Welcome to the waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and hating your spouse.

Every episode you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the

thing we cannot get off of our minds and today you've got me Shannon Paulis a

senior editor at Slate. This week I'm speaking to Heather Havrleski,

author of the book Forever Land

on the Divine Teadium of Marriage.

You might also recognize her name

from the long running advice column she writes,

Ask Polly.

It is really easy to have a black and white view of relationships.

You have a good marriage or you bad marriage. You find the right person to be with or you've accidentally kind of paired up with a bad match and things are bad.

You can spot the people who are in bad marriages. They bicker in public,

they admit that they aren't doing well. That's the kind of story we hear, right? A good marriage is blissful.

Heather Haverleski complicates this view by giving us an incredibly intimate view

of the inside of her marriage or at least a

snapshot in time of her marriage. She alternates in the book between explaining

that her husband Bill is the most handsome

wonderful person on earth and that he can be quote exactly the same as a heap of

laundry smelly inert almost sentient exactly the same as a heap of laundry,

smelly, inert, almost sentient, but not quite.

When Forever Land came out last year,

the reaction to that kind of language to describe your partner, it was kind of intense.

...