Sandra Tsing Loh is getting a divorce, and in her incomparable way, telling us a bit about it in the new issue of the Atlantic. In Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off (thanks to Harvey for sending me the link), the witty social commentator whose 2005 CalTech graduation address remains one of the finest I’ve ever read announces that she’s left her husband of twenty years after falling in love with another man:
I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day—literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks—when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized … no. Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, “Good relationships take work.”
I admit that I have little patience for the kind of narrative of infidelity that Loh offers here; falling in love with a man other than your husband is not something that happens to you while you stand idly by. The language of “surprise” suggests a lack of accountability; Loh’s use of the passive voice (”my commitment to monogamy, at the very end came unglued”) neatly avoids a full claim of responsibility. She’s one step away from, as J.M. Coetzee puts it, “resting her case on the rights of desire”. That’s troubling indeed. Someone who runs a red light might describe himself as “surprised” that an accident happened, but it’s obvious to everyone else that a poor act of decision-making preceded the “unexpected” crash.
But then again, I don’t know that claiming responsibility means all that much; most male politicians caught with their pants down do as John Ensign did this week — they claim “full responsibility”, which sounds laudable. It’s the politically wise thing to do: admit a mistake, come clean, and throw yourself on the mercy of your wife and the American public. It’s also a rather stereotypically masculine thing to do: by claiming responsibility, you assert control. You may be thought a wretch who made a bad choice, but you still get to present yourself as a strong person; you recast yourself as a brave man tough enough to “do the right thing”. When the Ensigns and the Spitzers of the world claim “full responsibility”, they imply that bad things don’t happen to them unless they let ‘em happen — which suggests a kind of manly sovereignty over actions and emotions. I’m willing to concede that it’s possible that Loh’s being more honest here in acknowledging that in the end some of us — maybe many of us — aren’t as in control over what we feel and even how we respond to those feelings as we imagine. Loh isn’t running for office; she’s telling a story about what it’s like to be us right now through the imperfect prism of her own life. She can afford a frankness about weakness that a politician can’t.
Loh goes on to talk about her circle of friends and their marriages, all the while pointing out the strange inconsistency we Americans have about enduring monogamous commitments. We divorce more often than the sexually liberated northern Europeans — and yet we continue to say, in survey after survey, that we believe in lifelong marriage. She cites Andrew Cherlin’s work, noting:
…(the) paradox is that Americans hold two values at once: a culture of marriage and a culture of individualism. Or is it an American spirit of optimism wedded, if you will, to a Tocquevillian spirit of restlessness that inspires three out of four Americans to say they believe marriage is for life, while only one in four agreed with the notion that even if a marriage is unhappy, one should stay put for the sake of the children. If America is a “divorce culture,” it may be partly because we are a “marriage culture,” since we both divorce and marry (a projected 90 percent of us) at some of the highest rates anywhere on the globe.
Loh makes the excellent point that a great many of us in our forties are the children of parents who divorced in a more free-wheeling (and, in popular culture, less responsible) era: Some of us, she writes, stay married because we’re in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 1970s parents, who made such a hash of it. I know that one reason I got married early and often (three divorces before my thirty-fifth birthday, a family record) was a rather obvious longing to make right in my own life what my parents did not get right in theirs. And I was unfaithful in the first two marriages, at times chronically, bewildered by my own seeming inability to remain faithful and assert control over my desires. Of course, I did what most Americans do when things go south in bad marriages: I blamed myself, and I blamed my wives, but I didn’t blame the institution of marriage itself. I had too much invested in the idea of lifelong monogamy.
Reading Loh on the subject of our collective contradictions about marriage, I’m reminded of the stories — some surely apocryphal — about sailors on the high seas in the pre-Copernican world. Navigating at night by maps of the heavens which were based on the idea that all the spheres above orbited the earth, they frequently got lost. Of course, captains blamed navigators and navigators blamed those who steered the ship, but for a very long time, no one thought to question the maps themselves, which had been drawn on a fundamentally false premise. And so when marriages fail, or folks cheat, we blame ourselves or our partners, but not the very idea of marriage in which we all so fervently — and, compared to our European cousins, rather exceptionally — believe.
