Marriage at cross purposes

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Or – Undoubtedly one reason why I am still single!

– Men could be all feminist on the outside. However, deep down, the reason they want a wife is because of unfemininst reasons. Guess what? There is absolutely nothing wrong with that! But equally, there is nothing wrong with my approach either. Some things in the Bible are “black and white”, clearcut: There is a God, Jesus is the only way to God. Other things are a little more open to argument, or personal preference. Some people try to wrap their preferences in the Bible – the Bible says! Then they argue, if you are a Christian, then you should think this way. This is another example, yet another one, of twisting the Bible to suit fit in with your personal preferences.

God is legitimately the God of the feminist and the conservative at the same time! Please do not try to foist your own views on me under the pretext of “Bible truth” when in truth the Bible actually gives leeway for a broad range or behaviours. Using the Bible to try to manipulate or control people in itself totally misunderstands what God and the Bible are about.

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I’ve just been watching another “text exchange” video on YouTube. Once again, this video showed a man trying to force his views that women should be housewives first and foremost on his career woman wife. (Something else I previously forgot to add about the protagonists of these videos, when I last spoke about them: the “hero” of the story, the one clearly and unmistakably “in the right” has always been female out of all the videos I’ve watched so far. Sometimes the baddie is male, sometimes the baddie is female, sometimes a male baddie pairs up with a female baddie, but so far, the goodie has always been female.) As usual in these accounts, or on those on Reddit “Am I the A**hole?” the man is always totally unreasonable, and expects the wife to somehow manage to have dinner ready for him as soon as he gets home, even if, as in this case, she is technically still at work (not working from home, mind, but still at work in her office a good long drive a away). There is never any nuance in these characters. The “baddie” is always overwhelmingly selfish and unreasonable, and the “goodie” always goes utterly above and beyond to make the relationship work before eventually having to walk away.
And this raises the same question I always have about these scenarios: If you knew that this man was like this, then why, lady, did you marry him in the first place? I think this suggests the answer that the woman did not know. OK, on one hand these “text exchange” stories are apparently made up and deliberately written to be as outrageous as possible. So we cannot look to them for reliable lessons about the real way people behave. But the AITA stories are supposedly real. Undoubtedly, some or perhaps most of these AITA stories are made up too. But even if a small percentage of them are real, there are so many stories like this that that would suggest that this happens to many women. They get married expecting to be equal partners to their husband in terms of work, childcare and housework only to then be met with traditional views and expectations from their husbands, or sometimes their inlaws (inflaws, as my fingers almost just typed!) and sometimes both their husbands and their “inflaws”.

I advocate for getting to know your spouse for two full years at least before considering them romantically. Thinking about all these text exchange videos that I watched and AITA stories that I read, I felt totally justified and more than a little vindicated regarding my “two year rule”. This is exactly what you should be looking out for regarding marriage, to avoid! If you are a woman, someone who is dreaming of a traditional housewife, while you are dreaming of being a career woman. Perhaps the man you are thinking of might not be dreaming of a wife as such, or what his wife might be. Rather, he is looking forward to the time when he no longer has to bother to even try to cook for himself, or he finds it all so challenging to manage all the day to day tasks of household admin by himself. Or if he is often invited to a friend or sibling’s house for dinner, he marvels at the way the household is run with routine and order, where everything just seems to “work”. Even without necessarily articulating it to himself, or realising it, I bet that what that particular man is looking for is a wife to manage his household. I am not trying to suggest that I know someone’s mind better than he himself does. I can’t help thinking though, that this might be the cause of the underlying conflict in many homes regarding the wife’s job: that the husband genuinely does respect career women! He works alongside women in his own job, he unpatronisingly knows that women are smart and immensely capable. So when before marriage you told him that you wanted to keep working, he was genuinely enthusiastic. It is just in practice, after the wedding, that he realises that actually, your career dreams and the fact that they keep you out until 8pm every night do kinda conflict with what he had subconsciously been dreaming of and looking forward to when he got married.

