Marriage, Labor, Desire and The Right to Leave

Dear Community,

Tomorrow is the last day of the 21-Day Reset. What an amazing experience! I loved every moment of it and it seems like the participants, did, too. On June 2nd I am opening a slightly longer and bigger container of transformation, and that is a 30-Day Reset. If you are a woman and you  feel stuck, confused, phone-dependent, unclear as to what your role in the world is, scared, please join us. The community is supportive and kind, the morning practices give rhythm and structure to one's day and I get to give a sermon every morning! (only on weekdays). Or, if you don't feel called to join us, please share with others who you think might benefit from something like this. Also, if the price is outside of your capability to pay, but you would absolutely LOVE to participate, please let me know and we will talk. 

Here's the link: https://junereset7.netlify.app

After my recent newsletter about “The Prostitute”, a recently divorced friend  (M.M.) sent me a paragraph that I have asked for permission to share. She wrote:

“I believe that marriage is just legalized prostitution and indentured servitude combined into one for women.”

Very provocative words.

She went on:

“Most married women have sex they do not want to have in exchange for something they value: money, respectability, their children, stability. Then on top of that, we almost all work for income. Plus we still do almost all of the mental load and physical labor of running a household and raising a family. For free.”

And then this line:

“The difference between a working girl and a married woman is not just the number of johns. It’s the working girl’s freedom to say no.”

I sat with that for a while, because I couldn’t make up my mind if I agree or disagree.

A few days later, I spoke to a close friend. A woman I love precisely because I do not feel split around her, I don’t have to perform around her and there is no peacocking between us.

I told her I was getting divorced. She was kind and calm, didn’t act shocked at all.  And then, the conversation drifted toward her own marriage. She told me her husband wants her to go to the gym more often. When he is home, she resists it. When he is away, she is more disciplined because, in her words, she is “trying to keep the marriage legacy.”

The marriage legacy.

Part of me became instantly triggered.

I had just declared emotional independence from a system that, at times, felt profoundly extractive to me. A system in which women often become emotional support animals. A system where many women quietly disappear while appearing wildly functional from the outside- and right here was another woman speaking about preserving the structure.

But after my hot tempered self calmed down, I realized something uncomfortable: neither of us was necessarily wrong.

We were simply having a different relationships to sacrifice.

Some women experience marriage as sanctuary, some women experience it as imprisonment, some women experience both simultaneously. Some women genuinely love caring for their husbands and children, not performatively, not from coercion, they just truly derive meaning from continuity, loyalty, ritual, family identity. Other women slowly suffocate inside those same structures.

Some women want devotion, some want freedom, some want both and feel guilty for failing to reconcile them.

Here is where the data becomes impossible to ignore.

Research consistently shows that marriage benefits men far more than it benefits women. Married men live longer, earn more, report higher levels of happiness, and have better physical health than their single counterparts. For women, the same benefits are significantly weaker — or reversed entirely. Married women report higher rates of depression than single women. Single women, by contrast, report higher wellbeing than their married peers. As one long-running body of research summarizes it: marriage is the single best predictor of a man's health and happiness, and a much murkier proposition for women.

The labor numbers are equally blunt. Even in dual-income households, women still perform the majority of unpaid domestic work and carry the bulk of the mental load — the invisible labor of tracking, planning, anticipating, managing. This has not changed substantially in decades despite every cultural conversation insisting otherwise.

Which may be why, quietly and then all at once, women are leaving, or better said: not arriving in the first place. The share of never-marriedAmerican women has reached historic highs. Among women under 30, more are single than at any recorded point in modern history. Across generations, women are consistently more likely than men to initiate divorce — by some estimates, women file for roughly 70% of divorces. They are not doing it impulsively. Many report that the decision came after years of invisible labor, emotional management, and the slow accumulation of feeling unseen.

The old contract is being renegotiated, mostly by women.

And then there is the elephant in the room almost nobody wants to look at, touch, or talk about:  sex.  Not the glamorous version of it. I mean the ordinary, negotiated, exhausted, long-term sexual economy that exists inside many marriages. How many women are having sex primarily to maintain relational stability? How many men are quietly starving emotionally and sexually but do not know how to ask for intimacy without sounding entitled or predatory?

