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There are benefits to being married to a psychologist. Sometimes, when I least expect it, my wife comes home from work, ignores the fact that I haven't done any of the dozen things I had promised I would do, puts her arms around me, and tells me that I am a wonderful husband.
I simply smile and receive this grace. It means she has just assessed the damage to a marriage in which the husband is truly awful, and she is feeling grateful that all she has to put up with is me.
But then there are the days when no matter what spousal virtues I have demonstrated, I find myself a marked man. The conversation starts innocently enough. "You know, it's a man's world. They control everything." I have learned not to play Bill Buckley to her Gloria Steinem. "Why do you say that, honey?" Her glare says, Don't give me that crap. You are part of the conspiracy and you know it. I try to look empathetic, but it is no use. I am the enemy.
Nine times out of ten, what prompts Karen's fury is a divorce case. The husband is hiding assets, and his wife has no clue as to what they actually own. Or he has cheated on his wife and now wants half her pension. Or the wife wants to fight for a just settlement but is afraid her husband will beat her or even kill her. Or she simply doesn't know how she will raise three children and meet expenses while her husband gets to live out the dreams of a second adolescence.
Karen has heard it all. She can walk her client through the stages of grief, help her deal with feelings of guilt, fear, and failure, and formulate a life plan. Still, Karen seethes with frustration at her relative impotence. She is on the wife's side, but everyone else, it seems, is on the husband's: the lawyers, the judge, the government, and, tragically, often the church. This is a reality, a widely acknowledged but little-discussed fact of life 30 years after the feminist revolution. And it makes women, like my wife, mad.
That anger runs deep. In its first weekend, The First Wives Club grossed $18.9 million; it topped $100 million for the year. The film made the covers of Time and People. An American nerve had been touched. What audiences have responded to is a story of revenge told as a comedy. The sweetness and thrill come from seeing the tables turned. And the wrinkle is that the bad guys here are not terrorists or drug runners or serial killers. No, the bad guys are the guys--men. And it is amazing how much pleasure the audience gets from watching them get their just deserts.
How bad are they? Morty's sins are the most common. After years of toiling with Brenda (Bette Midler) to build his appliance-store chain, he takes all the equity, grudgingly gives Brenda a paltry alimony (which he rarely pays), and moves into a downtown penthouse with a beautiful though classless twentysomething twinkie. That's bad.
Producer Bill leaves fortysomething movie star Elise (Goldie Hawn), his mentor and ticket into the 'biz, for Showgirls star Elizabeth Berkley--and then demands half of Elise's assets and a hefty alimony. That's worse.
Advertising exec Aaron is separated from Annie (Diane Keaton) so he can deal with his "commitment issues" in therapy. He invites Annie for dinner, takes her up to his hotel room, where they make love (he claims later that she manipulated him into doing it), and then tells her he wants a divorce; in walks their therapist--who, as it turns out, is having an affair with Aaron. That's worst.
In Gender and Grace, psychologist Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen puts forth the intriguing theory that men and women experienced the Fall differently. She speculates that men's sinful propensity is to objectify people and treat them as means to an end. Women, on the other hand, have a propensity to give away too much responsibility for the sake of relationship. If she were writing the book today, she would say, "For instance, in The First Wives Club . . ." The men, as noted, have treated their wives as the means to getting established in the world and then traded them in for newer models. The wives, on the other hand, let it happen.
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