Emily Gould’s Valentine’s Day confessional essay about divorce caused derision on the internet Right.
Gould describes how, seven years into marriage, she became gripped by mania, induced by too high a dose of anti-depressants. In this state, she became convinced that everything wrong with her life was the fault of her marriage. She overspent money; she cheated on him; she began drinking during the day. Eventually, at the insistence of friends, she committed herself to inpatient psychiatric care, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
From a tribal perspective, I’m not surprised by the scorn. Gould and her husband could not be more (sorry but there is no other word) libtarded, in that uniquely snobbish nouveau pauvre style you can only really perfect as Brooklynite. She is a New Yorker features writer, a former editor at Gawker, and co-founder of an artsy feminist imprint. Her husband is Keith Gessen, founder of the n+1 literary magazine, author of two novels. He is also the author of Raising Raffi, a confessional about the first five years of their son’s life, in which he reveals himself pathologically unable to provide the authoritative boundaries his son obviously, desperately craves.
But, contra the usual outcome of these confessionals, their marriage survived. After her release from psychiatric hospital, she remained certain that divorce was necessary. But she and Gessen were too poor to set up separate households, so they continued to co-habit, albeit in separate bedrooms. Then, gradually, Gould recounts how she came back to him: first sharing a TV episode, then occasionally a bed, and finally once again a bedroom.
“Divorce confessional” is a whole literary genre. These are generally written by liberal women, and typically end in rueful divorce, with a bit of mournful reflection and some sentiments about freedom and rebuilding your life. The most egregious recent example is perhaps Honor Jones’ notorious How I Demolished My Life, which describes Jones wrecking a stable, longstanding marriage “so I could feel the wind in my hair”. There are many more, some book-length: Gould lists a panoply of such texts, all of which condition her toward following their example.
And yet, despite this literary Greek chorus whispering in her ear, Gould and Gessen’s marriage pulled through. She is unsparing throughout, and her culpability comes through clearly. So, too, as they limp through the aftermath of her mania, something else is evident: a loyalty from Gessen that is so long-suffering some might read it less as steadfastness than contemptible passivity.
Gould writes of this time:
When we were inevitably together, at mealtimes that were silent unless the children spoke, I could see how wounded he was, how he was barely keeping it together. His clothes hung off his gaunt frame. And at night, when we passed in the kitchen making cups of tea that we would take to our respective rooms, he sometimes asked me for a hug, just a hug. One time I gave in and felt his ribs through his T-shirt. He must have lost at least 15 pounds.
When I invited marriage survival stories a little while ago at this newsletter, I did so because accounts like this are impossibly rare. With good reason, very few couples are willing to expose their intimate affairs to be raked over by the public, pain and all. When I made that invitation, though, I was astonished at the volume of stories I received. It suggests that, in truth, most relationships have challenging times - it’s just that these are extraordinarily difficult to share.
Perhaps, indeed, the only people who would be willing to expose their marital “rough patch” in this way are literary Brooklynites, acculturated like Gould and Gessen to the liberal valorisation of radical transparency. There’s much one could criticise about this: as I’ve argued, “digital modesty” is essential to sustaining what’s precious about family life in the digital age. And there is always something questionable about exposing one’s children to public scrutiny, even obliquely. There’s also much to criticise in the relationship, should you be of a relationship-criticising mind. But these reservations are for another time. Here I want simply to celebrate the couple’s magnificent loyalty-in-imperfection, whatever I may otherwise think of their outlook.
During her time as a psychiatric inpatient, Gould refuses to allow Gessen to visit her. He brings her gluten-free egg sandwiches anyway. She eats them, because the hospital food is so bad. You could denounce her ingratitude, scorn his willingness to tolerate it, or insist that his masculinity is hopelessly degraded by her infidelity, and the whole situation, and that they’d be better off separated.
But could you argue all this, and still describe yourself as on the side of preservation, loyalty, and the given?
