When Selfishness Becomes Celebrated

How modern culture repackages marital abandonment as radical self-love, with little counter-narrative from religious voices

Miranda July’s novel All Fours has been a sensation among middle aged women. The New York Times wrote about how the book influenced women to rethink marriage and family life:

It’s the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40.

Miranda July’s latest novel, “All Fours,” is about a 45-year-old woman who upends her seemingly settled domestic life by checking into a motel a half-hour from her house for a few weeks, taking up with a younger married man and then experimenting with an open marriage.

On her journey to self-discovery — and sexual awakening — she asks women she knows to share with her their true desires: Are they happy in their marriages? And if they’re not, are they going to do anything about it? What are the other possible arrangements for a life?

The book came out last May and is still huge. I just checked my local library and 127 people have holds on it. (The library has 26 copies).

All Fours is basically about a 45 year old woman who suffers a midlife crisis. In the book, the narrator, married with a child, sets off on a cross country drive from LA to New York, but never even makes it out of Southern California. She ends up checking into a cheap motel, spending $20,000 to redecorate her room, staying there three weeks, and becoming infatuated with the husband of the room’s interior designer. By the end, she and her husband adopt an open marriage, the narrator has affairs with multiple women, and supposedly the book ends on a somewhat ambiguous note. (I only read the first third of it).

This is hardly the first book of its type. In some ways it’s just the new Eat, Pray, Love for a new generation of middle aged women. Obviously there’s a huge market for this.

While the book does not directly tell women to leave their husbands, July has become an explicit advocate for that on her Substack. In a recent post, she wrote:

I do believe (and I tell this to my child) that romantic relationships are usually not supposed to be lifelong, but rather a season of a particular length, to be determined. People default to "lifelong" in part because it can be really hard to trust your gut about the length of the season. Some relationships only last a few weeks (or a night) but you spend the rest of your life using things you learned from them. No length is better or more profound than any other length.

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Often there is a new person involved in this crisis. Indeed it is the new person who makes it a crisis, who brings it to a breaking point. Most of the time this new person does not endure but they are still very significant in the story of your life (a friend of mine calls these people crowbars — they get you out.) What I really think is that you are not doing it for this new person, but for this new side of yourself.

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The fascism of our era will make you want to batten down the hatches, not rock the boat. But I think things generally turn out better when people trust the groundbreaking, progressive elements within themselves. There is much company on this route, whereas the more conservative path tends to become smaller and smaller until it is just you alone in a house taking care of an old man.

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One friend had an elaborate plan designed to make her leaving the marriage more palatable and understandable to her husband. It involved several lies and I was nodding for a while, it seemed plausible, maybe even kind. But then I remembered something! "Maybe he doesn't need to understand or approve of what you’re doing?"

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Novelty helps women stay very alive which is part of our very important purpose here on Earth. Doesn't mean you have to slut it up constantly, but the idea of one person forever was...probably not something women came up with.

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Women in the comments sections of this Substack do not seem to be regretting "blowing up their lives" even when they admit it was hard for a while.

Look for the through-line of your most inner self. What did you want for yourself when you were younger? Is it connected to what you now, so problematically, want? If yes, then perhaps you are not so much blowing up your life but rather redirecting it back to its most elemental and true path.

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Try not to be too afraid of the mess that will come with tremendous change; it's a mess you'll become yourself through. It's important. Fear stasis and spending this one life frozen in a crouched position, not wanting to get in trouble.

I have been noting for about three years that there’s been a recurring theme of the media glamorizing or in effect giving permission for women to dump their husbands and families for no reason beyond pure selfishness. We saw this in the treatment of the singer Adele divorcing her husband, and op-eds by writers like Lara Bazelon (NYT) and Honor Jones (Atlantic).

This is a progression beyond simply normalizing divorce. Even in the previous pro-divorce culture, women still felt compelled to give a reason why they were dumping their husbands, something that he had done wrong. This didn’t even have to be especially bad, like an affair. But there had to be some kind of negative behavior or trait of the husband to make a divorce seem socially legitimate.

Today, that’s not the case. The explicit message is that it’s ok to divorce your husband for purely selfish reasons, even when explicitly stating that he was a good husband and father and did nothing wrong. For example, Bazelon described her divorce as “a radical act of self-love.” Of her husband she wrote:

There was no emotional or physical abuse in our home. There was no absence of love. I was in love with my husband when we got divorced. Part of me is in love with him still. I suspect that will always be the case. Even now, after everything, when he walks into the room my stomach drops the same way it does before the roller coaster comes down. I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I loved myself more.

July is not so much about stressing the husband’s innocence, but does emphasize purely selfish reasons as a justification for leaving a perfectly fine marriage.

How has the American church responded to this trend?