Activist Women Claim Trump’s Election is Destroying Their Marriages

Activist Women Claim Trump’s Election is Destroying Their Marriages

Is there anything Trump can’t do?

An article recently published in New York Magazine is truly something else.

A handful of women who found themselves politically activated after Trump’s electoral win now believe they cannot live their newfound activist lives alongside their spouses.

The trend to normalize and legitimatize this kind of attitude and behavior is even more disturbing than the behavior itself.

After attending a “Witnessing Whiteness” class, fifty-something “Kristen” from Missouri couldn’t her unengaged husband who wasn’t interested in picking up a picket sign to join the mob. So, she left him.

I told him I really wanted to work on making the world a better place, and I didn’t feel I could do that within the confines of our marriage.

…I’d found a passion and wanted to spend all of my free time doing it. And that’s exactly what has happened.

It’s kind of sad, that in this horrible time I found myself, but I’m also grateful, both for what I had with Geoffrey and for where it allowed me to end up. Finally, I’m the feminist I should have always been.

And then there’s Sarah, a thirty-something from the Southwest who complains that her husband would be way happier if he would just do what she wants him to do:

It breaks my heart whenever he says he’s lonely. But again, I’m like, You don’t have to be lonely if you want to put up street signs with me.

…Part of it is that he has the perspective that this too shall pass. In my opinion, that comes from the privilege he has as a white male Protestant.

…I’d describe my husband as a feminist, but he doesn’t want to be the only dude in the room. Which bleeds into why I’ve never thought, Maybe I should just stop all this and save my marriage. That would teach our kids something I don’t want to teach them. It almost feels like the 2018 version of the woman who gives up her career to stay home.

“Samantha and John” from NYC are having issues because John doesn’t hate Trump near as much as Samantha:

We’ve been married 25 years, and we’re both lefties, and he thinks Trump is as much of a blight on the world as I do. But throughout the hiring of the Steve Mnuchins of world, the white privileged men, and with every single Cabinet member and Jared Kushner and Ivanka, he had much less rage than I did. Eventually he was like, “We can’t go to bed talking about them and wake up in the morning with you still spewing about them.”

With Brett Kavanaugh, the first thing he said about him, before any of the allegations, was that they were once on a panel at some alumni thing and that he seemed like a nice guy, which of course started a fight. I said, “A nice guy based on what?” Everyone is a nice guy. And then at first, when Dr. Ford came forward, his reaction had an element of “Boys will be boys” and, you know, “It was 30-something years ago.” Even after Debbie Ramirez came forward, he was like, “Do you still think he could change after college?” I was like, “No.” At each stage, he’s had to reassess his feelings. And at each stage we have yet another argument.

Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away.

Gee. I just can’t imagine why there would be conflict in a marriage where one is telling the other their opinions and thoughts aren’t the right opinions and thoughts.

If their stories are as they tell them, their reasons for parting ways with their spouses are wholly self-involved, myopic, and childish. They might be blaming the aftermath of Trump’s election for their marital disruptions, but I can assure you such attitudes were always present, they just found a convenient excuse on which to pin them.

Politics is not life and life does not revolve around politics, or it should not, anyway. Marriage and resultant families are the cornerstones on which any society stands or crumbles, not the other way around. We used to know this.

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