Behind Closed Doors? This Valentine’s Day, Maybe Not

Why a new genre — reality marriage lit — is here to stay

Lisa Taddeo’s brilliant New York Times essay, “My Real Love Language is Fear,” published on the eve of Valentine’s Day, is the final nail in the marital secrecy coffin.

It used to be sacrilegious to discuss the ins and outs of our marriages. And by “used to,” I mean, like, just a few years ago. When my college girlfriends and I started tying the knot back in the 2000s, our detailed late-night conversations about our respective smooches and the play-by-plays of our relationship dramas suddenly screeched to a halt. As wedding bands slipped on our manicured fingers, our lips zipped shut. The guys, with all their peculiarities and prowesses, the ones we used to collectively dissect and analyze for hours, were now off limits. Like paintings at the Met, the red velvet rope of matrimony cordoned off the most valuable canvases.

Married, when we took our regular girls’ trips and congregated at our increasingly infrequent group dinners, we chatted about anything but the most sacred terrain. Yes, inconsequential anecdotes were tossed out, ping-pong ball nuggets of information flying back and forth. But not the meaty stuff. As my mother and generations before her had cautioned, “What happens behind closed doors, stays…