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Damn you, Amanda, it’s midnight and I’m tired. But then you had to go and link to this

I don’t buy it that these folks who are dying their hair blue or buying fancy appliances are all that happy about their situation. I’m not saying single people are miserable, I was able to entertain myself quite well in my singleton years. But it’s malarkey to say they’re happier. A society with more and more single people living alone in their individual houses doesn’t sound like it’s going in the right direction. Not much of a future there. Who will take care of them in their old age? What will they pass on and to whom?

Advice: Singles should stop pretending they’re happy and OK with being single, admit that your life would be richer with a mate. Tell yourself that you want a wife or husband, and make that a priority.

First off, I like having my hair blue and if I still like it in two years, then my marriage will not persuade me to stop dying it. And while a good blender, or god willing, a real double boiler will not bring me eternal happiness, I do routinely derive satisfaction from using them. So fuck off.

Secondly, like Oh, mygod! I just finished a book dealing with just this topic! Susan Maushart, a twice-divorced social scientist, wrote a book in 2001 called Wifework: What Marriage Really Means to Women. And while she says a few things that Miss Modesty here would quote with glee, the major thrust of the book is that marriage is generally a raw deal for women, who are wise to be picky about who they marry and why, if they marry at all.

The first thing she did in the book was treat every marriage as three separate marriages: His Marriage, Her Marriage, and the Kid’s Marriage. Then she divided the tasks that women are expected to do, into housework, childcare and what she called “wifework.” Wifework was defined as the emotional work a woman does to maintain relationships. Work like stroking her husband’s ego, remembering birthdays of his relatives so he doesn’t have to, having sex when he wants to, serving the food he wants to, etc. She concludes that even men who think they agree to equality in their marriage feel entitled to a high level of emotional maitenence from their wives. The result is that marriage is good for kids (stability and all) and great for men, but awful for most women. Maushart feels that because marriage is generally better for kids the institution is worth saving, but it will not survive unless men examine this sense of entitlement and work to make marriage more equitable for women. It is, as Amanda would say, a harsh cost-benefit analysis of marriage.

(She doesn’t really touch the topic of homosexuality at all in this book. So when she says that being married is superior for kids than merely cohabitating in a committed relationship, I can only assume that she is talking only about couples who have the option of getting married. This book is hyper-focused on the straight nuclear family. She’s also not concerned with the health of childless marriages, seeing them as a private contract between two adults, the success or failure of which has less effect on society than a marriage in which children are being raised. Questionable? You decide.)

In the past, when gender roles were clear and women had few options outside of marriage, this sense of entitlement could go unexamined. Women needed men to provide for their children, hence the wifework was worth the effort.

But now, when most women have options other than marriage, the entitlement of their husbands – which the husbands don’t even acknowledge – is becoming an issue. Women who work outside the home and come home for a second shift of housework often begin to resent men who act like an extra child. She points to the fact that the vast majority of divorces are initiated by women, and that the men they leave are generally shocked-they weren’t even aware there was a problem because up until the point where the woman stopped making the relationship work, everything seemed fine.

The thing that struck me about this book is how perfectly it described my last relationship:

-Eating the food he liked, when he liked to eat it, check.
-Having the sex he liked, as often as he (not I) chose, check.
-Having to constantly self-censor to avoid hurting his feelings, check
-Being expected to be amazed and excited about every idea he ever shared with me, check
-Giving him the final say in most decisions because he made more/paid for/said so, check
-Watching what he wanted to watch even when it sucked, check.
-Not ever making him watch what I wanted to watch, especially when it sucked, check.
-Pretending it didn’t hurt when he made fun of my extra pounds, check
-Making excuses to myself when he didn’t have time/money to come to the gym with me like he promised but could make time for expensive weekend conventions with his friends, check.
-Pretending it didn’t bother me when he’d stick his feet in my lap and go “rub my feeeet!” even when he did it in front of other people or if I had a plate of food in my lap, check

Was he entirely a bad guy? Of course not. He was very nice (a perfect Nice Guy, if you will), creative, sympathetic, courteous, successful. He was perfectly unaware these things bothered me because I never mentioned it. And the reason I never mentioned it is because whenever I timidly tried to assert my desires, there was pouting or resentment and guilt. But stifiling these misgivings was alot of work. Unpaid, unappreciated work far more tiring than cleaning the bathroom or washing the dishes after work. And my resentment of him simmered, and then boiled, and then finally reached a flashpoint. The fact that he was unaware of the demands he was placing on me made them that much more infuriating. Eventually, the dread I began to feel when it came time to entertain and serve him for another weekend outwieghed the happiness I felt when things were going well between us. And when I broke up with him, he was shocked. He thought everything was perfect-and for him, it was. He said it was my fault things got so bad because I didn’t communicate, but was it my fault that he only heard what he wanted to hear?

If I had stayed with him long enough for him to propose (which he claimed he had been planning to do) would I have married him despite these misgivings? Probably. Hey, engagment rings are supposed to do that to a girl. And would it have ended in divorce? You betcha!

So I got another guy who was less work. One who, in the absolute worst case scenario, will at least wait until after the wedding to start treating me like a majordomo.

I guess I wasn’t alone, judging from the book, plenty of women married men who turned out to be not worth the effort. Putting it bluntly, marriage offered the men more than it did to women, and at the first opportunity, women started leaving in droves. Maushart argues that if men can’t think of a way to make marriage a better deal for women (and this will probably involve *gasp* giving up the entitlements, but they’ll also probably be happier in the end if they do so) then women with children will find another method to find support for raising them, and men will be left out in the cold with no one folding their underwear or fixing their beef stroganoff just the way they like it. Maushart would also prefer we all get on this stat, since she believes that marriage as workable institution can be saved and that doing so would be worthwhile for children.