Cinemorphosis

Tag: marriage

  • Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    Solitude Is My Boyfriend (And He Doesn’t Snore)

    In her essay “Same Life, Higher Rent,” Meghan Daum compares her life in 1997 to her life in 2017 and reaches a deflating, oddly liberating conclusion: nothing has changed. At 47 and freshly divorced, she’s more or less the same person she was at 27. Still single. Still chasing deadlines. Still drinking coffee, poking at takeout sushi, and trying to keep multiple Word docs open on her MacBook while ignoring the siren song of Twitter and low-stakes Amazon purchases.

    There is one glaring difference: her rent has skyrocketed and her cognitive bandwidth has shriveled. She estimates she’s lost 70% of her brainpower to the Digital Distraction Era. So yes—same life, dumber brain, higher rent. It’s a Nabokovian joke with a Billy Collins twist: Picnic, Lightning, but with Seamless orders and browser tabs.

    Like her earlier essay “The Broken-In World,” Daum doesn’t frame divorce as failure but as an act of radical return. Not regression—recognition. The performance is over. She’s stopped cosplaying as someone else’s version of a wife. The single life isn’t a punishment or a holding pattern—it’s her set point. The gravitational center she was orbiting all along.

    Coordinating a calendar with another adult, she admits, feels like a hostage negotiation. She loves living alone. She loves eating whatever she wants, whenever she wants, without anyone asking if they should defrost chicken. She can travel at the drop of a hat without shoving someone else’s life off balance. She’s not anti-love. She just refuses to bulldoze her rhythms for the sake of joint Costco runs.

    Post-divorce, she’s dated—kind, smart, well-meaning men—but none of them stood a chance against the one lover she can’t quit: solitude. She rarely goes on second dates. She doesn’t need romantic sabotage. She’s got peace and a dog. Who needs more?

    And let’s be clear: this position wasn’t won in a raffle. She fought for it. Marriage, divorce, reinvention. She earned this life through blood, paperwork, and self-inventory. She’s not about to crawl back into the foxhole of emotional compromise.

    Reading Daum, I’m reminded of a perfectly-cut line from Rodney Dangerfield: “You’re born a certain way and that’s it. You don’t change.” I think about that more than I should. At 63, I’m not all that different than I was at six. Moody, brooding one day. Goofy and loud the next. There’s a streak of isolato in me too. My family tolerates it. They let me take naps and skip amusement park trips that sound like air-conditioned nightmares.

    I’m probably not a perfect husband. But we make it work—me and this life. Me and my Daum-ian disposition. The marriage lasts, not because I’ve changed, but because we’ve all made our peace with who I am. And who I’ve always been.

  • Divorced, Not Damned: Meghan Daum and the Art of Letting Go

    Divorced, Not Damned: Meghan Daum and the Art of Letting Go

    In The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s 2016 essay “The Broken-In World” explores divorce with the same dry clarity one might use to describe cleaning out a fridge: inevitable, necessary, and oddly liberating. At 45, Daum finds herself in the middle of an amicable divorce—the kind without cheating, bruises, or courtroom melodrama. No one threw a lamp. No one stole the dog. Instead, it was just the slow, steady rot of benign neglect. Quirks once considered “charming” metastasized into full-blown repulsions. “Irreconcilable differences,” she concludes, isn’t a cop-out. It’s a dignified admission that entropy won.

    She discovers, to her great relief, that she is significantly less insane living alone. No more haggling over dinner, toothpaste caps, or passive-aggressive silences. Just peace. Divorce, in Daum’s telling, isn’t some tragic unraveling—it’s a grown-up’s fire extinguisher to a low-grade house fire of misery. It’s not weakness. It’s not moral collapse. It’s maturity, quietly slipping the ring off and stepping into air.

    Post-divorce, Daum moves to New York, joins the unofficial cult of the self-rescued, and discovers a radical truth: brokenness is the baseline. Normalcy is a myth. Everyone’s dragging a dented suitcase through life. Divorce just makes it public.

    Her real epiphany, however, isn’t just about divorce—it’s about the overinflated value of marriage itself. To Daum, marriage never felt like the final level of the video game, no Holy Grail behind velvet ropes. Monogamy had already given her a sneak preview. The ceremony, the legal bind—it was all anti-climax. If marriage is the gold standard, Daum suggests, then maybe we need a new currency.

    As a married person reading her work, you’re invited—no, cornered—into imagining a counterlife. The one where you’re single. I thought of the comedian and podcaster (soon to retire) Marc Maron: early sixties, unmarried, encircled by cats, vinyl, artisan boots, and a galaxy of fellow eccentrics. His life is cluttered, creative, obsessive. He has no wife, but he has a world.

    Daum’s point: we will find connection. If not through spouses and children, then through podcasts, group chats, improv classes, dogs, or elaborate hobbies that consume our evenings and fill the fridge of our loneliness with something edible. Marriage isn’t the only valid architecture for a life, and singleness isn’t a synonym for solitude. The real issue is connection. Not how we find it—but that we must.

