Harrison Scott Key Tells Us “How to Stay Married”….and Miserable

I naively asked, “Must marriage be difficult?” I had blessedly forgotten that one author had already spilled pages of ink in the assertion that, yes, it must be brutally difficult and unendingly painful.

What is this book?

After I heard someone describe Harrison Scott Key’s “How to Stay Married” as the “the best book I’ve ever read” I was committed to reading it. Whenever there is a proclaimed “favorite,” there must be something worth investigating. The title distills one of the most important principles of civil society: staying married. I was optimistic.

But then I tried reading it. The premise: Key’s wife had an affair with a neighbor. Twice. And they were running in some “Christian” circles that put a spiritual-sounding patina over all of their undisciplined emotional turmoil and self-imposed suffering. Suffice it to say, I don’t go in for caustic, self-deprecating humor. Unbearable!

Take, for example, this typical diatribe: “Staying married is not fun. Staying married is like being kicked repeatedly in the head by a mule who loves you, and the mule is God.” Speak for yourself.

Harrison recognizes how unappealing his union is and notes, “Plenty will read this book and say, ‘Lo, this is why I choose to remain single.’ Many do, and I lust for their disposable income. But somebody’s got to populate the damned planet and make the people who will raise the cruelty-free chickens and overthrow despots and build space freighters, and the babies who will grow….”

I confidently put the book out of my life. Until it was recommended again with the added enticement that the cheating wife, Lauren, wrote her own chapter at one point toward the end of the book. I fully expected her perspective to subvert expectations, provide sudden and shocking revelation, and transform the narrative. It did none of these things. The chapter from the wife confirms two things:

1. While it is perhaps impressive that Key stayed committed to his marriage even after betrayal, it ceased to be impressive when he proclaimed this commitment in public. The violation of privacy and the self-aggrandizement remove all merit, as evidenced by wooden prose with which Lauren regurgitates the accepted narrative her husband has sold to the public, if she did, in fact, write the chapter.
2. They may be married for now, but there is no basis for confidence in this off-kilter union of unhappy people. This is further supported by at least one divorced man expressing how deeply he related to the narrative. Yes, this type of excessive emotional dysfunction and indulgence is the lifestyle of people for whom sustained commitment is untenable.

It is tempting to go on, but that would mean only, once again, embarrassing myself with an overly zealous and outright uncharitable review. Writing a negative review really is an art. Caitlin Flanagan, with whom I’ve recently become acquainted (in the written word, that is), is a master of the negative review. She succeeds frequently in generalizing a group of people before skewering them, a move that prevents her from seeming to make a personal attack when she takes issue with their ideas. That’s a maneuver I’d do well to practice.

One reviewer used Flanagan’s own advice about writing a negative review to critique “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.” Jen Lawrence wrote,

But as Flanagan herself wrote in her article “What Price Valor”, her review in The Atlantic of Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Creating a Life: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Having a Baby and a Career, “We might track down all the book’s contradictions and try to make sense of them, but that way lies madness. Better to get a bead on [the author’s] . . . general topic of inquiry.” And so I put down my highlighter and simply read the book.

In the spirit of getting to the point and avoiding madness, I’d like to refrain from the temptation to brutalize the audience with every shortcoming of Key’s book and zero in on one factoid worth considering: The author mentions on multiple occasions his wife drinking apple juice.

Once when she was bleary-eyed, first thing in the morning, recovering from surgery, another random night before going to bed. What grown woman consumes apple juice? How would a hormonally dysregulated woman approaching middle age handle a glass of sugar water upon waking and before retiring for the evening?

The short answer from any woman who has dipped a toe into those choppy waters is likely not well at all. We would be naïve to dismiss the effects of metabolic dysfunction and hormonal irregularity on intimate relationships. A woman strapped into a rollercoaster of dysphoric episodes is likely incapable of the calm and steady interior development required for a sustained and meaningful connection with another person. This isn’t to pick on the lady at the center of this (her husband has already done a thorough and humiliating job of that). It’s to point out what is true in so many of our lives: While we try to psychologize and spiritualize and blame all of our problems on our parents, we might just be doing a crummy job of covering the basics of hygiene and good living on a daily basis.

Wean yourself off the sugar water. Form close friendships. Those two simple steps could have avoided a tawdry, years-long, two-part affair that will live on through this sad testament to the misery of many marriages that is the book “How to Stay Married.” It need not be so, and that is, at the same time, the saddest part of all and the source of all our hope: it need not be so!