Marriage is indeed hard work. And we Americans do tend to see a particular virtue in hard work. I know I do; sometimes I’m guilty of promoting a strangely Puritanical ethic which suggests that “that which is particularly difficult is particularly virtuous.” I’m the sort of person who fantasizes about vacations not on sandy beaches but at high-altitude running camps, where I might be free to log 130 miles of trail in a week. My wife, with her up-by-her-bootstraps narrative (raised by an immigrant single mother who spoke very little English, growing up on welfare before graduating with honors from USC and becoming a successful businesswoman) also has a personality that is enamored of effort for effort’s sake. And so we work at this marriage tenaciously. Coming from different sorts of troubled pasts, we share a confidence in our individual and joint ability to surmount any obstacle. Call it the “you and me, kid, can kick the world’s butt” attitude. And hence we sleep little.
Too often, we confuse our own particular personality traits with universal virtues. Marriage is hard work, yes, and Hugo and Eira like working hard. As we often joke to each other, we’re “growth junkies.” Therefore Hugo and Eira have a successful marriage. But what about folks who would rather relax with a glass of pinot than climb a mountain or dash off on another whirlwind trip through fifteen airports in sixteen days? What about those who have, well, less to prove to the world and to themselves? What about those for whom self-denial (something I discovered in my thirties after a long period of addictive self-indulgence) is tedious and misery-making rather than liberating? At some point, surely, we — I — need to acknowledge that what works for some need not work for all.
I welcome your thoughts and responses to the Loh article in the comments section.
Hey, let’s take a tired old premise and spin it into paid column inches!
Seriously, not impressed. Of course Loh’s lover is more attractive than her husband; he’s her lover. Cynthia Heimel wasn’t the first or last to point out that a paramour is always going to seem much more attractive than your spouse. Your lover isn’t the one who snarls about the eggs being runny, or who you’re seeing at six in the morning while you’re rushing your kids off to school. The relationship with an outside person is always going to seem better and more exciting - for the novelty value, if nothing else, but also because of the lack of day-to-day tedium and old hurts.
Hugo, you already pointed out the cute use of the passive voice (blaming her “commitment to monogamy”, instead of herself), but stripped of its pretentiousness, Loh is saying that she’s tired, resentful of a husband she perceives as absent and leaving the majority of the housework (and sometimes breadwinning) to her, and she has a new, exciting lover as an alternative. This isn’t about feminism, or marriage at all. It’s an old and not particularly original story. But hey! It’s in the Atlantic so let’s all start chattering!
“I admit that I have little patience for the kind of narrative of infidelity that Loh offers here; falling in love with a man other than your husband is not something that happens to you while you stand idly by.”
It’s been my experience that people often have no control whatsoever as to who they fall in love with. As someone who has found themselves in love with someone she had no intention of loving, I can attest to that at least to some degree. Arguing that we can control who we fall in love with is like arguing that homosexuals can control who they are attracted to. Which is, of course, ludicrous to those of us with any understanding of that particular issue.
While we have limited control over our desires and emotions, we do have complete control over our -actions-. She may not be fully culpable in her love for someone other than her spouse, but she is fully culpable for any -actions- she engaged in with someone who was not her spouse.
I love Loh and had the same mixed feelings about the article as you did Hugo. Though I admit, after having been married for 9 years, I can understand why in general serial monogamy might be the most realistic fit for most people.
One thing that struck me here was Loh was the relative disregard on Loh’s part for her kids. Her deal-breakers was that she couldn’t replace the romantic image of the co-transgressor with that of her husband. But maybe–when there are kids depending on the marriage’s stability (as she acknowledges toward the end of the piece)–the bar ought to be set lower.
In “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce,” Elizabeth Marquardt documents the multifarious damages done by divorce to children (http://www.betweentwoworlds.org/). And she suggests that
Her narrative got me thinking about A Doll’s House. Nora’s husband was a total jerk who mistreated her. She ultimately decided to leave her family in order to “find herself.” While she had sufficient reason to pursue a new life, Loh does not. She was not being abused; she simply fell in love with another man and didn’t feel like working on her marriage anymore. That should not be tolerated. While you say that you have little patience for it, you don’t really take a solid position on her decision, either. If you neither think passiveness nor taking responsibility is virtuous in these sorts of situations, then what is?
