What if some of history’s most fascinating people didn’t need better marriages — they needed permission not to marry? In this re-release of a fun, historically rich Solo classic, Mary Dahm and Peter McGraw discuss people who probably shouldn’t have married, using figures like Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to reveal how marriage became the expected escalator into adulthood, respectability, and belonging.
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Listen to Episode #269 here
People Who Shouldn’t Have Married (Again)
Challenging the Marriage Prescription
Welcome back. What if some of history’s most fascinating people didn’t need better marriages? They needed permission not to marry. In this re-release of a fun, historically, rich Solo classic, I speak with Mary Dahm about people who probably shouldn’t have married. The episode uses figures like Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to expose a larger cultural lesson. For much of history, marriage was not just promoted. It was prescribed, expected and treated as the necessary escalator into adulthood, respectability and belonging. As you know, that is not the case anymore fellow Solos. I hope you enjoy it. Whether it’s your first time or second time hearing it. Cheers.
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Our guest is Mary Dahm. Mary is a writer, English teacher and previous guests from episode 19, Write Your Way Out. Welcome back, Mary.
Thank you.
This episode came from an idea that we had. We were discussing how many female writers, potential careers were cut short by marriage. It came up with this loose idea for a episode about people who should not have married. People who have married but should not have done so.
Not all female writers. You’ll be surprised by some of the people.
It’s not all female writers.
Mostly the first one.
The idea was that there was a time because when women got married, they had to take care of a home, raise children, and give up any aspirations they had. That’s where this got started, but then it morphed into this idea. As I like to say, I’m not anti-marriage. I just think it’s over prescribed. That when most people do it, there has to be a subset of people who probably shouldn’t be doing it. I thought it would be fun to try to highlight some of those people through history who may have been better off remaining solo.
It’s subjective. These are my opinions. If it’s a person in history, all you have to go off of is their writings, and letters. The evidence you have from their lives based on other people.
Did you do some research for this?
One of the people is from one of my favorite nonfiction books of all time. I just know it well. I didn’t have to do much research. I went back to sections of the book that I had already taken notes on and then I did. There are all people I already knew and I did some additional research.
The premise is these are people throughout history who may have been better off remaining solo.
I would say another interesting way to put it is, if they were alive, when being solo was more acceptable that perhaps they would be solo. They would not marry now but at their time, they didn’t have the choice to not marry.
That’s fair thing. For example, podcasts didn’t exist in the 18th century.
These are mostly these are 19th century and 20th.
Podcast didn’t exist in the 19th century but they did. There wouldn’t be one called SOLO – The Single Person’s Guide to a Remarkable Life, but now there could be.
I would say the 19th century version of podcasts were lecture circuits. Public intellectuals would go around oratory. They would do these rail tours around the country. There was such a thing as public speech and people listening to that. That’s how people got new and progressive and interesting ideas. The anti-slavery movement emerged out of a lot of those lectures by Emerson. People had access to new and interesting ideas that are now spread by podcast. I wouldn’t say it was the medium. It was the fact that just marriage was such a part of society. It was an alternate path.
There was no one on the lecture circuit talking about this.
Although, I would say slavery was a bigger problem. That’s good that they were talking about that instead.
I’m glad that one got tackled, so then we could open up some time for this one. There’s one people that I have on my potential list. I have a loose list. You have a realist.
I have a realist. You have a shit list.
I just wrote down a few ideas.
For context, I have a Word document that is color-coded and about 2,000 words long. Pete has yellow legal pad with doctors handwriting that I can’t read.
That’s exactly right. Why don’t you start with your numbers as number your one person.
Abraham Lincoln’s Depressive Realism
This is my number one and I hope I don’t go on for too long. This is a very interesting one. For a little context, this is from a book called Lincoln’s Melancholy. Mostly this is from that book by Joshua Wolf Shenk. The premise of this book is it’s more about mental illness than it is about marriage. It’s the idea that Abraham Lincoln was not the president he was, despite of his depression. He was the president he was because of his depression.
