Between Christmas and New Years’ Day, a time when most families are celebrating the holidays, the Atlantic published “How I Demolished My Life: A Home Improvement Story” by staff writer Honor Jones, about her home renovation and subsequent divorce. Much like two recent critically acclaimed films which depict divorce as a kind of freedom from the limitations of marriage – Netflix’s Marriage Story and HBO’s reboot of the 1973 Swedish miniseries Scenes From a Marriage – Jones’ reflection dramatizes her own ill-defined quest for personal fulfillment, leaving her spouse and children, as well as their feelings, by the wayside.
Divorce: A Breach of Privacy
Jones’ piece has been harshly criticized on Twitter and in the pages of at least one magazine for its perceived self-centeredness and callous treatment of her husband and children. Not only have Jones’ children suffered a major disturbance in home life through their parents’ separation, but their personal plight has also been celebrated by their mother publicly with little regard for their privacy. Jones concludes that in taking away something her children will never get back, she is offering them “a way of being in the world, of being open to it, and open in it.” Her vision of what she wants for them is one in which the children don’t share from what they have, but don’t “have” anything that isn’t someone else’s already. You might imagine this as a fantasy world wherein the private life does not exist and there is little sense of belonging to someone or something other than a mass society:
“More and more, I understood that what I wanted for them was public, not private, spaces. Maybe they would know from the beginning, in a way I hadn’t, that they didn’t have to own the playground to share it: monkey bars polished by thousands of hands, the secret shaded rooms under the slides, the parents filling water balloons for any passing children.”
Marriage and family by their very nature cultivate privacy for individuals, spouses, and their children, which in turn check society’s more impersonal tendencies. The private realm allows us to see ourselves, and others, in a more human way – with personal and particular needs and as having the capacity to choose the good. The family home at its best affords children a safe place to live, learn, and grow without fear of rejection. But Jones wants “public, not private, spaces” for her children, and rationalizes that they will learn to be better sharers as a result of this divorce. Aside from the ramifications of learning from a young age that even family doesn’t stick together, it is enough for Jones to justify ending a show of domestic bliss by noting “the kids don’t care about soapstone counters of what kinds of hinges were on their cabinets.” This is tantamount to the argument that children are better off with happy, divorced parents than with married, unhappy ones, when there is copious evidence that divorce does not eliminate, and may in fact perpetuate, conflict for parents and their children.
The Architecture of Marriage
Perhaps the most pernicious idea contained in the essay is that marriage is not a comprehensive union, but a means of self-fulfillment; a promise that can be revoked without consequence. Jones writes,
“I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself…I wanted to be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy. How much of my life—I mean the architecture of my life, but also its essence, my soul, my mind—had I built around my husband?”
It’s one thing to renovate a marriage together for the better, but quite another to demolish it for the sake of building another home entirely for oneself. Jones thinks she needs her own space, in which she can recognize herself as the sole proprietor. Yet, this is completely contrary to what marriage is – a free, mutual, and fruitful gift of self for life, for better or for worse. Personal fulfillment is expressly not the goal, but a more perfect union between the spouses which is not only good for them, but good for their children. Love is also not a feeling, but a surrender of personal ambition for the sake of another. Love is what prevents homes from crumbling into a cloud of toxic demolition dust.
Fortification Through Fidelity
It’s not that surprising today to find a prestigious,160-year-old magazine such as The Atlantic violating the sacred character of marriage and family life, but it’s where we are decades after the Sexual Revolution and its attendant ills of family breakdown and social disruption. As a result, there is growing discontent among people of all ages damaged by divorce in childhood which has led them to embrace love and fidelity along the lines of traditional marriage and family. To give hope to those young people mired in the muck of divorce or separation, we have to treat and speak about our own marriages, families, husbands and wives with even greater affection, so that children like Jones’ know that intact family life is something to be desired. This new year, show them by your personal commitment to marriage and family that you don’t have to tear down the old to make room for something new.