… (oops, the text got broken up accidentally)…
Marquardt suggests that there are no good divorces, and that there is virtue in staying in a poor marriage just for the kids–barring abusive situations.
So, although I am not unsympathetic to Loh’s experience, I find her narrative disappointing because she ultimately fails to show an understanding of the way her actions are hurting her kids.
Sarah, I like the actual taking of responsibility: what I’m acknowledging is that it has become formulaic for adulterers in our society. It’s ritualized rather than real. Full responsibility means you understand why you did it and you have the power to not do it again — and that clearly isn’t the case for all who use the Ensign/Spitzer/Edwards language.
Loh isn’t being deliberately deceptive; she’s acknowledging that she felt surprised by desire and overwhelmed by it — she’s not adopting the PR language of “deeply regret”, “fully responsible”, and so forth. That doesn’t mean she isn’t morally accountable — but it does mean she is willing to say yeah, you know, I’m not as capable as I thought I was.
Infidelity is wrong. Period. And I am always frustrated by the notion that our desires can trump our commitments without our consent.
“Infidelity is wrong. Period. And I am always frustrated by the notion that our desires can trump our commitments without our consent.”
Infidelity is wrong. Realizing that you are no longer happy with your spouse and would rather be with someone else and making that a reality through divorce is not.
Agreed, Faith.
There’s self-denial that is working with your spouse to achieve a joint goal, and there’s self-denial that is living with an unhappy and perhaps inequitable relationship forever, and those are different things. But I don’t think the preferred activity level of a person or couple has all that much to do with self-denial/self-indulgence. A person can need and appreciate having time to relax, and yet not be self-indulgent to the point of putting their own needs consistently ahead of those of their spouse, family, etc. And that is also about compatibility. Everyone comes into a marriage with needs. Needing to relax by watching television, reading, or relaxing with a glass of wine is not really any different than needing to relax by running a lot (which I know is one of your passions). For the sake of the partnership it may have to be reduced or cut out from time to time, but it is a need that the other spouse must recognize and try to accommodate to the extent possible. I think what sustains a marriage is understanding each others’ needs, similarities and differences; knowing what your partner is doing to accommodate you, and him or her knowing what you are doing to accommodate him. Appreciating those accommodations, and negotiating them when appropriate.
“Together we can DO anything” as an energetic mantra could just as easily be “together we can work through anything” - still a mantra of persistance, but it could be a low-key, sitting around talking persistence rather than an energetic change-this change-that see what works persistence.
And, in some relationships, monogamy should probably be on the table for discussion about whether it is working or not. Most marriages begin with an assumption of monogamy, but given how many people find it so difficult to achieve, I think it would be better for it to be more acceptable to negotiate levels of monogamy when unhappy rather than “cheating” (lying and betraying one’s partner) or divorce being the only options that spring to mind for most people.
Well, this is certainly an interesting contrast to the thread on Kipnis’ book (which Loh quotes) a few days ago at Pandagon. Hugo, I think you are drawing too extreme a dichotomy between people like yourself and your wife, who appear to thrive on constant hard work, and people you see as not particularly driven or work-oriented. People can be highly ambitious, and take a huge amount of pleasure in their work, without taking the philosophical position that every significant part of their life must be seen as some kind of work project. Obviously relationships, like anything worth having, do take some work in order to be enjoyable, but acknowledging this fact is a really far cry from conceiving of a relationship’s primary function as a vehicle for work. Somebody who doesn’t take this view of relationships is not necessarily unambitious or uninterested in work as a whole.
The whole “marriages take work” meme doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you also acknowledge that whatever work you put into it is worth the corresponding pleasure you get out of the marriage. Loh appears to have taken stock of the amount of work it would take to make her marriage functional again, and decided that the payoff wasn’t enough to justify it. To criticize her for doing that means buying in to the idea not only that marriages take work but also that ANY amount of work you do to preserve a marriage is morally required of you. I don’t think the fact that she cheated really changes this reasoning; she shouldn’t have done it, and she shouldn’t expect not to be judged for it, but I don’t think it puts an additional burden on her to go above and beyond to try to save her marriage that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
I do ultimately agree with Mythago, though, that there’s nothing particularly modern, new, or insightful about this story. Variations of it have been happening pretty much ever since marriage has existed.
