Wellness

The novel is fraught with couples who face challenges in finding happiness and satisfaction in marriage. Typically, the problem stems from the modern desire to have marriage be the emotional, sexual, and psychological anchor that heals all old trauma and replaces the need for any other people.

At the heart of the novel are Jack and Elizabeth who, in different ways, struggle with the reality that their married relationship is different from their experiences dating. Jack feels that their relationship has lost its emotional richness—that he and Elizabeth merely carry out domestic tasks side by side and no longer share the emotional and physical intimacy that they enjoyed in their youth. He longs for that past closeness. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is less interested in recapturing the past and instead wants dramatic upheaval to fix the marriage. She seems unbothered by the distance between her and Jack, pushing for separate master bedrooms in their new home—a drastic change that Jack is anxious about. Demanding something new and different, Elizabeth persuades Jack to explore Kate and Kyle’s sex party as a solution to their malaise. Eventually, Elizabeth’s insecurity is revealed to be the product of guilt: She fears their relationship is rooted in a lie, because she conducted a psychological experiment on Jack when they met without his knowledge, convincing him that he was experiencing love at first sight. She also figures out that assuming happiness lies only in the future has poisoned her ability to enjoy the present—a realization that makes her want to recommit to Jack and no longer long for some kind of perfect relationship.

The novel offers several other examples of couples experiencing marital conflict: Jack’s parents Ruth and Lawrence Baker, Brandie and her husband, and Kate and Kyle. Ruth and Lawrence have a loveless and emotionally detached marriage, due in large part to Lawrence’s proposing marriage to Ruth out of obligation, rather than any real feelings. They do not work to overcome their antipathies, instead retreating into solipsistic resentment and dysfunction: Lawrence distances himself from Ruth, accusing her of intentionally being responsible for their daughter’s death; meanwhile, Ruth increases the intensity of her narcissistic self-pity. Brandie and her husband attempt a traditional marriage designed following the dictates of conservative Christianity: Brandie leaves a high-powered career to become a full-time mother. Since in this ideology, the wife is solely responsible for everything in the domestic sphere, Brandie blames herself for her husband’s infidelity. In response, she adopts a version of the magical thinking pseudo-philosophy of manifestation; her desperation for Wellness’s “love potion” stems from the same clinging to anything that offers hope.

The novel depicts Kate and Kyle as having the most functional marriage, possibly because they are the most clear-eyed about the limitations of their union. For them, full sexual expression requires other people; their untraditionally open marriage includes sex parties and swinging. Kate and Kyle are highly critical of the traditional institution of marriage, insisting that it is an outdated mode of coupling. In keeping with one of the key motifs running through the novel, they speak of their open marriage as a revamped technology for the new millennium. They are adamant that a single person cannot fulfill all the needs of another, so multiple partners keep a marriage healthy and successful by taking some of the burden off spouses to be each other’s be-all and end-all. Interestingly, however, this is Kyle’s second marriage, and Kate is half his age—a mismatch that suggests either that he learned how to be in a more successful relationship after his first one failed, or that their connection is more surface than substance.