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Kay Heimowitz
For a long time, folk wisdom held that men were the losers in the marriage bargain. Men had to be “tied down” or “trapped” into marriage—hence the familiar pop-culture image of a groom at the altar, sweating as though he were in the early stages of Ebola. “Take my wife” jokes were a staple of mass entertainment. Literary heavyweights like John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth excelled at highbrow depictions of restless bourgeois husbands stumbling through midlife crises.
Today, it’s middle-aged women who are bailing out of wedlock—shedding their husbands, their youthful illusions, and their inhibitions. Divorce, according to a 2024 Washington Post headline, is how they are “finally finding happiness.” Some of us may remember when divorcées were regarded with quiet pity—presumed to have been abandoned for a younger secretary, a nurse, or perhaps a golfing buddy’s soon-to-be ex. Loneliness was considered their inevitable fate; no desirable man, it was thought, would want a woman “of that age.” Now, a wave of writers has discovered divorce to be an extremely liberating development for women.
Note the curious context in which this cultural turn is taking place. Marriage and, by extension, birth rates are hovering near record lows. Gen Z—the next cohort poised for adulthood—ranks marriage and children near the bottom of its life priorities. Family life is a mess. A closer look at the self-actualized divorcée opens a window onto the fractured state of relations between the sexes in a twenty-first-century, postnormative America.
The new divorce story stars a professional-class woman, somewhere between 36 and 50, who leaves her husband and sets out to reinvent her life. Her “divorce journey” often involves lots of intiimate relations and self-discovery—sometimes insightful, often not. This theme is all over Hollywood in movies, entertainment and literature.
A superficial reading of this new subgenre might describe it as the second coming of Second Wave feminism. Second Wavers saw marriage as a kind of domestic Attica; Betty Friedan famously likened her own middle-class home to a “comfortable concentration camp.” While men were free to pursue ambition and self-actualization, women were stuck with the deadening, low-status work of dishwashing and child-rearing.
Many of the new divorce stories suggest that not much has changed. Men may spend more time with the kids than their fathers did, but they still treat wives as default housekeepers and nannies. Lenz’s memoir begins with her return from a professional conference to her husband of 11 years and their two children—only to be greeted by an overflowing bag of garbage in the breakfast nook. Her husband had “forgotten” to take it to the outside bins. “I’d been raised in a world that said women could do anything . . . but here I was defined by children and housework,” she fumes as she cleans up the mess.
But a careful reading reveals a deeper, more opaque frustration with marriage itself. The ex-wives in question experience marriage not as abuse or betrayal but as an impediment to full selfhood. None of the husbands is unfaithful, violent, or cruel. Several of the writers don’t even have children; they’re free from the demands of parenthood. No, the problem is more existential. The very label “wife,” the structure of “the marriage plot” that links adult identity to family formation, seems to cloud their sense of who they are. It’s as though being a wife and being a person are incompatible roles. Jones, a mother of three, struggles—with limited success—to articulate the emotions that led to her divorce. “I could be myself and be a mother, but I could not be myself and a wife,” she writes. “I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t,” she continues. “But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself.”
Bazelon strikes a similar note in her Times essay about ending her marriage: “I was in love with my husband when we got divorced. I just loved myself more.” Her divorce, she concludes, was an act of “radical self-love.” Set aside the question of whether a man could proclaim his “radical self-love” and still make it through the slush pile at a major publication; the answer is self-evident. What’s striking in Bazelon’s account is the implication that she can truly discover herself only in isolation—that her full self can emerge only through complete autonomy.
The language of self-love saturates these writings. The very human longing for deep connection is increasingly framed as a failure of commitment to personal freedom. “Walking away is a strength,” writes Lenz. Jamison, newly divorced and author of Splinters, admits that she was reluctant to confess that she still wanted a partner: “I was embarrassed not to be enough for myself,” she writes. Her shame speaks to the power of a prevailing cultural ideal of the modern woman: cool, self-contained, and indifferent to norms and obligations.
Then there is Miranda July, a divorced, bisexual, perimenopausal mother of a “nonbinary” child and a “semi-famous” California artist—much like the heroine of her cheekily titled 2024 novel All Fours. It would be hard to overstate the excitement that the book generated: award nominations, book clubs, Substack posts, confessional essays, group texts, and, yes, actual divorces. Articles with headlines like “Getting Divorced with Miranda July” and “The Women Rethinking Marriage and Family Life Because of Miranda July” make a strong case that the nation’s divorce lawyers and marriage therapists should put the writer on retainer. July’s narrator dismisses the classic midlife crisis as something for “silly men in red convertibles,” but she herself now deserves the title “guru of the unhappy middle-aged married woman.”
