🔥 Burn it down (but ethically)
Lyz Lenz burned her wedding dress and ended her marriage. Getting to the conversation about her scorched marriage was worth all the trouble.
Way back in 2021, my Iowa-based brother- and sister-in-law gushed to me about a Cedars Rapids Gazette writer they loved, Lyz Lenz, who had taken to writing on something called a Substack. They gave me a gift subscription to her newsletter, Men Yell at Me, along with the gushing.
I immediately fell in love with her feisty feminism and social commentary. I like that she was in Iowa - a state with a bunch of people I love. I now look forward each week to learning who (or what) has been dubbed “The Dingus of the Week.” Inspired by Lyz, I occasionally dub my own Dinguses, and it feels right and good to name their absurdity with a silly word.
Loving her newsletter, I pleasantly anticipated her new book - This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life - about her divorce and reclaiming women’s space in society.
The Trappings of Trad Gender Roles
I’m not looking for a divorce - I am happily married and intend to keep it that way - but I am deeply interested in how societal gender norms influence our culture and public health.
Seeing the Trad Wife social media trend, including the promotion of submissiveness to husbands and raising children as the only job that women should hold, should make it clear to anyone who’s watching that the conservative Christian Right Wing is very, very, very interested in keeping women in the kitchen and in our marriages, come hell or high water. Conservative Catholic kicker and “damp wet sock of a human being” Harrison Butker recently told a class of graduating women that while they may go on to lead successful careers, “my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother” and that she embraced “one of the most important titles of all. Homemaker.” Apparently, telling women we can be equal members of society is “the most diabolical lie.” In a profound plot twist, it turns out his mom is a medical physicist.
No shade on women who want to work in the home, but I wanted to be a doctor.
Early in our relationship, I asked my now-husband what he imagined his future life would look like. He described a stay-at-home partner and a bunch of kids. I was open to having kids, but I intended to have a career. It was (and is) critical to me that I have financial stability regardless of marriage, which meant I would never be willing to run an unpaid childcare service. I never wanted to feel financially trapped in a relationship. If that was a deal breaker for him, we should call it quits. He decided he wanted to keep dating (and I did too). Our marriage has evolved through a thousand decisions about what kind of relationship we want to be in and how to care for each other and our family.
Divorce is like car insurance: it's really expensive, and I hope to never need it, but I know I benefit from its existence. The existence and availability of divorce make marriage a choice rather than a trap (if you can afford it).
Happy Women Dinners
When I saw there was a dinner event through a company called Happy Women Dinners to meet Lyz and hear a reading from her book only 20 minutes from my work, I knew I wanted to go. My husband and I checked our schedules - he would be with the kids. Then I saw my work schedule — I was covering a liver transplant call and was assigned to work late. (No doubt this would give the damp, wet sock man a bunch of patriarchal feelings about who should have been watching and feeding my children).
If there is one rule in the life of an anesthesiologist, it’s that you never make important-I-don’t-want-to-miss-this-plans when you’re on call. It’s like asking for your heart to be broken. It felt like a pipe dream, but it was also something I wanted, and I didn’t want work to take it away from me. I decided the worst thing that would happen was losing a little money and that I was lucky to be able to make that bargain.
I rolled the dice and signed up. I explained my situation to Jill, the organizer, who told me I could get there as late as 6:45pm without missing the reading and conversation.
On the day of the event, I showed up to a brutal schedule that looked like it might blast past 7pm. There were the surgeries I knew about, but also add-ons (extra cases). I tried to contain my despair.
But lo! The anesthesia universe smiled upon me - a case got rescheduled, and another patient didn’t show up. I compulsively checked my email to make sure a liver transplant hadn’t been scheduled - and by 5pm, I felt pretty confident there wouldn’t be one during dinner. The OR staff brought their A-game, and we finished in record time! Against all odds, I could jet to the locker to change my scrubs to Normal Person Clothes™️, drive across town (green lights all the way!), and arrive at 6:30 pm. Was I jittery and out of breath from hustling? Yes, but these are the things we endure for joy.
If I could make it, I figured I’d get dinner and hear Lyz read a bit of her book. I had no idea how intimate the event would be — only about 30 people at a beautiful house with a sunset view of the Bay Area.
I was the last to show up, and I took the last seat at one of the tables. I quickly figured out I was sitting next to Lyz!
It must be weird to meet people who know so much about you but you’ve never met. Despite this, Lyz was fun and curious and we were suddenly talking about families and disability and Iowa and kids. She had great questions about bioethics, and I got the sense we could have chatted for hours. But as the star of the event, I couldn’t suck up all her time telling her about my life’s work. The lady had books to sign!
