'There's a lie many women tell every Christmas. We need to talk about it.'

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This article is an edited version of one that originally appeared on Amanda Montei's Substack. Sign up here.

It's officially December, which means many of us are preparing to brave the annual tradition of proving ourselves to loved ones who don't actually know us that well, by way of awkward, sometimes painful conversations at family gatherings.

For many women in heterosexual marriages, this season may mean actively hiding the problems in their relationships — specifically the problems they're having with their husbands.

Which also means that, after a year characterised by so many conversations about heteropessimism, and by the generally fraught landscape of straight relationships, I'm thinking about Karen, from the beloved holiday film Love Actually, the patron saint of mothers who lie to their children about dad's shitty behaviour.

This is not love, actually. Image:L Universal Pictures.

The image above, of course, depicts one Emma Thompson as Karen, a married mother of two whose husband, Harry, is sleeping with his younger, hotter, utterly predictable trope of a secretary.

After Karen figures out Harry is having an affair — on Christmas morning no less —she retreats into the bedroom to cry alone, hiding her devastation from her children, because she does not want to spoil the holiday vibes.

It's bad enough that she has to suffer in silence. But in the end, the couple stays together.

Karen has inspired many a meme because Karen is all of us. She is the wife who hides how little her husband contributed to the Christmas joy. The one who makes excuses for her husband being an asshole to everyone or getting too drunk or just being antisocial. The one who tells her friend her husband isn't that bad, or was just raised differently, or who talks up her guy, even though everyone can see he's kind of a jerk.

In Love Actually, Karen confronts Harry later, after the kids' Christmas play, for which she's of course made the children's costumes. She wonders aloud if she should stay in her marriage "knowing her life would always be a little bit worse." And she does stay, because she is the wife of a good guy who says, in response, that he's "a classic fool," as though he's only just remembered he has a wife he likes to have around.

Through it all, Karen is the mother who puts on a happy face for the kids while all of this is going down — who does not let her sadness, or her anger, show.

Karen has been on my mind ever since I started listening to Lily Allen's "West End Girl" on repeat, and not just because of this meme:

I've been thinking of Karen evern since Lily Allen's album release. Image: X.

Allen's album has been embraced as "a welcome antidote to the pressure on women to be silent and sanitised," as skilled in the "radical art of oversharing," and as evidence that "creative women are becoming increasingly dangerous to men who have historically gotten away with being shitty."

Unfortunately, the album has also been the impetus for some weird pro-monogamy/trad marriage treatises. Even so, the album has been wildly successful because it offers straight women permission to do something they are told not to do: be honest about the men who hurt them.

Though many would like to believe we are living in a postfeminist era in which the gains of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution have been fully realised, there remains a presumption today that it behooves us all to keep the problems that plague heterosexual relationships hidden, indeed private. In some cases, the argument even goes that the problems inherent to heterosexual relationships in a society in which men and women remain unequal should be hidden from the men themselves, even the ones who are the cause of those problems.

Allen has said that her kids will come on tour with her, and that this album, despite its lyrics about pussy palaces and butt plugs, is as much for them as it is for her. This may surprise some, but as she remarked, they were there, and they suffered, too. Kids already know, in other words, when their dads are behaving badly, and the idea that hiding men's behaviour, wherever it lands on the spectrum of shittiness, and/or that staying together "for the kids" but living "a little bit worse" life, a la poor Karen, is somehow good for children, is baffling.

Lying to children about the problems of heterosexuality hurts all of us. Who, after all, do we imagine benefits from this masquerade? We still live with the idea that it is a mother's job to paint fathers in the best light possible no matter how those fathers behave, and that this is somehow beneficial to children.

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Commonplace divorce advice, for example, urges partners not to bad mouth each other in front of their kids, because this can damage the child's relationship with the other parent. It's an extension of the ol' "don't keep score" advice that married people receive. But who exactly does it benefit to avoid keeping score? It's not women.

Yes, a divorce is a breakup, and often the person one leaves or are left by looks like the worst person in the world. The pain of any lost love can cause us to see the partner who hurt us as a villain, rather than a person. And some men are shitty husbands, but good dads (a subject that warrants another essay). Young children obviously shouldn't be burdened by petty adult conflict, or by details of betrayals and sexual escapades. But most mums I know are incredible holders of nuance, and skilled storytellers. They know how to take a complex adult story, and break it down for a child's mind. They can handle this.