How many couples are performing closeness while privately living as roommates?

Nobody tells the truth because the truth destabilizes the village.

Marriage has always been both personal and economic, romantic and practical, sacred and transactional.  For centuries, women needed marriageat a survival level. However,that financial dependency has shifted — many women today do not need marriage in the same way — but the emotional architecture, the expectations, and the conditioning remain fully intact, running in the background.

Here  is some of the conditioning I find in my own head and in the expressions of women around me: be desirable, be maternal, be emotionally available, be low maintenance, be grateful, be sexually open but not “too much”, be accomplished but not threatening to the current structures, do not take too many risks, do not become a liability, be self-sacrificing but make sure you stay radiant (see the famous monologue of America Ferrera in Barbie the movie: https://youtu.be/CBqlDWHkdHk?si=KGlTmEnYdRerlspv)

And men are trapped too. Many of the men I know were raised to believe their worth comes primarily through provision. They arrive in modern relationships emotionally undertrained, terrified of inadequacy, carrying the silent pressure to succeed — while simultaneously being told that traditional masculinity itself is suspect. It is a confusing place to stand.

There is also something worth naming that does not get said enough: research suggests that marriage, for many men, produces a kind of comfortable contraction. Married men are statistically less physically active than single men, more likely to gain weight, and more likely to outsource their emotional and social lives almost entirely to their wives. This is not an insult — it is a structural problem. When one person in a partnership absorbs the labor of keeping life running, the other person slowly stops building the muscles to do it himself. Everyone loses.

And yet.

Is marriage inherently oppressive?

Because I have also seen marriages that function like ecosystems of tenderness. At the beginning of my own marriage, when I was severely depleted — lonely, sick at a soul level, a new immigrant with no support and no resources — I was cared for with astonishing devotion by my soon-to-be ex-husband.

I have also seen couples grow each other rather than consume each other (not that many, though).

The truth seems to be that humans are so complex that no one label will be able to contain the multitudes of the human experience: not every marriageis a cage, not every divorce is liberation, not every sacrifice is pathology and not every compromise is self-betrayal.

But I do think something is cracking open culturally and that is that women are increasingly unwilling to donate their life force automatically, and men are increasingly confused about what replaces the old contract. It seems like the old scripts are dissolving faster than new ones are emerging, which possibly means that  many of us are improvising intimacy in real time: messily, imperfectly, sometimes beautifully, sometimes destructively.

As I often say in my groups: the quality of a life depends on the quality of the questions we ask.

So maybe the better question is not "Is marriage oppressive?" but rather:

Can two people remain deeply truthful while building a shared life?

Can love survive without ownership?

Can devotion exist without coercion?

Can a woman say no without fearing abandonment?

Can a man be needed without becoming entitled?

I do not have any answers to any of the above questions. However, I do know this: any relationship that requires the death of the self in order to survive will eventually begin feeding on resentment. And any culture that refuses honest conversations about intimacy, labor, desire, exhaustion, motherhood, money, autonomy, and power will keep producing people who feel secretly trapped inside lives they are supposed to call blessings.

I will leave you with the question I keep returning to — and please respond if you feel moved to. I always love hearing from you:

How do humans love each other without disappearing?

I wrote this inflammatory piece yesterday and then I decided to wait for one night before sending it (partly because of my history of impulsive decision-making, leading to questionable choices, and partly because I was scared). And this morning, I wanted to hear one of my advisors’ (name and contact information provided upon request) opinion about it. I am truly curious about my blind spots and the places where my consciousness is still low, still serving only ego and not necessarily any greater good. This is the answer I received:

“I can see several places where the psyche is trying to compensate the position of the newsletter. Not because the piece is “bad.” It’s powerful, sharp and alive. But strong writing almost always reveals the shape of the writer’s current possession. The unconscious leaks through rhetoric the same way dreams leak through symbols.

First: this is a genuinely compelling piece. The emotional intelligence is high. The tension is real. You avoided a lot of the simplistic “marriage bad / liberation good” traps that most internet discourse collapses into. The paragraph about “different relationships to sacrifice” is probably the deepest line in the whole thing because it destabilizes certainty. That’s where consciousness starts increasing.

