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.
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.
A majority of husbands, like mine, get by with doing a minimal amount of housework and childcare and family management. Despite a widespread American preference for egalitarian marriage, it is, in reality, an exception to the rule. In many marriages, wives do more, worry more, care more, work more.
I’m talking about the natural superiority of wives.
Before you start frothing at the mouth with outrage, please think about this for a moment. When confronted with domestic chores that need to be done, with family money that needs to be managed, with children who need to be reared, wives are quite often (though not always) the ones who are more efficient, more organized, more able to decide, more capable of multitasking, more empathic, more supportive, more self-sacrificing. I’m not saying that this is a good thing — in fact, I’m saying that it can harm marriage in a myriad of ways — but I am saying that it happens in the majority of marriages today.
In my new book, The Superior Wife Syndrome, I provide a great deal of evidence to support this conclusion, much of it from a Web survey of
about 1,500 wives and husbands that I designed and analyzed. None of the spouses I interviewed, by the way, were aware of my theory nor did I use the word "superior" at all. Nevertheless, I discovered that two in three wives know more, do more, decide more in their marriage, though almost none of them expected this to happen when they were first married.
If this describes your marriage, then you know exactly what I mean. If not, then good for you. Congratulations. Consider yourself lucky to
be among one in three wives who, by design or great good luck, find themselves in a nonsuperior-wife marriage. (If you aren’t sure which
group you fall into, then take my test and find out.)
Still, you don’t have to despair if you’ve got one of those husbands who, like mine, prefer not to have to think. The first step is to acknowledge that this is what you’ve got, and then to persuade your husband that the situation must come to an end. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, the responsibility for remaking your superior-wife marriage is yet another wifely task that’s primarily your job. Yes, your marriage might be in a pickle because you’re the one who’s the everything expert, and yes, you’re fed up and you want a change. But now, I have the nerve to tell you that you’re the one who also has to undo the mess, because if you don’t, nobody else will.
What can I say? A woman’s work is never done.
More from wOw:
Are We Too Far Gone for Monogamy?
I Was the Other Woman
Is 'The Good Wife' the 'Smart Wife'?
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