Just after Christmas 2021, Honor Jones, a senior editor at the Atlantic, published “How I Demolished My Life: A Home-Improvement Story.” It’s a self-portrait of a mother who, while wrangling with kitchen renovation plans, decides she doesn’t want a new kitchen.

She wants a divorce.

Jones spends the next three thousand perfectly manicured words trying to justify her decision to break up her family. She displays all the self-congratulatory bravado of middle-aged white women who read Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House or Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray for a high school literature class and then imagine themselves forever in the role of Brave Protestor of Victorian Oppression.

Jones describes her marriage, which produced three children who are still young, as her cage. Her imperfect suburban home is, to her, an icon of her imprisonment.

She doesn’t like the “chaos” of her house and, even with the help of sensible Luba, her hired cleaning woman, she finds the lived-in quality of a home with children irksome.

“[T]he crumbs got me down. I sometimes felt that they were a metaphor, that as I got older I was being ground down under the heel of my own life. All I could do was settle into the carpet.”

So she tells her husband she’s divorcing him. She loves him, she really does. He gave her everything she’d asked for. But it wasn’t enough.

“I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself.”

She seems to think she has now suddenly come to herself: only by breaking free and feeling “cold wind on my face” will she be herself again.

So they move their three children into a large apartment in New York City (the city is “better for our careers”). She and her husband alternate staying with the kids and camping out in a smaller, one-bedroom apartment that they can afford. She sells their Pennsylvania home, folds her husband’s sport coats for the last time, and ruminates on the deep mysteries of self-actualization.

Jones is a gifted writer. She applies all her considerable talent in the art of rhetoric, but only to showcase her utter failure in the art of self-knowledge.

All in all, she paints a vivid picture of what we might call a “good divorce.” She applies just the right measure of compunction and sincerity, as well as compassion for her children (whom she admits she’s deprived of their family).

The piece struck a nerve. It received pointed censure on the Atlantic’s Twitter feed and comment box, much of it along the lines of “you sad, pathetic, entitled woman” and “what about your children, you selfish pig.”

It’s unlikely a Twitter mob will ever change a heart or mind. And to be fair, we don’t know the real Honor Jones, who may be far more conflicted about her decision than the picture she has put forward. We can’t know what other factors in her life and marriage she has chosen not to share. The fact that such “brave,” “confessional” writing is encouraged, let alone celebrated as heroic and cathartic, tells us more about our society and its appetites than about the writer.

But the public response to the piece does get surprisingly close to the heart of the matter. Marriage was not the prison. Jones was terribly, tragically wrong, because her marriage was in fact her best means to finding herself. By jumping ship on her family, she abandoned the one vessel that could best carry her on her voyage of self-discovery: the life-long, exclusive commitment made in a marriage.

Self-knowledge is the key to the happy life. Greek philosophers inscribed the admonition “know thyself” over the entrance to the oracle at Delphi. Confucian and Daoist philosophers, in their distinct ways, call for self-awareness and self-cultivation.

We are a puzzle to ourselves, as Jones demonstrates. But she has swallowed the lie that only by breaking free of commitments and disappointments and the daily grind of life together will she find out who she really is. That daily grind is called “losing yourself,” and it hurts.

We make a promise in marriage that offers unconditional love to one person and the children that come from that union: we say “you can place your happiness in my hands.” In that moment, both you and all your dependents are inextricably linked by your own choice until death. No amount of re-imagining your life will change the fact: you will never be fulfilled personally until you have fulfilled your vow. We don’t understand the vow when we make it, but it hangs in our hearts as an immovable lodestar.

If you want to be the brave hero, a real protestor of the wretched, selfish human condition, you must lose what you thought was yourself. As G. K. Chesterton writes, “‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers.”

Until you bump up against other selves, other people, you will be inaccessible to yourself because we are social, dependent creatures. Life together is our window to our true selves.

