Agency and Satisfaction
Does consciously exercising the former lead to the latter?
For weeks now, I’ve been trying to clarify some thoughts I have about Substack and long-term relationships and family life. I’m still working out those thoughts, but I’m curious to know if anybody else (regardless of gender, as I don’t think this theme is exclusive to the female experience of the above) is wondering why we bother with it at all.
Over the past decade or so, it seems the anglophone world has soured on conventional notions of long-term relationships and family life by extension. I remember reading Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 article in The Atlantic titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which landed with a bang on public consciousness. The article was a surprise to me as I had been first introduced to both Anne-Marie and her husband through their scholarship.1 Although I didn’t yet have a child, I instinctively related to her experience of work vs. parenthood.
Honestly, I’m not sure why anyone ever thought women could have it all. Were we so naive as a society to think we could simply pluck a married, middle-class mother from her relatively long-term confinement to the home or the margins of the labour force, toss her into the centre of the workplace, and gender relations would just . . . neatly adjust? That expectation reads to me like it came from economists salivating at the thought of all the women-turned-economic-units and what this would do for the national economy.
Overall economic trends have nonetheless seen a steady increase in the participation rate of married mothers in the labour force (from below 20% in 1950 to over 70% in 2023)2 – a transformation in our families and our workplaces that occurred within two generations. This rise is coupled with more recent social trends such as the booming costs of a university education caused in large part by the adoption of a corporate administrative model, imposing unprecedented pressures on middle-class parents. Parents today are far more invested in their child’s mental, emotional, physical, and intellectual development than those of previous generations.3 After all, our children will need to surmount obstacles or at least confront conditions that seem stacked against them to an existential degree.
I don’t think we’ve ever expected so much from ourselves and our relationships.4 Naturally, these expectations create additional burdens of self-knowledge. I can’t help but notice, too, that married mothers unhappy with their marriages and parenting are writing about it on Substack. And when it comes to relationships more broadly, terms once derided as “psychobabble” fifteen years ago are now commonplace on the internet. We’ve learned how to pathologize behaviour, casually diagnosing narcissism or a personality disorder or just general “toxicity”. Our most intimate relationships have traumatized us, unfairly burdened us, or generally disappointed us.
So why do we bother at all?
When it comes to love, I was a late bloomer thanks to my religious upbringing and a financial imperative to acquire my higher education at an expedited pace. I didn’t start dating until my early 20s, as the recipient of an inordinate amount of male attention in the military. I quickly married my first real boyfriend and although that relationship ended around the ten-year mark, I remained legally married for a total of 18 years – a number of which I spent living with my ex-husband.
This was primarily for logistical reasons (it’s difficult to divorce when two parties reside without permanent legal status in one country on passports from two other countries). But it was also due to several other factors, including:
survival mentality. I had long since practiced subsuming my own wants and needs to money demands. If living with a former partner whom I had shared much of my adult life was a cheaper and more convenient option than not, I would.
exposure to ample precedent. My own parents lived together following a legal separation as they couldn’t afford to pay for two households. I have other family members who continued to live (platonically) with their partners post divorce for various reasons, as well.
This model – let’s call it living together apart (LTA)5 – seems to be growing in popularity likely due to the rising cost of living, which is making it increasingly difficult for divorcing/divorced couples with children to afford two separate households. Debts and escalating expenses have a way of re-casting personal preferences and emotions as luxuries one cannot afford. Whatever the case, I was proud that I did divorce in my own way. I did not push myself to move on until I felt the need to, and it was quite some time before I had a relationship that prompted me to finally take action.
In fact, once I got over my anger at being in a position where living with my ex-husband made more sense than not, it was easy to do so. I imagine I had what is, for many married mothers, an ideal situation of sorts:
a co-parent who handled at least half of the childcare and was willing to step in at the drop of a hat as needed;
a partner to assume responsibility for a minimum of 50% of collective expenses;
no pressure to earn more, do more, or achieve more;
financial and emotional security, knowing that I was not at all alone in shepherding a child into adulthood; and
the ease of sharing a space with someone highly familiar with my habits and preferences.
