"One imagines [JD] Vance gasping in horror at Mlotek’s account of
the 'airiness' with which she makes her wedding vows, recalling 'how easy it was to swear I would want what I had'—as if marriage might be a commitment to one’s desires rather than a commitment to another person, or a role in a community. Reactionary and revolutionary views of marriage alike offer narrative satisfactions that the liberal view seems to lack. Eulogizing a marriage undertaken in this spirit presents a storytelling challenge: it requires inventing the stakes yourself. Mlotek—like many brides and grooms writing custom vows—doesn’t quite pull it off. But she does make privacy and its place in love feel idealistic and almost subversive. Her book is subtitled 'A Memoir of Romance and Divorce,' and her reticence is perhaps the most romantic thing about it, testifying to an abiding intimacy that transcends any legal relationship. After she and her husband decide to separate, she manages to avoid telling most of her family and friends for nearly a year...."
Writes Molly Fischer, in
"Who Gets to Define Divorce/The battle for custody of a contested institution" (The New Yorker).
Mlotek = Haley Mlotek, author of
"No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce" (commission earned).
Idealistic and subversive privacy in love... but you can still write a memoir about it... when the love dissipates beyond mere airiness and into utter nonexistence.
The aforementioned JD Vance is also a memoirist, as the New Yorker article pauses to say: "In 'Hillbilly Elegy,' his parents’ separation is the wellspring of childhood suffering; his grandparents’ home is the one source of stability, and he idealizes their volatile union." For the record, Mlotek and her erstwhile husband had no children, or even pets.
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47 comments:
With a title like that, she was visualizing the book before she said the vows. Prove me wrong ! And I want to see a Mlotek TikTok.
""One imagines..."
Every Leftist suicide note begins with this.
"The last name "Mlotek" is of Polish origin, potentially a shortened form of "Mamrotek," a nickname for someone who mumbled or talked incomprehensibly, derived from the word "mamrotać" meaning "to mumble or gibber"."
..."Haley Mlotek’s “No Fault” joins a number of recent books by women that take up the dissatisfactions of heterosexual matrimony....."
Oh, Margaret (hand flip). See, it's a story about stories !
JD living rent free in their heads.
”One imagines …”
Of course one does. This is the key first step in setting up a straw man.
It's not horror; it's pity.
One imagines [JD] Vance gasping in horror
Well, no. You imagine, because Vance is a Republican and you're a Democrat. Is mentioning Vance or Trump required in writings at the New Yorker? It seems that way.
Because the party led by Trump would gasp at various versions of divorce as an institution.
The rules we put on Marriage and divorce are governed by the conflict between the Pair Bonding and the Harem/Dominant male social contracts.
Watching modern feminists argue for and demand a Harem/Dominant Male breeding pattern for society just makes you laugh at the stupidity of modern womyn.
"Marriage"
"You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means"
Molly Fischer, Palo Alto prep school with tuition of $62500, Yale University, Brooklyn hipster, New Yorker writer since 2022. Why does anyone give the thoughts of such a hothouse flower more than a moment? She is floundering around searching for an attack line so that she can make deadline.
Imagine what it is like to live an emotionally close existence with an obsessive follower of the NYC zeitgeist. I can see the problematics of the institution of marriage in such an environment.
the reference to Vance saves Molly from having to speak candidly in her real ideological terms about her hatred of bourgeois heteronormative patriarchy.
"as if marriage might be a commitment to one’s desires rather than a commitment to another person, or a role in a community."
I rest my case.
There is a lot of talk on YouTube about how every time a woman has a brief sexual encounter, the man is happy enough the next day, whistles while he skips away, and never texts again, and the woman suffers emotional distress, but over time, she learns to suppress these feelings of distress and accept this type of short term relationship as natural. The problem is that what was causing the emotional distress was an aborted bid for pair bonding by her hormones, and once she learns to suppress the feelings that lead to pair bonding, guess what? She can't pair bond. This hormonal pair bond, which both parties feel in a healthy traditional marriage, is what the marriage ceremony recognizes.
You can still have the marriages without the pair bonding, but it's a cargo cult marriage; it's not the real McCoy, it's something new. Don't expect the same results. Let's don't think about the children, shall we?
"The idea that your marriage is your own (secular, individual) business is the kind of thing that bedevils religious conservatives.”
What a surprise that is the lead in to a story about divorce.
