Marriage can be tough, but most books (or shows, movies, and real-life people) gloss over the really tough stuff.
One author is seeking to shed some light on what she says is the real truth about married life. Heather Havrilesky, 51, wrote a book, Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage, about what happens post-marriage vows. In it, she confesses to hating her husband.
She even goes so far as to calling him a "smelly heap of laundry" and a "snoring heap of meat."
Heather's book is, of course, coming under a lot of scrutiny. But she's not too worried about it. She believes that far too often people don't tell the truth about how hard it really is to stay married to the same person year after year, decade after decade.
A lot of people might think Heather's words are a bit harsh. She says, per The Times, that even in the happiest of marriages “you’ll still wake up every morning wondering why you signed on to drag this wretched, snoring heap of meat with you everywhere you go until the day you die.” She also claims that anyone who decides to embark on the journey of marriage is definitely “a true masochist.”
Is it brutal? Totally. And many people won't like what Heather has to say, but her words are surely going to strike the right note with a lot of people, too. It's definitely not easy to spend every day with the same person, or go through really difficult challenges or life changes with them. The lifelong companionship that we're made to believe is pretty wonderful if you find the right person can also include frustration, anger, and resentment.
"I kept picking up books about marriage and then throwing them across the room," Heather said about her inspiration to tell her own story. "They just felt so false. It’s not immoral to tell your story the way you want to tell it, but it feels merciless to the culture at large to offer these carefully curated glimpses of people’s lives, which you see so often on Instagram and Twitter, where everything is serene and lovely and calm and loving. It seems as if what makes you feel empowered in this f*&^ed-up world is creating an illusion for others."
She makes one really important point that is hard to deny about the way that marriage is typically portrayed. "We pretend marriage is a binary system, either you’re happy or unhappy," she said. "I wanted to own up to the full range of emotions a marriage creates."
Heather's words may not be for everyone, but her perspective is really important. That's especially true because she also writes that she is a believer in marriage. Perhaps that means that feeling a range of emotions, even awful ones, doesn't necessarily mean a marriage is destined to fail.
Of course, people are going to come to bat for her poor husband. But Heather says he's just fine with her writing honestly about their marriage: “He’s very nice, but he really doesn’t care about what others think about him."
