What makes someone marriage material?

Mar 11th, 2013 by OMGchronicles

As some of you know, Susan Pease Gadoua and I are co-writing The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels (and just snagged a literary agent, so things are really looking promising!)

While it’s essential to talk about reinventing marriage to get the marriage you want, here’s an interesting question to ask yourself: Am I marriage material?

I stumbled upon an interesting article in the Columbia Spectator, the second-largest college daily paper, written by Noel Duan, a Columbia College senior and “proud career-driven feminist” — “Are You Marriage Material?”

After talking to a friend who says the most important things he wants are a wife and kids, Noel wonders if she is:

“I want kids, too,” I confessed. Unfortunately, I just figured how to load a dishwasher two years ago. I’m still figuring out how to be a Real Person with Real People Skills, not to mention take care of someone else. We spoke intensely about preparing for the future, and I started to wonder if I should have studied how to be better “wife material” as much as I studied ontology and the happy hour menu at The Heights.

Another friend, an “ambitious girlfriend with a 4.0 GPA,” tells her, “I want to be good at domestic tasks. I have this fantasy of being a great wife.”

Which leads me to an important question, What does it take to be a great wife (or husband)? And, how do we prepare for that?

A quick Google search brings up a bunch of “answers.” Your Tango suggests men won’t consider a woman marriage material if she doesn’t have confidence and if she creates too much drama; Ask Men indicates being sexually compatible and on the same page about money; eHarmony says a marriageable man must have respect and be honest; a New York Times Room for Debate offers various viewpoints, but notes that without good-paying jobs many men — regardless of their ability to be honest and respectful ways — are not marriage material.

Making more men marriageable is one of the goals of the Institute for American Values and the National Marriage Project, though apprenticeships and helping those in the military and in jail (hmm, I’d have to think long and hard about marrying someone who’d been in jail — wouldn’t you?).

Despite our desire to have our spouse be an equal partner, we — men and women — have a hard time embracing men as stay-at-home dads. We still expect that men will be the breadwinner.

Noel rejects the idea that you need to be a good cook or a good housecleaner; instead, she says it’s figuring out who you are first:

being good marriage material is nothing to be ashamed of. … Being good marriage material means being ready to love someone selflessly — till death (or divorce) do us part. It means accepting our own imperfections and learning to love someone perfectly in spite of — or because of — his or her imperfections. Before we get there, it means figuring out who we are.

That sounds like a good idea in theory. If only figuring oneself out were easy! It isn’t, of course, and many of us do not accept our own imperfections because most of us don’t know what they are.

I finally got it together in my mid-40s, when I was considering whether I should salvage my second marriage or get a divorce. I delved deeply into my family-of-origin issues to understand whatever crap I had brought to the marital table. And, when you get to midlife, you do tend to gain more confidence.

Now, at 50-something, I finally have self-awareness and confidence (I was always able to love selflessly although sometimes not in a healthy way for me.) I am good marriage material.

Too bad I don’t want to marry again!