On a recent episode of the very raunchy “Call Her Daddy” podcast, host Alex Cooper and actress Sophia Bush talked about divorce as casually as retiring a pair of ill-fitting jeans. If a woman is questioning whether she could do better than her marriage, Cooper told her audience of predominantly young women, “the answer is always yes.” When critics pushed back, Bush dismissed them as people who “hate a woman with agency.”
No one should stay in a marriage marked by abuse or one where differences would make raising children together harmful. Women in those situations deserve support, not judgment. But “the answer is always yes” is not about them. It is a shrug at the most serious promise most of us will ever make, offered up to millions of young women still deciding what kind of lives to build.
This is a shallow way to view marriage and a terrible message to send millions of young women. Cooper wants us to believe that a spouse is less a partner than a placeholder, someone to keep around until a better option comes along. Marriage becomes one more product to review, return, and upgrade, and the highest virtue is never settling. That recipe leads to permanent dissatisfaction.
Cooper an...