I didn’t realize until I arrived that Shannon Watts (founder of the gun violence prevention group Moms Demand Action) would also be there for a panel conversation. The night just kept getting better.
American Divorce
After dinner, we gathered around the giant chic living room for the book reading and panel. The conversation was profound and deep and critical and timely. We talked about how the American marriage economically extracts women for their unpaid labor. We talked about gender roles, violence against women, and a society lashing back against the modest gains women have made in the last several decades. With Watts and her gun violence expertise, it was easy to contrast the happy marriages women thought they were getting with the violent reality many women (and their children) face.
Some women simply didn’t want to be with their husbands anymore. Should they be forced to stay in an unfulfilling relationship out of societal duty alone? Many of the women in the audience were divorced because they had made their choice - with a resounding “no.”
I thought I was attending a book reading, but the host’s home became a container where women could talk about divorce and leaving shitty or mediocre marriages and the new freedom they found in leaving behind what society told them they were supposed to want. We talked about the economic and financial drivers in marriage. We talked about leaving abusive men. We talked about our mothers and grandmothers who couldn’t leave because they’d been excluded from the working world and couldn’t even have credit cards. We talked about raising kids and what a safe family means. Women shared the relief and anxiety of divorced parenting, navigating co-parenting, and absent fathers. We discussed what it would look like to be happier, healthier, and enjoy stability in a culture designed for legally binding marriages.
Watts wrote about being a panelist at the event in her newsletter:
“The women in the audience nodded in agreement, and several of them chimed in about their own experiences with being married, divorced, or dating as a woman in midlife. Some of the women said they were unhappily married and wanted out. Others said their divorces had given them new freedom after being confined to one partner for so many years. But interestingly, none of the women said they were happily married, but maybe that’s why they came to the Happy Woman Dinner about divorce in the first place.”
I read the second to last sentence with a smirk. It wasn’t a space made for women who didn’t want divorces. As a happily married person, attending an event celebrating an author’s divorce felt like trespassing or, at the very least, getting an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of another way to live. The woman I sat beside was also married and uninterested in divorcing, but she hoped her marriage could evolve. Would learning about divorce help her manifest the growth she hoped for?
#NotAllMarriage
To turn the focus to stable marriages would risk warping an honest conversation into an out of touch #NotAllMen version. Women at this event didn’t believe that no marriage could ever be fulfilling. They knew their marriages weren’t, and they needed out. Marriage isn’t working for a lot of women, and no amount of other women’s happy marriages changes that. When divorce is culturally treated as a failure, there are few spaces where a group could openly talk about the collapse of the marriages they entered so hopefully.
Being in community means picking up on the vibe and knowing when to listen and learn, not contribute.
Fear of Divorce
There will be women who are afraid to read This American Ex-Wife because we are taught divorce is dangerous and shameful. But marriage can be those things too. Lots of women are legally, financially, and socially trapped in unhealthy, harmful marriages yet aren’t sure how to get out. Divorced women at this event were paving a different way, outside of our culture’s norms.
When I returned from the event, energized and excited about a divorce book, my own husband bristled lightly. I’m lucky to be in a relationship that is much more a realized version of Eve Rodsky‘s Fair Play than Lyz Lenz’s description of her marriage (and the rotting garbage that finally ended it). But even someone else’s celebration of divorce being brought into our house carried some tension. If you say “divorce” three times in a mirror, does your marriage fall apart? I had to remind my husband that This American Ex-Wife was about another marriage and another family. Not us.
It’s hard to quantify the degree to which being surrounded by a bunch of women who left unhappy marriages reinvigorates my sense of having won a cosmic lottery in my own relationship. By what miracle did we find each other and not manage to ruin a good thing? Why does creating and maintaining a supportive partnership seem so unusual? I have enough cis-het friends on dating apps to know that a good man remains hard to find. I often tell my husband he can never die because I cannot deal with starting over.
We can’t talk about gender in America without addressing marriage and divorce. The social, economic, religious, and cultural significance are baked into our lives - whether we like it or not. Fear of discussing divorce isn’t changing the fact that so many marriages end. Fear isn’t making us better partners, parents, or confidants.
Lyz’s book paints an alternative narrative where women can proudly launch into their second act sans husband. Divorce doesn’t mean you’re a failure - it may mean that you are very brave.
“Burn it down (but ethically)”
After our brief chat about what-the-heck-do-you-do-as-a-bioethicist, Lyz signed my book “Burn it down (but ethically).”
If you aren’t already familiar with Lyz, I hope you’ll read This American Ex-Wife and learn about the next Dingus of the Week at
.
She an absolute delight. ❤️