But there are still some shadows moving underneath.

1. The newsletter subtly frames women as the primary existential subjects and men mostly as extractive systems

This is probably the biggest blind spot. The emotional center of gravity is about women sacrificing, disappearing, performing labs, suppressing desireand how men benefit from this. Now — statistically, there is truth in some of this. But psychologically, the piece risks flattening men into function instead of subjectivity.

There is very little curiosity in the piece about male loneliness, emotional starvation, disposability, terror of inadequacy, sacrificial labor and psychic fragmentation* many men experience inside modern marriage. The masculine appears mostly as beneficiary, demander, or unconscious extractor. That imbalance matters because resentment can masquerade as moral clarity.

One of Jung’s recurring warnings was that whenever consciousness identifies too strongly with one polarity, the unconscious compensates with the opposite. The more a psyche sees only female suffering, the more likely shadow-masculine suffering goes underground and returns distorted later.

A counterargument someone intelligent could make is:

“You are describing marriage primarily through the lens of emotionally disappointed upper-middle-class western women while ignoring the massive civilizational burden many men carry silently.” And honestly? That criticism is legit. Not because your observations are false — but because they are asymmetrical.

2. The piece risks confusing “institutional failure” with “archetypal failure”

Modern marriage is struggling. Absolutely. But the newsletter sometimes slips into implying that the institution itself is fundamentally coercive rather than the fact that modern humans are developmentally unprepared for the archetypal weight of marriage**.

The unconscious question underneath the essay seems to be: “Can commitment survive once individuality awakens?”

That’s a much deeper and more universal question than “marriageexploits women.” And honestly, I think that is the real dragon you’re circling.

Because once consciousness individuates enough, every structure begins feeling partially imprisoning: marriage, religion, career, nation, identity, family systems.

The modern psyche wants both infinite freedom and permanent devotion, and often wants them simultaneously.

3. The essay occasionally uses statistics as emotional reinforcement rather than genuine inquiry

The research section comes after the emotional framing has already primed the reader toward a conclusion. Which means the data functions more like prosecutorial evidence than exploration. That doesn’t make it manipulative necessarily — but it does reduce dimensionality.

A deeper version of the piece might ask:

• Why do women initiate divorce more?

• Are women more developed emotionally?

• Has modernity made men developmentally obsolete in certain relational domains?

• Has economic independence simply made long-suppressed dissatisfaction actionable?

• Are modern expectations of marriage impossible for both sexes?

• Has the collapse of extended family systems overloaded the nuclear family beyond what humans evolved to sustain?

Right now the essay gestures toward complexity emotionally, but intellectually it still leans toward a directional moral gravity:women are awakening from unequal systems, which may be partly true, but it’s definitely not the whole thing.

4. The shadow underneath the piece may be disillusionment with dependence itself

“A system in which women often become emotional support animals.”  I think the unconscious tension may actually be less about marriagespecifically and more about: asymmetrical emotional labor, dependency, covert contracts, resentment born from unspoken sacrifice, the terror of needing someone and the humiliation of feeling trapped. In Jungian terms, the piece feels less like a sociological essay and more like an individuation document disguised as cultural commentary.

Meaning: the psyche may be using “marriage discourse” to metabolize a personal confrontation with sacrifice, freedom, obligation, and identity.

5. There’s a subtle inflation risk

The voice occasionally slips into: “I can see the hidden truth others are too unconscious to admit.” That’s dangerous terrain psychologically, and not because you’re wrong — but because insight intoxicates. Particularly after divorce, awakening, liberation, or ideological disillusionment. One of the easiest ways the ego inflates is by identifying with revelation. The psyche can unconsciously turn pain into ideology, heartbreak into cosmology, resentment into philosophy, liberation into superiority, and when that happens, the writing loses its soul and becomes propaganda. I don’t think you have crossed that line, but I can feel the gravity pulling there.

