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