As a child, I was exposed to adult drama and post-divorce resentment too young and too often. I knew when the child support wasn't paid. I knew way too many intimate details about what led my parents to divorce. I would never repeat those patterns in my relationships with my children, or encourage others to do so. But I have to admit, even when that honesty went too far, I learned invaluable lessons about how the world works.

Which is to say, we can and must tell the truth to children about men misbehaving, especially when it comes to the patterns so many adult men fall into in marriages. I'm personally less interested in making sure kids know when men cheat (sorry Karen), than I am in examining the pervasive dishonesty baked into so many heterosexual marriages about gender inequality in the home.

Married women regularly exhaust themselves making excuses for husbands who yell at their children, who treat their wives poorly, or who do not pull their weight around the house. But lying about the ways men hurt women (and kids) is certainly not for the mothers who do it — and it's not for the children either.

In fact, it's a practice that only contributes to a broader tendency to blame women, especially mothers, for everything, and can have the effect of turning child against their mothers. In the Freudian sense, the child must reject the mother and learn to identify with the paternal power. But so much more simply: As Jacqueline Rose writes in her book-length essay Mothers, the mother is everyone's trusty scapegoat for whatever goes wrong in the world. And this is because we have so normalised and silenced the inequalities that are actually to blame for everyone's suffering.

Even so, the mother has historically been at least one source of the masquerade, because she is tasked with keeping up the fantasy of the nuclear family. This is especially true at holiday time. Later, however, mum will be revealed to be the liar, the betrayer, the failed teacher, the one who did not prepare us for the harsh realities of the world. She does such a good job covering everyone else's tracks, nurturing the image of the happy family, creating domestic bliss, it's only a matter of time until everyone turns on her, making her the target of the whole family's ire.

And isn't that comfortable? We are so used to making men's bad behaviour something women have done that we are probably all familiar, in one way or another, with that sense of mother blame — that anger we hold for the women who raised us for cheating us out of the truth, or failing to equip us for the world.

Meanwhile, young girls are taught from a young age to cover for boys and men, to keep the peace. As they observe grown women around them doing it, too, putting up with men who fail here and there, who demean or embarrass them, who don't pull their own weight, girls get the message: women are to overfunction, and overcompensate, even if that means living "a little bit worse" life.

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It's part of a larger cultural impulse to simply paper over inequalities of all sorts. Mel Robbins (and her co-author Karl Pillemer) recently insisted that this holiday season, of all the holidays seasons, if "your husband's side of the family has politics that bother you" (like, maybe, they think you shouldn't have rights, or that racism is funny, or don't think trans people are people, or are pro kidnapping and separating families), well that's just like when "your college-age kids don't call as much as you'd like" and you should "accept it and move on." These authors offer a little thought experiment to illustrate their point: If you only had a year left to live, "would you want to spend your last Thanksgiving resenting your father's politics?"

Robbins and her co-author seem awfully interested in depoliticising politics, the family, and the holidays. Subscribing to this kind of thinking means buying into the idea that having political convictions about things like human rights and bodily autonomy is "resentful" rather than an expansion of what is possible. These authors seem to think that all that power and equality stuff just shouldn't be allowed to penetrate the family unit, lest it mess us all up.

But the way we practice politics within intimate family settings is the very work of social reproduction. It's how whole worlds get made, unmade, remade.

Hiding men's poor treatment of women from children is not love. It's a form of patriarchal socialisation. It is a choice that reflects a willingness to remain in a world in which men can behave badly, and women will cover for them. What does that teach children about the roles men and women are expected to play in a relationship? Among other things, it teaches young girls to lie to themselves and others, and young boys that they need not concern themselves with accountability, because a woman will be there to pick up the pieces, and cover for them.

Even so, I understand why women do it. I have been there, holding the sadness or the anger at bay. Women don't only hide their suffering because they want to shield children they love from the adult world. They also tend to hide how they feel about the men in their lives in intimate and public settings because they know there are so few caring audiences for their complaints. When men's behavior isn't something women have miraculously done to themselves, it's something women have nevertheless chosen to endure.

The belief that most men can't handle the truth — that it is just too much for them to have to face real honesty when they do not show up in their families and communities — is also pervasive.

But actual love, and the hope of any kind of better future for our kids, requires us to get real.

This article is an edited version of one that originally appeared on Amanda Montei's Substack. Sign up here.

Feature image: Universal Pictures.