How My Marriage Works

A Father’s Day appreciation essay—with a dose of realism.

A quick reminder: everyone is of course welcome here, but paid subscriptions are what enable me to spend the necessary time researching and writing this newsletter. And as with all of my essays that get into some more personal territory, I’m paywalling this one to avoid the abusive vicissitudes of the internet. Thanks for being readers.

Is having a boyfriend cringe? If so, having a husband is clearly more so. And praising your husband publicly is so cringe as to be practically unforgivable. It smacks of hetero-exceptionalism or even the hetero-optimism that, contrary to a recent exceptionally silly New York Times opinion piece, is simply not feasible. Nonetheless, I come in this post not to lampoon Father’s Day but to praise the father of my child. I do so partly in the spirit of hetero-insistence: good men are possible because they’re actual, if occasional, and so many straight women are entitled to better. We have the right to insist on more. And I also want to demystify what makes our feminist marriage work, albeit with a dose of healthy, painful realism.