He was able to see things in a certain way and truly see accurately how bad the Civil War would be when other people were optimistic. There’s a reason we remember Abraham Lincoln the way that we do. He stood outside of his time, almost. He was such a free thinker. He almost seemed immune to the norms of the period that he lived in.
The premise of this book, not having read it, but knowing what I know about depression. One of the things about depression is that depressed people are often much more realistic in their thinking. They don’t have the natural optimism bias that a lot of people have.
There’s a term for that. It’s called depressive realism. Shank’s basic argument is, “An optimist is a good leader in times of peace. A pessimist is a good leader in times of crisis.”
I’ve heard about this with like Churchill.
Churchill was bipolar.
These leaders who have some issues with mental illness, sometimes can thrive in times of chaos.
I don’t want to get off track. That’s the premise of the book. This marriage thing is a relatively small part of it, but it just stood out to me. To talk about this, we have to talk about Lincoln’s time. Talking about the fact that Lincoln was such a depressive, this was in sharp contrast to the idealized sentimental. I would say, sappy as fuck version of marriage at the time. People would do things. If their spouse died, they would put a lock of hair at a locket and wear it forever because they knew that they would be with them in the afterlife forever.
Before that, pretty much through all of history, people had a much more practical view of marriage. Marriage was initially amongst like hunter-gatherer groups. It was just a way to divide labor and help people live more cooperatively and expand families so that you had in laws. It was good to have a lot of bigger families because society was so based on sharing. Later, it was a way to consolidate money and power, especially for the rich.
There was this huge shift that is still influencing. The way we view marriage now that happened in the late 1700s and then in the Victorian era, especially, which was like 1830s through the end of the 19th century. It was when this shift happened where people began to marry for love more at higher rates. People viewed their partner not to serve a practical purpose but that they were emotional, spiritual and financial partners. The idea of the soulmate essentially emerged during this time right directly during the time of Abraham Lincoln’s coming of age.
You can imagine this extremely negative, extremely gloomy, and extremely pessimistic person. Abraham Lincoln’s generation were coming of age during the 1830s and that was right when this changed started. Lincoln’s contemporaries described him as gloomy and extremely pessimistic. As a young man, he was suicidal. He had a suicidal crisis. Somebody like that with this idea of marriage as being this idealized spiritually fulfilling, sort of transcendent state, as someone who’s a depressive realist didn’t sit with him.
I want to make sure I understand this. It sounds like what you’re saying is, prior to this time marriage was this utilitarian function. You need it in terms of survival. It had to do with families uniting in some way.
The specific function it served varied widely throughout history but all of them were pretty utilitarian. With hunter-gatherers, it was pretty much labor purposes. Later, it was to consolidate wealth, but it was always some very practical function.
Around this time, you started to have this idea of marrying for love and a soulmate. There’s this very fulfilling element to marriage beyond the practical element. It’s not that the practical elements went away.
It’s still existing.
Obviously, it’s like moving two people under one roof saves money, for example.
Marriage as a 19th-Century Medical Prescription
They’re just wasn’t even that expectation before that somebody would marry for love. Maybe we get it to this a little later, but for most of history, it was very common to have mistresses and have affairs. That wasn’t very taboo because there was not this expectation that you had to get everything. Especially all of your sexual needs met from a marriage. In Victorian time that was not acceptable.
I sense where you’re going with this. Abe Lincoln, is famously married, as all presidents have been.
Will we ever have a solo president? Probably not, but we don’t have to get into that.
It’s a good question. There’s some chance that’ll happen. There’s a movie called the American President and it is a solo president. He’s a widow.
The only acceptable solo.
The only acceptable solo is a man who is widowed. That’s right. Lincoln got married.
He got married after some amount of drama. He courted Mary Todd. The courtship at that time, I would compare it to maybe moving in with someone with the expectation that you would get married. There was such expectation behind. He eventually broke off the courtship that caused a lot of rumination and stress for him and then, eventually, they were reunited at a gathering of friends and they became engaged. This is something that interests me. The person who engineered wasn’t like an organic. They happened to meet.