Re: Emily’s comment on “levels of monogamy”: Would the straight community be better off if the option of “open relationships” had the same acceptance as in the gay male community? Have there been any non-biased studies of whether this works when kids are involved? I would be concerned about unstable attachments (adults coming and going in kids’ lives) and potential for abuse by their unrelated boyfriends/girlfriends.
In a roundabout way, this also reminds me of Hugo’s post about men who can’t open up to anyone but their wives. Are people taking lovers when what they really need is extra close friends? Our culture sees all intimacy through the lens of sex, and then puts the burden on the monogamous pairing to satisfy all of our intimacy needs.
I experience myself as having control over whom I fall in love with in the sense that there’s generally a sort of prodromal period, where I can see that I’m falling for someone and choose either to hang around them all the more, or not.
Since I’ve been married, I’ve tended to cut short any outside flirtation before it gets to the “falling in love” stage, so it’s more past (and absent) flames that I have to compare to Joel, than current possibilities. But, having been married now for 21 years, I totally agree with mythago’s “Of course Loh’s lover is more attractive than her husband; he’s her lover.” Being married day in and day out for decades just isn’t the same thing as having a lover; it brings its own benefits, but always finding your spouse the most exciting person ever, through sickness and health and arguments over housework, just isn’t, in my experience, one of them. If nothing else, that interesting outside person who may be eyeing you is new and not to be taken for granted. Not that I don’t still find Joel attractive, or still want to have sex with him, but not every day of 21 years is full of passion and excitement.
(On the positive side, though, we do still go out and do things together, pretty much every week, and I do still look forward to those outings, as does Joel, so I’m a little bemused by the scattered talk on the web, after the Obamas went to Broadway, about “Date Night” being “work.”)
Dammit, Hugo, that’s not the passive voice. It’s a change of agent.
That said, the last paragraph of the Loh article is much more telling.
but it does mean she is willing to say yeah, you know, I’m not as capable as I thought I was
No, she really isn’t. She continually takes little digs at her husband throughout the piece, and she blames her ‘commitment’ to monogamy; she doesn’t say, you know, I’m bored with the guy I’m married to, or, I’m just not monogamous. She’s clearly very unhappy with her husband, maybe to the point that the marriage really isn’t worth saving; but she’s not honest with her readers about that.
Maybe, like me, she looked at the payoff of whatever amount of work it would take to fix her marriage, i.e., being married to her spouse, and decided it just wasn’t worth it.
In my case, I looked at the situation and, taking everything into account, decided that the best case scenario of an attempt to rebuild my marriage was that I would get to keep being with someone I didn’t want to be with.
Then again, maybe that’s just a failure of imagination on my part. Maybe there could have been a better best case. We’ll never know since I didn’t believe in that possibility.
Infidelity is wrong. Period.
I think I agree with you. But this pair of sentences also made me think of this bit from Adam Gopnik’s utterly fabulous review of the Starr Report (one of my favorite pieces of writing to come out of that ultimately dull political tumult):
People seem to be trying to parse “The Report” from scratch, as though its subject were entirely new. But there is a whole literature devoted to the question of adultery, transgression, and the law, and that literature is called “literature.” It has what are called “points” and “morals,” and first among them is to be extremely suspicious of anyone who tries to compress the erotic life into overly pointed morals. Novels have always been inhospitable to people who make too much of the law–think of the beadles and lawyers in Dickens–precisely because a good narrative gives us such a complicated view of human motives and their mixture that we are rightly suspicious of anyone who tries to apply a rule book to that plurality.
And yes, of course, you were laying down the moral law, not the law of the state. But I think it still applies.
– Which is, again, not to say I disagree with you. I think the whole subject is so complicated that I am hesitant to apply even a meta-comment like “your statement is too broad and simple” to its complexity.
PS: …Along similar lines, this quote from Milan Kundera.
