Earlier this week, Angelina Jolie said marriage to Brad Pitt has changed her for the better, inspiring her to “be a better wife. I’m going to learn to cook.”
It was a curious thing to say — is being a cook what “good wives” do? Maybe, for Angelina. But I’m not sure it answers the question for the rest of us — what exactly makes a good wife? 
Well, people have ideas about that. Thought Catalog recently listed 25 Things Girls Do That Make Guys Realize They’re Wife Material. Sure enough, along with bringing others happiness, being likeable, going with the flow, being the guy’s biggest fan and being low-maintenance, “they can cook.”
I’m not sure I agree with that although I indeed can cook and love to do so. That wasn’t enough to keep my marriage together, so obviously wives need a few more skills than that. (and let’s face it, when it comes to divorce, those desirable wifely attributes often have no monetary worth in court of public sentiment — just ask newly divorced multimillionaire Jamie Cooper-Hohn).
The Telegraph’s Daisy Buchanan, about to become a wife herself, has some thoughts on society’s expectations of wives:
The problem that persists (and my problem with the Thought Catalog piece) is that we place an enormous weight of expectation on women and their behaviour within a marriage — but culturally, that pressure is not forced on men in the same way. We’re still suffering from a hangover of hundreds of years of seeing ourselves as desperate, wannabe wives, hoping to be picked out from the crowd by a choosy potential husband.
Although marriage is a contract between two people, we still cling to the convention in which we wait for someone to ask us to be their wife and then take their name. … Of course, being a good wife shouldn’t be any different from being a good husband. But men aren’t targeted with the same stream of ‘make her marry you!’ articles.
Sadly, she is wrong in believing that “being a good wife shouldn’t be any different than being a good husband”; an overwhelming number of never-married women want a husband who has a steady job (while men say they favor someone who shares their ideas about raising children) and that male-as-provider model most likely perpetuates gendered expectations when it comes to marriage.
When George Clooney proposed to now-wife Amal Alamuddin, some people — and I’m sure some of his former girlfriends — wondered, why her? What does Amal have that the others didn’t? It’s clear the typecast “perpetual bachelor” and purported commitaphobe was neither; he just was waiting for the right woman to commit to. A woman who is wife material.
Again, we are stuck trying to define what that means.
Awhile ago a college senior and a “proud career-driven feminist” wrote an essay about how her peers were questioning if they were marriage material. One friend, an “ambitious girlfriend with a 4.0 GPA,” told her, “I want to be good at domestic tasks. I have this fantasy of being a great wife.”
Domestic tasks? What year are we in?
Mrs. Clooney (yes, Amal took Clooney’s last name) is a top-flight human rights attorney — she may or may not cook and she may or may not know her way around a Swiffer, but somehow I don’t think Clooney married her because of her great domestic tasks. I’m guessing he asked her to marry him because she’s smart, she’s beautiful, she has a kind heart and she has confidence. And, perhaps most important to Clooney, a noted jokester, a sense of humor.
But there are other expectations of being a “good wife” that go beyond our own. Just ask Oprah — despite being smart, beautiful, kind-hearted and confident, she is clear that society’s expectations of being a good wife is not her thing; she’d rather stay a good girlfriend. Which means that perhaps she isn’t good wife material after all. Which means there is no one-size-fits-all definition of what a “good wife” is or does. Or is there?
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(polls)
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“Wife material” is a list of qualities for women living in Ozzie and Harriet’s neighborhood. Those days are long gone, and will never return.
Women today aren’t interested in a life of service, not even to her own family. Life is much more than the dishes and doing laundry, and these women want as much of that “more” as they can get. Increasingly, this means having to choose between having that “more”, or settling for some guy who isn’t suited to her in the slightest. As long as she can win a high-paying job, that “more” is within her grasp.
Men today meet most of their own needs once done by the likes of Harriet Nelson. They don’t wear clothes which require ironing. They tend to eat out of the freezer into the microwave. Housecleaning gets done once or twice a year whether it’s needed or not. These men aren’t about to trade a gaming life for a blaming wife, especially once the sex dries up. The smart ones have already gone through this without having to resort to divorce to end it. They never married for it in the first place.
So forgo the urge to merge under sanction of one’s deity and the law. It isn’t worth the aggravation and disappointment. Enjoy the moment as long as it lasts, and mosey on. Leave the lists to accountants.
My husband and I are both capable of cooking, doing laundry, pushing a vacuum cleaner, and taking out the trash. Yes, we need to have these things done in our live, and they get done. But neither of us married the other for housekeeping and cooking services. We married to share our lives, to experience a deep connection with a trusted partner, to love and be loved.
Love is just another four-letter word.
I think intelligence and sex appeal need to be added to the survey choices.
Rosemary, you’re lucky. Marriage couldn’t have been better summed up. As a widower who had an experience similar to what you describe , optimism is believing that a widow with that perspective will someday cross my path.
Well a Career woman would be very hard for her to be wife material especially with all their Greed and Selfishness that they carry around these days.
Twitter: OMGchronicles
says:
Because she wants to make her own money, and do something fulfilling in addition to caring for loved ones … just like men do? You want her to depend on her man for money and everything else? You want her to want you because you can rescue her from a career?
The problem is that many women that have their Careers making a very high salary usually would want the Best of all and will Never settle for Less since it is all about them which is why many of us Good men are still Single today when many of us are Not Single by choice. Lets face it, most women will Never go with a man that makes much Less money than they do which makes it very sad for many of us men that really wanted to get married to have a family since many women just Can’t Accept us for who we really are. Quite a Change in the women of today compared to the Good old fashioned women of years ago that Weren’t like that at all since Both men and women in those days really had to Struggle to make ends meat the way our family members did. It was Definitely very easy for our family members finding Love back then since as you can see that the times were completely different than today. It is just too bad for us men that many of us were born at such a very bad time which had we been born back then since many of us Would’ve been all settled down by now with our own Good Wife And Family that many of us still Don’t have today.