The Make America Married Again Era
  June 4, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, This Sunday, the most powerful bicon to ever gyrate on screen is returning. Life is looking up.  In today’s newsletter, we take a look at the field of battle (including, yes, Graham Platner’s odds) five months out from the midterms. Plus, THE expert on marriage answers our questions. 🧛🏼♀️, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONRunning up that (Capitol) hill: This year’s midterms will be upon us sooner than we think and while the experts say Democrats are poised to take back the House, the Senate is an entirely different beast. To survive the remainder of the Trump administration, we’ll need all the political firepower available, and that includes a majority in the Senate. Plus maybe a voodoo doll or two, who knows. This week’s elections brought some morale boosts for Democrats: In Iowa, a Trump endorsee lost his primary, exposing the slow fade of the president’s pull; Deb Haaland is on her way to making history in New Mexico; and Montana’s Alani Bankhead is leading what appears to be a successful charge to flip a Senate seat. Is that hope we’re smelling? Yes. But there’s still a long road ahead. The state that could make all the difference in the Senate is (🥁) Alaska. Both parties are pouring millions into the state’s top candidates, Democrat Mary Peltola and incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan. (There are actually two Republican Dan Sullivans running; the GOP favors the one from Anchorage.) Alaska hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2015 but experts say Peltola, a former tribal judge who served in Congress for three years, has made the race competitive. “You’re likely to see an election that, just by historical standards, is a little bit tougher for Republicans,” a senior political advisor told Alaska Public Media. On the opposite side of the country, another contentious battle is brewing in Maine—particularly for women voters. The race will most likely come down to Graham Platner—who is still in the lead for the Democratic nomination despite being embroiled in a sexting scandal, and who last year had to have a Nazi tattoo covered up on his chest—and longtime Senator Susan Collins, a Republican who famously claims to be pro-choice but acts otherwise on the daily. Before Platner’s spicy texts went public, he was considered a strong candidate to make a real run at Collins. But now, he’s given voters (and every woman who might find “he kept an AR-15 in his apartment” a red flag) pause. And if Platner or any of these Democratic hopefuls want to turn the tide in November, it is women voters they’ll have to convince. Women now vote significantly more than men in this country and, in fact, the number of women who vote in midterms has been on a steady rise for decades—roughly 10 million more women voted in the 2022 midterms than did in 2006. No wonder the right is suddenly hyper-focused on suppressing women’s votes. In other words: It seems clear that massive turnout this November by women is the simplest way to put the brakes on Trump’s runaway train (and maybe even impeach him in January). It worked in Hungary. It can work here. AND:
 A VISION AND A VISIONARY (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 Three Questions About…MarriageIs there any hope for hetero couples? Historian Stephanie Coontz’s new book has surprising answers.BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ  THE MARRIAGE EXPERT HERSELF. (COURTESY OF STEPHANIE COONTZ) As someone who’s obsessed with both feminist history and equitable marriage, I’ve long considered the work of family historian Stephanie Coontz a north star. Throughout her 50-year career, she has closely examined the evolution of marriage, gender roles, and the nuclear family, most famously in her bestselling 1992 book debunking midcentury nostalgia, The Way We Never Were, and in her 2005 book Marriage, a History, which was cited in the 2015 Supreme Court decision granting marriage equality. Amid the rise of the manosphere and tradwives, or what Coontz dubs the MAMA (Make America Married Again) era, I’d already been itching to get some historical context from her—and then she dropped a new book, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage. I spoke with Coontz about why 1950s nostalgia is roaring back, how gender roles are inseparable from the legacy of democracy, and how history can save our marriages. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about your new book because, as far as I’m concerned, you wrote the definitive history of marriage. What made you want to tackle this subject again? In the last few years, a lot of people have asked me about heteropessimism and the idea of toxic masculinity, and do we have to give up on heterosexual relationships and marriage? In this book, I don’t deny the problems, but also suggest that people take a little historical perspective. For me, if I know a certain behavior is how people were trained to behave, it’s easier for me to confront the change I want without concluding that the person [exhibiting the behavior] is bad or uncooperative. I call these gendered behaviors “historical earworms”—messages that have been passed down to us from children’s stories, lullabies, books, politicians, all of which tell us the way men and women supposedly “are” and the way they need to act or can’t help but act. Boys get a lot of those very early: Don’t be a baby, don’t cry, toughen up. Women get them, too: [We’re supposedly] more moral and better at caregiving and domestic tasks, which leads us to gatekeep those tasks. These historical earworms echo in people’s heads long after they have decided they want to change the ways they’re relating to people. History gives us the self-knowledge to see how these earworms are intertwined in us, and therefore how we can dismantle them. One of the most fascinating chapters in this book was about how the legacy of democracy created unique forms of “earworms”—particular gender stereotypes that are relatively new. Can you explain that? I’m not saying that the older, aristocratic patriarchy was better. It was very, very brutal. But it operated on a different set of beliefs. Men were the ones claiming to be the idealistic ones who sacrificed for the greater good, while women were too selfish and ambitious and therefore had to be dominated. There wasn’t this idea that men couldn’t be emotional: If you go back to the 12th-century epic poem, The Song of Roland, 10,000 soldiers faint and fall off their horses and weep bitter tears when Roland dies. Men from the 18th century would write to a fellow man who’d gone away, “I cried when you left. I will be so lonely until you come back.” This changed, ironically, when societies began to espouse equality during the democratic revolutions [of the late 18th century]. We developed the idea of political and social equality and yet continued to enslave Black people, dispossess [Native people], and oppress women. So if they believed that all human beings were created equal, how did they explain keeping these other groups down? That’s when you really get the invention of the most horrible biological explanations. For Black people, [the white men in charge claimed] they were less than human. For women, it was that they’re wonderful and virtuous but they’re weak, so we need to protect them. By the mid-19th century, we expected women to be moral and to take care of people and stay at home. Masculinity became defined as the opposite of femininity, so men started taking pride in being aggressive and not being altruistic. You now think you were too dismissive of people who are nostalgic for midcentury America in your book The Way We Never Were. Why? [The height of marriage in this country] was embedded in a time when social and economic conditions were improving. There were rising wages and social access for people who were not ever going to become millionaires, but who could see themselves making what people during the early [American] Republic used to call a “competency”—something that made you competent to be on your own. I was surprised to learn that not just white people are nostalgic for the 1950s: 53% of Black people and 57% of Latinos believe our country’s culture and way of life have “mostly changed for the worse” since the 1950s [compared to 55% of white people], according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey. Even for people living under segregation and oppression, there were civil rights movements going on, there was hope that things were getting better. Of course, because of feminism, we now have higher standards for what our marital relationships should look like; households in the 1950s had much higher rates of domestic violence and abuse. For my book, A Strange Stirring, I interviewed more than a hundred women who had read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique [when it was published in 1963], and it was clear that even the women who were not getting abused were very deeply unhappy with… the lack of interest in them as human beings. So maybe what all these people are looking back at fondly is not the kinds of homes that people actually lived in, but how much easier it was to get a home in the first place.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
