The Case for Telling Your Husband About Your Obsessive Crush

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There’s a reason that readers have been turning to writer Heather Havrilesky about their angstiest problems for more than a decade. In her column, Ask Polly, now published on Substack after stints at The Awl and The Cut, Havrilesky dissects life’s hardest questions with compassion and insight, but also bravado and self-deprecation, lots of jokes and rollicking extended metaphors. In one of my personal all-time favorites, Polly advises women dating straight men (sigh) to resist pretending to be a sweet, Lil Debbie snack cake when you are actually an oily, emotional anchovy (“Instead of questioning why I was spending time with guys who only craved fluff and sugar, I grew ashamed of my oily, salty nature. I tried to act sweeter, snackier, Lil’-er.”) For many years thereafter, the mantra I repeated to myself before dates was: “You are not a Ho-Ho. YOU ARE AN ANCHOVY.”

Last year, Havrilesky turned her powers of observation on a deeply personal subject: her 15-year marriage to her husband, Bill, and the intricacies of latching yourself to a single other flawed human being, presumably until one of you dies. In Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage, out on paperback on February 14, Havrilesky offers an unvarnished view of her life with Bill, complete with chaotic road trips, early motherhood, a cancer scare and even the time, recently, when she developed an obsessive crush on another writer.

In our conversation, we talked about having the internet pass judgment on your marriage, what it takes to be radically vulnerable about your feelings, and how that aforementioned crush ultimately panned out.

Why did you decide to write about your own marriage? Did you have an idea that it would open your marriage to a lot of public scrutiny and the implications of that?

When I started my book, I wasn’t really afraid of doing it. I was old enough and had been writing about myself long enough that I thought, “This is good.” This is a great topic for me because my husband doesn’t mind me writing about him—which is a rare thing in a marriage—and also because our marriage has gotten better and better over the years. I thought it would be fun and easy and interesting and dramatic to write.

I had read a lot of things about marriage that felt sugar-coated and like bullshit to me. I found myself wanting to read a very realistic depiction of a marriage that you might get from a friend. And even with friends, it can be very difficult to get the details from someone about how bad things sometimes get, or exactly how rough you sometimes feel, even though you love your partner and you’re mostly happy with them. As I got into it, all of these things happened and it became more scary to write—the crush that I had in the book wasn’t completely over when I was writing, Covid happened, and I got cancer.

It was kind of an insane time to be sharing so much actually. I think part of the reception was maybe a reflection of that. All of the sudden people felt sensitive about the integrity, quality, and the sustainability of their own relationships.

Let’s talk about that reaction. When it came out last year, there was a huge response to the excerpt published in the New York Times. Some of the reaction boiled it down to “Writer Hates Husband” or people smugly talking about how good their own marriages were. Why do you think people reacted in that way?

The subhed of the New York Times excerpt was “Do I hate my husband? Yeah, sure, of course I do.” It was phrased in a way that was supposed to indicate that it was a joke! I don’t walk around saying I hate my husband.

The conversation eventually turned into, “Is it okay to hate your husband or not?” which is really not what it’s about. It’s sort of, “Is it okay to feel an emotion for a person who you spend most of your time with?” in my case. Well, it’s always okay to feel an emotion. But people have moral views about what you’re supposed to feel and not feel and if you feel like you’re letting someone down by feeling your emotions, you’re in trouble. You can’t have a healthy, intimate relationship if you’re not allowed to feel emotions within that relationship, in the company of another person. You have a right to your desires and full expression of your emotions. That’s what a good marriage is. It’s two people’s full selves and honoring each other’s wilderness, essentially, in addition to their civilized places.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about how marriage is an institution that has maybe outlasted its usefulness and is perhaps not the most logical way to arrange your life anymore. You’re very clear-eyed about marriage at the outset of Foreverland. I want to hear your thoughts on marriage as an institution and why it’s worth doing for you and so many other people?

I’m always ambivalent overall not about my marriage, but about ultimately, what is

the ideal way of living? How can we feel the happiest in our lives and what does it take? For me, it bothers me a lot that people are so rigid about how a marriage should be. To me, it’s two people having a conversation about what they want their lives together to look like.

Obviously, there are all kinds of unspoken expectations about what it means to be married and what your gender means within a marriage and how your marriage should function. There’s a lot of talk these days that marriage doesn’t suit women, that it doesn’t serve them. People emerge at different times saying that marriage is a bad institution that oppresses us. And I think, what shape is your marriage taking that you feel that way?

My book is a memoir, it’s just a personal story, it’s not a how-to, it’s not a survey of how marriages work, it’s just my very personal views and feelings about my marriage along with a lot of reflection on what it all means and how we do this. But one of the main things that I wanted to get across is if you want a good marriage you have to stand up for your desires. There are times in your life where you have to be very, very clear and tell the other person directly what you want. And if it is an important thing that you want, you cannot back down. You cannot say, “They just won’t give it to me.” If you know that your happiness depends on something, you have to assert yourself, even at the risk of fracturing your marriage.