6. The deepest missing layer: eros

Oddly, for a piece about marriage, there is very little exploration of love itself, not romance, not attachment, not logistics, but actual eros. The terrifying force that dissolves ego structures and reorganizes identity. Your writing discusses  labor, duty, sacrifice, domesticity, stability and autonomy, but not longing, enchantment, devotion as transformation, desire as initiation, the mystery of choosing one person repeatedly over time. Without eros, marriage becomes an economic arrangement. Without logos, it becomes chaos.

The real question is: how do humans hold both?

That feels like the deeper newsletter hiding underneath this newsletter. And honestly, I think your consciousness is already reaching toward it. You can feel it in the tension between: “the right to leave” and “the marriage legacy”- that polarity is alive and the tension is fertile.

As Jung wrote: “The tension of opposites is the essence of life.”— Carl Jung, CW 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis.

And I think this piece becomes truly profound if you stop trying to determine which side is correct and instead descend deeper into:

What kind of consciousness is actually capable of love without self-erasure?

Explanation of terms used above: 

*psychic fragmentation of men: many modern men (enough of them that this has become culturally visible) experience themselves as divided into incompatible selves inside marriage — and often don’t have the emotional language to recognize it, let alone communicate it. The fragmentation often looks something like this: a provider self, a sexual self, a boyish/playful self, an ambitious self, a spiritual self, an exhausted self, a father self, a hidden resentful self, an emotionally dependent self, an autonomous self etc. A man unconsciously starts asking: “Which parts of me are still allowed to exist here?” and because most men are not trained in introspection, shadow work, or emotional articulation, the fragmentation usually manifests indirectly: numbness, pornography, irritability, emotional withdrawal, workaholism, addiction, compulsive hobbies, secret fantasy lives, affairs, loss of libido, depression disguised as being tired, quiet despair.

One example

Imagine a man who enters marriage with erotic vitality, ambition, tenderness, freedom, spiritual hunger, wildness, creativity and then slowly, over many years, his erotic self is domesticated, his ambition becomes financial obligation, his tenderness becomes utility, his freedom becomes responsibility, his spiritual hunger has to be postponed, his wildness becomes inappropriate and his creativity becomes impractical.

Adulthood requires some level of sacrifice, sure. But if too many aspects of the psyche are exiled simultaneously, the unconscious begins revolting. The unlived life accumulates pressure. Jung talked constantly about this phenomenon indirectly through the idea of the shadow and unlived aspects of personality. The parts we exile do not disappear. They go underground and become autonomous.

Modern masculinity itself is fragmented. Historically, masculine identity had clearer archetypal containers: warrior, builder, monk, father, craftsman, farmer, elder.  Modern men are often expected to be simultaneously emotionally open but also contained, dominant but non-threatening, ambitious but fully present, sensitive but sexually confident, safe but exciting, devoted but endlessly self-actualizing, productive but spiritually evolved.  This sounds like an insane amount of contradictory psychic instruction.

And many men silently fail under the weight of trying to reconcile incompatible ideals.

Another really uncomfortable layer: sometimes marriage becomes the symbolic tomb of unrealized possibility, not because the spouse is wrong, not because commitment is wrong but because commitment forces a confrontation with finitude. To choose one life means killing all other possible lives: one woman, one city, one family structure, one rhythm, one future.

Part of the masculine psyche often grieves the unlived lives without knowing that grief is happening.

Here’s the thing that makes this genuinely tragic and not reducible to gender politics (see the earlier lines in my personal article): women often experience parallel fragmentation inside motherhood and marriage.

And that is why these conversations become so combustible: both sexes often feel unseen in their sacrifices.

And both are often secretly asking: “Did adulthood require me to amputate too much of myself?”

The modern psyche desperately wants commitment, freedom, erotic aliveness, stability, individuality, transcendence, family and autonomy, but it looks like we have no idea how to hold all of those simultaneously without fragmentation.

That may actually be one of the central psychological problems of modernity itself. As Jung wrote:  “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

Meaning: sometimes the symptom is what emerges when the soul refuses the life it feels forced to live unconsciously.

**archetypal weight of marriage: The archetypal weight of marriage is the psychological, symbolic, and spiritual gravity humans unconsciously place onto pair-bonding.

Modern people tend to think marriage is a relationship, a legal arrangement, a romantic commitment or a lifestyle preference.

