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 (pictured above). 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.”
When some women become mothers later in life their standards of parenting go
up, so they devote even more time to it, often to the detriment of their
relationship, she says. “It is great to put lots of energy into it, but
often you are taking on an unnecessary role. Once your relationship as a
couple starts to disintegrate, it has an immediate impact on your children.
But a happy couple makes a happy family. It isn’t all about ferrying Johnny
to flute lessons; it is about enjoying a night out on your own occasionally
— that’s better for him than being driven to activities.”
So what now constitutes a good wife? Sampson believes it is the way we handle
“equality” in the relationship. “We all think that we have moved on from
those 1950s roles — until we have a child. People get married with a
fantastic view of equality, but don’t think through how that will work in
practice. Once you have a baby, you expect it to be the same, but it’s not.
Point-scoring isn’t going to work.”
A recent survey of 5,000 people found that a lack of sex and the stress of
parenting were among the top reasons cited for arguing within a marriage.
Especially the former. A website for men, www.nomarriage.com, illustrates
this problem with almost comical misogyny. “My wife is a frigid, shrivelled
bitch,” writes one contributor. “Before we were married, we had plenty of
sex, but as soon as we passed the six-month mark after our wedding she
stopped being interested. My wife only f***s when she ‘feels sexy’.
Translation: when I give her jewellery. She is just a withered old bag at
the age of 35.” Here’s another: “[Before we got married] sex then was four
to five times a week. Now I have a four-year-old son who sleeps in my bed
with my wife more nights a week than I do. Sex now maybe once a month.”
Borderline demented as some of these comments are (the website has published
a book that contains a guide to whether a woman will make a good wife, more
of which later), it seems to be a fact that sex within marriage is
suffering. Studies have indicated that when men aren’t touched
affectionately they become more aggressive, and increasingly don’t want any
contact that isn’t sex. At the same time women are encouraged to seek more
independence and not be tied to the home, yet there is a heavy modern
expectation on a man to be a “good husband”.
Laura Schlessinger’s book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands
, suggests that in the age of feminism we have paid too much attention to
women’s needs and forgotten that men have them, too. We have also developed
a notion that a woman who seeks to meet her husband’s needs is subservient,
but a husband who fails to meet his wife’s is a pig. “Most of the women who
complain that they are not getting what they want from their husbands should
stop and look at how disrespectful and disdainful they are of them,” writes
Schlessinger.
Anita Jackson, a psychotherapist and the author of Rekindle the Magic in
Your Relationship! (rekindlethemagic.com), says: “One problem with
equality — which I approve of, by the way — is that we have moved away from
the man being the man and the woman the woman, except in terms of the women
having the baby and making more of an emotional transfer. There is still
something about being in relationships with a man/woman role, so the man is
in charge but not controlling and the woman may have her bag full of stuff,
be forgetful and change her mind. Because this is how we are and it
is what we do.”
So what makes a good spouse? Letting natural roles emerge and not fighting
them? “In a way, yes,” says Jackson. “We are being asked to be perfect
parents. We can’t be perfect individuals, let alone perfect parents or
perfect spouses. If we strive for perfection, we lay ourselves open to
failure. If we try to be the best we can be, that’s enough.”
Some take a rather more extreme view. An e-book published by the
nomarriage.com website, written by a man, defines a good wife as one who
wasn’t brought up with Western values. “Pick a woman to marry who will be a
GOOD WIFE and KNOWS HOW to be a happy, successful wife, and KNOWS HOW to
help you be a better husband,” it says. “Pick a woman from a culture that
encourages this. In other words, DON’T marry an American/Western woman. They
are much, much harder to be married to, simply because they have been
trained to NOT make any effort to be good wives. They have been trained to
focus exclusively on their own needs, and to completely ignore yours. They
have been trained in a thousand techniques for making it all ‘your fault’.
Not fun. Being married is damned near impossible anyway. No need to make it
harder.”
Hysterical though this viewpoint is, might we be making things harder than
they need to be? Denise Knowles, a Relate counsellor, says she has to hammer
home to couples the fact that making time for each other is a neccessity,
not an act of selfishness. “There is a misconception that to be good parents
the couple has to be sacrificed,” she says. “I often find myself asking
people, ‘What happened to the couple here?’ Everything seems to be pivoted
around the children and work.” So what is her view of a good wife? “One who
can offer support when needed, but can also receive support and ask for it.”
Margaret Ramage, a sexual and relationship psychotherapist, believes that we
can sometimes become too hung up on the concept of “serving”. “I don’t see
that serving each other is neccessarily a bad thing. It is an act of love,”
she says. “As long as it feels equal, so what? If you are subservient on a
Tuesday and he is subservient on a Thursday, what does it matter? We are so
busy standing on our rights sometimes that we forget important things. Doing
the ironing is an act of love, as is putting out the compost.”
She adds that in striving to be good parents, we forget that the best parents
are often those who are genuinely happy together. “To raise children with
love, there has to be a strong bond of love between parents,” she says. “It
is that love between the parents that sustains them. If it isn’t there, the
child misses something. If people neglect the nurturing they need to give as
adults, their parenting will break down in the end.”
