Reading the 1968 Good Housekeeping article for today's class, I was reminded of a NYT Modern Love column I read a few days ago, in which a gay man describes the end of his 22-year marriage:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/style/modern-love-conversion-therapy-gay-husband-haircuts.html?_r=0
It is obviously told from a different perspective than the GH article, but I thought it provided such an interesting parallel, 50 years later. There are differences in spousal acceptance and reaction (ending the marriage or not) and societal acceptance (the wife in the GH article felt she had to remain anonymous, while this man openly shares his story), but I thought both articles provided a powerful glimpse into the enormous emotional complexity of the situation for all involved.
Thank you for sharing this article, Emily! I really enjoyed reading it and agree that it provided such an interesting complement to what we read in class even though the two articles were written 50 years apart. Some aspects of the article that stood out to me include:
ReplyDelete- The idea of ritual (haircuts) and how that was such a constant in both of their lives and, as the writer notes, more of a role in their relationship than sex potentially ever was.
- The fact that 12 (?) years into marriage, the wife asked the writer if he were gay, but only now, 10 years after that point, was the marriage actually ending, despite many aspects of the marriage changing in the meantime. This is similar to the GH article because there is a comfort in the normality of the two marriages despite them being so different than "normal."
- The theme in both articles about the desire for normality and wishing the husbands weren't gay because it makes their lives and marriages more complicated, even though these were written in such different time periods. I found it powerful when the writer says "Elizabeth [his wife] saved me" by realizing he was gay because there no longer was this sense of secrecy in the relationship and in the writer's own identity. That said, the writer of the GH article would probably wish the secrecy still existed and that she never had to know about her husband's gayness (if I'm remembering correctly??).