It is rather strange – whenever I think of marriage, I don’t really think about what I expect my wife to be like. Other people may have dreams and expectations about what their perfect wife would be like, but I don’t do that very much. Instead, I find myself pondering more about it means to be a good husband. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read so many books on manhood, and how to be a good man. Or perhaps it’s because I spend so much time talking to girls about their love and relationship problems. I’m very very clear about what’s expected of a good man and husband. I’m almost totally ignorant about what it means to be a good woman and a wife.
Of course, knowing what it means to be a good husband doesn’t mean being able to live up to it. One of the main reasons I hold back from romantic pursuits at the moment is that I can see very clearly that I don’t measure up to the standards of a good husband. In other words, I don’t think of myself as worthy to be able to care for, provide for, love and support a woman in the way I think she should be. It’s perhaps a bit odd that I think this way, or care so much about it. I wonder if any other guys who enter into relationships think about this? Or do they just blindly plunge into it, and either trust that everything will somehow work out fine? Or do they just not think about it at all, or have lower expectations?
I find that I have a negative tendency to think of many members of my sex as irresponsible people who have double standards when it comes to marriage – they want a perfect wife to accept their imperfect selves, without bothering to work to better themselves for their wife’s sake. Any “improvements” are for show only, during the courtship stage, to impress her or her family enough until after the wedding ceremony, where he can finally drop the act and get back to his usual habits. While I reasonably deduce that this cannot be true (or else we would have a lot of marriages breaking up… wait, isn’t that happening already?), it nevertheless remains a strong stereotype in my mind. And I’m almost pathologically determined not to be that sort of man.
Which, of course, leaves me in a bit of a quandary – I either become the perfect husband, or never get married.
(… I wonder if there’s a girl out there who’s struggling as much with the question of being the perfect wife as I am with being the perfect husband? I’d like to meet her. It would be fascinating to hear the opposite point of view.)
In any case, what brought this on was my continued work on the Wedding Vows project. I’m currently in the process of trying to re-write one portion of the narrative, and I realised that I’ve covered pratically every theme I wanted to talk about in the work already. So trying to insert a new segment into the narrative, I have no relevant thing I want to say with it, mostly because I lack knowledge about the woman’s point of view.
However, looking at what I’ve written before, I still feel very pleased and proud of this work. Especially of the segment I wrote to replace an earlier part which I took out. The segment was entitled “Generations”, and it depicted the deathbed scene of the wife’s father. In the scene, the dying father entrusts the care of his wife and his daughter to his son-in-law. When I first wrote that scene, nearly a year ago, I knew it was a powerful one. I wasn’t exactly clear why it was so, yet I knew I should put it in, and that it was infinitely superior to the scene it replaced. Today, as I was musing, I finally got an insight into why.
I think every young woman, who has been raised by a good father, would naturally want their father to approve of their choice of life partner. The reason why is obvious – from their childhood, their definition of what it means to be a husband and a man is shaped by their father. The father sets the standard for the husband to follow. To know that their father approves means that he accepts the husband as an acceptable example of the standard of manhood that he has set for his family. But I went even one step further. In this scene, the father entrusts the care of his family to the son-in-law. The father views the son-in-law not only as an example of manhood, but the heir to his responsibilities to care for the household. He is not just accepted, he is trusted to continue the legacy of manhood in the family. He is worthy to step into the position the father has held for so long as the head of the household.
I’m very very happy that I wrote that. It expresses what I have to say about responsibility, which is the first and foremost characteristic that must define a good man, in my book. And I think that women would approve of it too… at least, the one girl who I’ve shown it to so far (my artist) says that she likes it a lot. Now the trouble I have is trying to write the female corollary to that theme – what is the duty and responsibility of a wife? And how can I express it in a idealised romance? (Or have I already done so?)
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