That middle-aged women can be possessed by intense sexual desire should be obvious. That this desire can threaten—or end—a marriage, just as it has for legions of Bill Clintons and Woody Allens, should be just as clear. But while men of that ilk were widely seen as tawdry, self-indulgent cads, judgment seems beside the point here. Sex is imbued with quasi-mystical force, bringing spiritual meaning to some of these women’s lives. Silcoff finds in her postdivorce sex life “a total new world of openness, exploration, interest, comfort in myself, self-knowledge and even, I daresay, wisdom.”
The proud self-sovereignty and sexual joy of the new divorce narrative has turned the old image of the sad, lonely divorcée on its head. “Congratulations!” Lenz instructs us to say to a woman headed to her lawyer’s office. “You have the courage to fight for your life!” This cultural vibe shift has awakened American animal spirits, with entrepreneurs cashing in on the trend—hawking DIVORCED! necklaces, EX-WIFEY T-shirts, and I DON’T cake-toppers for profit. The soon-to-be-liberated can sign up for divorce registries to replace the toaster that their ex laid claim to—and plan a party while they’re at it. The Divorce Party Handbook (2016) offers “fun, creative ideas for menus, games, invitations, and gifts.” But be warned, says Arag Legal, a “legal protection insurance” company: it’s best to avoid serving hard liquor—“not only for safety reasons, but to keep [guests] from deterring from [sic] the positive nature of the party.”
Parties! Freedom! Loyal and always available friends! It’s enough to make even the most stoic married woman glance at the balding man across the kitchen table, muttering at his phone, and entertain dark thoughts. But there are several reasons to think twice before diving into one of these chronicles—let alone bingeing a Sorcerer’s Apprentice parade of them, as your correspondent did—and rushing to order decorations for your divorce party.
For one thing, marital misery, while clearly the experience of these individual writers (and, yes, many others), doesn’t align with what we know about the general population. The best survey evidence suggests that married men and married women are, on average, both happier than their unmarried counterparts, even in middle age. Also absent from the story is the fact that the large majority of women who divorce aren’t Brooklyn journalists; they’re blue-collar wives from places like Arkansas and Wyoming. In fact, women with college degrees—like the ones writing these essays—are significantly less likely to divorce than those without a degree. Over the last several decades, marriage rates have plummeted for less educated women, while their college-educated peers have seen no such decline.
That points to an often overlooked truth about these tales: they unfold against a backdrop of affluence, privilege, and professional success. With a nod to my Manhattan Institute colleague Rob Henderson, you might even call them “luxury belief” divorces—celebrated by the well-off, who are insulated from the harsher consequences of marriage breakdown.
Historically, marriage evolved as a survival mechanism in a precarious world—especially for women and children. In wealthy societies, many of those dangers have been defanged, though not for everyone. None of the women in these stories is flying private, and some briefly fret over insurance bills or day-care costs. But those worries soon give way to book contracts, lecture gigs, and enough disposable income for restaurants, vacations, and stylish home decor.
The authors’ good fortune is evident in their Instagram photos and author headshots. They look great but certainly in a way their grandmothers would have found miraculous at the threshold of menopause. First-world nutrition, hormone therapy, advanced dentistry, personal trainers, yoga studios, expert colorists, multifocal contacts, Botox—all play a role in the story of luxury belief divorce. “Before the Machine Age, men wore out at forty,” a best-selling journalist observed in 1933 about a new midlife malaise appearing among bourgeois men. Before Big Pharma and a gazillion-dollar fitness industry, women were drained by 45.
Another reason to doubt whether these particular ex-wives reflect a broader social reality is that many seem oddly unaware of the past few decades. It’s as if girlbosses, powerful women like Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, and the normalization of single motherhood never happened. Today, more than at any point in history, women can be selective about partners, plan their futures mindfully, or remain single and have children on their own. Yet we find Lenz asking, in all seriousness: “Why are men able to have careers and families when career-minded women are threatening to the union?” Stranger still is Joanna Biggs’s search for role models in the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot: true rebels in eras when social norms and the marriage plot were rigidly enforced by a cohesive moral consensus. A well-cushioned woman in the twenty-first century—when divorcées and single mothers appear in every issue of Vogue—can write her own ticket.
