Boundless Webzine, the hip, youthful side of Focus on the Family, has tips for the young’uns on how to have a successful marriage:
In an effort to draw on the experiences of those who have lived together successfully as husbands and wives, we asked married couples to participate in an informal study. More than 600 people agreed to speak candidly to the younger generation about the concepts and methods that have worked in their homes.
They give three pieces of advice, two of which I will dismiss as boring: I personally feel a Christ-centered home is optional, but I’ll give them the assertion that commitment is important to committed relationships. It’s OK to marry someone with the goal of remaining married until you die, as long as you realize that it ain’t the end of the world if that rather ambitious plan doesn’t pan out.
It’s the third tip that I have a little problem with. You see, it’s a Focus on the Family subsidiary, so of course it has to reinforce tired gender stereotypes:
First, it must be understood that males and females differ in a way not often mentioned.
And of course there’s a little bit of science there you can sometimes back that claim up with, as long as you’re willing to ignore the teensy, tiny little detail that when it comes to variations in innate ability between the sexes, variations between individuals of the same gender are always more dramatic than the averaged-out, usually microscopic to the point of statistically irrelevant differences between genders:
Research makes it clear that little girls are blessed with greater linguistic ability than little boys, and it remains a lifelong talent.
However, if you’re going to pick a Men/Mars-Women/Venus narrative, at least pick one that wasn’t recently, publicly, and thoroughly demolished:
As an adult, she typically expresses her feelings and thoughts far better than her husband and is often irritated by his reticence. God may have given her 50,000 words per day and her husband only 25,000. He comes home with 24,975 used up and merely grunts his way through the evening. He may descend into “Monday Night Football” while his wife is dying to expend her remaining 25,000 words.
Both sexes say the same amount of words — about 16,000 per day — a new study shows.
The study, published in today’s issue of the journal Science, included nearly 400 undergraduate students — 210 women and 186 men.
Where could this stereotype have come from?
Yet women do tend to talk more than men. Every knowledgeable marriage counselor knows that the inability or unwillingness of husbands to reveal their feelings to their wives is one of the common complaints of women.
Prolly has nothing to do with wife work, so certainly you female Boundless readers shouldn’t go to your library and pick up a copy of Wifework, by Susan Maushart. Certainly women in a Boundless-approved marriage wouldn’t be stuck at home with the kids all day and dying to talk to an adult when her husband got home. There is absolutely no way that is where this stereotype comes from. Instead, it’s just a God-ordained irreconcilable difference that you’ll just have to live with, because God, in his infinite wisdom, basically wants you to be vaguely unhappy but not exactly miserable because this is the system that allows him to bestow book royalties on his servant, James C Dobson, Ph.D., author of What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.
First, it must be understood that males and females differ in a way not often mentioned.
Because if grown adults walk around saying, “Boys have penises, girls have vaginas,” they are assumed to be morons who liked that stupid movie a little too much.