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Divorce is a feminist issue.

I know that particular f-word is naughty. But don't start imagining seventies-era, hairy-armpitted, ball-busting women.

I say feminist because it's the word that suggests helping women to understand their potential, make choices out of desire, not expectation, and fully know themselves.

I know this because I am a graduate of Smith College, a legendary feminist institution in Northampton, Mass., where I didn't learn a thing about how to navigate my life as a (presumably) liberated woman.

The process of divorce was a much better teacher.

Like so many women I know who are figuring out their lives postmarriage, I am stronger than before, more clear about my identity, more aware of what a good relationship should be, and fearless.

But I wish it had been different. I believe in marriage. Or want to, anyway. Sometimes, I think the problem is the institution. It is what needs to be remodelled so that it's good for both men and women.

In the new movie Evening, Vanessa Redgrave's character tells her nurse that she had two failed marriages. After a pause, she says that there was another affair in her youth that felt like a marriage. It lasted 40 years. She had loved him unfailingly all through the years. Problem was, she hadn't seen him for 40 years, she says in her slightly delirious death-bed ruminations.

Her nurse replies, "It's often better that way." To which the movie audience snickers in humorous agreement.

But is marriage only wonderful when it's imagined?

The women's movement changed expectations for what we could do in the workplace, but gave no guidance on how to manage a marriage and a family. And some of women's attempts to assert their power in marriage have been unfair to men.

Betty Stockley, a marriage and sex therapist in Toronto, told me of a client who was struggling with his domineering wife. "He is doing everything she wants," Ms. Stockley explains. "He comes home as early as possible. Makes sure dinner is started. But that isn't enough. She is always criticizing him. In the evening, he goes downstairs to watch porn because certainly, for sex, he doesn't want to deal with her."

Well, that's a guy we can safely call Mr. Ball Busted.

Smith is a wonderful academic institution, but the image of women it presented was varied and confusing.

Sure, Gloria Steinem, who is an alumna, once famously quipped, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

But on a Saturday night in the various dorms on campus, the women known as the Debs (as in debutantes) were out in force, dressed in their best pearls and makeup, as the Harvard and Yale men were bused in for "mixers."

Nobody helped us grapple with the complexity of being female: to want an interesting career, to love, to be loved, to be a mother, to be a wife, to want some measure of independence. No one discussed how to be that Have It All-er.

Women and men of my boomer generation had to figure out the modern terms of marriage while we were in one. Which isn't easy. It's like trying to teach a horse that's been trained to plod around a ring to leap over the rails and gallop through the field.

Maybe that partly explains the oft-repeated statistic that in divorces of people older than 40, the majority of the splits are initiated by women. Maybe those gals have been popping babies, upholding the domestic-goddess ideal, building their careers and being wifely, and then they get to this point where they decide that the husband can't be what they need (or doesn't want to be) and they're tired of the struggle. If they have been working, or at least keeping a hand in a career while in the child-rearing years, then they have an economic viability outside of a marriage that allows them to do without one.

We are the Straddle Generation, caught between old ideas of marriage and quickly evolving expectations of how we want to live.

It's why many women talk about their divorce settlements almost as if they are rewards for having done time in marital prison. "I know this sounds crass," says a woman I know in Rosedale, an upscale neighbourhood in Toronto. "But if you think about it like a business deal, you realize that you're better off financially, and for having had children, than if you hadn't married."

The same thinking lies beneath the saying many divorce-happy women repeat: Children are forever. Husbands come and go.

But men are often bewildered by what their wives want.

"It sure surprised me," a man I know said of his divorce after 12 years of marriage. "I thought everything was okay. We have four great children. I like to cook. But suddenly, she comes home with a bellybutton ring and a tattoo and says she is not happy."

Others have told me that they struggle to live up to their wives' desire for enlightened husbandhood.

"Women have been struggling to redefine their role in society and in marriage, and men have been asked to stand aside and not interfere," says a man I know, Mr. Sweetly Progressive. "We watch women take on huge amounts of responsibility and workload in their quest to 'have it all,' and we do our best to make ourselves useful," he says.

Pity those poor husbands, I say. The good ones, I mean. They're flying without GPS.

In his popular new book, The New Rules of Marriage: A Breakthrough Program for 21st-century Relationship, author Terrence Real makes important headway in the redefinition of the institution we are so ambivalent about. He discusses the old rules that no longer work and attempts to set new ones. My favourite: "By mastering the art of relationship empowerment, we use the magic of connection to heal ourselves as we learn to change ourselves, not our partners [italics his]."

Gosh, that's inspiring enough to make you want to do it all over again. Which is the point. Marriage can be good.

Anne Bercht, author and marriage counsellor in Abbotsford, B.C. (website Passionatelife.ca), told me that a woman in one of her sessions said that "she had been married to 17 different men in 20 years."

It was a positive statement. What she meant was that her one husband had evolved, just as she had, throughout their marriage. They allowed each other room to be, to grow.

Women need to talk about where the real power is. It is not only in having the ability to pursue work outside the home. It is not just in motherhood, although I can count myself among those who say it is the most fulfilling thing they have ever done. It is somewhere in the courage to love: to love ourselves for what we want or don't want or can't have, and to love the men who aren't afraid to let us embrace whatever it is we want to try.