Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story was the sort of thing that inspires a lot of eye-rolling. Elizabeth Weil’s story was ostensibly about attempting to submit a decent marriage to counseling and therapy, to see if things might improve. What readers got instead was a shapeless noodle of a story that felt like a therapy session itself: The writer airs grievances, goes on too long about small irritants, and wanders through her long-simmering gripes with more ferocity than they’d seem to merit. I came away feeling weirdly Sarah Palin-ish: This is what these San Francisco elitists have to complain about? My husband spends too much time at the gym, is too obsessive about his cooking prowess, and is decent but predictable in bed? Oh, get over yourselves.

But what interested me most about this story was that these two have three children, and they just barely make an appearance in this story. Maybe it’s just because Weil’s story is about marital strife, but to my reading,  she and her husband spend a whole lot of time screaming at each other. And the stressors in her marriage seem to stem from (a) her focus on being a parent first and a mate second, (b) her husband’s resentment of same, and (c) her resentment over his resentment. I have a sense that these kids (ages 4 and 7) are old enough to know there’s something not right between Mommy and Daddy, and that, it seems to me, ought to have been part of this essay-experiment. That, and a few days’ serious editing.