Hard To Do. Kelli María Korducki
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knowing in our bones that we exist to follow our bliss. Don’t know what your bliss is? Fake it ’til you make it – the late-capitalist mantra that’s arguably the central proverb of contemporary wisdom.
It seems almost retrograde to regard individual relationships as critical pivots in the grand scheme of our self-propelled stories. It’s unlikely you’ll be denied a job – let alone locked up – on account of a domestic partnership not working out, and yet both scenarios have happened to Western women within the past century. As of the 1970s, we no longer have to prove mistreatment in order to obtain a divorce, and we don’t even need to marry in the first place. It’s taken for granted that a majority of us will form multiple romantic partnerships over our lifetimes.
And yet, we agonize over our cultivation of meaningful human connection. We make couple selfies our avatars on Facebook and instagram our friend groups with the zeal of paparazzi. Our intimate freedoms are startlingly new, and they absorb us in exhilarating pursuit. But the basic blueprint of Western partnership – a marriage between two people until one or the other is dead – remains tethered to a time that was not so free, nor so distant. Our grandmothers’ mothers were not likely able to own property, to economically support themselves, or to vote. For my contemporaries plumbing the uneasy depths of semi-young adulthood, the burden of history hangs in balance with the tightly bundled load of our personal needs and desires. The archetype of successful adulthood still rests on finding our ‘other half.’
The person with whom I broke up those years ago was (and is) kind, sweet, smart, and good. The dictionary definition of a mensch, he also made (and, as far as I can guess, continues to make) much more money than I do. I adored his family and knew that, even after the months and years that would inevitably pass, I would continue to miss them; they had become my family, too. It felt cruel that I had been raised with a set of expectations about partnership that would make this terrible outcome also, ironically, the one that was best for everyone.
That gruesome irony is what this book endeavours to unpack. I wanted to get to the bottom of the cultural and economic developments that have enabled women like me to break up with stable and decent partners, or with any partners at all – and why, despite those developments, the decision to stay or go has remained so charged. When did it become so damn difficult to figure out not only what we should want, but what we do want? I wanted to understand where in history the material concerns and emotional ethics of partnership has diverged in the first place – where and how it had become impolite to mention money and love in the same breath, as though their symbiotic relationship isn’t gleefully reinforced by holidays that celebrate consumption or karat counts on rings.
The road to our status quo was paved by history’s haves. Marriage was about the allocation of stuff, and its backstory is a timeline of wealth-preserving demands by white, property-owning members of Western society. In many respects, our love lives continue to be governed on a presumption of heteronormativity, whiteness, and material comforts.
Romantic love in long-term partnership was, itself, invented alongside the market economy. The partner choices we have as women and femmes of any sexual orientation are a direct inheritance of the conditional freedoms we have gained as a by-product of capitalism, made ambiguous by the inequalities that this system continues to reinforce. My generation of women and femmes might be the first with the unlucky privilege to weigh the contradictions of an ideal partnership and choose outside the conventions of shared wisdom. We are, whether we like it or not, pioneers. What do we do with this mantle we’ve inherited?
For those of us who are not straight-leaning, who are not gender-conforming, who have crossed the threshold of middle age in the absence of a partner, this question probably feels a bit dull. The heteronormative rites of middle-and upper-class adulthood are small existential potatoes, all in all. But never before in history have we demanded so much of our significant others, such complex criteria along social, economic, emotional, and sexual lines. To complicate existence even further, the parameters of an ideal life have never been less clear. It’s hard to know what we want when the potential stakes are higher than we might want to admit. And despite the widely accepted notion that personal happiness is paramount above most other things, the liberty to accept this as truth is so new that it isn’t always apparent when we do or don’t have it.
Just as the flaws of past relationships become clear once viewed with the wisdom of hindsight, the developments throughout history that have allowed for men, women, and everyone in between to have some semblance of romantic freedom seem obvious when traced backwards from the now. Nothing is natural. We are a pragmatic species. At the same time, these bread-crumb paths through the forest of our past aren’t necessarily the ones we might have guessed. This book is a forensic investigation of the material conditions that have led us, particularly as women, to the present moment – the political, religious, and economic shifts that have made breaking up possible, yet still so hard to do.
1
Leaving a Good Man™
Several years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the prolonged and heart-wrenching breakup that persisted in destroying my entire life over the course of many months, a friend sent me an essay she thought I should read. She was also in the middle of a breakup – a divorce – and we had met a few years earlier through the partners we were simultaneously losing. As one terrible summer faded into an even bleaker fall, we became Gchat pen pals in an ongoing correspondence of mutual despair.
I was officially single and deeply ashamed. To me, my breakup had constituted a karmic injustice that I could have stopped – against my wonderful former partner, against our respective families, and against the scores of women throughout history who’d been denied the love and respect of a Good Man. My friend told me she looked at this must-read piece from time to time, whenever she was feeling scared about the future. I still wasn’t sure that I might have one.
Go, even though you love him.
Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you.
Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his.
Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him.
Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him.
Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three.
Go, even though you once said you would stay.
Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone.
Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.
Go, even though there is nowhere to go.
Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.
Go, because you want to.
Because wanting to leave is enough.
She copy-pasted the excerpt into the chat window so that I might read it first, a block of beatitudes for the guilty heart. The piece, ‘The Truth That Lives There,’ was actually an entry in an ongoing advice column, answered by a then-anonymous woman addressed only as Dear Sugar.
On the other end were a series of women seeking answers, all with versions of the same problem. ‘Dear Sugar,’ the first wrote, and proceeded to describe her age (twenty-six), her new husband (older; kind and funny), his wedding proposal (like something out of a movie starring Audrey Hepburn). ‘I do love him,’ the woman insisted. ‘And yet … I want to leave but I’m also terrified of hurting my husband, who has been so good to me and who I consider my best friend,’ she pleaded. ‘Sugar, please help me.’ Signed, Playing it Safe.
There were four other letters like it, grouped together. Signed, Standing Still. Signed, Claustrophobic. Signed, Leaving a Marriage. Signed, Trying. ‘Trying is lying,’ my therapist had said, months earlier, when I realized it was over.
Sugar replied to the collective because, as she explained it, their letters told a story complete enough to answer themselves. They brought her back to a painful moment of her own life – ‘the most painful,’ she wrote. She’d