PRAISE FOR HARD TO DO
‘With steady and incisive historical mapping and expertly deployed wit, Kelli Korducki both sheds light on the modern mythological creation of the breakup as a cultural mainstay and offers readers alternative possibilities of how love, independence, and agency might shape our worlds.’
– Alana Massey, author of All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers
‘The decision to break out of a decent romantic relationship almost always feels like an act of revolution, especially for women – so why has it never been defined that way? Hard To Do takes an illuminating, fastidious, and humorous look at the acts and facts that conspire to keep us from choosing anything other than the status quo. It’s a crucial and compelling inquiry into the alternate definitions of what it means for a woman’s life to “work out.”’
– Kathryn Borel, Jr., author of Corked: A Memoir
‘In Hard To Do, Kelli Korducki grapples with capitalism, patriarchal society, and the historical course of love and marriage as she investigates how women today often find ourselves caught between dueling desires – for love, for security, for the achievement of our own independent ambitions, for a lack of ambivalence – as we navigate romance in a world that hasn’t exactly considered what we want to factor very highly into the equation. Merging her own story with keen analysis, Korducki asks what it takes to be true to ourselves now. This book will make you smarter about love, money, and whatever path you choose.’
– Jen Doll, author of Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest
copyright © Kelli María Korducki, 2018
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Korducki, Kelli María, author
Hard to do : the surprising, feminist history of breaking up / Kelli María Korducki.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55245-352-0 (softcover).
1. Separation (Psychology). 2. Interpersonal relations. 3. Love. I. Title.
| HQ801.K66 2018 | 306.89 | C2017-905080-XC2017-905081-8 |
Hard To Do is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 527 2 (PDF), ISBN 978 1 77056 526 5 (EPUB).
Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free download offer at any time.)
For my mother
Introduction
In the year I broke up with someone I had loved and lived with for nearly a decade, I attended four weddings over a period of six weeks. This fluke of timing belied a cosmic indifference that felt so on-the-nose, I couldn’t help but laugh. How funny it was to come out of a nine-year relationship at twenty-eight, I thought, and to start all over at the precise moment when everyone around me was choosing ‘shit’ over ‘get off the pot.’ How hilarious to get sloppily drunk and dance all night in celebration of forever-love when the evidence suggests you’ll die alone. I laughed at all of it, the animatronic caw of a person whose muscle memory has unlearned, over a course of months, passable vocalizations for joy.
I’d spent my twenties watching girlfriends date their way through a succession of assholes, slackers, softboys, and duds, before eventually landing on lovely people who did not meet those descriptors and settling down with them. I’d gone the other way and gotten serious fast with a kind, brainy housemate at the beginning of my second year of university, functionally a hausfrau before I’d even exited my teens. The messy trial-and-error of a dating phase was something I’d escaped, perhaps unfairly, and I wondered at the time whether my lucky roll of the dice had clouded my perception of the actual odds against what I seemed to have won.
My relationship ended for any number of reasons, but a dearth of affection wasn’t one of them. I was unhappy for reasons that felt trivial when I said them out loud, which was almost never; I barely had the language to describe my predicament in the first place. More than anything else, my uncertainty manifested as a physical sensation, a gut-level insistence I no longer had the option to ignore. I was privileged enough to recognize a value in my own happiness and the integrity in making a sacrifice to achieve it. I also knew that to do otherwise would be, at the act’s core, a selfishness of its own.
The truth was that my on-paper reasons were there, and they still make sense after the fact. The timing was bad, for one. My dreams for myself were bigger, louder, more insistent than my dreams for an us – any us, even hypothetical pairings that would never exist. I was ambivalent about marriage, period, and about children even more so. I’d just put in an IUD that I vowed not to remove until it expired in my mid-thirties. Above all, there was too much I wanted to do, too many windows that my sanity demanded I keep open. The trappings of permanence made me feel uneasy, and for years youth had let me push them away, until the day it abruptly stopped being enough.
The relationship might not have ended at all if I’d been born even a generation earlier. The kind of life I wanted lacked precedent among the women who had shaped me, by their own choice but also by their more limited options. I didn’t have much money and my professional prospects were limited within a dying industry of ideas and words. Yet I intrinsically grasped that my life could be an adventure of my own making; this seedling of a vision felt too precious to set aside, even as it rendered my heart ugly and wrong. I suspected that nobody in my family understood, nor anyone in his. I steeled myself to be hated.
That summer, during the worst of it, I paced outside a Chicago McDonald’s while waiting for a train to cart me home from a music festival whose details the anguish of that period has all but erased. The July heat was oppressive, just like everything else.
My father was to pick me up from the train station in Milwaukee, my hometown some two hours away, where I was hauling my corpse for an annual summer visit. In the shadow of the McDonald’s sign, I phoned him my whereabouts. On the other end of the line he sounded almost as deflated as I felt. My grandfather was slowing down, he said. His memory wasn’t so good. His heart, even worse. My father’s pained resignation to his own father’s mortality was taking a toll, despite the distributed support of a half-dozen siblings and my mother, his wife of thirty-four years. I thought about how, in thirty-four years, I would be five years older than my father was at that moment. I thought about how, one day, much sooner, he would be old, too.
‘Life is hard,’ he said, pointedly, ‘and harder if you’re alone.’ Don’t make a decision you’ll regret for the rest of your life, he added. Or maybe I’d inferred it.
Life is hard, and all the harder because of decisions like the one I ultimately made: to walk away from a sure thing. Nuts! Pause for a moment to consider the tremendous novelty of that choice within a society whose institutions continue to uphold the nuclear family as its foundation. The primacy of personal growth and self-actualization overrides consideration of the collective yet counterintuitively sets us up to risk thwarting our own self-interest – that is, it sets us up to do what we want in the moment. And so, this terrifying leap I ultimately made was the only thing I could talk about for many months, daring anyone at all to talk some sense into my hungover husk.
Today, we have the liberty to step away from relationships,