A lot of the book is about you and Bill being radically honest with each other. I think a lot of people find uncomfortable conversations, well, uncomfortable or they have trouble being that vulnerable. Do you think you’re a person who’s naturally more honest and open or is it your relationship with Bill that got you there?

There’s a little bit of my relationship that got me there for sure. In the early days of Ask Polly, I wrote a lot about how being with someone you can completely trust changes everything. But I’m also a person who’s at war with herself. I am very open at this point in my life but it took me a lot of work to continue to be more and more open.

People assume, ‘Oh, you’re just a person who these things are effortless for. You’re willing to be that bold, and say those things, and admit your crush and most people wouldn’t put up with those things.’” And the thing is, you teach people to put up with you by loving them for who they are. You get there by showing up day after day, and saying I’m with you, I accept you. If you’re with someone great, you give them that kind of approval and love and they’re grateful for it, and they give it back to you. You stay out of that realm of contempt and you stay in that good place of honoring what each other needs. There has never been a time when more honesty and more talk didn’t make me feel better about my marriage.

I do want to zero in on the anecdote that you tell about developing a crush on another writer at a dinner—there’s a twist at the end that I won’t spoil—and working through your feelings with Bill right alongside you. I think that would make a lot of people squirm—can you talk more about that? Was it ever an option not to tell Bill?

In the beginning, I didn’t take it seriously at all. I was thrilled to tell Bill. I thought, “Somebody kind of likes me! Someone wants to make out with me! I can’t believe it.” It was just pure ego.

The next day, Bill called me from out of town, and I had been really obsessed for 24 hours. This was 14 years in, and I had never been tempted before. I had never thought of cheating, it was ludicrous. I was fully in my marriage, and then all of a sudden, I was like, “Oh! Cheating seems amazing. And what’s so important is that you don’t tell the other person! Your husband doesn’t know anything about it. That would be incredible if you didn’t know something about me.”

I’m kind of a person who, when I have a new feeling, I just dial into it. It’s not like I didn’t have any moralistic ideas about it or that I didn’t feel ashamed of it. In some ways, talking honestly to Bill about it was a way of handling my shame around it. I told him, “It’s not that serious I’m sure, but I’m just going to tell you what I’ve been thinking about and I feel like a jerk for thinking about it.” And he responded, like, “Whatever, man, that’s just fantasizing! Relax.”

At one point as you were about to meet this other guy for a drink and—I’m paraphrasing here—you ask Bill, “Am I going to sleep with this guy?” and Bill says, “I don’t know, are you??” It seems that he was pretty mellow about all of this.

Bill is not that zen about everything. There were times when I said, “Look at this picture of him! Look at this video!” There were times when I pushed it. But in some ways, that’s a way of saving your relationship. Let’s share in this, instead of me privately freaking out about it. I think Bill understood that was the energy behind that whole thing. But he was also like, “I understand the draw, but it’s obvious you two couldn’t even spend a day together.” And that’s accurate. There are times when you can’t see the truth as well as someone who’s right next to you who knows you really well. You’ve created your own version that you’re clinging to like a tasty little candybar in your pocket that’s melting.

With Bill, I’m always pushing us to grow past our assumptions of where we are. It’s not like I don’t present challenges to him that he’s bewildered by. He can get insecure. He can get worried about where I am. But in that particular situation, he was right about everything.

There is a lot more awareness now of open relationships, non-monogamy, and polyamory. I’m curious what you think about those relationship models as someone who has thought a lot about her own marriage and marriage in general?

I’m fascinated by their popularity at the moment, and I think it would be cool to ask people questions about how it works, and where it falls apart and where it sticks together. Especially people who are in open and poly relationships and absolutely committed to maintaining that way of life indefinitely, who are like “This is the best way to live.”

I used to believe that’s a terrible way to live, no one should live that way. It’s scary and it makes everyone insecure and there’s probably some man in the middle of it that’s getting exactly what he wants while everyone else suffers! That used to be my own jaundiced view of it but it’s changed. I tend to feel we’re too moralistic and restrictive in the way that we imagine relationships. My overall conclusion about myself is that I couldn’t handle it.

It’s interesting to ask the questions, even if you know that you’re never going to have an open relationship. Bill and I have had those conversations, and it’s good to have them about things that challenge your ideas of what your relationship is. That was part of why I talked so much about my crush when it came up. Every time Bill and I talked about it, we would land in a new interesting place that we’d never been before. We learned a lot about each other, and any subject like that is worth talking about. When your trust is high enough with another person, you can say casually, “will we be doing this for the rest of our lives? Do we want to do this for the rest of our lives?” It’s exciting to be with someone who can say, “Oh, let me go back into that question and be honest with you about my impressions, without fear.”

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