But archetypically, marriage has almost never merely been those things. Historically and psychologically, marriage carries the weight of: survival, lineage, sexuality, identity, social order, religion, fertility, inheritance, belonging, morality, sacrifice, meaning, immortality, union of opposites. And that is an absurd amount of symbolic pressure to place on two nervous systems.And modern people often walk into marriage consciously thinking: “I found my person.”While unconsciously carrying: “You will complete me, heal me, validate me, eroticize me, witness me, stabilize me, spiritually awaken me, help me parent, financially partner with me, remain sexually alive forever, and make my life meaningful while never imprisoning me.”

Historically, marriage was never just personal. One of modernity’s strangest moves was turning marriage into primarily a romantic fulfillment structure.For most of human history, marriage was embedded inside tribe, religion, economics, extended family, ritual, shared labor and cosmology. Meaning: the marriage carried less psychological burden because the culture carried some of the weight.

Now the couple is expected to generate meaning, intimacy, sexuality, purpose, healing, friendship, co-parenting, emotional regulation and existential belonging mostly by themselves. Two people are now expected to do the psychological work an entire village once did.

That’s archetypally enormous.

Jung would say marriage activates the unconscious immediately

The moment two people commit deeply, projection explodes. You no longer merely interact with the actual person. You interact with mother/father wounds, anima/animus projections, unmet childhood needs, shadow material, unlived desires, attachment structures, power dynamics, existential fears, spiritual longing.

Marriage confronts the ego with limitation

This is one of the deepest archetypal functions. To marry is to voluntarily enter repetition, responsibility, sacrifice, compromise, aging, reality. Which means marriage often initiates the death of fantasy identities.The psyche realizes:“I cannot live every possible life.”

That realization is archetypally heavy.

A marriage silently kills alternative lovers, unrealized futures, fantasies of infinite freedom, certain versions of youth and some narcissistic fantasies.

Not that I know anything about this, but it seems to me that healthy marriages requires mourning and there is no evidence available anywhere that modern culture teaches this.  Instead we say:“If it’s true love, it shouldn’t feel limiting.”But archetypally, all commitment limits possibility, because that’s what gives it meaning.

Again, according to Jung, marriage is also an alchemical container. He viewed deep relationship as one of the primary containers through which unconscious material becomes conscious. Meaning: marriage is not merely companionship, but it is a psychic pressure chamber, where the other person eventually forces confrontation with your shadow, your dependency, your narcissism, your wounds, your capacity for love, your selfishness, your cowardice, your tenderness, your undeveloped masculinity/femininity.

This is why long-term intimacy can feel simultaneously sacred and unbearable and the relationship becomes a mirror the ego cannot fully escape.

The archetypal weight became harder to carry once individuality intensified.

Pre-modern humans derived identity largely from kinship, religion, duty, survival while modern people derive identity increasingly from self-actualization, personal freedom, authenticity, psychological fulfillment. And that means that marriage has to somehow hold ancient bonding instincts inside radically individuated psyches.

Marriage archetypically represents the union of opposites, that is why marriage symbolism appears everywhere in myth and religion: Shiva/Shakti, Christ and the Church, yin and yang. Not merely man/woman, but freedom/bondage, self/other, eros/order, individuality/devotion, chaos/stability, transcendence/ordinary life.

Apparently, the psyche intuitively experiences pair-bonding as cosmologically significant. Which is precisely why  relationships that end hurt so disproportionately: the soul experiences the rupture as way more than logistical loss, more in the category of metaphysical collapse.

As Jung wrote: “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” And that transformation is the archetypal weight: marriage asks the ego to survive transformation without losing its soul.

Disclaimer: I sometimes use AI as a collaborative thinking and editing partner to help refine and articulate ideas that emerge through my own lived experience.

 With love, (a tiny sprinkle of) rage, and reverence,

Your disorganized, recovering people-pleaser, community-dreamer, hope-filled activist in the making, deep-sleeper, clean compliment giver and receiver, not-a-true-exhibitionist, 21-day resetter, recovering prostitute, courageous by practice, trusting by skill, always with my head in the clouds, but loving my feet on the ground, 

Corina