Ladies, Miranda July is Not Your Friend

Last year, author Miranda July released a novel called All Fours. The book is a trope-y mess: a middle-aged wife and mother takes a cross-country road trip, during which she meets a man, begins an affair, reckons with sexuality in middle age, and ultimately ‘liberates’ herself from the ‘shackles’ of sexual norms. The book enjoyed glowing reviews in elite media, but it was hardly a trailblazer. Literature critics have praised this formula—recently-divorced woman embarks on an exotic adventure of self-actualization—for years (remember Eat, Pray, Love?).

But we’re in the age of the online newsletter. And while All Fours is technically fiction, the author has built a successful Substack in which she urges her large online community of women to take the book’s ‘recommendations’ to heart.

“Romantic relationships are usually not supposed to be lifelong, but rather a season of a particular length, to be determined,” July writes in her now-viral manifesto. The desirable length of a romantic relationship, she explains, is whatever feels “right.” (One presumes she means “feels right to you” and not, obviously, to your partner. Actually, let’s hope your partner doesn’t also heed her advice!).

The point of a woman’s life, according to July, is to “know [her]self.” To this end, she counsels women to pursue relational and sexual “novelty,” which she says, rather bafflingly, “helps women stay alive.” In this view, everyone else—romantic partners, friends, one’s own children—are mere objects which either “serve” a woman’s self-fulfillment or keep her from it.

Cultural observers might balk at such brazen selfishness, or question July’s flawed logic: what about all of the people a ‘liberated’ woman might leave in her wake? Doesn’t the husband who is abandoned by his wife, or the children abandoned by their mother also deserve to ‘know themselves,’ to ‘pursue novelty,’ and to be happy? She warns that women who commit for life to their families risk one day finding themselves “alone in a house taking care of an old man.” That’s supposed to be a cautionary tale. Perhaps it hasn’t yet occurred to July that she might one day find herself alone in a house needing someone to care for her. 

But there’s a simpler problem with July’s ethos: it’s bad advice. If she wants women to be truly happy, leaving their families behind to pursue their own desires is about the worst advice she could give. According to the most recent General Social Survey, the happiest women in America are married moms: 40% of women between ages 18 and 55 who are married with children say they are “very happy;” compared to only 22% of single childless women. 

Women in lifelong marriages get to wake up every morning and discover the supernatural richness of long-suffering fidelity in two directions: they get to give this gift and receive it.

Married couples also have sex far more often than singles. The most recent National Survey of Family Growth shows that sexlessness—the amount of people going months or years without having sex—rises as monogamy declines. And married women of faith are nearly 50% more likely to report higher sexual satisfaction than their nonreligious peers.

So how did Miranda July (and her many philosophical foremothers) get this so wrong?

The answer might have something to do with the paradox often found at the center of happiness research: deep, lasting happiness is much more strongly tied to meaning than it is to pleasure. Psychologist Paul Bloom probed this paradox in his book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. In it, Bloom shares an illustration of the difference between pleasure and meaning from Harvard psychology professor Dan Gilbert, which goes like this:

So I may be a shameless hedonist happily swimming in my Olympic size pool, feeling the cold water and the warm sunshine on my skin and my hedonic state could only be described as pleasurable. Occasionally I jump out of the pool, pause, and think about how empty my life is, and for a few minutes I feel bad. Then I get back in the pool and swim some more.

Gilbert suggests there are “two different sort of conscious experiences” in this parable: the Experiencer, floating in the pool, and the Observer, who gets out once in a while for a little existential crisis. Paul Bloom says most people believe that making the “Experiencer” happy from moment-to-moment will conveniently add up to a lifetime of happy moments. Miranda July would no doubt agree.

But the research suggests the opposite: what people want more than momentary pleasure is a sense of meaning—we want our Observer to be happy. That often means asking the Experiencer to delay gratification, or even to suffer every once in a while. In fact, by pursuing pleasure when what we really want is meaning, we usually fail to achieve either. 

This makes intuitive sense. Consider the popular adage about motherhood: “the days are long, but the years are short.” Surely the “Experiencing” days of the married mother often leave her feeling tired, frustrated, and under-appreciated. And yet those same “Observing” mothers often report that their years are filled with deep and profound goodness.

It’s a tragic irony that in claiming her highest goal is to “know herself,” Miranda July doesn’t seem to understand herself at all. Perhaps this explains why the research shows that married religious women tend to be the happiest: Christians believe that to truly “know” ourselves is to be skeptical of our own fleeting desires. It is to recognize that our hearts and memories are often faulty, that we’re capable of profound self-deception, and that we might be very, very wrong about what we think will make us happy.

In fact, telling women they should wake up each morning and ask, all over again, whether they really want to commit to the spouse and family they were committed to yesterday is a remarkable cruelty. One of the great blessings of a marriage vow is the freedom to lay down that burden. Women in lifelong marriages get to wake up every morning and discover the supernatural richness of long-suffering fidelity in two directions: they get to give this gift and receive it. They get to become the sort of person who gives and receives it. If women really want novelty—an experience they cannot find anywhere else, or by any other means—this, surely, is it.

Maria Baer is a freelance writer, reporter, and podcast host. She has written for Christianity Today, Breakpoint, and World magazine, among other publications.