You would think that maybe a mutual friend or maybe a family member brought them back together. In fact, it was Lincoln’s medical doctor who had been treating him for a depression, with leeching and all the horrible treatments they had at the time that obviously don’t work. He arranged the reunion because he was following the prominent physicians view at the time that marriage is a prescription for, he called Lincoln’s condition, hypochondriasis. Marriage is a healthy state of life and it’s a medical prescription used to cure basically anything. It’s like, “You’re struggling? Get married. You’ll feel better.”
Some things haven’t changed.
It’s not like it’s not a reach to know that he didn’t want to get married. In the historical record, he told a friend Mary and her quote, “It would just kill me.” I thought that you would appreciate some of his reasoning. This was something he told a close friend in a letter. This is related to the fact that if you have a serious depressive episode of mental illness episode, you worried that you won’t be able to trust yourself anymore or trust your decision making.
He prided himself on his wits and his decision making. He wanted to have that strong. He worried that another person in the picture would create difficulty. He said, “In that ability, you know his decision-making. I once prided myself as the only or at least the chief gem of my character. That gem, I lost to the depression. How and when you too? You too well known I have not yet regained it and until I do, I cannot trust myself in any matter of much importance.” This is a man trying to come back.
What stage in his career and his life was this? Was this early on?
I believe he had two major depressive episodes. One where he was suicidal in the early 1830s like 1832 or 1834. He was in his twenties. He was starting to work in the legislature but like local state legislator and not get involved in national politics. That happened in the 1840s. My favorite part of this whole book is his description of this wedding. Lincoln dressing for his wedding. A boy who was just a guest asked him like, “Where are you going?” He’s wearing all his tux. Lincoln answered, “To hell, I suppose.” I didn’t know you when I read it, but when I re-read it I said, “It sounds like Pete.”
That’s funny. He’s essentially in that moment admitting that he’s not a good candidate to marry, in general.
What are the chances you’d marries another person with mental illness. She was likely bipolar. Those symptoms don’t come up until little later. At the time he married her, she was a lovely woman and he liked her. Everyone liked her. There wasn’t something a graciously wrong with her. She was a good match. He didn’t like the idea.
In part because he felt like having his individual perspective was so valuable for him. He didn’t want that crowded out.
He was someone who valued rationality to the extreme. He’s still known for this very measured decision-making of going through every option and thinking very reasonably at a time when a lot of people were impassioned about causes. He was a very thoughtful thinker. He felt deep emotions because of his illness, but he was always very reticent in the letters to his wife. He never expressed much of affection for her.
The upside of him marrying, in general, is that it allowed him to become president. I don’t know that much about Lincoln. I had read a biography about him many years ago that I thought was quite good. One of the things that striking about him is he unretired from politics to run for president. You can imagine the counterfactual, the what if world. What if Abe Lincoln hadn’t run for president? What would have happened to this country during that critical time? I think people agree he’s one of the great presidents given what he did.
That’s a good point. The idea that he needed to get married in his life to be able to become president. Also, he did love his children even though he lost two of them and that was hard. It’s not so much for this one that he should not have gotten married. I would say if he were alive, perhaps he would be so low.
His personality is not well suited for marriage. That’s a great one.
A quick plug. If any of this interested you, Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk.
That’s a good one. Can I ask you about one that I have that I’ve been thinking about?
Is it Don Draper?
I have this idea of fiction. Let’s digress for a moment because it probably doesn’t count to have a fictional character come up in this. Except that it’s telling when there’s a fictional character who shouldn’t have gotten married. I don’t think it’s just on Draper. I feel like it’s almost every single character in Mad Men. Think about through the list. All the major characters have profound problems with their marriages.
I’m trying to think of one who doesn’t. Pete and Trudy end up happy in the end.
He had to move out at one point because he was having an extra marital affair and she caught him. He also never embraced moving out into the suburbs. He wanted to remain in New York City that he resented that.
