The traditional rules and roles of a marriage are set in gold and stone on the day you get married. But in the modern era, what’s to stop you from re-looking at the rules, and putting a little much-needed excitement back in your partnership?
I have been married for 10 years. I know – thank you. It has been an extraordinary journey with a really lovely man and two children (3 cats, but they are easy). Some of it has been awesome beyond words, and some of it awful beyond words.
In the last two years my husband and I have been struggling to get our couple-mojo back. Children, running a home, school lunches and shopping for Christmas gifts have taken their toll.
Where it was really showing up was in our sex life. There was such a lack of connection and joyfulness that it made me want to weep. My husband and I are good domestic partners, our home is run fairly calmly and competently and for that I am deeply grateful. But I was having that desperate feeling of “is this it for us” that just turns the next 20 years grey.
In the last three or four years I have observed a number of my friends leaving dreadful marriages and I have listened carefully to all that was shared. I noticed that almost all these women were desperate to leave the marriage, but mostly what they were desperate about was the role of ‘wife’ that they were trapped in.
Slowly, it started becoming clear. I realised that as miserable as I was, I had no desire to leave my partner. I love him dearly and I don’t want to spend my life with anyone else, but the resentment and the lack of intimacy were killing me.
I decided to be very brave and chose to share my grey feelings with my husband. He found them hard to listen to, but I could see something was resonating. I explained to him that our sexual relationship had been reduced to me doing my wifely duty and I hated it! Back in the day, my partner and I had a delicious physical relationship that I really enjoyed. What happened?
Then one day I said to him “Babes, I love you so much that I don’t want to be your wife anymore. I want to be your lover! I want to be your friend! I want to be your playmate! This wife thing is killing me”.
The poor man was naturally taken aback. I took me time to explain that I wanted to be with him, but not in the constricting roles of wife and husband with its baggage and wink-wink disrespectful little jokes about everyone just surviving the next 40 years.
There is a big, thick tome, full of the wife and husband rules that constrict the living out of a relationship. I realised I had internalised these rules as if they were my own. It occurred to me that they are not mine, I don’t have to be that.
I can recreate this contract with my partner. I can get out of being a wife without having to break up my family. As we took the rules from implicit to explicit, we saw how damaging some of them were. Don’t get me wrong, there are aspects to wife and husband that are amazing. But only when you are consciously choosing your way of relating.
We started exploring what our marriage could look like if we wrote our own rules. And we did, and I am back in delicious connection with my partner, lover and friend.
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