After excising the intimacy elements from my marriage, then, my relationship with my ex-husband was transformed. This worked very well up until it didn’t, and I re-fashioned a more conventional co-parenting arrangement in order to pursue a romantic relationship that eventually ended up not working out. So now, as I weigh the decision to continue that longer-term romantic relationship, I find myself returning to the question of whether one is even worth what it demands of us. Do the positives outweigh the negatives? Is it not just easier to transform our marriages into relationships of convenience, pursuing a series of shorter-term relationships as desired on the side?
I’m not the only one asking such questions. Recent polls show that relatively few Americans see marriage and parenthood as key to a fulfilling life. With each passing decade, significantly fewer divorced people – especially women – are opting for remarriage. Researchers have argued that “mismatches between women's evolved preferences and configurations of modern marriage often clash, producing dissatisfaction.” But if dissatisfaction with our relationships is indeed the general outcome of rising expectations (as Kerala Taylor recently theorized in her excellent Substack essay on why white, middle-class women may be the unhappiest mothers), then perhaps curbing our expectations could lead to greater satisfaction.
Changing my expectations about my marriage, re-fashioning it into a platonic partnership, produced a far more satisfying outcome in the end. So I wonder if, in order to derive greater satisfaction from the kinds of relationships that are most likely to disappoint us, we may need to interrogate and re-configure our expectations.
This is not to argue that we all need to adjust our expectations downwards. I’m not saying we should simply expect little from others in order to never be disappointed. Rather, I think we should try to make conscious choices about what we will and will not look for from our relationships. We may think we already do so, but do we really? I suspect most of us are far more likely to passively accept expectations that have often been implicitly presented to us.
To illustrate, our expectations about how we will live out our long-term relationships have remained largely unchanged since the postwar economic boom – despite mounting economic pressures and sweeping social changes that have increased what we expect from our relationships. In terms of how we live, it’s fair to say that the middle-class population still expects to:
create a nuclear family unit
reside in a single-family dwelling, most often in a suburb
purchase and eventually own a relatively large house
purchase two vehicles, and
divide the labour of maintaining a family/home between two partners
Within this framework, we then look to our partners to deliver fulfillment, a sense of purpose, friendship, and whatever other intangible qualities we may not have expected in earlier eras. We expect our job to interest us or at least make us feel valuable. If we don’t yet have one, then we expect our academic degree(s) to land us the sort that at least could potentially do so. After roughly a decade of blogs and social media images depicting idealized versions of family life, we probably expect parenthood to come with lower costs and fewer demands.
What if we simply . . . stopped having so many expectations, period? It’s easy to play this out when it comes to a middle-class lifestyle. If we’ve never expected to live in a detached house, for instance, it isn’t a hardship to live in an apartment or condo or duplex. If we stopped expecting to upsize every few years to accommodate our growing families and instead made do with what we had, we might have more options and therefore less disappointment. I worked out many such scenarios in my 20s and 30s, making choices about where and how to live that challenged conventional expectations and afforded me a sense of freedom and engagement with the world.
It’s harder to play this out for a long-term relationship as doing so requires a good sense of what you truly need from a relationship and why. But this is the exercise I want to attempt.
When I turned 40, one of the reasons why I began to focus on myself was simply because I finally had the time to do so. Thanks to the pandemic and the generosity of our federal government, I didn’t have to work. It felt like a now-or-never moment to finally address an issue that had persisted since the end of my marriage: the near total absence of my personal life. I knew I eventually wanted another long-term relationship and, as my ex-husband wryly pointed out to me one day, “You’re going to actually have to try to get one.”
I thus girded my loins, suffered through some selfies, and forced myself onto dating apps. My initial process of selecting a match began with staring intently at a man’s eyes in his profile photos, trying to imagine forging some sort of connection with those eyes and inviting them into my life on a regular basis. This obviously gave rise to mixed results and, through trial and error, I learned how to dismiss potential matches by way of mundane criteria regarding level of education or ability to spell or (worst of all) height.
It seemed as though I’d been funnelled into an AI-based sorting process for mate finding. It felt devoid of meaning yet this was nonetheless supposed to be the starting point for a relationship. Against all odds, I eventually met someone whose ability to maintain a conversation over text matched my own (the digital equivalent of hitting it off). Still, I had no expectations the relationship would go anywhere as I was living with my ex-husband at the time. I approached the matter by simply dropping that bomb halfway through a first date and seeing where it landed. To my surprise, the conversation continued. He seemed to like me.
A month or so later, I was shocked when he asked me to be his girlfriend and thrilled to assent to his request.