    Now in her fifties, Daum is single, scraping by with podcast revenue and teaching gigs. No financial safety net. No partner to split the rent or cover her if she breaks a hip. But what she does have is agency. A voice. Essays that hum with intelligence and self-awareness. She doesn’t glamorize her choice. She doesn’t hold it above yours. She simply claims it as hers—and owns the wreckage and wisdom that came with it.

    She’s not superior. She’s just no longer married. And for her, that is enough.

  • Marriage as a Three-Headed Beast: A Review of The Four Seasons

    Marriage as a Three-Headed Beast: A Review of The Four Seasons

    I’ve worshipped at the altar of Tina Fey’s comedic brilliance for decades, so when The Four Seasons popped up on my Netflix feed, I was dismayed. This didn’t smell like Fey’s usual ambrosia of wit and subversion—it reeked of midlife schlock. I swatted it away like a pop-up ad and went back to Black Mirror Season 7, content to wallow in algorithmic despair. But then the critics on Larry Mantle’s AirTalk (KPCC 89.3, for the culturally literate) described the show as “a good hang.” That faint praise intrigued me. My wife and I hit play, expecting light entertainment. What we got was a surprise: not only was it watchable, it became quietly addictive—then, unsettlingly, admirable.

    In eight breezy half-hours, The Four Seasons somehow captures the slow psychic erosion of long-term marriage with unsettling accuracy. Tina Fey and Will Forte play Kate and Jack, a couple who seem… fine. Functional. Even affectionate. Until the cracks begin to spread like hairline fractures on a windshield. By episode three, they’re in the car, both shouting expletives at the realization they need couples therapy. Not because they’re broken, but because their marriage has mutated into an ungovernable third organism—a beast with its own moods, tantrums, and existential despair. Therapy is no longer optional. It’s marital chemo.

    And so they go. They learn the rules: de-escalation, boundary-setting, “I” statements. The fights stop, which sounds good—until they stop talking altogether. What remains is a dried-out husk of a relationship, padded with therapy-speak and mutual avoidance. Every conversation is a minefield of affirmations and self-soothing clichés. They’ve traded rage for beige. No more screaming matches, but no more real connection either. They look like two grad students in a toxic group project, just trying to pass the semester without killing each other.

    Yet somehow, this truce counts as a win. The marriage is stable. Homeostasis, if not happiness. It’s better than divorce, which they watch unfold in their friends’ lives with morbid fascination. Their pal Nick leaves his wife for a younger woman named Ginny, who speaks in TikTok euphemisms and bathes him in fresh-eyed adoration. Nick is euphoric, weeping with gratitude like a man who’s just discovered fire. But Kate and Jack look at him the way you’d watch someone dancing on the deck of the Titanic. They’ll take their muted misery over the exhausting ecstasy of dating a woman who thinks Kenny Loggins is a type of sourdough. And who can blame them?

  • Punchlines and Prenups: Why Comedians Make Surprisingly Solid Spouses

    Punchlines and Prenups: Why Comedians Make Surprisingly Solid Spouses

    In her essay “What Comedians Know About Staying Married,” Olga Khazan throws us a curveball: stand-up comics, those neurotic jesters fueled by dysfunction and oversharing, somehow have enviably strong marriages. Yes, the very people whose livelihoods depend on broadcasting their most humiliating personal stories to drunken strangers in dark clubs have—brace yourself—functional, long-lasting relationships.

    This sounds like the premise of a dark joke: A comedian walks into a marriage… and it actually works out?

    Khazan rattles off an eyebrow-raising list: Bert Kreischer (who once famously performed shirtless while talking about binge-drinking with Russian mobsters), Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Tina Fey, Conan O’Brien, Adam Sandler, Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen Colbert, Tom Papa, Jim Gaffigan, and Nate Bargatze. Not exactly a group of low-key, emotionally regulated nine-to-fivers. And yet, many of them are married to the same person they were with when they were broke, bombing open mics, and sleeping on stained futons.

    So what’s the secret sauce—besides not cheating with the club manager or moving to L.A. for “more stage time” and never calling home again?

    According to Khazan, it’s that these comics are astute students of human nature. Their job is to analyze and exaggerate the absurdities of life, especially their own. They live in a constant loop of self-examination and observational sharpness, and when that lens is turned inward—not just for laughs, but for emotional insight—it becomes a tool for longevity. In other words, they have weaponized their neuroses for good.

    By that logic, therapists, philosophers, professors, and other caffeine-dependent, overthinking professionals should also have excellent marriage stats. (Spoiler: they don’t.) So the real takeaway isn’t that comedy makes you marriage material, but that a reflective worldview and the ability to call yourself on your own crap might.

    Still, Khazan digs deeper and finds another ingredient: collaboration. These comic couples are often not just married; they’re co-creators. Podcasts, YouTube channels, touring schedules, editing sessions—they’re not just paying the bills together, they’re building something. It’s the opposite of what she calls “mutual stagnation,” that slow marital death by couch, where both parties rot in front of The Great British Bake-Off, silently aging into human-shaped throw pillows.