Still, while some women may come across as entitled or overly eager to play the victim card, it would be a mistake to dismiss the deeper—or, rather, systemic—issues underlying many domestic labor complaints, especially among mothers. For obvious reasons, a script dating back to the Stone Age put mothers in charge of caring for infants. Because women were tied to the home, they typically handled domestic tasks like laundry, cooking, and nearby foraging. While residential arrangements varied—and elite women often outsourced child care (usually to other women)—stereotypical “women’s work” has dominated for most of human history.
That is—metaphorically speaking—until yesterday. Technology and science have largely tamed the conditions that shaped traditional domestic roles, to women’s great benefit. But those advances have also created a real, perhaps irresolvable, conflict. As middle-class women earned degrees and entered the white-collar workforce, the norms governing the division of labor no longer held. A novelty emerged: Who now handles the early feedings, laundry, grocery runs, and school drop-offs? Who cleans the gutters or mows the lawn? There are no standard answers; everything is up for negotiation. Lacking a shared script, couples must draft their own domestic contracts, a task requiring foresight, self-awareness, communication, and trust. Those traits are not always abundant in either sex.
Now add to this disheartening predicament the pull of creative work—the aspiration of all the ex-wives in question. In her 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill describes the greedy demands of writing as the “art monster,” which thrives on solitude, a rare commodity when sharing space with a husband and children. Many male writers have avoided marriage altogether, fearing that it would smother their artistic obsessions. Flaubert—whose character Emma Bovary embodies the “bourgeois disillusionment” that haunts our well-off literary divorcées—famously resolved to be “steady and well-ordered” in life so that he could be “fierce and original” in his work. Vladimir Nabokov managed only by finding a woman willing to bring steadiness and order to her genius child-husband. “He didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him,” Offill notes.
Modern couples enter this fragile marital ecosystem with a shared understanding that divorce is always an option—not an easy one, perhaps, but hardly a catastrophe. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the period when divorce was becoming normalized, roughly four in ten Gen Xers had divorced parents. They don’t recall a time when marital breakups were rare and weighty. Jamison’s father married three times; his third was officiated by her mother—his first wife. Mlotek recalls her grandmother casually referring to her “husbands,” which she found “glamorous” as a child. Her mother was a divorce mediator, a skill set that came in handy when she split from Mlotek’s father. “My entire world was divorce,” Mlotek writes, matter-of-factly.
Easy, widespread divorce—Mlotek calls her book No Fault—offers benefits to some men and women, and most Americans view the policy favorably. But the “airiness” with which Mlotek approaches her own wedding reveals one of its unintended consequences. Mlotek’s boss notes that she married in a “desultory” way; she herself wonders why she even made the decision. The answer: not because she longed for a bond that she could commit to, or because she wanted to build a family, or even to offer future children a stable connection to their father. It wasn’t for the sake of a party, a leatherbound photo album, or a meaningful rite of passage. She married because, as a Canadian citizen, she needed a green card to stay in the United States. That she had so little stake in the marriage is, in the end, no fault of hers. It’s the culture she lives in.
The literary ex-wives club, Lenz told the New York Times, is “trying to upend narratives—or create new ones” that would overthrow the traditional “marriage plot.” But what kind of narrative do they have in mind? July tells her Substack readers that the ideal length of a romantic relationship is “whatever feels right.” Biggs speculates that the partnership between George Henry Lewes and George Eliot may have been “happier perhaps because they weren’t yoked together by law,” as if the daily choice to stay together conferred more meaning—this, even as several of the unmarried couples she profiles experience plenty of misery without the benefit, or burden, of legal recognition. Jamison admits that she still wants love but also says that she “want[s] to believe in another way of living—one that didn’t lean so adamantly, so insistently toward romance.”
A crucial omission reveals everything that’s wrong with these alternative narratives. Children—and their fathers—play a minor role, if any, in their thinking. The facts of human reproduction led cultures across time and geography to converge on the idea of binding together the two people who created a child. Marriage helped solve problems that every society faced: it tied kinship networks together; fostered group cohesion; reduced jealousy and violence; and, by connecting a child to two parents, increased the odds of that child’s survival. What it never promised, and never could, was freedom from what Freud called “ordinary unhappiness.”
