Reinventing History: This Is Not Your Parents' Marriage
The social and economic changes reshaping the institution of marriage have entered American society gradually but steadily since the mid-1970s. That means a great many of those marrying in the last two decades grew up in households where male and female roles were undergoing a rocky transition. Many experienced divorce as children, with no models of a successful marriage between equals to draw on for their own adult lives.
With today's new normal of equal marriage translating into multiple breadwinners paying the bills, and divvying up housework and childcare on an ad hoc basis, there's a great deal of confusion out there about how to handle it all. How long should a new mother (or father) stay home with a newborn child? How much “help” with household or parenting should be expected of the spouse who works outside the home? Who makes sure the bills are paid on time? Who decorates the house? How are buying decisions made? For better or worse, there are no fixed answers to any of these questions. So, if you're feeling overwhelmed and unsure of how to share power in your marriage, first take a breath — you're not alone.
Second, it's important to honor the emotional support you give each other no matter how well or not so well power sharing is going in your marriage. Know that power sharing will be a process of negotiation that will last as long as your marriage.
Your emotional support is the foundation for the discussions and negotiations that will be necessary in order to reach agreement about how to share power as you structure your day-to-day lives together. When you have this unbreakable emotional bond, each of you knows that no matter how difficult your disagreements may be, both of you are committed to seeing the process through.
Question
What is emotional support?
It is the love bond (a commitment) that exists between two people who want to join their separateness into one. It is the ability to communicate feelings. It is the quality of deep friendship that must exist in a marriage if it is to survive the challenges facing every couple.
No Operating Instructions
Where do you look for models of equal power sharing in marriage? No other formal relationship in our lives operates with this ideal of equality. Between parents and children, parents have the legal and moral authority and responsibility. In most workplaces, there is an established form of authority. One person is the boss, accountable to people superior to him; if he is the CEO, he's accountable to a board of directors. Marriage, however, is not a business contract. If it were, the relationship would be reduced to exchanging services with fines paid for breaking the agreement.
America's original marriage laws were based on English common law and later legal statutes, which only gave men legal standing. With this legal standing came the right to control all marital property, including his wife's wages and inheritance, with or without her consent. He even had the right to control her body and the children.
It took nearly two thousand years for Western culture to grant women equal rights in property and marriage (England began changing its laws in the 1850s; by 1900, the United States had followed suit). While fundamentalist religions may continue to uphold a traditional patriarchal view of marriage, these communities are still subject to modern society's laws and customs.
Beware the “Old Rules”
While this history of marriage may seem archaic, even irrelevant to today's couples, what is often not well understood is how vestiges of these cultural traditions can leak into modern minds, or at least the unconscious parts of those minds, muddying the waters for couples attempting to split up rights and responsibilities equally in a marriage.
The man who stays home with the kids while his wife works — whether this joint decision came about voluntarily or because of a lost job — may find he has to fight feelings of shame over not being a “proper” provider for his family. Or the woman who juggles kids and a job and feels inadequate in each role must fight her unconscious belief that she should be strictly a mother and wife and not forge an independent work life.
In today's equal marriages, spouses share the belief that they will make their own joint agreements about power sharing, including all decisions affecting money, sex, property, and children. However, they're given little guidance on how to go about it, and can find themselves battling outmoded beliefs they may not even realize affect them. Do not make the mistake of underestimating the complexity involved in this process, or the need for flexibility as conditions in your marriage change over time.
Alert
What you don't believe can still hurt you. Outmoded beliefs — for instance, the notion that a man who stays home to care for children while his wife works is being unmanly — can undermine your relationship and disrupt the agreements you've made with each other, especially during stressful times.
Examples of unforeseen life changes that can bring major consequences for marital agreements are when one of you loses a job and opts to return to college for retraining, or when a child or elderly family member needs intensive caretaking. Your operating agreements will require creativity, diligence, and regular monitoring. The process of reaching and maintaining them will test the depths and strength of your emotional bond. Frankly, if power sharing were easy, there would not be a 50 percent divorce rate.