I don’t know if we should go too much in the Mad Men if people haven’t seen it. It’s probably not the most interesting example.
The point is, the lead character Don Draper is married multiple times and ends in tears every time.
Don is especially known as this womanizer. His constantly at the office. He can’t stop trying to escape from his life and having all these affairs and completely the archetype of the stoic silent type but emotionally unavailable father. What interests me with that is that a person like that whether or not they want to have kids. They probably should not have kids. They’re not suited to being a parent, but he had to have a wife and have kids.
For a similar reason to Lincoln, to work in advertising. You got to look like a family man. You have to subscribe to certain values so you can go to the golf course and chat about the wives and do the thing. There’s a lot of careers like this. This is interesting. Pressure to get married. To get married can come from your career path and the culture of that world.
That’s right. Even though it doesn’t have much to do with your ability to be good at your job.
It’s just culture.
Ernest Hemingway: The Artist and his Lifestyles
It’s just socialization. Let’s move past fictional characters. I was going to ask about Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway was one of the great American writers. Certainly, it fits the Solo persona, in terms of lived a remarkable life. He created more than he consumed. He went on these adventures. He this vigorous physical life. He wasn’t what you would normally think of as like the weak writer.
Someone who wrote strong, but their personal life was weak and frail. This is a man who hunted and boxed. He was a hard drinker and could mix it up with the locals and so on. He had been married four times. To me, he seems like a good candidate for someone who shouldn’t have married just by virtue of getting divorced the number of times he did. That’s a pretty good piece of evidence. What do you think of that?
I found this great. I think you like Hemingway because he has a white beard and likes to work out.
He’s also a man of habit.
He likes to box.
I do like Hemingway for all those reasons.
I know.
Not so on the hunting stuff.
I think you and Hemmingway would get along well other than the drinking. He would make you feel like a little bitch. He’d be like, “Do you want another one?” You’re like, “The last time I drink was two months ago.”
It’s true. I would say this. If I was with Ernest Hemingway, I would get drunk with him.
Yes, but you’d be drunk after the second drink and you’d embarrass yourself. He’d ask you if you want a third and he wouldn’t understand why you’re saying that. He’d be on his eighth and you’d be on part way through your second. You’d be the same and you’d be more drunk.
It’s probably number three, I’m guessing but yes. I have not been drinking. I would be at a distinct disadvantage.
Hemmingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer said, “I don’t mind Ernest falling in love but why does he always have to marry the girl when he does?” Which is an interesting question. He’s not living as early as Lincoln was. Hemingway died, I want to say 1961. I don’t have it in front of me, but lived for mostly the first half of the 28th century. It wasn’t quite the same marriage culture. It was more liberal. He wouldn’t have needed to marry all these women to be with them sexually.
If he would fall in love, he could wrap up into it. He pulled the trigger and marry them rather quickly.
He would. He was a hopeless romantic for someone who’s so interested in masculinity. The interesting thing, in the course of my research, I found out that Hemingway was a sugar baby.
Is that right?
That’s what I like to call him because it amuses me. That’s a lot of his writing. I reread Snows of Kilimanjaro, which is a story about a guy who’s on a big game hunting expedition in Africa, gets grungy in his leg and waiting to die. He reflects on his life and a big part of the reflection is he married one, he would rich bitch after the other. His misogynistic and blaming the women when he’s the one who married them. A lot of his writing was about sad reflecting on the fact that his first wife was the love of his life.
This is Hemingway.
He wished that he stayed with her and he kept going from one wife to the next.
These women helped support his lifestyles, so to speak, which involved travel.
Big game hunting and watching bull fighting. Doing whatever he wanted. Being able to write without worrying about making a living. This started with Hadley Richardson, his first wife. That was how these habits started. That’s when I would say after that his books were successful during his lifetime. He was making money. With his first wife, he had nothing. He married her and he was only able to write The Sun Also Rises known as one of his best books because she supported him while they were living in Paris and he was able to write that book full-time. That’s why I call him a sugar baby. It amuses me.