Despite my expectations hovering at rock bottom in the initial stages of my relationship, I felt them begin to rise the longer we stayed together. At the same time, I was distracted by a larger project of drastically changing how I had been living my life. I didn’t want to bring the problems of my first marriage into my new relationship and I knew that by better understanding myself as a whole person, I could become more aware – more aware of my own behaviour patterns, how these patterns extended from my life experiences, how they were currently impacting me, and how I wanted to change them. I also wanted to develop a stronger sense of self so I would be more active in a relationship rather than passively waiting for it to somehow fix itself. When it came to how my life unfolded, I wanted to exercise more agency.
Perhaps it was this focus on my internal state of being that prevented me from becoming too dissatisfied as my unmet expectations multiplied. I certainly felt, at times, as though I alone carried the weight of many responsibilities. I sometimes felt alone, period. I was sometimes highly uncertain as to whether we were a good match. My anxiety intensified but still, I had no desire to end my relationship. And when it did end, imploding out of seemingly nowhere (although really from an anxiety-fuelled dynamic that simply reached a breaking point), I was unprepared. I was forced to process my breakup, completely restructure my life, and re-envision my future partly by again scrutinizing my sense of self.
Why had I bothered with a relationship at all? Because it had made me feel alive and seen and valued in a way that my marriage didn’t. Because this feeling was less ephemeral and more transformative when backed by a lasting commitment. Because even when the relationship was less stable than I anticipated, less predictable than I wanted, it often brought out the best in me. Because I knew that with this person, my mindset was changing. Because I felt like it, because I wanted it, because I wanted something for me. Because I wanted him.
Why would I do so again? Because I know that he can grow and I can grow and we can grow together.
I read Anne-Marie’s Atlantic article not long before I became pregnant with my own child. Looking back, I believe it curbed my expectations of what I would be able to juggle while working. If someone from such a prestigious background with expansive access to resources needed to choose between her ideal career and parenting, I certainly would have to, too. And after I had a child, I began making decisions that gradually eroded the possibility of a tenure-track position in academia in favour of being the parent I wanted to be. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I’ll regret it at age 65, facing retirement with only a modest savings account on hand. But I may not live until age 65 and I’m alive now, along with my child, so I don’t yet. I can accept that I won’t have it all because I never fully expected to.6
I wonder if this is why so many middle-class mothers are unhappy with their marriages and family life. Perhaps like me, they turned 40 and woke up one day, looked around, and thought, “How on earth did I end up here?” But maybe their expectations were higher than mine so their disappointment was more acute. Or maybe their dissatisfaction arises from the research finding that if women perceive themselves as “doing everything,” the benefits of a marital partnership are diminished. Our perceptions shape our expectations and our feelings, in turn, potentially closing us off to the rewards a long-term relationship and parenthood can bring.
Ironically, I now find myself considering re-embarking on my relationship but this time in a living apart together (LAT) model. My expectations are low and my agency is high. I no longer need a partner to split the rent or help me manage my anxiety or nudge me through my burnout. I no longer carry expectations about how someone else will deal with their own issues and will instead leave it to them to show me. Having dismantled my life already, I can leave this relationship behind for good. So maybe this is why I find myself willing to re-engage, to re-consider, to re-pursue.
I wonder if consciously exercising a choice about having a relationship with awareness of its flaws, and with only loosely held expectations that are subject to change as needed, can build both a sense of confidence and responsibility – and maybe even satisfaction.
For now, I think, it’s good enough.
I don’t know either in person. I mean I had read their work a number of times, as they are both scholars of note in my academic discipline.
These are overall trends but it is worth noting that race/ethnicity, place of birth (local/foreign), age, and other factors can all exert an impact on participation rates.
Did you know that the concept of adolescence has only existed since the early 1900s and really didn’t take off until the postwar era? This, too, was a product of economic and social development.
There is research to support this claim: women today contribute 35% more to child care and housework than mothers did in the 1960s. This pattern applies even more strongly to mothers who outearn their spouses (suggesting that more successful women feel greater pressure to conform to traditional gender roles). If that isn’t a recipe for burnout and divorce, I don’t know what is.
As compared to the living apart together (LAT) model.
Is this statement a self-limiting belief? Is it a sad verdict on the state of society or just realistic? Could acknowledgment of individual limits be an empowering choice? You decide.