People will say, “Life pulled us apart.” But that’s wrong. Your own faults (both his and hers) pull you apart, and the hard work of marriage and motherhood is recognizing that you, not your promises, will have to change. Marriage exposes our faults so that we can become the best version of ourselves.

She’s swallowed the lie that only by breaking free of commitments and disappointments and the daily grind of life together will she find out who she really is.

Children do this better than any of the other gifts of marriage. Unlike the many couples struggling with infertility, Jones’s marriage was blessed with three beautiful children. She has three human beings who needed their parents to make them a home to achieve their own human flourishing.

And the surprising twist that Jones missed is that she needed them. She needed her family and her vows. Self-sufficiency and self-actualization are, as Leah Libresco Sargent has written, not the default but the “aberration.” Sacrificial care for others and self-realization are two sides of the same coin. It is a great human paradox that nevertheless is true.

At one point in the piece, Jones reports that her real estate agent reassured her: “This happens all the time.”

Yes. It happens all the time.

One in four Millennials report that their parents were divorced or separated. Only about six in ten were raised by both parents. When they were young children, the divorce rate was close to 50 percent (it has declined over the last forty years, but only by about 5 percent).

To be fair, Jones acknowledges her children at intervals throughout the essay. She feels that, in spite of their loss, they are also beneficiaries of this new arrangement. She’s made the children “freer.” They will receive “a way of being in the world: of being open to it, and open in it.”

More and more, I understood that what I wanted for them was public, not private, spaces. Maybe they would know from the beginning, in a way I hadn’t, that they didn’t have to own the playground to share it: monkey bars polished by thousands of hands, the secret shaded rooms under the slides, the parents filling water balloons for any passing children.

Jones imagines for herself children who somehow, in some way that allows her to pursue her new life with minimal guilt, are actually benefiting from the divorce.

My son is only six. He doesn’t know the worst that can happen. I don’t want him to know. Do I? I admire his confidence, but I sometimes wonder if he could use a little more of that animal intelligence – by which I mean, I guess, fear.

Divorce will certainly provide him with a little more animal fear. There have been sociological studies of the adult children of divorce (such as the 2014 Linacre Quarterly report) as well as large-scale collections of their own testimonies such as Leila Miller’s Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak.

Miller’s book gives a voice to the previously voiceless. “The unspoken, isolating (but ubiquitous) pain of divorce on a child is the most under-reported story of our time.” Reading through Primal Loss, you can understand why divorced parents don’t want to hear it. One thirty-five-year-old mother and professional whose parents divorced “amicably” testified:

A parent might be able to totally start over with a new spouse, experiencing freedom from the first marriage and only minimal contact with the first spouse. For the child, however, their worlds will forever be fundamentally split. Forever. There is no starting over with a clean slate; things are now complicated and fractured. Divorce starts a family onto two different paths that, as the years unfold, grow further and further apart. It’s not a one-time event, but rather an ever-changing and ever-widening gap that only the children are really tasked with straddling and reconciling, season after season, change after change.

Abandonment issues that spring from such powerful but unacknowledged feelings haunt the adult children of divorce. They have lost their “first family,” while their parents are busy building new lives and new families. In many cases, the grief never ends.

A six-year-old doesn’t get to build a new family in the brave new “public space” Jones imagines. Maybe the kids don’t want a more public life. Maybe children need a private home and a sense of security.

Maybe giving a healthy dose of fear shouldn’t come in the form of intentional parental abandonment. Maybe children should face danger first in fairy tales, where the dragons are defeated because strong knights and noble ladies are true to their promises.

Jones briefly entertains the notion that she is wrong: “Maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe I’m not free of anything and I just want different objects, a different home, maybe someday – admit it – a different man.”

She may wake up one morning in her luxury New York apartment with her new husband or wife, order some organic avocado toast, pen the next great American novel, and therein find herself.

But it’s more likely self-knowledge, if it ever comes, will come the day she’s reading Goodnight Moon to her grandchildren and suddenly realizes what she did to her own kids. On that day, the truth will be a cold comfort.