The Resolute Woman

Category: marriage

  • A familiar room

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    resolutewoman
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    Kirsten and Dieter are “dearest friends,” but they have differences of opinion. They have had the same argument for years until it became “something like a familiar room where they met,” writes Emily St. John Mandel in her book Station Eleven. My husband and I have some of those familiar rooms. Next time we disagree…

  • Beat your wife “lightly”

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    resolutewoman
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    Pakistan’s most populated province approved a law that gives women protection from abusive husbands. However, the country’s Council of Islamic Ideology strongly opposes the new law, reported The Dallas Morning News in its May 27 issue. The council has drafted a proposal that husbands should be allowed to “lightly beat” their wives.

  • A legacy of bluebonnets

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    resolutewoman
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    Today, when Lady Bird Johnson’s name is mentioned, many Texans—like me—think first of the countless bluebonnets that blossom along the highways of our state every spring. In the years before she died in 2007, “those who remembered her only as the wife of an unpopular president may still have disparaged her Southern drawl, but closer…

  • The marriage that made a president

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    Betty Boyd Carroli, in her book Lady Bird and Lyndon—The Hidden Story of a Marriage that Made a President, concludes that Lyndon never would have succeeded as a senator or made it to the White House without the help of Lady Bird. Lady Bird Johnson was “an invaluable asset who served as sounding board, financial…

  • Be a bit bendy

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    resolutewoman
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    Lucy, Tess’ mother, gives her daughter advice about marriage. “Sometimes I look back and think, goodness me, we took our feelings so seriously,” says Lucy in Liane Moriarity’s book The Husband’s Secret. She’s talking about her marriage and why she divorced Tess’s father. “Everything was black-and-white. We got into our positions and that was that.…

  • Keep learning

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    resolutewoman
    in ,

    Tess is forced to analyze what has happened to her relationship with her husband in Liane Moriarity’s book The Husband’s Secret. “It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners,” Tess thinks to herself. “It was easier to pretend that there…

  • No choice in the affair

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    resolutewoman
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    What’s to happen now to Miss Morton since Edward is engaged to someone else? “We think now,” said Mr. Dashwood, after a short pause, “of Robert’s marrying Miss Morton.” If you’ve read Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, you know that Robert is Edward’s brother. “The lady, I supposed, has no choice in…

  • A complicated marriage

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    resolutewoman
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    Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt had “a complicated marriage,” concluded filmmaker Ken Burns when he talked to an audience in Dallas recently about his new PBS series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Burns paused just a minute for emphasis. Then, he smiled and added, “But, that’s redundant, isn’t it?”

  • Words can be abusive, too

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    resolutewoman
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    “He practically trailed me around the house from morning until night, calling out my shortcomings,” the author writes. “He had developed an obsession with knobs and handles. It seemed that I turned them too hard or not hard enough. I over tightened the knobs on the shower and stripped them. I didn’t turn the knobs…

  • What’s your married name?

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    resolutewoman
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    For many women, their maiden name is the same as their married name. About 35 percent of married women in their 20s and 30s are keeping their own last names, according to a study by Facebook, a study we read about in the July 26, 2013, issue of The Week. That’s a big increase. Only…