Happily Ever After?

We were at the bookstore today and I came across 'I'd Trade My Husband for a Housekeeper' a 'keeping your marriage together after babies' kind of book.

***me lets out of a big pocket of breath***

And egad, did it speak to me. In fact, it reached out, stroked me & gave me a fracking orgasm.

I can't tell you how afraid I have been to say that my marriage is not a 'happily ever after', not because it isn't working out but because my expectation of 'happily ever after' really has been so insanely high that the poor boy never did stand a chance.

• The book talks about women thinking of marriage (and I paraphrase here) as the comparatively easy part (And I am so guilty of this - the hard part was finding the boy, getting the parents to agree, planning the beautiful wedding - so definitely the marriage should be easier). Whereas men see marriage as a sort of 'giving up of things' - which though it sounds terribly unromantic, makes them better prepared to face up to the work that a marriage is.

• It also talks about the shift in gender roles that has left men and women confused and confrontational about what they should / should not be doing within the house & without. Like, there is no more a road map for this generation to look to as to what their roles should be like. We are constantly redefining ourselves & striving towards equality in our marriage.
  

• One of the best quotes in the book is from a 10 year veteran of marriage, & it goes:
  

"My poor husband has cereal three nights a week. I feel awful about that - I know I should be doing more! I have this anger about having to do it...I know that it's expected, so I rebel and don't do it and then feel guilty for not doing it"

Oh unknown Sara from Becks County, USA - you made me cry!!!

I don't mind feeding the husband
I don't mind cooking for the husband
I don't mind making his meals
It is so traditional and so what my mom used to do that I am having a hard time even writing the fact.
I like cooking but I hate being expected to do it.
I hate being looked at as a wife because, much as I love my liberated-in-comparison-to-the-rest-of-the-family father, there were so many things I heartily disliked about what my dad expected my mom to do that I vowed that when I got married things would be different.

And though our relationship is vastly different, yet I yearn for perfect equilibrium.

• The book speaks of how "in this pro-feminist era....with more choices & opportunities...we expect to be happier than our mothers".

How very true! I thought that since I had grown up in much more unrestrained world than my mother, I expected to be much more in control & to be in a more perfect relationship (which in my mind, equates to happiness).

And while I am, yet there seemed to be a constant need to do more, to experience more photograph worthy moments, to have more, to be yet more closer.

It's almost like I was trying to judge my own marriage/relationship from what it looked like from outside & found it lacking perfection.

'We are supposed to be romantic'
'We are supposed to be out and about'
'Our wedding anniversary has to be superlative. Superlative I tell you!'
'We need to be having more sex and being more adventurous'

Old news but it took seeing it in print for me to realise I was struggling not with the boy's expectations but with my own.

I am happy. Not excited in a Harlequin romance sort of way. He doesn't make my heart flutter all the time like he used to when we first started dating, we don't rip off each other's clothes all over the house as much as we used to, sometimes we are out and we have really boring conversations.

Is that normal?
Are we normal to be like this after 7.5 years of being together?

And today, the boy & I were discussing it and he was like - you think we don't talk enough???
Ugh.
Don't you even remember who I was when we first started going out?

And gawd, yes I do - that reticent gangly man with a cute behind who grunted his way through a conversation.

And we have come so far!

And yet, I want more. NOW!

I know that the boy is a far far cry from any of the male role models in our combined families.

But he is not yet the Renaissance man.

An example:
You think you know everything about a person and then he comes out with - 'no, I won't be comfortable with our child being gay'.
And it boggled me.
Because he has gay friends. And I have gay friends. And we have mutual gay friends.

And to confront the fact that we have such fundamental differences as above perplexed me.
Because hadn't we known each other forever?

Where does that leave me?
His nonacceptance of a potentially gay child?
Why is it easy for him to accept gay strangers and not a gay flesh and blood?

Side note:
He would not budge even in the face of disapproval from friends. I suppose it is good that he's stating his opinions and not pretending to be one person online and another offline who goes 'Oh no, I couldn't possibly move in with that person, because he/she is gay/divorced/single mother'.

Another instance, he still maintains that the appropriation of Palestinian land by Israelis is justified.
How is it that we can love each other and yet have such vastly different view points?

It's been a struggle for me to get away from the fact that two did not become one after our marriage. We are still two different entities, with unique personalities and differences, living in love. And to accept that that is fine too, in fact it may just well be fantastic - our differences creating a more interesting household.

The relief has also come from the fact that with the boy, there is no pressure to be similar.
From him, there is always acceptance of differing view points & even a matter-of-factdnessabout it.
He accepts my attitude and I am learning (v.slowly) to accept his conservatism.

And live with the fact that perhaps we may see eye to eye in the future or we may not.

It seems like such obvious fact but I am constantly surprised that our relationship is still a work in progress.