A Friend Stopped By | 10/20/2009 3:00 am
The Truth About Marriage, by Carin Rubenstein
The author of a controversial new book explains why egalitarian partnerships are the exception, not the rule
Carin Rubenstein
Editor’s Note: Carin Rubenstein is the author of The Superior Wife Syndrome, just published by Touchstone. She holds a PhD in social psychology from New York University.
A few years ago, I received a metaphorical wake-up call from Marriage Problem Central, informing me that my state of matrimony was out of
whack.
That pivotal midlife moment came when my husband and I were visiting our extended family in Washington, D.C., to celebrate our daughter’s college graduation. We don’t live nearby, so I’d ordered a cake ahead of time, from a bakery located a mile or so from our hotel. The day of the celebration, I asked my husband of several decades if he’d mind getting in the car to pick up the cake, which I’d paid for in advance.
| Doing less is the male default position, while the female default setting is to do more and more until we do nearly everything. |
He was adamant in his sincere — and definitive — refusal. "I don’t want to have to think," is what he said, as if that were not part of our connubial arrangement. And it’s not, actually.
See, thinking is what I do; that’s my job in our marriage. Going along to get along is what he does. I’m in the driver’s seat, he’s along for the ride, sitting shotgun while he stares out the window or fiddles with the radio.
Works for him.
The question is: What’s it doing for me? Answer: Not one damn thing.
In the years since that weekend, I’ve discovered that there are millions of wives who share my fate. After studying the matter — I’m a social psychologist and survey researcher — I have come to realize that my situation was predicated on being a superior wife: I’m the one in the marriage whose job it is to do all of the heavy thinking.
Let’s backtrack for a moment. As newlyweds, many of us expect to enter a true partnership when we marry, just as I did. But over time, and especially after having children, these egalitarian arrangements are often transformed into an unrecognizably lopsided state of affairs. Wives end up doing almost everything, including bringing home the bacon; husbands wait for it to fry up in the pan.
It took me much too long to realize that this is what had happened in my own marriage, mostly because it happened so slowly and so naturally, as if it were inevitable. But soon after that weekend in Washington, I realized that I was wedded to a hair-losing, chore- and responsibility-evading extra child.
I had become my husband’s keeper.
This is, as it turns out, the marital dilemma of the moment. My conjugal imbalance is part of a much larger, more widespread problem. Like me, many wives have become the superior members of their union, because they have no choice in the matter. Men do less because they can, because their wives let them slide. Doing less is the male default position, while the female default setting is to do more and more until we do nearly everything.
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57 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment
You & Mr. Hicks get the prize for the day.
Reading this article I got the impression she was one of these women who has to have things a certain way or it’s not "right" and she’s either chosen a man who would let her do it all her way or she’s trained him to let her do it all her way and now she’s stuck w/ someone who is not a true partner who is willing to sit back while she does all the work.
kind of like the woman who wants to take complete control in her relationship so she marries a mommy’s boy who needs someone to look after him and tell him what to do and when to do it and then when a major crisis happens, as life so often will throw at us, she doesn’t have a partner she can lean on and depend on. instead she has a child who panics and collapses under the pressure while everything else is falling apart around her.
I’m not impressed w/ her article and I see a woman who chose poorly in selecting her life partner—not some insidious cultural trend. while I do know several marriages and relationships that fit this description, every last one of them are go getter, type A personality females who married lazy men.
If you’re in a relationship with another person, and you’re doing all the work, it’s because you have CHOSEN to. There are other options, including telling the other person, "Pitch in or get the fuck out."
If you’re going to be doing all the work anyway, there’s less of it to be done when you’re alone.
A good partner is such a bleesing, is s/he not? My ex claimed he couldn’t sweep, mop, or vaccuum the floors, or run a brush through the toilet bowl because he had a bad back, but did nothing to minimize the amount of cleaning he expected me to keep up with while I was working a full-time job and he was retired. Paying someone else to do the cleaning wasn’t in the budget. I felt that the least he could do was pick up his cluuter and put it away when he left a room, but he wouldn’t even do that. I picked up dirty dishes off the coffee table, newspapers off the floor, etc. The only chore he did was washing and drying clothes, but he wouldn’t put them away, so I would have to clear all the clean laundry off the sofa before I could even sit down. It was ridiculous, and it didn’t take long before I had enough of it.
After I left him, like you, I actually had MORE time for my child because I wasn’t having to deal with HIS messes.
The man I am now married to understands that the floors need to be cleaned by everyone in the household who walks on them, meals need to be cooked and dishes washed by everyone in the household who eats, and toilets and tubs need to be scrubbed by everyone in the household who shits and showers. We both have jobs that bring in income, we both do housework, and we both do yardwork. That gives us more time to enjoy each other.
Yes I feel pretty cool with it now partly due to our role reversal. I have a great husband who since losing his job last year is (slowly) evolving into a 21st Century Man. Not quite a house-husband, he will cook and clean on his schedule. I’m not critical and if I want something done sooner than later, I do it and he’s not offended. I must admit it’s a strange arrangement lol! But I found that the key is to refrain from my natural tendency to nag. When I ask him to do a specific task, I ask, not order. If he bristles, then I use my excellent negociation skills.
I’ll admit that I believe that I do more in terms of the work, home, relationship balance. But I won’t complain because I have a committed partner. I’m thankful that don’t have to carry the entire weight myself.
I am happily in an so-called ‘rare’ nonsuperior-wife marriage.
I must agree with Mike Hickes not-so-eloquent reply that "this is a load of crap." I took the survey and it’s written with a bias slant where most perfectly balanced marriages will suddenly look to be a "Superior Wife" marriage. I hope that nobody takes this so-called survey as being indicative of an imperical scientific proof they are in an unbalanced marriage.
If the author was merely revealing her own situation as being ‘similar in many marriages’, then she wouldn’t be making generalized statements like
This is not empirical nor scientific, and is based upon an assumption purely from a significantly biased ‘survey’. Prior to submitting my comment, I read the website attached to the ‘test’ that the author had posted. (http://www.thesuperiorwifesyndrome.com)
Just because someone "holds a PhD in social psychology from New York University", this does not mean they have scientific basis to publish a book based upon their own experiences and some gathered from pointed questions online. I agree, many women may have married boys, but give better evidence and a wider scientific study for this theory than what I just read above. I find it misleading, poorly researched and inaccurate.
I’m not so sure "Superior Wife" is quite the right phrase to describe this phenomenon. The "Put-Upon Wife" might be more accurate.
I concur with others here that the survey was pretty useless. The questions are not specific enough to be meaningful: efficient at what? Vacuuming? Finances? Maintaining the car? On doing more than one thing at a time - simultaneous multitasking, or managing several projects concurrently? What is intended by the question? And why can’t we both be multitaskers? Why does one of us have to be a lump in this survey?
Interesting, though, to consider Rubenstein’s observations in light of the work of Grameen Bank and other micro-lenders, who found that when they loaned to men in developing countries, the money would be frittered away on personal pleasures, the family would not benefit, and the bank would often not recoup the loan. When they began loaning almost exclusively to women, the women built small businesses, repaid their loans, and used their profits to provide for their families; they improved their homes, educated their children, fed the whole family a better diet, etc. And an indirect benefit was that the men respected their wives more and abused them less, when they saw the benefits their wives were providing. Food for thought.