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.
We first see them as cheerful, independent, intelligent friends in college. Fast-forward 20 years and you’ve fallen a long way, baby. They have lost touch with each other. Annie has become so codependent she is no longer capable of uttering a declarative sentence. Brenda has been reduced to enlarging herself through overeating and becoming a nag. Elise turns into a lush and a cosmetic-surgery junkie.
Redemption comes through sisterhood and a decision to fight back. The men, as it turns out, are almost pitifully easy targets (mostly because they expect no resistance from their formerly passive wives). And here is where the audience moves beyond chuckling at the jokes to full-blooded cathartic release. What woman wouldn’t enjoy the fantasy of seeing the husband who has betrayed her begging, as Aaron does with Annie after she buys out his business partners, that she not let him go because he can’t start over again at his age? Her response–“I know just how you feel”–carries the same force as Dirty Harry’s bullets.
My wife was once surprised by the candid and unguarded comment of a pastor: “Women who go through divorce often become so much more alive, more interesting than they were before.” Karen and I have noticed this uncomfortable phenomenon–uncomfortable because it complicates the otherwise simple formula “Divorce is bad.” This dynamic is clearly at work in First Wives. By the end, the three Muskatettes are each self-confident, fit, and healthy. They have shed their neuroses and taken control of their destinies. One could even say they glow. In fact, it is hard to imagine that their husbands (even those three) would have divorced them if they had displayed such dynamism while still married.
But the movie isn’t really antidivorce in the first place; that’s not the point. We witness these women being tossed carelessly aside, but we never hear that marriage should be for a lifetime. We watch them receive psychological punches in the gut, but we never hear questioned the husband’s right to leave. The moral force of this movie is directed solely to the how of these divorces: that the husbands were mean and insensitive and kept too many of the marbles.
Sociologists have amply documented that women suffer more than their fair share in a divorce. Their standard of living goes down; men’s goes up. Men remarry sooner. Yet secular feminist groups are not on the march against divorce. They want equity, not longevity.
Why? I believe it is because women who go through divorce often end up closer to the ideal feminist vision. Divorce is the machine that produces self-reliant women–women who are not dependent on men. Van Leeuwen’s theory helps to explain this metamorphosis. In divorce, women experience a harsh correction to their propensity to give away or deny too much of themselves. As Diane Keaton’s character screams to her husband: “I’m sorry. Sorry I worked and slaved all those years to give you everything you ever wanted or needed!” Is marriage really supposed to sound like martyrdom?
While the movie is not antidivorce, it is not prodivorce either. The opening scene, and the event that initially brings the three women back together, is the news that their friend Cynthia, their rich, society friend who had given everything to her husband, jumped from her penthouse apartment after he left her for a younger woman. The pain of divorce is a cultural fact.
The church has begun to mobilize in its fight against divorce–with community covenants among pastors to guarantee premarital counseling, lobbying to change no-fault divorce laws, and proactive efforts to save marriages–but First Wives reveals another step we need to take: promoting models of marriage that allow women to thrive and grow without having to divorce.
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