I don’t really think of myself as “conservative”. I agree with Dávila that “The reactionary does not become a conservative except in ages which maintain something worthy of being conserved.” But if (also with Dávila) my aspiration is to be “a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills”, this means always looking for what is not Spreadsheet Man, the atomised homo economicus of infinite interchangeability, for whom the default is separateness, and whose weak ties can and must always be sacrificed on the altar of freedom.
For me this is the heart of the matter: those aspects of us and our situation and relationships that, for whatever reason, are not malleable, fungible, soluble, interchangeable. Our bodies, our loves, our habits, our covenants. And hunting for those sacred shades means celebrating stories that embody some aspect of this - even when their source is the most otherwise irksome of libtards.
Gessen’s egg sandwiches are a profound gift. In this small act, despite the toxic culture of radical transparency he and his wife propagate, despite every aspect of their common life seeming dedicated to the most thoroughgoing of shitlibbery, he does the most profoundly, accidentally reactionary thing imaginable: he keeps showing up.
Through a stretch of unremitting bleakness in their marriage, he shows a grim willingness to stick it out. And that, in turn, grants space for her to return from the wilderness of mania, and - eventually - for love to return to their home. However close-run it is, the parents of two little children keep it together. That is not something any of us should scorn, however bewildering the details.
Who knows what will happen for these two, over time? It’s never possible to see into, or understand, someone else’s marriage. Perhaps it will all still come apart, in the end. But perhaps it won’t. And anyone who thinks of themselves as hostile to “the libs” and who is nonetheless denouncing Gould and Gessen for sticking it out is, in my view, no less of a shitlib than those they seek to “own”. For to the extent that your moral and social default is separateness rather than loyalty, dissolution rather than covenant, rupture rather than repair, you too are a shitlib.
None of the above is, of course, to say that all difficult patches are or should be survivable - though I suspect that more are survivable than currently survive. But whatever you think of the specific circumstances, no one who views themselves as “not a lib” should be reflexively advocating the dissolution of a marriage, when the covenant becomes difficult to uphold. And we should especially not be doing so, where little children are concerned.
So in the spirit of Abolishing Big Romance, let us not seek to “own” these libs. Instead let’s celebrate them - albeit for doing something accidentally not at all lib. If Gould’s story is an honest one, she and Gessen comprehensively abolished Big Romance. In doing so, against all the odds, they upheld loyalty, and rebuilt a measure of love. And in the end, that’s all any of us has.
Even if they spend the rest of it being insufferably lib, I wish them a long and happy life together.
> I don’t really think of myself as “conservative”. I agree with Dávila that “The reactionary does not become a conservative except in ages which maintain something worthy of being conserved.”
The "things worthy of being conserved" do still remain, no matter how diminished they become by the pounding of outside forces. But in a time when that which is worthy is diminished, I believe the duty of a conservative is not simply to conserve what little remains, but to *restore.*
As C. S. Lewis famously wrote in response to abuses of the term "progressive" to give a veneer of respectability to the destruction of society a century ago — what, you thought all this was new? — “We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
This remains to this day the clearest explanation of the true conservative mindset that I've seen. Turn around and go back to the right road, restore that which the fake-progressives have tarnished, and get back to making real progress.
Brava, and this piece pairs well with Kat Rosenfield's joint review of the Rob Henderson and Molly Roden-Winter memoirs: https://unherd.com/2024/02/polyamory-is-a-luxury-belief/
The conservative formula ('do the right thing, suck it up, subordinate your ego to the greater good') is in fact good advice and should be followed, and yet, there is a hunger in the soul for 'glory' or just 'an exciting story' that is unfulfilled by the 'trad program,' and which is why the Gospel of Expressive Individualism finds such fertile ground.
This also resonates with Stella Tsantekidou's reflection that 'actually, a truly 'trad' society [clan above self] kind of sucks and isn't that great to live in.' https://humancarbohydrate.substack.com/p/why-i-am-worried-about-the-rise-of
What's needed is some sort of formula that can reconcile the self and the greater good, that acknowledges that one must both die to oneself and one's ego, yet also offer the self the eventual promise of redemption and glory. And that, my friends, is where Jesus Christ enters the picture...