He might not be a perfect candidate for someone who never married because one of his four wives was someone that he had more modern romantic connection with.
He had a romantic connection with all of them.
She was special. The other one is that the marriage served this utilitarian function for him, which is often the opposite. In a world where she didn’t have equal opportunities, she was able to support herself in part through a marriage. He was able to support himself at least in his writing through one of his marriages or some of these marriages or all of these marriages.
I honestly saw initially the four wives. The first thing I thought was, “I probably shouldn’t have. Probably not much in common with Lincoln, but in that category, he would have been best to be solo and date these women.”
The way to think about this is not at the time he should have been single. If Hemingway was alive, would he be well-served remaining single?
If he were alive, he wouldn’t have gotten married four times. I can’t think of anyone who would do that or has done that.
That was one of the people I had thought of. Who else do you have?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Victorian Norms
Another one that I find very interesting is likely not a name that you would know. She was a very prominent, intellectual and philosopher of Lincoln’s time period. A little later, she lived 1860 to 1935. She did a lot of her work during the late Victorian era. Her name was Charlotte Perkins Gilman. If you ever take a Victorian literature class or anything on gender feminist studies. You’ll read her famous short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.
The Yellow Wallpaper just illustrates her whole philosophy. It’s about a Victorian woman who gets married. She’s married to a physician notably. These Victorian physicians, they just mess up. They’re not doing anything useful. She married a physician and she has a baby. It’s very clear what she has in the story is postpartum depression, but they called it nervousness or hysteria. Her husband is playing the traditional Victorian role of husband where he is, both her caretaker and a condescending way. Her emotional partner, but he’s her doctor, so he’s giving her medical advice.
The advice is to like, “Stay in this room. Don’t do anything. Sleep after each meal. Don’t write, don’t paint. Don’t see anyone.” We all know the real cure for depression is to get out and do things, see people and to move. The woman in the story basically starts seeing these crazy shapes in the wallpaper. She just keeps describing it as this lured yellow wallpaper. First, she sees the cracks slithering around and then the cracks in the wallpaper become bars.
She sees a figure like a woman crawling around and shaking the pattern on the wallpaper. It’s a gothic horror story of this woman ultimately goes crazy. It’s a great story, but it mirrors her life where she got married. She had just never been someone who would have wanted to have a kid aside from the postpartum depression. Many people want to have kids and love their kids and experience that. Aside from that, she had a mother who was very, probably we would call it, emotionally abusive.
Her father left and her mother was very withholding of affection. She never had any interest in kids. She wanted to be an intellectual. She wanted to be on the lecture circuit, like we’re talking about earlier where you go to all these places and gives speeches. She did do that later in life but she just never had much interest in kids and family life. She got married, had a kid, and experienced a horrible postpartum depression.
For unrelated reasons, later, she separated from her husband, which was very rare at that time. She moved from the East Coast to Pasadena California. Where she worked as a writer. She was active in these reform groups and feminist groups. In 1894, she sent her daughter back East to live with her former husband and his second wife. She wrote in her memoir that she was very happy for her ex-husband since.
She wrote her daughter’s quote, “Second mother was fully as good as the first and perhaps better in some ways.” She still saw her daughter later. She moved back there. She wasn’t like a monster. She’s did what would not be super uncommon for a man to do and give up custody. For a woman in the Victorian era to willingly do that is highly unusual. It shows that she never wanted to have kids in the first place.
Some of this conversation obviously is not just marriage per se, but it’s also this idea of having children. How much do children derail? What underlies this a little bit is this notion of either, you are not well suited for it personality-wise, but then also you might not be well suited for it lifestyle-wise.
You might not be well suited for it because you had a messed up childhood and you have trauma. You can get over that and stuff, but if you have not addressed that, you probably shouldn’t have kids and pass on your parent’s trauma onto them.
Certainly, that notion that you’re not very good at it might be part of it, too.
