DADvocate

Ellen Tien at Oprah.com claims she's " She's happily married, dreaming of divorce." Pretty hard to do if you ask me.

From reading the article, she sounds self-centered and not that happily married. The first paragraph gives us a clue.

I contemplate divorce every day. It tugs on my sleeve each morning when my husband, Will, greets me in his chipper, smug morning-person voice, because after 16 years of waking up together, he still hasn't quite pieced out that I'm not viable before 10 a.m.

Here she displays the attitude that it's her husband's job to conform to her desires/whimsy/demands. I wonder if Tien appreciates at all having a bright, chipper person with whom to share the morning.

Tien then goes on to tell anecdotes of a variety of her husband's shortcomings.

Following this she says, "Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man,..." Got that? Every male is a "Moderately Bad Man." In Tien's estimation there are no good men, except maybe in some world to which she has never been exposed.

She calls it the Mid-Wife Crisis:

Mind you, when I say Mid-Wife Crisis, I mean the middle-of-married-life kind, not the kind where you go to Yale to learn how to legally brandish a birthing stool. As one girlfriend remarked, it's the age of rage -- a period of high irritation that lasts roughly one to two decades. As a colleague e-mailed me, it's the simmering underbelly of resentment, the 600-pound mosquito in the room. At a juncture where we thought we should have unearthed some modicum of certainty, we are turning into the Clash. If I go will there be trouble? If I stay will it be double? Should I stay or should I go?

She finishes up with:

Maybe one day, marriage -- like the human appendix, male nipples, or your pinky toes -- will become a vestigial structure that will, in a millennium or two, be obsolete. Our great-great-great-grandchildren's grandchildren will ask each other in passing, "Remember marriage? What was its function again? Was it that maladaptive organ that intermittently produced gastrointestinal antigens and sometimes got so inflamed that it painfully erupted?"

Yes. Yes it was.

Tien appears to be a woman without the ability to make the commitment to a man that women often complain about a man not being able to make. She also appears to only be concerned about how she feels and whether or not her husband satisfies her in some way. Finally, she seems to be a rather miserable person and I doubt any man (or woman) could change that. Lacking any vestige of insight, Tien decides men are bad.

Unfortunately, since her writing is probably widely read, she's influencing women and girls to think the same way with no concern to the larger picture.