There are lots of low key harems going on right now based on Tinder. It's the 80-20 rule where 80% of women go for 20% of the guys, and the women live the dream that one day, they will move into the #1 position, when in fact the man has zero incentive to change anything, unless the day comes when it stops working for him, and that day may never come, as the Godfather said.
Marriage is an institution of the State? A religion with its own rites perchance Pro-Choice.
Marriage is between me, myself, and I? Selfieish. #NoJudgment #NoLabels
Interesting how the Left/left New Yorker writers always have put some Republican/Rightwinger in opposition to their "enlightened" view. And to constantly paint themselves as "edgy" and "Subversive" despite winning the culture war about 40 years ago. Today, people think they're being "reactionary" by asserting Trans people shouldn't use the girls bathrooms.
Hillbilly Elegy was Vance's Mein Kampf.
We long ago got to the point where people can do whatever they want. Get married. Don't get married. Get married and have an open marrige. Or not. Get married and get divorced - a 100 times or one time. have kids - don't have kids. Or adopt.
No one cares.
Molly "Headley Lamarr" Fischer to JD Vance: "I didn't get a gasp out of you, mister!"
Jaq said...
There is a lot of talk on YouTube about how every time a woman has a brief sexual encounter, the man is happy enough the next day, whistles while he skips away, and never texts again, and the woman suffers emotional distress, but over time, she learns to suppress these feelings of distress and accept this type of short term relationship as natural. The problem is that what was causing the emotional distress was an aborted bid for pair bonding by her hormones, and once she learns to suppress the feelings that lead to pair bonding, guess what? She can't pair bond. This hormonal pair bond, which both parties feel in a healthy traditional marriage, is what the marriage ceremony recognizes.
You can still have the marriages without the pair bonding, but it's a cargo cult marriage; it's not the real McCoy, it's something new. Don't expect the same results. Let's don't think about the children, shall we?
This is the fundamental fulcrum of conflict in developing our social contract. There are 2 options:
1. Rulers and Peasants. The elite males hoard and control the breeding age females. Non-elite males have access to prostitution and the option seizing breeding females form surrounding tribes.
2. A more egalitarian society with pair bonding and social moors places on men to allow wider availability of breeding females.
This is the fundamental biological underpinning of the social contract in society and each of these paths leads to obvious pros and cons.
This brings to mind a wedding "vow" that became common for a while. "As long as our love shall last". Which I always heard as "sometime next year". If you are planning to divorce just don't bother getting married in the first place.
Shallow, self-obsessed people. Hallmark-card vows. A marriage so evanescent that no one notices when it is gone. Is that really even a marriage.
I lost my wife of thirty-seven years in 2024. One of the things I learned since she was gone was that emotional pain can be as agonizing as any physical pain. There's less blood to mop up afterwards. But sometimes the pain is the only way to know you still live.
There is a secular motive and liberal principle of social progress to keep women/ girls affordable, available, reusable, and taxable, and the "burden" of evidence sequestered in sanctuary states. #HateLovesAbortion
I'm not sure "reticence" is the correct adjective for someone who writes an entire book about their marriage and divorce.
Not that anyone cares, but I'm siding with RNB 3/26/25, 1:36 PM
"Shallow, self-obsessed people. Hallmark-card vows. A marriage so evanescent that no one notices when it is gone. Is that really even a marriage."
The first that I recall being "beat over the head" with the women of the Left's preoccupation with self-interest, self-regard, self-celebration, was "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert (which I never finished.)
Or perhaps it was Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex," wherein she broaches the [new] philosophical(?) topic of women's self-identity?
This self-centric and self-glamorizing "Look at me! Look at me! Aren't I such a deep thinker!" becomes so very boring.
They are boring people striving mightily for attention.
Houseplants???
Don't scoff, they are living things, and you probably know as well as anyone: divorced folk can fight over anything if they are petty enough...
RCOCEAN II said...
We long ago got to the point where people can do whatever they want. Get married. Don't get married. Get married and have an open marrige. Or not. Get married and get divorced - a 100 times or one time. have kids - don't have kids. Or adopt.
No one cares.
------------
Your kids care.
The other kids can see it too.
Do you think... she got married, and divorced, and was taking notes all through the process just to publish a book/memoir? How sad. Marriage is a permanent thing, whether you have kids or not, or divorce or not. Go into it that way. We'll have less marriages, but less divorces/kids of divorce too. There is no such thing as "starter marriages."