That interests me. This is what we were talking about earlier. It’s like what I was talking about with the Lincoln thing where this doctor says marriage is the cure, if you’re sick or you’re not thriving or you are not doing well. Marriage will fix it. I think people think that with kids when you’re not happy. That a child will complete you or give you a greater purpose in some way. Some people are wonderful parents and some people are not cut out for it. If I went into sales, I like to use a career comparison.
I’m introverted and I’m nervous. I don’t like talking to people and I don’t have a passion for what I’m selling. People wouldn’t say, “Kust keep doing it until you get good at it.” They would say, “Maybe you’re not cut out for. Maybe you should try a different career,” but people don’t say that about kids. They say that everyone should do it.
That’s right. The way I was thinking about it is that some career paths, some choices that people make or not even that they make. It’s a calling that they have. A lot of writers have a calling, for example. We’re talking about a little bit about writers. They’re compelled to do this. Some careers are so incredibly difficult that they take an overwhelming amount of time and energy. Also, risk that children don’t lend themselves to very much. You might be able to get away with having a partner, especially a partner who’s willing to support you. The obvious thing is, if you’re a woman and you’re doing more of the caregiving than your partner, which is has been traditionally the case throughout history.
Even now. Even when it’s more equal than it’s ever been and in terms of the labor division of kids. Even when men feel like it’s equal, the woman says it’s not equal.
There’s a lot of evidence for that. It’s called the second shift that women put more effort into the shift when you get home. Whether it be making meals and all the other types of support the goal that go on. Charlotte seems like a good one, clearly.
Although, after all this drama played out, she did have a lovely marriage to her first cousin at the end of her life. She was very happy about it. She talked about it oddly with all that Victorian idealized language. She spent her whole life fighting for women’s rights and that women shouldn’t have to be the primary caretakers of children. I would say that this is a good example of someone who probably wouldn’t have kids.
Mae West and the Art of the Double Entendre
I have a potential one. I want to get your reaction to it and that’s Mae West.
I don’t know much about her life.
That’s fine.
I was looking up quotes. We’re both interested in one-liners jokes. She’s the best at the one-liner.
She’s the master of the double entendre. I write about her in Shtick to Business. She’s fascinating.
Did she get married?
I don’t know.
We have to look this up.
I’m guessing that she did. First of all, she was super cutting edge in terms of dealing with taboos.
She was married twice.
She was this highly sexualized woman. A lot of her jokes were double entendre about men, about sex, and so on. One of the cool things about Mae West was she has this great quote, which is, “I love censorship. I’ve made a fortune because of it.” One of the things that she did was, she had this very sultry sexualized voice. She could say regular run of the mill things and it sounded naughty. She found a way to avoid the censors in the FCC because she would technically not say something wrong.
She could just be like, “Apricot,” and everyone freaks out.
She has these like very fun quotes that suggests that she’s not the marrying type.
She did marry twice.
She did. The fact that someone married is not good evidence.
It doesn’t mean they’re the marrying type.
That’s right.
Especially when her first marriage was in 1914.
There you go. Mae West is a maybe.
This is weird. One says she was married to one dude in 1911 to 1943. The other one says 1914 to 1920.
We’re going to get back to May West, though, because at the end of this, you have a few quotes about marriage that are going to be good and some of them she has won.
She’s got like three. I truly can’t tell if she’s been married once or twice. It’s giving me like dates that overlap with these two guys. Anyway, she was married but we don’t know how many times.
No problem. That’s not a big deal. Do you have someone else on your list? My other one is related to these people who would do these public talks traveling around was Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde shouldn’t have gotten married because Oscar was gay. It’s pretty strong evidence that you probably shouldn’t have got married at that time. Let’s jump into these quotes.
There’s a lot.
We can do a few and see how it how it plays out. One of the fun ideas about famous quotes is that it takes the temperature of that time of these people and so on. Especially because on one hand, there is this view that marriage is a path to blissfulness. Marriage is a way to cure your challenges in life and so on. Yet when you have individual talking about this stuff, maybe they’re not so positive. Did you pick one?
