Being a perfect parent is now deemed more important than being a good spouse. Our correspondent tries to define what makes the ideal partner
The millionaire founder of Kwik-Fit, Sir Tom Farmer, was recently asked to give his best piece of advice for becoming a business success. His answer was simple: find a good wife. “I know it sounds romanticised but it’s true,” he said. “The most important person in my life has been my wife.”
Undoubtedly, many people will find this sentiment romantic. A good many more might be confused. What exactly does a good wife mean these days? Is it someone who stays at home to raise the children, or who shares the financial burden by going out to work? A high-earning glass-ceiling breaker or a yummy mummy who keeps a well-stocked fridge? In February the Office for National Statistics told us that the number of couples choosing to marry has dropped to its lowest for 111 years, and divorce rates remain high. “Good” wives and husbands are apparently thin on the ground. The Good Wife’s Guide, published by Housekeeping Monthly in the 1950s, advised women to put a ribbon in their hair as they served their husbands’ evening meal — a suggestion that most modern women would deem to be insulting — while a 1958 edition of Housewife magazine invited them to take part in a “How good a wife are you?” quiz. Yet the guide at least set out exactly what was expected of wives. As the author Marilyn Yalom says in her book A History of the Wife: “To be a wife today, when there are few prescriptions or proscriptions, is a truly creative endeavour.”
Some experts believe that as modern life becomes more demanding, what defines a good partner has not only become obscured but has been pushed down the pecking order. So much emphasis is now placed on being a Good Parent that being a Good Spouse comes a poor third after a) the children and b) the job. Marital conversation is reduced to “Have you got the juice?” “Yes, have you got the wipes?” The advice given by her mother to Jerry Hall that to keep a man a woman must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom seems ever more quaint now that housework is increasingly outsourced, food is fast and marriages become increasingly sexless (witness the emergence of books for the sexless marriage with titles such as Okay, So I Don’t Have a Headache, I’m Not in the Mood and For Women Only, which lists techniques that wives use to avoid sex). Has the race to raise the brightest child, get him/ her into the best school, ferry him/her around to the highest number of improving activities actually put marriage under strain?
Val Sampson, an author and a couples counsellor, has launched relightmyfire.org, a website dedicated to helping couples to find their passion again and make each other a priority. She says: “I see a lot of people who have lost sight of fact they are a couple and see each other only as Mum and Dad. Women in particular get a lot of affection energy from a child. They turn to the child for cuddling, touch and sensual needs. They become almost absorbed by the child. It is like a grenade exploding in a marriage.” In search of the good wife by Carol Midgley
Mark Alexander
1 comment:
Rustresistance said:
Without dipping into old territory, may I suggest that things have moved on so far, too far, maybe, that to expect changes to today's attitudes to marriage, and indeed, the nature of the institution itself, is nigh past possibility.
I fear you are right.
Why? Is it not clear now, that though platitudinous politicians and social commentators bleat on about marriage and it's advantages, (not a dig, Mark,) they are unwilling or unable to institute policy changes that can effectively encourage or enforce a re-emergence of the desirability or necessity of marriage.
Agreed. By the way, I didn't take it as a dig. (I assume you are referring to my single status.)
If marriage is a practical alliance of two people with the end result of creating a family, and hopefully some measure of happiness, then why do we not see real proposals that can help this happen?
Why indeed!
Property prices are so high that most children are staying at home until their mid-twenties, the Government does more to promote drinking and gambling than they do marriage, and the established Church is more interested in the rights of gay-vicars than they are of straight newly weds.
The values of the Sixties have had a very deleterious effect on society. Add to those values, the government's unwillingness to support the institution of marriage, and add, further, the downfall in the rôle and importance of the Church to ordinary people's everyday lives, and we have a fine mess!
Meanwhile immigrant families that are at least initially supported by Social Security, with their proclivity towards family life and larger families, finding themselves in a comparatively better environment, take advantage and rapidly have their children, boosting the demand for housing and increasing the demands on the Health and other services.
Did you know that they have just announced today that some banks are offering up to SIX times a person's salary to make it possible for the poorer off to be able to buy into the housing market? Now that must surely be a recipe for disaster.
Previous generations of these families now find themselves with children who live in a world of gang dominated street violence, stabbings, teenage murders and drugs, with all the social consequences of deprived housing.
It's a bleak reality for many, I'm afraid.
I am not suggesting all this is down to African or Asian immigrants, as now membership of the E. U. is bring hundreds of thousands of young Eastern Europeans who are potential new child-bearers.
No, I understand that.
Though some may approve of what I consider to be Hitleresque social engineering on the part of the quasi-Marxian Labour/Liberal governing wolf-pack, I say STOP!
Agreed.
Enough is enough. We are an island, we have limited resources, we have to rely on sea-transport for most of our needs, and as we have seen, our Navy is no longer capable of protecting these resources courtesy of a bungling bunch of Defence Ministry penguins and redundant rear-admirals.
They all seem to be bereft of any ideas as to what to do about the mess they have got us into.
Further expansion of population especially based on alien, and often alienated immigration is a dead end from which we will wish we could escape.
I already do!
It is time to discriminate.
To use the power of discrimination of thought, to decide who is beneficial to our future and who is not.
There's nothing wrong with using our powers of discrimination in a positive way. That's why humans have this ability. People discriminate all the time, for example when shopping. We choose this item instead of that, because we think it is better.
If our population is aging then encourage British families to have children and not rely on the deceit of bringing in external human resources to provide for our future.
Who wants to be in an old peoples home, old, defenseless, white and British, in twenty or thirty years time, when the only staff will be the new generation's of imported youth (it's getting that way already) resentful and desiring the wealth of the older generations.
It's very much like that now. Many old people's homes, and especially the NHS, would collapse without this immigrant labour.
Why is this new trade in imported labour considered more acceptable than the slave trade.
I don't know. You tell me.
To me, it is a deceit, even though it has become the acceptable reality, and it is a good indicator of the trouble the fools of Westminster are conjuring from the depths of their tortured imaginations.
People in power fiddle with stupid laws when they lack the courage or ability to do what they should be doing.
One of the first things we need to do is support the institution of marriage, and encourage our indigenous population to have more children. No society's future can be guaranteed without new born babies.
Post a Comment