    I had a flashback reading that: Estes Park, Colorado, 2002. I was the best man at my friend’s wedding. As I helped the priest unload a boxy camcorder from his Volkswagen Beetle, he said, “My brother’s getting divorced. No affair, no drama. They just didn’t grow.” That phrase haunted me. They just didn’t grow. They watched TV every night until they turned into living wallpaper.

    In contrast, the comic couples Khazan describes are building together, or at least sharing war stories from the front lines of the road. They’re not roommates with mutual dental insurance—they’re comrades. And while the rest of us are debating whether to splurge on Disney+ Premium, they’re debating how far they can push a bit about their sex life without getting served divorce papers.

    Khazan points out that this delicate dance—what to say on stage about your spouse and what to leave in the vault—requires real communication. These couples talk about boundaries. They negotiate what’s sacred and what’s fair game. That kind of honesty may not always be funny, but it’s the opposite of resentment.

    And the road? Turns out, time apart isn’t marital poison. It’s oxygen. When one half of the couple is in Omaha doing five shows in three nights, they’re not growing sick of each other’s chewing or laundry pile. They’re getting some much-needed space. Absence makes the heart grow fonder—and also less likely to stab someone for breathing too loudly.

    But ultimately, the golden ticket, according to Khazan, is metacognition: the ability to think about how you’re thinking. It’s that moment where you pause mid-freakout and realize, “Oh. I’m spiraling like a lunatic. Maybe I should stop yelling about the dishwasher and step outside.”

    It reminded me of a moment in my own marriage two decades ago. My wife and I were in the thick of some knock-down-drag-out verbal joust over—well, I have no idea. Whatever it was, we were spiraling fast. But then, mid-argument, I had an out-of-body experience. I hovered above the room like a judgmental ceiling fan and watched myself—a grown man—losing his mind over who knows what. In that moment of clarity, I clutched my stomach, declared I had “intestinal distress,” and locked myself in the bathroom for 45 minutes. Crisis averted. Marriage preserved. Thank you, metacognition.

    So maybe that’s the real lesson. You don’t need to be a comedian to make your marriage work. But it helps to be someone who’s spent a lifetime poking around in the attic of your psyche, who can recognize your own absurdity in real time, and who knows when to quit the bit and retreat to the bathroom before you say something irreversible.

    Marriage isn’t a punchline. But if you’re lucky, it’s a running joke you both keep writing together.

  • What devotion really looks like

    What devotion really looks like

    When I think of love in all its fullness, I dredge up a memory from 1982—a gem buried deep in my psyche from my early twenties. Back then, I was in college, slogging through a statistics course taught by a professor who looked like he’d been teleported straight out of a Dickens novel. Wild white hair defied gravity, crazed blue eyes darted around like they were searching for meaning, a nose as red as a warning light hinted at extracurricular activities with a bottle, and his overall aura was eau de whiskey. He was a kind man, though, in that shabby, endearingly tragic way.

    The class itself was a masochist’s delight, and by week four—when the sadistic monster called “standard deviation” reared its head—half of us were drowning. Among my classmates was an elderly African American couple in their early seventies and always dressed for church, who were either a heartwarming sitcom subplot or walking proof that God has a delicious sense of humor. The husband, a determined relic with a cane, announced on the first day of class that this was his seventh attempt at passing statistics. His wife, the embodiment of long-suffering devotion, was there not as a student but as his support system—a Bible-toting, knitting saint.

    The husband’s approach to learning was…unorthodox. While the rest of us quietly sunk in our seats, he would occasionally leap to his feet mid-lecture, his cane clattering dramatically, and hobble to the chalkboard. Pointing a finger like a preacher calling out sin, he’d declare, “That’s not the answer I got. Let me show you!” And then he’d scrawl his “solution” on the board—a series of hieroglyphics that no one could understand. 

    The professor, to his credit, tolerated these interruptions with the forbearance of a man who had seen worse (probably in his flask). Meanwhile, the wife would bow her head and whisper desperate prayers to “sweet Jesus” as if divine intervention might save her husband—or at least restore a shred of her dignity. Students stifled laughter behind cupped hands, and I sat there, torn between secondhand embarrassment and the sneaking suspicion that this was comedy gold worthy of Saturday Night Live.

    After class, I’d drive home and pop in a cassette of “Tiny Children” by The Teardrop Explodes—a song that paired perfectly with my mood of existential dread. I’d replay the scene in my mind: the old man’s quixotic battle with the chalkboard, the wife’s quiet perseverance. And then, like clockwork, I’d start crying. Not just because I was floundering as badly as he was with standard deviation or because my social skills were nonexistent, but because that woman had shown me something profound: the power of love. Real love—the kind that sticks with you through seven attempts at statistics, through public humiliation, through everything.

    I can still see that couple vividly. The husband’s determination, the wife’s quiet strength, and my own pathetic, lonely self, sitting there and learning—without realizing it—what devotion really looks like.