I picked both. I picked some that directly contradict.
That ends up being the case. Again, it’s not that marriage is good. It’s not that marriage is bad. It’s good for some people. It’s bad for some people. You would expect that to be reflected in individual’s quips about marriage.
I find this one interesting. This is George Bernard Shaw, the writer. I’d say, this is going against the Victorian ideas that were popular Lincoln’s time. “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive and most transient of passions. They are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”
First of all, that’s hilarious and well said. In the following way, let’s use Hemingway as an example of that. It sounds like he truly fell in love with each of these women. The idea is that love didn’t last.
It’s not crazy to fall deeply in love with four people over the course of your lifetime. If you expect each of them to last forever, it’s unrealistic.
I don’t know a lot about the research on love but, obviously, there’s these different forms of love that have been documented and so on. This idea of romantic love, this “soulmate” esq love that butterflies in your stomach. The evidence for that is that it passes with time. Not quickly, but it does pass with time and certainly passes before death does one part.
Although, women live longer than men. They don’t have to tolerate it as long, generally.
That’s a good one.
Friendship vs. Romance in Historical Philosophy
Here’s the counter argument because my mom is always spouting pro-marriage arguments to me and I’m always telling her that, “If I get married, I get divorced. I’m okay with that.”
The data suggests you have a 35% chance. Yours would be lower because you’re highly educated.
It doesn’t mean I make good decisions.
That’s fair.
That’s one. The argument is, most people, if they’re smart, not the people who get married at Disneyland. People who get buried at Disney World are people who should never be getting married. Quit playing.
That’s just a random observation you have.
They would subscribe to that idea that the most transient of passions that love can last forever. A lot of people would be more realistic and think that it changes over time. These are two different great thinkers who had that same idea. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” The great philosopher and writer, Montaigne said, “If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.”
That’s a strong point. When I think about my longest relationships, they were often based on a more of a friendship model than a passion model. We just got along well in the same way that I get along well with my non-romantic male friends. It’s easy for that relationship to keep going and being good because you share similar interests. You share a sense of humor and you just get along. You can talk a lot in that way. I certainly would say that for a long marriage, that notion of strong friendship.
That was the model for a lot of history, too. In the Victorian era, they got very idealistic, spiritual and sentimental about it. All through the 1700s and into the early 1800s, the model was, they would say first, “You start to hold someone in a steam like you respect someone. If you deeply respect someone, then love will follow.” It’s the respect first and then the love. That all comes from rationale and intellectual compatibility. A lot of people think of love as something outside of themselves like a force that just hits you like a lightning bolt or something.
Now, it just starts with a thirst trap.
Now, it starts with sliding into the DMs.
Which is the hot picture and you’re like, “Oh yeah.” This was what I found. This is about artists, Ivan Turgenev.
The Russian writer.
It is not a good thing for an artist to marry. As the ancient used to say, “If you serve a muse, you must serve her and no one else. An unhappy marriage May perhaps contribute to the development of talent, but a happy one is no good at all.” We can guess what Ivan’s marriage was like.
I think that’s the outdated argument that artists shouldn’t be happy. That you need to be unhappy to be an artist.
I agree with that. Here’s another one. This is from a book about advice to writers, so they’re a little one-dimensional. “The best advice on writing I ever received is don’t have children. I gave it to myself.”
That’s my favorite one.
That’s Richard Ford. That’s super fun one. Do you have a Mae West one?
Wit, Wisdom, and Cynical Takes on Marriage
I have a few Mae West.
Let’s do some Mae West.
I’ve got a George Carlin one, too. “I am is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that I do is the longest sentence?” That’s George Carlin.
I like that it could have been Carlin or Mae West.
It could have been either. These are all in the same vein. Mae West said, “Getting married is like trading in the adoration of many for the sarcasm of one. Although, that could work from both ends, then you get to direct all your sarcasm on the poor bastard who married you.”
