Welcome to the Waves, Slates 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 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, Debille, 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 Cleanse She Hates Husband in Memoir.

There's a new book by a journalist, wife and mom, who reflects in her on her 16 years of marriage,

writing about how she hates her husband, calls him a smelly heap of laundry, and a snoring heap of

meat and claims anyone considering getting married is a massacre.

Right, did your wife write that?

Yet she also calls it divine. Yes, thank you. I actually need to read that.

Can you relate to anything she writes here?

...