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 that 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 Haberleski, author of the book Forever Land on the Divine TDM 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

have a 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 Haberleski 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,

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. The view, for example, ran a segment called Woman

Claims She Heats Husband in Memoir.

Can you relate to anything she writes here? You know what? We got snippets of this book,

and they used the word hate, and she used the word heap a lot. Did you notice that? She calls

my heap of this and a heap of that, but marriage is work.

Now Forever Land is out in paperback. I'm actually engaged to be married myself,

and so I thought this was the perfect time to catch up with Heather about why she wrote this book

in the first place, and what she thinks of that response now. We also get into what to do when

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