I would like to point out another example of Loh’s abdication of personal responsibility…her use of Helen Fisher’s work. Fisher’s theory, as stated in Loh’s article, is that our personalities are in some way affected by the hormones we are most saturated with in the womb. Conveniently, the four hormones she has selected are well-known and easy to pronounce. Paired with generalized type descriptions, it is compositionalism seasoned with a dash of the Barnum effect. It is Galen’s humors all over again…who you are is decided by what you are.
If this is the case, if our personalities are decided in the womb, then it only logically follows that one cannot held accountable for the way they act. “It’s my hormones! It’s the way I was made! How can I be expected to control that?” As illustrated by Loh’s friends, it is an insidiously attractive excuse. “My type is this, my spouses’ is that, it’s not my fault that I don’t want to be with them any more! It’s science and endocrinology!”
It’s an antiquated and scientifically repugnant cop-out paired with questionable evidence. Awful.
You know, my misplaced apostrophe makes that last quotation a bit more interesting…
Apologies, folks!
I can’t remember everything perfectly but one of the women at the dinner has a man who is gone 40% or so of the time, and another is chronically stressed and overworked at her job, and still another (or maybe it’s the same one) finds that hubby isn’t turned on any more because he says she is getting fat (or he has some other problem –maybe he’s cheating?). I don’t condone cheating either, but it seems to me that these women are under a lot of stress they don’t need and might be more likely to do things not in everyone’s best interest, than if they had easier lives.
Companies that overwork their employees, a culture that tells you you have to have a big house and fancy this and that so you have to work overtime, and also that you have to be thin or you are some kind of criminal, are part of the problem. Not to mention a system that makes it hard to afford medical help when needed, have someone home to wait for the repairpeople, etc. Sometimes even an extended family isn’t enough. I can’t blame them for wanting to get divorced, but I wonder if the problem isn’t “a lot of people too few” rather than “one man too many” (all right, sometimes it turns out to be the wrong man, but still.)
I find it hard to cry for someone who gets 120 grand a year…but I can’t say I envy them either when it comes down to it, if this is the price. To save these marriages, to save the minds of everyone involved not just the mothers, it’s going to take more than just 2 people “working on the marriage”.
If I was in that kind of situation, having to do everything and never being good enough, I’d probably wind up doing worse things than putting my boots under the wrong bed.
Her husband has no moral alternative but to write his own article for the New Yorker.
Writing for Popular Science doesn’t count, and an essay in the National Review will result in a deduction of points.
I think you’re making a false distinction between people who like working hard, in your sense of working hard (which appears to be mainly about physical exertion), and people who are incapable of and unwilling to do the work needed for longterm monogamy. They’re different kinds of work.
You seem to be assuming that there is only one kind of enjoying working hard - your kind - and everyone who doesn’t like that kind of hard work doesn’t like to work at all.
Which is wrong. I would be exhausted and miserable trying to keep up with your vacations, but I can improvise for twelve hours straight without breaking role. I find it very hard to think of it as work, but of course, it is. It’s mentally and emotionally demanding and while I enjoy it immensely, I also schedule recovery days.
I think what I’m trying to say is that self-denial and hard work don’t always look like your self denial and your hard work. Which is why a marriage doesn’t have to look like your marriage to be successful.
Both of the author’s married friends at the dinner have husbands who are said to absolutely refuse to have sex with them (in one case blaming this on the woman being fat). And the author heavily hints that one of her biggest beefs with her husband was in the bedroom. I sense a trend, either in the author’s social circle or in what sort of marriages she picks to make her point.
“I think I agree with you.”
I can think of only one instance were infidelity is understandable: the person is being abused and can not escape the relationship. Even the “I’d rather cheat than get a divorce because I don’t want to hurt my children defense doesn’t fly with me.” While I’m sure divorce is hurtful for everyone involved, I remain unconvinced that divorce is more harmful to a child than being forced to live with two parents who do not love one another.
Otherwise, I actually believe infidelity falls in the realm of emotional abuse with the possibility of it becoming physical abuse should the person contract an STD and pass it on to their partner.
There is just no excuse for infidelity barring extreme circumstances like mentioned above. However, I’m all for people having multiple partners while in a committed relationship just so long as they -discuss- it with their partner first.
