Sylvie, in an apartment in a converted church in Brooklyn. Their home is extremely neat and well-organised. When I arrive, one evening mid-week, Tom takes Sylvie out to a nearby park and Dunn and I sit down to talk about the time that she first became really furious with him.
The fights began a few weeks after Sylvie arrived, although things really went south a year later. “I looked around and I realised that I really was kind of doing everything,” she says. “The cooking, the cleaning, the laundry and most of the basic childcare. He didn’t seem capable of changing a nappy.”
The night before I meet Dunn, I make the mistake of leaving the husband-hating book on our table, where my wife begins reading it. She quickly becomes enraged by Vanderbilt.
“Who does he think he is?” she asks. I’m at the sink, doing the dishes. Every so often, as I load the drying rack, I hear my wife exclaim at something Vanderbilt has done. She recites the stories of his worst offences.
Dunn looks after Sylvie all day but asks Vanderbilt to take her for one hour while she interviews Jennifer Hudson on the phone for a magazine. “One single hour,” says my wife.
During that hour, while Dunn is in the midst of this interview, Sylvie interrupts to say she needs the loo. They are potty-training her so it’s really urgent, but Vanderbilt has not noticed because he is playing chess on his phone.
“If he were my husband that phone would have gone down the toilet a long time ago,” my wife says.
Yeah, I bet, I say, as I load the dish rack. She returns to Vanderbilt’s crimes. He gets up late; he plays football on a Saturday morning; he goes out whenever he wants. “After they had a kid, he took up long-distance cycling!” she says.
DUNN QUOTES a sociologist named Michael Kimmel, of Stony Brook University in New York, who is director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities. Kimmel says men select the fun childcare duties. “Dad takes the kids to the park on Saturday mornings to play soccer and Mum cleans the breakfast dishes, makes the beds, does the laundry and makes lunch.”
“I can’t even look at my husband’s Instagram account, because it makes me jealous,” says Dunn. I tell her I suspect she is exaggerating, to make her book more dramatic. “Did you see the bikes upstairs?” she asks. Yes, I did. Two sleek-looking racing bikes. “There’s a doorway there that his surfboards are going into, because he’s taken up surfing. The fact that his life did not change one iota after Sylvie [was born] really got on my nerves,” she says. Dunn thinks she was partly to blame. As a celebrity interviewer, she would learn everything about her subject, until, “I knew the name of their dog,” she says. “I threw myself into motherhood the way I did with all my jobs.” There was the initial shock of it; then a feeling of: “Oh, okay, I’ve got this,” she says. “I just took it to an extreme where I shut Tom out and I could do everything better myself. Not true — he does many things better. “I was surprised at that sort of ingrained traditionalism that even I had,” she says. And she felt herself inadvertently passing on the same lessons to their daughter. “I realised how many speeches I gave to my daughter about how girls rule and you can do anything, you know?” she says. But, “She said it all the time. ‘You do all the boring jobs.’ Because I was like a stage hand. If we would go to the beach, I was the one bringing the sandwiches and setting up the beach towels while they went and frolicked. This was my own martyrdom also. My words meant nothing and my actions meant everything. That was passing it on.”
Before I’d pitched up at her house, Dunn had been talking with a friend who has a high-powered job, but couldn’t help feeling that her husband’s job mattered more. “I probably had a little of that too,” she says. “There is a darker fear, the fear of being a pain in the arse ... Some darkness that’s carried over from earlier generations. That fear of having a big mouth.”
She developed “a little bit of tunnel vision, about feeling oppressed all the time”, she says. “That was the narrative that I kept sticking to over and over again.”
She found herself shouting at her husband, using “terms that had not crossed my lips since I was a New Jersey teen in the 80s”, while he retreated, confused. Their daughter, Sylvie, would tell her not to shout at Daddy.
“We were at loggerheads. He was shutting me out. He didn’t want to talk about it; he didn’t want to deal with it. I think he was just waiting for me to calm down, you know?” she says.
She told Vanderbilt she wondered if they should get divorced, a suggestion that stunned him. Apparently this is a common dynamic: most divorces, for couples over the age of 40, are initiated by women, and a sizeable proportion of the men say they didn’t see it coming.
Although America’s divorce rate has remained stable since the 80s, it has doubled among the over-50s and one cause of this mid-life divorce epidemic appears to be housework. In her book, Dunn quotes a sociologist named Scott Coltrane, who observes that “one of the biggest shifts in recent years is that many women will simply not put up with partners who don’t contribute at home”.
Faced with this prognosis, Vandebilt agreed to marriage counselling. He had thought of this as something couples did when they were already doomed and I did too — I’ve been surprised, lately, by how many of my friends in apparently contented relationships are doing it.
Dunn and Vanderbilt went to see a terrifying sounding man in Boston named Terry Real. Unhappy couples fly to his clinic from all over the country for a thoroughly unpleasant talking-to which costs $800 an hour.
Real gave Dunn a media discount, but it still cost them US$2500. A relative pointed out that