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On 26 July 2009, a woman named Diane Shuler drove a minivan carrying herself, her two children, and her three nieces the wrong way on the Taconic State Parkway in New York State for nearly two miles. She hit an SUV carrying a father and his adult son head-on. The only survivor was her 5-year-old son. Some details have come out about her movements before the crash, but nothing that really explains how the accident happened. The coroner's decision was that she was drunk at the time of the crash, with a blood-alcohol level of .19; a conclusion supported by the smashed 1.75-liter bottle of vodka on the van's floor. Despite this evidence, her family and friends find this conclusion hard to accept because they had no idea that she had a drinking problem. She had a six-figure job in cable television, managed the household finances, looked after the two children, all generally on her own. Her husband worked nights, and so they only saw each other on weekends. Moreover, the husband gratefully allowed Diane to be the boss, happy to have her mother him as well as the children.

A marriage that got much more national attention than the Shulers' was that of Jon and Kate Gosselin. According to Diablo Cody, writing in Entertainment Weekly, "The show was interesting because Jon and Kate hated each other. In its finest moments, Jon & Kate Plus Eight was an uncomfortably crisp reflection of a new American family dynamic: Mom as the aggressive, gruff-voiced breadwinner . . . ; Dad as a passive, befuddled man-child who dreams of the lifestyle teased in his Esquire subscription" (4 December 2009, p. 28).

Another marriage being carried out in public that seems to conform to this model is that of Governor Mark and Jenny Sanford, which I've blogged about already. You know what they say: the first time is an accident, the second time is a coincidence, and the third time is a real pattern.

I was first intrigued by the Shuler case because, aside from the mystery centering on Diane's condition, it raised the question of how open life partners should be with each other. How much should one reveal to one's partner about one's darker thoughts, emotional pains, worries and anxieties? The common wisdom is that one should be able to be totally open with one's life partner, but reading about the Gosselins' marriage, which seems like a clone of the Shulers', suggests to me that, in most marriages, openness is a one-way street. If Cody is right, that the strength and competence of women like Diane Shuler and Kate Gosselin has the effect of infantilizing their husbands, it makes sense that the one who has taken on the role of the "strong one" has to maintain that façade, even at the cost of her own happiness, or, in the case of Diane Shuler, of her life and those of several innocent people.

So, what is the answer? Why do women allow themselves to be put in this position? Why do we allow men to opt out of adulthood?