Writing a Different Kind of Love Story About Marriage
Award-winning writer Elisa Faison breaks down the need for writing a different kind of love story about marriage in fiction.
One of my earliest memories is of pretending to be Ariel singing on a rock to entice Prince Eric. The happily-ever-after love story took root in me early. As I became a teenager, it began to blossom. How many times did I watch You’ve Got Mail with my grandmother? Moonstruck with my mom? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with my high school boyfriend? The love stories became thornier—but they nevertheless affirmed one thing: these two people can’t live without each other. I devoured these stories, and this idea. It lives in me, still.
And I’ve been lucky enough to have my own love story—one that’s picture perfect for a friends-to-lovers rom-com. I met my husband at summer camp when we were still kids. We ended up at the same college and became friends. In my junior year, we took a Renaissance poetry class together(!) and—against our will, because he was about to graduate and I wanted to remain free to date around—fell in love. Reading Catullus, for God’s sake! We got married when I was 24, because we couldn’t live without each other. The end!
But of course, living happily ever after involves one crucial thing: living. There’s another kind of story I love, too—one that I developed a particular obsession with in graduate school. The marriage story. Novels like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice feature marriage plots; they’re structured to show the chaos of courtship resolving into the order of marriage. But, like many of their contemporaries, these novels evolved from what were called “conduct books”—sets of instructions for women on how to be wives. In many early marriage plot novels—Pamela is an especially good example—you can also see the mundane specifics of how to manage a household laid out for the intended female reader. If the marriage plot is sexy and exciting, the marriage story is dull and domestic.
The marriage story had an especially big moment in midcentury America when men began writing about domestic life. John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, for instance, is about a bored husband desperate to escape the constraints of parenthood and a loveless marriage. Of course, he has an affair. They all have affairs! There’s been an interesting, contemporary revival of this kind of marriage/adultery novel in recent years which follows a similar plotline, but from the wife’s perspective. In Sarah Manguso’s Liars, the betrayed wife is finally allowed to rage; in Erin Somers’ The Ten Year Affair, the wife is finally allowed to be the betrayer.
These are the models we so often see for stories about marriage. The marriage plot (which ends in a happy marriage) and the marriage story (which describes a marriage in which someone feels trapped). But increasingly, these aren’t the models we see for real life marriages. And the longer I personally kept living happily ever after, the less I saw myself and my marriage reflected in either.
When I started writing Skin Contact, I’d recently completed my dissertation about motherhood and domesticity in the contemporary American novel. I was working as a bookseller, and I loved recommending books about complicated, angry women; about yearning, avoidant, bisexual women; and about tumultuous and beautiful marriages. But as a reader, I was finding myself frustrated. Where were the portrayals of bisexual women who were actually dating women? Where were the portrayals of open marriage that didn’t ultimately suggest they were in a doomed or even dangerous phase? Where were the portrayals of polyamory that were as intimate as those of love between two people?
Because here’s what else was going on: I was mourning my mother, who died in 2020, and my grandmother, who died in 2019. I was trying to become pregnant. I had officially come out (after a decade-long soft launch) as bisexual. And I was one year into what remains a very happy open marriage.
With Skin Contact, I wanted to offer an intimate portrait of a marriage over the course of several years. One thing I love about marriage novels is the way they invite you, the reader, into the privacy of the domestic space. The best marriage novels often feel subversive in the way they ask you to peer through the windows of someone’s private life.
But what happens to the structure of the novel when you blast open the private walls of the relationship? With Skin Contact, I wanted to preserve the subversive intimacy of the romantic relationship, while also opening it up to others. I wanted to depict a stable marriage while also describing the ups and downs of dating. I wanted to show a happy home that wasn’t always well kept, that could get messy. I wanted to merge, in other words, the marriage plot with the marriage story. I wanted to show that living happily ever after can also mean continuing to date, continuing to fall in love—continuing, in other words, to be confused, to be infatuated, to be disappointed, to be obsessed. That it can also mean, in other words, to keep living.
From the start, I knew that my novel would be sewn together from multiple perspectives and stories. I initially envisioned the full work as one which followed a bisexual married couple, Ben and Frances, in a long through-line that was inter-spliced with break-off stories about the people they were dating. The reading experience would mirror that of dating—you see someone briefly and maybe they disappear, or maybe they become important to your story; or maybe, later on, you glimpse that lost person across the aisle in the grocery store, but find you can’t get any closer. It can be a sad, frustrating, and beautiful experience to know some people intimately, but for a short time.
But I was surprised, in writing, to find that what felt truer to me in writing about polyamory was to consider the other forms of love that shape our stories. When you come out, you’re blasting open the private space of your marriage, and this can break barriers in platonic relationships, too. You open your decision to the opinions of friends and family. I found myself writing several chapters from the perspectives of friends who all question Ben and Frances’ choice—and this felt fruitful to me as a way to explore the open marriage more generally.
Because I found, too, that I had new questions when I came out. What would my mom have thought of this? What would my grandmother have thought? What were their marriages like? What had they hidden, or what were they open about with me?
At its heart, I think Skin Contact is an exploration of intimacy. When we think of something being “intimate,” we immediately think of sex. But I wanted to consider intimacy in its many forms in this novel—sexual/romantic intimacy, but also the intimacy between mothers and children, and between friends—all of the richness found in the relationships that bolster, intrude upon, or elasticize the marriage story.
What I’ve come to is this: When the marriage plot is over—even after we meet and marry “the one”—we all continue to fall in love. For some people, that’s with a new girlfriend. And for many others, it’s with their new baby. Or with a new friend, who you can’t wait to gossip about Love Island with. All of these new loves have baggage. They can mean losing yourself or your partner for a while. Sometimes, they mean you fall out of love with someone else.
Just like love itself, the love story is expansive enough to contain all of these iterations. We just have to open it up, and let it.
Check out Elisa Faison's Skin Contact here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
