Modern Marriage is Weird
Modern marriage is weird. I mean, the idea is we’re partners, right? Ideally, we love each other and work together in an egalitarian manner to manage life, whatever that means to us — take care of a home, raise kids, pay taxes, share a Netflix account.
That’s not how marriage was initially designed, though.
It was conceived of as a way to join families, make alliances, better the family standing and had nothing to do with love. By the 1950s, though, arranged marriage was largely out in the United States but the entrenched gender roles were still in place — the ones that had been there for hundreds of years. (Here’s where I got all the above general info.)
Jason and I, my friends and neighbors, we all have post-feminist* marriages. Everybody contributes to keeping the household running and no one adult person’s opinion is valued over another’s. I know no women who ask their husbands for an allowance and no men who declare themselves the head of the household. But…
We seem to take on stereotypical roles anyway.
Women are the primary caregivers of kids, especially when they are little. They are more likely to work part-time and make less money than their spouses. We still hold on to these vestiges of gender roles that run through our lives like unacknowledged background music. We believe men are just as capable of taking care of children, that women are just as able to bring home the bacon and yet largely, we fall into the grooves of our ancestors.
I feel a pull between the baked-in belief that I need to be there for my children and the feminist idea that homemaking is not enough, is selling myself short. It leads to a lot of angst when I have to decide whether to, say, go to a coveted writing workshop or attend my kids’ school programs.
I see it in Jason’s frustration as he hears an echo of obligation, coming through the generations from our grandparents’ era, to take care of us, his nuclear family. It’s a pull that gives him a comfortable sense of being needed but one he also resents. He wants to be needed, but it also stifles him.
The somewhat instinctual urge to fulfill these antiquated roles is like a cultural appendix;
it doesn’t do anything useful for us, but it gets infected from time to time. (Link to another time I made an analogy about an appendix) It’s the reason I’m the one who feels guilty when the house is dirty, which, let’s face it, is all the time.
Sidebar: Someone recently asked me if I cleaned my own house, and I didn’t know how to answer. I mean, I don’t, but no one else does, either.
Back when men made money or worked the fields or whatever (I don’t know, I’m a city kid) and women changed diapers and did the wash, everyone knew their roles; it had been that way for hundreds of years. What we have now is much less clear. It’s harder to figure out who's responsible for which thing, which may be why we fall back on the generationally familiar.
Partnership is messier, but it’s better — the way democracy is messier but better than autocracy.
We’ve only been doing this marriage-as-partnership thing for about two generations. We don’t have it figured out yet. But we’ll get better at it. In a couple hundred years, we won’t fall into gender stereotypes so easily. Perhaps marriage as we know it is even on its way out. Maybe in the future, people will partner (or group) up to raise kiddos and then naturally drift apart if it suits them, no messy divorce necessary. (Podcast episode about my own messy divorce below)
I’d love to be able to stick around to see what people have done with marriage in 200 years.
— mostly as a fly on the wall or a talking head if someone cryogenically freezes my brain for science. I don’t want to actually have to make life decisions for that long.
Until then, though, the best I can do is this: When I have a choice between Suzie homemaker and Workday Wanda, I divest myself of the “shoulds.” I set aside the noise in my head that tells me a good mom makes dinner or a true feminist would say, “Let them eat cereal.” I look at what’s in front of me, what’s in my gut. What do I want to do? What is the most important for all of us in this moment?
That’s the best I can do right now,
even if I know my decisions are tinged with the gender roles of old. We are making progress. Those roles are much looser than they used to be. And both legally and culturally, we are more accepting of relationships that don’t fall inside the narrow vision of “one man, one woman, cis-het marriages, til death do we part.”
But think about it. Reflect. Where do you see the echo of traditional gender roles in your relationships? How have those historical cultural values affected your life?
*I looked up “post-feminism” to make sure I was using it correctly. It doesn’t mean what I thought it meant, but actually, for it’s controversial nature, seems to apply even more.