Right, Lynn, maybe she needs to find friends with different problems (and she might wind up counting her blessings.} Right, Faith, cheating is a form of emotional abuse. And right, Froth, there’s different ways of working hard.
But there is such a thing as too much work–on the job, on the house, on one’s looks, you name it–and it can make everything else fall apart.
Randomizer, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that you (or Loh) are bad people and we all know they should have stayed married; but in Loh’s case she’s not really being honest with the reader. A simple “my marriage is beyond repair and I no longer love my husband” isn’t a story, but lard it up with musings on monogamy, The Nature Of Marriage, blah blah blah and the chattering classes will love you.
Right, Lynn, maybe she needs to find friends with different problems (and she might wind up counting her blessings.}
Not really my point; I think she’s overgeneralizing a certain kind of marital problem. Many marriages lose some of their initial passion; not all marriages (nor yet all companionate marriages) turn totally sexless. Whether you stick a sexless marriage out, or leave it (and whichever of you is however much at fault), it’s a particular, common but not universal, marital problem. It’s not EveryMarriage.
I think the verb form in question is the “past perfect exonerative”.
You may not agree with it, however, based on observable actions what Gonz said appears to be true. Men who are interested in one night stands might be likely more inclined to move on if a woman rejects them outright whereas men who are interested in more might stick around. That does not mean it necessarily works or works well. It probably results more in women pushing away men they would like rather than fending off unwanted attention. However, that does not mean it is not used.
That you as an individual do not do such things is anecdotal. It is whether women in general do such things that is the issue. Again, from what is observable, it appears that many women do use pro forma objections. The denial of this is somewhat odd in that it is actually a cultural norm for women to play “hard to get.” The general position is that women should not make themselves readily available and that men should work hard to earn women’s interest, regardless men’s social or economic status. In other words, women rejecting men outright coincides with existing social expectations. If you are arguing that no women do this or very few do it despite tremendous social pressure, it begs the question why women do not simply ignore other social demands that are just as common.
I think the issue is that few people view their own actions as part of the problem. Instead, people look at their inability to get the result they want and blame it on others. That leads to the complaints about women and the equally inane flip-side complaints about men like Cara’s statements. Neither of those resolve the problem. They may do more to exacerbate the situation than that correct it. Part of it is a lack of mutual respect, but I think the larger part is out society’s profound me-ism. Once one steps back and stops thinking everything is always about you, it is much easier to understand how one’s actions impact the way people respond to you. That does not mean that everyone will suddenly be nice to you, but it will help you determine whether it is your actions that are causing the problems or those of others.
However, it takes a lot to humble oneself in that way, so it is not likely many people will do it.
Wrong thread. Please remove the above comment.
I think the point of hard work is missed here. There is a difference between a fun and/or rewarding challenge and drudgery……..and work can be either of those things. Claerly she’s saying that for her, her marriage was all unpleasant effort and no payoff……….quite different from a running camp.
I live in one of those Northern European countries Loh (and Schwyzer) mentions. Norway (and sometimes Sweden because of work), to be exact and I can tell that the 50% divorce rate is just as much a reality here as it is in the US. Uber-liberals in the US often want to emulate Northern Europe norms without really knowing all the facts about the way of life here. It’s often very laughable and sad at the same time.
While anyone in any long term relationship at any given time can certainly relate to Loh’s disillusionment about marriage and her place in it, her narissistic and self-absorbed view on the institution of marriage, parenting, gender politics and the world in general strikes me as absurdly myopic and distasteful.
Her first transgression is cheating on her husband in the first place. As someone said, we often can’t control who will love, but we can certainly control how we manifest that love. It is very likely that many of these politicians experienced the same kind of disillusionment with their lives as Loh did, but a sympathetic ear for their plight is often left to the smoke filled rooms of their old boy’s networks. Not in paid by the word (at a considerable sum) articles whose sole purpose is absolve one of responsibility in a pathetic effect to garner sympathy.
Second, she shows little to no concern as to how this will affect her daughters, and her overall attitude is an unfortunate one because this is a woman those girls will ultimately turn to for example and guidance.
Thirdly, her dedication to generalisations, suggesting that, because her marriage was a fluke, so is everyone else’s. Misery does indeed love company. Tragic.