I was over at my mother’s for Easter and picked up a recent copy (okay, it was July 2009) edition of the Atlantic to find a new book review and personal essay piece by Sandra Lsing Loh called “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off!” What was this the author wanted to abandon? Marriage, it turns out. In a reflective essay considering four recently released books on marriage, the author suggests that we are now in a post-marriage society and the best thing would be to never get married at all, raising children in tribal family groups or giving them to the new breed of homemaker dads.

It took me aback — or perhaps, I should say, it took me back — right back to the 70′s. Only this time, men are not being castigated for being insensitive over-libidinized macho men, but instead, and I quote, “male kitchen bitches” who are too concerned with boulibaise (or however you spell it) and who, unbelievably, no longer want to have sex.

Maybe just not with the particular women they are married to, I would have to suggest to the author?

Okay, let’s get one thing straight here, Ms. Loh. You can bring forth these ideas of yours and act as if you’ve just hatch them onto the scene, but all this proves is that you did not read enough Doris Lessing in college. We are not brinking on a new age of marital enlightenment. These problems with marriage you have disclosed in your essay have been around a while, perhaps as long as three to five thousand years. People used to get around some parts of the problem with poligamy, but the problem was, this created large groups of men who had no spouse and a very acrimonious household without clear heirs; reference the story of King David in the Bible. It seems pretty clear that marriage is just plain hard. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t a lot of effort is put into trying to dampen the expected negative consequences, rarely with great success. A lot of people who get divorced wind up admitting ten years later it probably wasn’t the greatest idea; yet nevertheless new hordes of filing-for-divorcers show up daily.

Our own Tarrant county recently completed a huge new court building for “family court,” almost entirely to handle the legal fallout of divorces.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, although Loh’s essay is well written and well argued, I’m not buying her thesis for a second. And what’s more, I think the entire tone smacks of the kind of male-bashing I grew used to in college.

Just last night, perhaps ironically, I was teaching myself a new guitar song. I’m into folk and blues and country, and somehow, this song seemed to say a lot to me after reading that article. If this essay wasn’t good enough to elucidate the sentiments; perhaps Tammy Wynette can do a better job. And as she says, let’s please try to keep our expectations reasonable. “After all, he’s just a man.”