“I used to think of us as a couple of really bright, attractive, well — liked people,” Seth said softly, at the end of my interview with him, “but the last three years have been tense. When Гт doing an eleven-hour day, Гт sure Гт no fun. When Jessica is bummed out, shes awful to live with.”
But at least, they felt, they had their sex life to hold them together. Both Seth and Jessica complained of lack of sexual interest, but thought it was due mostly to fatigue. In a matter-of-fact way, a way beyond sadness, Jessica added slowly: “I would never consider withholding sex, no matter how angry I am. I think both of us realize that if there’s no sex, there’s no marriage. There’s enough else going wrong with the marriage. If I wasn’t sexual with him, he’d find somebody else and I wouldn’t be surprised at all. I would assume he would and I would move back to Seattle.”
Something had gone terribly wrong in the Steins’ marriage. Did some early emotional deprivation cause each one to be too anxious about their own needs to take care of the other’s? Was Seth too anxious about his self-worth to nurture Jessica, and Jessica too afraid of intimacy? If so, perhaps the Steins would have run into problems regardless of the contradictory pressures of work and family, and regardless of a difference in gender strategy. But Seth nurtured his clients and his ailing father (for whom he had prepared a salt-free lunch each weekday for an entire year). And Jessica was able to develop a close relationship with her psychiatrist and with her friends. The idea of some early psychic injury does not explain why each one expressed their vulnerabilities in this particular way.
Again, perhaps the marriage suffered from a clash of ethnic traditions. Seth Stein came fromVclosely knit, intensely emotional, first-generation Russian-Jewish family. Jessica came from cooler, more restrained, Midwestern Swedish parents who resembled the parents of Diane Keaton in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall. In their book Mixed Blessings, Paul and Rachel Cowan suggest that the Jewish man who marries a Gentile woman often seeks a wife who is less intrusive and controlling than his mother, while a Gentile woman seeks, in her husband, the warmth, intensity, and excitement of upward mobility lacking in her cool and collected father. By middle age, the Cowans suggest, the wife may find her husband full of badly expressed needs and the husband may find his wife cool and detached. Perhaps this happened to the Steins. But I found this pattern between workaholic husbands and professionally ambitious wives who combine other ethnic and religious traditions as well.
A third interpretation—that there was a clash of gender strategies—may tell us more. With regard to the second shift,
Jessica was not a supermom; she had bought herself out of what she could, and cut back her career to do the rest herself Seth didn’t do the “downstairs,” like Evan Holt, nor like Peter Tanagawa give his wife enthusiastic support for her role at home. Seth had joined that group of men at the top of much of the business and professional world, men who are married and heterosexual but to whom women and children are not what’s basic. In a way, Jessica felt that Seth had “died,” like her father.
Disguised by a thin veneer of egalitarian ideology, Seth’s view of his fatherhood was pragmatically adapted to the enormous demands of his career. His egalitarian feeling rules didn’t conflict with underlying feelings; rather the rules themselves felt inconsequential, light. He “should” care about Jessica’s career, but he “couldn’t.” He should want to engage his children emotionally, but he “couldn’t.” The “shoulds” were a diminished part of himself; the “coulds” ruled the day.
To the extent that Seth was involved in his family life, he expected to receive at home and to give at work. Jessica’s gender ideology led her to want Seth to give at home as well as at work. They differed from other couples in the early motives they attached to their gender ideology and in the moves—mainly outward—they made on behalf of them. If at first Seth stayed late at the office in order to become a successful “man,” later he stayed there to avoid conflict at home, all because, the myth went, he was a “hard — driving Type-А guy.” Under the guise of balancing motherhood and career, Jessica had withdrawn somewhat from the children, oriented their frustrations toward Seth, and withdrawn almost totally from Seth.
It is worth asking why Seth and Jessica didn’t sense the potential clash of these “moves” before they married. When Jessica met Seth, in her first year of law school, she was attracted to his look of success. He was a good-looking, surefooted, intense man on the rise. Jessica had that look of success too. Seth saw in her the elegant, beautiful, slightly restrained woman of his own socially mobile dreams.
On the face of it, Seth had quickly adjusted to the prospect of Jessicas career:
There was a very clear contract when we were both students as to what Jessica was about, and why she wasn’t going out with me one weekend. Her exam was more important. There has never been any doubt that Jessica was going to be a professional lady all her life. You knew that some women in law school would drop out for ten years to raise their kids. Not Jessica. Work is her whole life. She’s not interested in an afternoon of tennis. Screw tennis. She’d rather be working.
However, this was not the same Jessica whom Seth imagined would become his wife. He had a secret idea: Jessica had not really meant it. An educated womans commitment to her career, he might have felt, was like an attractive woman’s commitment to her virginity—if a man makes the right moves, she will give it up. The virgin says, “No, no, no.. . yes.” The career girl says over and over, “I’m serious about my career,” but ends up saying, “Really, a family comes first.”
For her part, Jessica ignored the early signs that Seth would put his career ahead of hers. She did not harbor the idea that he would change his mind, but she all along expected potentially contradictory things: that they would mainly rely on his salary, but that he would also be as involved at home as she.
If we see in the Holts, the Tanagawas, and the Steins three still — life portraits of strain in two-job couples, each represents a different kind of myth, and underlying tension. The family myth of the Holts misrepresented the fact that the wife, Nancy, did the second shift. The Tanagawas misrepresented the reason why the wife did it (Peter wasn’t as interested). The Steins misrepresented the facts, again. Officially, Seth wasn’t home: but unofficially Jessica wasn’t either.
A1 three women felt a tension between their gender ideologies and the realities of their marriages. For all three, this tension was exacerbated by the birth of their first child, and became a crisis with their second. In all three cases, the women ended up doing what got done of the second shift.
But in each case the consequences were different for their marital economy of gratitude. In the Holt family, Evan and Nancy appreciated enough other qualities about each other to compensate for their displeasure about the division of labor at home. Except for the issue of Ninas higher salary, the Tanagawas, too, agreed enough to appraise each others gifts in the same light. But the strain in the Stein marriage more completely inhibited their exchange of credit and thanks. Missing this, they gave less love and moved apart. The most strained marriages I found were generally between two people more centered on career than on family, and in dispute over their roles at home. In no other kind of marriage was gratitude so scarce, the terms of its exchange so much the object of dispute, and the marital heartbeat so precariously slow.
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