So it is bad enough when these things are discovered after marriage. And yet, what drove me to write this post is this: when these things are known before marriage. [By the way, I am so sure that I have written a post very similar to this before, even possibly with the same title!] A long while ago, a matter of years ago, it occurred to me that one of my own unsubtle challenges in marriage is this: what I am dreaming of in marriage is probably the exact opposite of what many men are dreaming of. Many men are unapologetically thinking of finding a woman to look after them and their household. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I will say it again: There is. Nothing. Wrong. With. That! The important thing though is to make sure that you and your future wife are in agreement, and to make sure of that before you get married. Otherwise, before you know it, you will find yourself the subject of a text exchange video and/or an angry AITA post. (“And I had a blog, for crying out loud, where I made it clear that I was a real feminist and I did not want to be a housewife! He said he loved me so much and he would support me in whatever I wanted to be! And then everything changed after we actually got married!…!”)

One timely proviso I would offer though is this: in our times, it only grows ever more difficult for a single individual to bear the costs of maintaining a household. As I read the Antiwork subreddit quite a bit, (for the uninitiated, a subreddit is, like “Am I the A**hole, a standalone forum on the bigger website of Reddit) by now it is a cliche that in the 1960s, at least in the US, someone could get a minimum wage job straight out of high school, and still comfortably earn enough to support a full family, buy a couple of cars, go on nice holidays, buy a house, or even a few, and still have enough to save for a comfortable retirement, all on that single minimum wage job. Times have changed, and now increasingly both partners in a marriage need to go out to work, and even then the family still often struggles financially. So if you know that your wife has no choice but to work full-time outside the house for money, then that would surely mean that as a husband you just cannot insist in the same way about her maintaining the house and housework to the same standards as if she was working full-time as a housewife. But apparently, crazily, some husbands still do insist on just this…or so AITA would have me believe.

However, I know, I already know, I have always known that being a housewife is the complete opposite of what I am dreaming of a in a marriage. When I am dreaming of marriage, that does not include dreaming of spending my entire life cleaning a house or maintaining order in our lives, even if the house in question happened to be my own house. When I dream of marriage (man, I have definitely written this article before!) I dream of the emotional component, and the intimacy. That is all I dream of. That is all I need. To be honest, to be brutally candid, I cannot accept that “housewife lifestyle” as the price of my marital dreams, that the only way I can achieve emotional fulfillment is if I buy it at the price of becoming a lifelong housewife. Honestly I just don’t think it’s worth it, and I would rather continue to carry myself and my bleeding heart around.

To be clear, if I’m going to be living in a house, then clearly I am going to be cleaning it anyway. What I mean is that I cannot embrace that as the whole essence of my existence. It can only be “by the way”, or incidental, not the “be all and end all”.
Honestly, if I could juggle my schedule to be able to cook for my family, I would love to do that. Actually, being able to cook with my husband is something that I have always dreamt of, as I think it is quite great for emotional bonding together. You know, I don’t talk about children a lot on this blog. That is for this reason: as much as I love children, and I genuinely do, unlike for many women apparently, they are not my end goal regarding marriage. Rather the marriage itself is the end goal. So children are not a mandatory aspect in my dreaming of my marriage. My marital dreams are not dependent on having children. But if God did bless our union with children, then that would definitely skew the balance of how I spend my time. Because children are not like housework, something that can be tucked in “incidentally”. Rather, they rightly demand the greater part of your time and mental effort. That is why I am working so hard now to be in a comfortable financial situation in case we do have children, so that I can afford to stop focusing on work to instead focus primarily on my children. Personally, I cannot bear the thought of handing my children over to external childminders while I am at work, I would rather be bringing my own children up myself. Ironically, on the text exchange videos there are some beastly husbands who approach things from the opposite perspective, and criticise their stay at home wives for “not contributing” to the household. One husband apparently, implausibly, threw his wife and their newborn daughter out of the house only three weeks or so after the baby was born, accusing his wife of being “lazy”. This is obviously as unreasonable as when men are annoyed with career wives. Surely in real life no-one would do that…surely?!