That last sentence exemplifies the crap writing of the rest of it. Does JD really idolize his grandparent's volatile union?
"as if marriage might be a commitment to one’s desires rather than a commitment to another person,"
This person has no idea what marriage should be.
Marriage should be both of these.
If you only want to commit to yourself, you shouldn't get married. This is a very self-centered attitude to take and is unfair to the person that you're get married to.
"For the record, Mlotek and her erstwhile husband had no children, or even pets."
Or an actual marriage if you believe the excerpts from the author.
What I find most entertaining in this entire discussion is that it is College "Educated" women that are leading the charge to create a society where they are farmed out for sex by elite men on tinder during their breeding years and then discarded to be lonely for the rest of their lives after they turn 30 or so.
Or they are stuck raising a brood of children on their own with no support from the father.
But at least they get to have abortions because that is FREEDOM!
Women are truly their own worst enemy.
Let's see, other works by Haley Mlotek. "Superman is Jewish," she might even be right. Signing that "critiquing" Israel is not anti-Semitic, isn't that great:
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/jewish-writers-say-critiquing-the-state-of-israel-is-not-antisemitic/
The Fischers and Mloteks traditionally advertise their neuroses in the mass media, but this time will be different. I don't think they get how worn down their supporters on the right are, all while they cheerfully and repeatedly sink their knives into the backs of their host.
"For the record, Mlotek and her erstwhile husband had no children, or even pets."
If they each had no spouse, they'd be almost human.
Being widowed, I know exactly what RNB is talking about at 1:36 PM. It's common to talk about one's wife as one's better half, but this is exactly true. What's left after she passes is not of the best.
What utter garbage:
"Mlotek’s divorce came at the end of a thirteen-year relationship: she and her husband met as sixteen-year-olds and stayed together, an early and enduring commitment that marked them as outliers among their peers."
OMG we were so much better than our stupid peers who had no "enduring commitments"...
" “We knew something they didn’t,” Mlotek writes, of the clarity they shared and the identity it gave them. “We were each other’s home. We were together forever.” "
Again, WTF? Yu were "together forever"?
"They didn’t plan to marry but did so for visa reasons when Mlotek took a job in New York. One year later, they agreed to separate. "
And there ya go...
Not an "enduring commitment" not "each other's homes" not "together forever" ... hell they weren't even planning to be married but only did so for the immigration issues and then separated after a year.
What a crock.
Perhaps a C-Class corporation would be more empathetic to her secular sensibilities.
There are two questions here that often get conflated:
1) Can society as a whole say who I am partnered with, what the terms of that partnership are, how/when it can be broken, and what I call that partnership?
No.
2) Can society as a whole say there is a concept of a lifelong partnership which is a strong covenant and breaking it is extraordinary. And we call this partnership "marriage".
Yes. Society has said this for a very long time (with varying degrees of strength). And a widespread understanding and valuing of this concept is good for society.
It's fair to say: "It's none of my business what you meant when you said `I do' or why you decided to say 'I'm done'. But that is not an example of what we should promote as 'marriage'."
I'm still hopeful that marriage skeptics and critics will find their way outside to the front lawn and retrieve the baby from the long-ago evaporated bathwater.
It’s so amusing seeing non Christian’s think their pathetic little lives are “shocking” to Christians. Christians have read the Bible. They know all about sin, truly horrible sins that really would shock the silly, insular little author to her core.
The only people who get and stay married these days are upper-middle-class whites — ironically also the only people who read the New Yorker.
Based on my having read his book, I don't imagine that there's much that would make Vance gasp. (Or, not even based on what he's told about his life, just based on him being a Marine.)
I also don't think he idealizes his grandparents' marriage. I think they were the only source of stability for him and that he appreciates their effort to be that despite them eventually living in separate homes.
Hmmh--"reactionary" and "revolutionary" views of marriage offer something that liberals just don't get. Well butter my backside and call me a biscuit. I'd say that reactionary views of marriage have worked pretty well for at least the last two hundred years in Western society. Revolutionary views of marriage--gay marriage for example--is being tried out and may work well--time will tell.
Imagine if you will, the entire country thinking and living as New Yorkers do. Imagine it as it would really be, not as you wish it would be. The Left likes to think that left wing areas keep conservative areas viable and sustainable, but of course it is really the other way around.
"Bedevil" doesn't mean what the author seems to think it means.
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