Eat, Pray, Leave

For a long time, folk wisdom held that men were the losers in the marriage bargain. Men had to be “tied down” or “trapped” into marriage—hence the familiar pop-culture image of a groom at the altar, sweating as though he were in the early stages of Ebola. “Take my wife” jokes were a staple of mass entertainment. Literary heavyweights like John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth excelled at highbrow depictions of restless bourgeois husbands stumbling through midlife crises.