So this is what I mean about marrying “at cross purposes”. All the things that I am dreaming of are “Emotional intimacy! Passion! Heart-to-hearts! Definitely not being a housewife! Perhaps being a mother, or not, but either way not being defined by it!” whereas Mr. Possible Huggie-Wuggie candidate might well be dreaming of “a housewife! Wow, such an amazing housewife! Piping hot dinner on the table when I get home from work! She can work too, of course, “if she wants”, but first and foremost, she knows her place is to be the manager of our home!”

This is why people really need to be honest with themselves. If you are the kind of man who dreams of hot, delicious meals being ready on the table as you get back from work, then you need to admit that to yourself before you go wifehunting, and then admit that to any woman you might be interested in. I forgot to say above – while I myself don’t dream about this kind of lifestyle, there are women who do dream of it! If you are able to be honest with yourself that that is what you want, who knows, you just might manage to weed out women like myself, and end up with someone who wants this lifestyle and yearns for it as much as you do. Surely this is far better than trying to hide the truth, then ending up with someone as feminist as I am who is more likely to insist that you should be making her dinner (laughing to myself!)

You know what would make me so angry if I ended up with a man who tried to make me his housewife? The fact that I was so open and transparent about who I am before marriage. I know that some women do try and hide it from the other direction, in some sort of bid to marry someone (anyone). However, that is now who I personally am at all. So that is why I am saying it now, shouting it now – how much do you want to bet that even with all this some men are magically not hearing what I am saying. And then after marriage, they will start saying: “But I thought..!” No, I definitely cannot afford for anyone to start thinking about who I am and what I want and how it compares to what he wants me only after he has married me. If anyone is going to be doing any thinking about me, then please let it be before marriage. This is another reason why I need to “two year” someone, to see whether he is the kind of person who actually listens, and has actually heard what I am saying, before I go ahead and marry him.

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Still living in a man’s world?
This is actually a different post, but I was also thinking about it earlier, and I just want to quickly put down these thoughts before I forget them. This is a continuation of a post I was writing here a few days previously:
Many men are romantically speaking still living in a world where they as men have all the power romantically – or they apparently think that they are still living in that world.
I was just thinking of the way a few men I have come across behaved. There was a post I was reading yesterday on Medium. And the man writing it was saying that this is what single women should do. On one hand, he acknowledged that many men have experienced lots of rejection, suggesting that in those cases of rejection women held the power, then he later on stated that “men don’t like women who are strong and independent”. This was a post that I did not bother to comment on. However, I was thinking that if women are empowered, then they don’t need to care in the same way about what men might want or not want, as we as women did historically have to care, because marriage was more of a historical necessity. Some men seem to act as if we are still living in those days, and as if we as women are still constrained by those same economic necessities.

I was also reflecting on a personal experience, with a man I was romantically checking out. This man acted so arrogantly, my goodness he was bad. And I was reflecting on it, not for the first time, that he apparently thought he still lived in that world where men held all the power, and consequently can apparently treat women however they wish, because we as women would have no choice but to sit there and take it. (And I in particular was so eager or desperate to win him that I would doubly take it.) Casting my mind back, this opinion, that he did think that, was reinforced by a time when he seemed to bend over backwards to express his approval of a way I did something, as if he expected that approval to be somehow definitive in my life, as if from henceforth I would feel authorised to carry on doing that thing. And I thought to myself: “So?!” As in: “Why do you imagine that I need your approval to make my life choices?!” It might seem a little harsh to say that about someone after he was my husband. But this man was not my husband. He was just a man who all the same thought that his approval would make a qualitative difference to my life. And then there were a number of things that this man did, which were so arrogant that it was literally as if he thought that relative to me he held all the power, and I would have no choice but to sit there and take it. You know how people sometimes look at you and jump to conclusions about you? Well I often give people that same impression that I gave him, that I am so weak and helpless, so it would not be surprising if he behaved in that crazy way only with me.
In the end, what did I do? Ultimately I simply walked away.
You know what? Even jf I had been living in that world of relatively powerful men and relatively powerless women, I would never have sat there and taken someone treating me poorly just because he was a man and he thought he could get away with it. So how much less now?!