Marriage--The Great Negotiation

Marriage is a negotiation that rivals deals made at U.N. In some unions the jobs are generally divided along traditional gender lines. My parents marriage was one such example for many years. Dad’s domain was work and the garage, mom was in charge of the rest of the house and anything that fell under that particular umbrella. She handled all the housework and cleaning, cooking and dishes, diapers and bedtime stories. Dad made sure the oil got changed in the car and the lawn was mowed. He went so far as to proudly proclaim that he had never changed a diaper (a condition remedied when he babysat the grandchildren.) This all changed when I was in High School. Women were renegotiating almost everything in life. More women were working outside the home, and their daughters were prolonging marriage. It was a natural transition for me. Although I knew that my dad didn’t cook, clean or do dishes, I also knew that my future husband was going to be more hands-on when it came to family duties. All my friends felt the same way—and we didn’t feel that we were being rebellious at all—it was just the new expectation.


My father’s world changed one day when we were on vacation and my dad said to my mom, “Honey, I’m thirsty. Can you get me a Pepsi?” My mom didn’t miss a beat, “Why? Are your legs painted on?” This response was so completely out of character for my mother that I stopped dead in my tracks and stared. My dad was equally as stunned. My mother continued to slowly turn the pages of her magazine as if nothing was different—but it was very different. You’ll have to ask my mom what made her snap and what the ensuing years were like for her. For me it was like watching a slow car crash. My mom would want my dad to change and my dad would dig in his heels, but neither wanted to give any ground. I watched my mom blossom and take on more leadership roles outside of our home while my dad seemed to silently stew in his recliner while watching golf on television. I’m sure it was hard on both of them.

My marriage is still in negotiation although I still think my mom’s was more difficult. I married a man who knew how to clean a toilet and didn’t assume that it was my job to do it all the time. We split housework pretty evenly since both of us hate to do it but we both need to live in a fairly clean space, and now we have capable children who are forced to contribute in the form of clean bathrooms and vacuumed floors. But a more equal gender-neutral marriage isn’t all sunshine and roses either. There are jobs that neither one of us like to do (organizing comes to mind), and since it doesn’t naturally fall into either of our wheelhouses, mainly because we’ve built our wheelhouses from the ground up rather than from tradition, then those jobs get pushed (sometimes literally) into the closet where they can marinate for decades.

Then there’s the money dilemma. You’d think two incomes would make it easier, but we argue about the same things that my parents argued about when it came to money—mainly what are we going to purchase with it—except now we can pout and pull the “it’s my money and I’ll do what I want with it.” This approach rarely works, of course, unless you’re willing to sacrifice your retirement savings so that you can have the new kitchen AND he can buy the big screen. Generally we act more like adults than children (thank heaven) but our five-year-old personas have been known to throw a couple of raspberries at each other from time to time.

I have friends who even negotiate when it comes to sex. I’m not really going to touch that topic except to say that when sex becomes a weapon or currency it’s no longer fun. Sex that isn’t fun translates into bad sex. Bad sex ruins marriages—enough said.

Maybe all of life is a negotiation but marriage is definitely the trickiest. When I yell at my drycleaner and demand a refund, I’m not emotionally invested and I’m more than willing to move on to the cleaner down the street. But when it comes to my marriage I’m not willing to blow it to bits over the day to day bumps. I have to walk tenderly because I want my husband to be tender with me. After all, a clean bathroom is nice, but at the end of the day I can live with a dirty sink—I can’t live without the pillow talk that makes me remember that this marriage wasn’t a business deal, it was a sweet deal and I intend to keep it that way.