I don’t think she meant it that way.
I know but that’s what I think of it. It’s like, I could torture him I of I lived with him. It could lower his self-esteem. She said, “Men are my hobby. If I ever got married, I’d have to give it up.” My favorite is, and I think Lincoln would have said this, too. “Marriage is a fine Institution but I’m not ready for an institution.”
That’s a fun one. I like the double entendre there. That’s good. If you’re reading and if you know of other people besides your parents who should never have married. Please reach out to me and let me know. I can add them to the list.
Are we going to make a long list? They’re not going to be people that anyone knows. They’re going to be like actual people.
You can start thinking. There’s folks like Bill Clinton. A politician, you had to do it, but he didn’t seem like the best.
They had a very genuine intellectual connection and emotional connection. I think it’s hard to have that much power.
It is interesting that you were saying how these earlier marriages had looser standards when it came to extramarital sex.
Did I talk about that already? I don’t remember.
You did. That is interesting.
It’s because they weren’t attended to be based on love.
For it to work, for love, you have to embrace this level of monogamy and this one person forever. When it was done for these utilitarian purposes for survival, build well and these things, the idea that you aren’t as committed sexually. It’s a release valve of sorts it sounds like.
Also, politically, for wealthier people or for anyone in government and politics. Concubines were a big thing throughout history. Mistresses were much more common. Once we played all these moral values around it, which was relatively recent. Now people are like, “Bill Clinton needs to keep it buttoned up.”
Also, things have also changed in terms of the reporting of this. It’s not like anything about Kennedy. That was notorious for being misbehaving as president. We can end on this note because it’s an open thing. Which is, it’s that idea of marriage and children going together. They’re almost one-to-one throughout history that if you got married, especially pre-birth control. If you got married and you were having sex, there were kids that were coming.
I like the way you said. It’s just something about it. It sounds like a train coming.
A freight train of children are coming. There’s these in-between stages. Is the person was not well suited to be a parent? What opportunities did children block for people throughout history? Especially women. That’s the thing that is striking. That’s why birth control has been so liberating for women because they can pursue what it is that they want to pursue when they want to pursue it.
They can choose when they want to have children if they want to have children and so on. That’s the first level and then the next level is, whether a partner, a so-called life partner, helps or hinders a person’s lifestyle. In some cases, they help because they can support an artist. The Hemingway more patrons style relationship that might exist, versus someone who should be out in traveling the world and they’re locked up.
A Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She became the lecturer, the public intellectual she always wanted to be, but she had to get out of her marriage to do it.
Also, she had to even forego her parenting some of it. That’s fascinating. This was fun. I didn’t know exactly what to expect because this was loosely conceptualized. At least you did your homework when it came to this.
I always do my homework.
You were very good.
I’m a teacher.
Community Building and Closing Thoughts
Mary, that’s great. I’m going to put some of these things in the exhibits for people and I’ll say this again for folks. I am looking to start to build a community for solo. Please go to the SOLO page at PeterMcGraw.org and sign up for the mailing list. I’m going to be hosting some live Zoom events where people can give some feedback about the show, suggest episodes and most importantly, start to interact with the type of person who is being drawn and who should be tuning in to the show.
The community idea is very fun and I’m excited to see what happens with that. Also, thank you for having me.
Welcome back and thanks again, Mary.
Important Links
- Mary Dahm on LinkedIn
- Write Your Way Out – Previous Episode
- Lincoln’s Melancholy
- Snows of Kilimanjaro
- The Sun Also Rises
- The Yellow Wallpaper
- Shtick to Business
About Mary Dahm
Mary Dahm is a writer and medical technology publicist living in Hollywood, where she writes fiction instead of watching movies. She holds a masters degree in secondary education from the University of Southern California and formerly taught high school English. She is at work on her first novel.
Mary Dahm is a fiction writer and medical technology publicist living in Los Angeles. She holds a masters degree in secondary education from the University of Southern California and formerly taught high school English.