Feminist Advice Friday, Bad Advice Edition: My marriage is melting down and my husband refuses therapy

The bullshit of "You can be right or you can be married."

Bad Advice Friday is a twist on my usual Feminist Advice Friday. In this semi-regular column, I look at the bad advice other columnists have given. Here are some previous columns:

• There is always a pile of dishes in the sink, and I’m doing way more than my fair share

• My girlfriend broke up with me over my messy apartment

• My daughter in law caught me badmouthing her

The Bad Advice

This week’s column takes us to Philippa Perry of The Guardian, who apparently believes that being married is the highest priority above all else, especially happiness.

The advice-seeker reports that her marriage goes through cycles of meltdowns, and is currently in another one. She says, “I wish to talk everything through, but my husband is a man who finds talking difficult and resorts to the silence of stone.”

Her husband, of course, refuses therapy, and the burden of fixing it all falls to her. There are also financial issues:. They are both self-employed, but “…I earn well intermittently while he earns very little. He is also in debt to the tax man again. I’m exhausted and frightened, but with enough scraps of battered love to try and move us forward.”

Philippa’s advice reads like a patriarchal textbook written in the 1950s. She gives almost no actual advice, instead devoting most of the column to chastising the writer for being too critical and too mean to her poor, poor husband. There’s no right or wrong way for her husband to behave, you see, only rules for her. And the central rules include staying married at all costs, accepting any and all treatment from her husband, and never seeking to change anything her husband does.

This string of garbage sums it all up quite well:

“It does seem from your email that you are playing the “me-right-him-wrong” game. Desist immediately. You can be right or you can be married, but you cannot be both. You seem to be seeing talking as right and silence as wrong.”

The Feminist Correction

The fundamental assumption in this column is the assumption that underlies so many harmful choices, so much damaging gender conditioning: the idea that it’s better to remain married than be single. We know only a few things about this woman’s relationship with her partner, and none of them are good:

• He won’t talk to her.

• He won’t go to couples counseling.

• She feels resentful.

• Their communication is poor.

• She is unhappy.

In spite of hearing only negative things about this woman’s marriage, the columnist assumes she should stick with it, and that she should give and do more than she already is, in service of this man who makes her miserable and won’t even talk to her.

This woman gets one and only life, and this columnist is telling her to sacrifice even more of it in a relationship that makes her miserable, with a man who offers nothing in return.

What the fuck?

Then she goes so far as to tell the letter writer, “You can be right, or you can be married.” This plays directly into the trope of the nagging wife who is never satisfied—a reality that, in patriarchy, almost never exists because women are taught to expect so little from men. She’s guilting this woman for expecting that her husband be willing to work with her on problems. She is right, and her marriage sucks, so it would be much better to be right and unmarried. But sure, I bet expecting even less will improve the writer’s quality of life.

Here’s what she should have said:

Why do you want this marriage? Why? What is he bringing to the table? Anything? If you still want this marriage, it’s time to look at what is going wrong internally to make you think this is all you deserve.

Scraps of love are not enough. You deserve real, substantive love, and you should demand that it’s that or nothing at all. You’ve presented absolutely no positive qualities in your husband, instead only clarifying that he seems unwilling to do anything to save this marriage.

Does this marriage even really exist? It seems like it doesn’t for him.

You deserve a partner who will work for you. Not one who throws little scraps your way and expects you to be satisfied. You already know that even when things improve, they just get bad again.

And that’s on top of him creating financial issues that you shouldn’t have to deal with.

Get out. This will never get better.

Read more Feminist Advice Friday here.

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