The Good Wife

A good mother can never be a perfect partner. Here we find out why...

Have you ever thought, what does it mean to be a good wife these days. Is it someone who stays at home to raise the children, or who shares the financial burden by going out to work?

According to Times, London 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, and 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?"

It began as the old story: boy meets girl. They hold hands. Soon, boy-girl get married, they have a baby. And the good wife, becomes a perfect parent.

Forget romance, all tenderness is reserved only for the child. Remember, 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, put the good wife into the deep freezer!

As soon as a child is born, husband and wife stop having a relationship. They become Parents. It's the tendency to see children as extensions of oneself that make couples live their lives through their kids. The environment today is so fiercely competitive that being a mom or dad is not an easy job. You want your child to be the best in every possible area. It gives mothers great personal gratification.

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.

But one-thing's for sure. If there is a crack in the marriage, it's bound to show. Obsession for raising the perfect child is just another factor that adds fuel to the fire. If you are not a good spouse, you'll have to struggle to be a good parent because the child needs attention.

Recent surveys available over the Net list lack of sex and stress of parenting among the top reasons cited for arguing within a marriage. Being a parent is easier than being a spouse because being the latter calls for continuous engagement with the spouse's subjectivity. Couples need to discover each other. They need to swtich roles. There's no point being a perfect parent if you're not a good spouse.

So, what makes a good spouse? Letting natural roles emerge and not fighting them. It translates into the fact that one has to appreciate the subjectivity of the other. A lack of empathy in modern couples stops them from realising that when kids will fly out of their roost, it's the spouse they'd have to return to for love and comfort. The question is would they like to go back to a perfect stranger in the twilight of their lives?