What was he thinking?

It seemed important to me that men be able to weigh in on these issues, both for themselves and for women. Because chief among the women's frustrations with their men was this question of, What is he thinking? Sometimes, of course, this is phrased as a rhetorical question, but in a larger context it's not so rhetorical. Women really do want to know. And they're generally not going to get good answers out of their husbands because it's too loaded. In fact, I doubt many of the men in "The Bastard on the Couch" would ever sit down and articulate their feelings to their wives quite the way they have here either, because their own relationships are also too loaded for such a thing, and who can come up with an articulate explanation or defense of how they're feeling in the middle of a fight? Not me.

Me neither. And while you can probably spit and hit a book club reading "Bitch" in Amherst, San Francisco or Manhattan, I can't see "Bastard" readers sitting around deconstructing it.

I do think guys' thinking has evolved in that tackling these issues takes up more of their brain time, and I know from working with the men in the book that the problems of modern marriage and parenthood are on their minds constantly. But most men I know still don't talk about this stuff with other men. Although it occurs to me that almost every man who's asked me about the book at a dinner party or wherever has almost immediately begun to unload to me about the intimacies of his marriage, so who knows?

Men want to figure this stuff out. But they're on the defensive so much that they're a little hamstrung. In Vince Passaro's essay "Why Men Lie (and Always Will)," he talks about the moral high ground women always seem to occupy in relationships, and how men are always working from a deficit of one kind or another -- the man's never doing enough, his life isn't as hard, he's been privileged for most of world history while women haven't, et cetera. So this position isn't really a place where you're going to feel comfortable airing your frustrations with your marriage or your sex life. Compounding this is a man's sense that it's somehow not polite to criticize his wife in public. After all, he's got to live with her, and she's angry enough already. For whatever reason, most women I know don't share this inhibition. They tend to fire away. And I don't even think their husbands mind that much because they know it's better for them in the long run for their wives to blow off the steam in little bursts than hold it in until they explode.

Both "Bitch" and "Bastard" spend a lot of time looking at the notion of the "egalitarian marriage" -- which definitely doesn't seem to be working. Where did it go wrong?

Men and women get married these days and often have this idea of egalitarianism as a goal. They probably met in college or grad school and have equal skills. They come at the marriage equally armed for combat, knowing they can walk away from it and both leave equally. Add to that that all the old rules are stereotypes. If you're both lawyers and your wife does all the shopping and cooking there's a stigma attached to it, even if she enjoys it. You find yourself trying to not do certain things even if you naturally want to do them. Whenever my wife and I have responsibilities where they fall along sexist lines -- she likes to cook, I like to muck around in the yard -- we're sort of embarrassed for it. I think this silently goes on in almost every marriage. It's almost comical what we're avoiding in order to embrace full equality in a marriage now.

Next Page: "We walked into marriage thinking that equality would make our marriages better than what came before"

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