Lightbulb Moment: Why I Now See My Husband Differently

Posted on by stilllearning2b

“I’m going to get this done for you today,” my husband said after asking me to mix the epoxy that would soon coat the garage floor.

“What do you mean, ‘for me?’ I really don’t care much at all about the garage or the shed, so it confuses me when you say you’re doing them for me. Those are the things that you care about.”

He thought a moment before responding.

“I want you to have a house you love. That you feel proud of. Everything I do around here is ultimately for us. For you. It’s like planting is for you. You do it because you enjoy the process and the result, but you also do it to make this home better for both of us.”

The plants:)

I thought back to my efforts to paint the living room before he returned home, my search for the “perfect” end tables to complement the new sofa and my carefully arranged and found frames on the new picture ledges. In each of those cases, I was thinking of what he would like. Because even though none of those details are ones that are particularly important to Brock, he enjoys and benefits from me tackling those areas that he would likely ignore if left to his own devices.

Yet, when he was engaged in similar projects, I tended towards annoyance at being interrupted for help (his projects always seem to happen when I’m in the midst of my own thing) and an utter lack of comprehension at his motivation.

Lightbulb moment.

What I sometimes perceive as a self-serving undertaking is often initiated as an act of service.

And now every time I pull my car over that newly epoxied garage floor, I whisper a quiet, “Thank you.”

 

 

How the Language We Use Reveals Our Assumptions

Posted on by stilllearning2b

I was working on a post about relationships that begin with infidelity the other day when I found myself at a loss.

Unless I’m sharing my personal story, I try to write from as much as a gender-neutral perspective as possible. I typed the phrase, “Mistress or …” waiting for the masculine version of the word to pop into my head.

And I drew a blank. My trusty thesaurus wasn’t any better and even Twitter couldn’t find a male-gendered term that means an affair partner.

As I reworked the sentence to include a gender-neutral poor substitute (paramour), I found my mind actively chewing on this suddenly-realized vacancy in our language. After all, women cheat (the studies are notoriously inaccurate, but the rates aren’t usually much below men) and I would wager (again, going with statistical evidence) that the majority of those women are cheating with men.

So what are those men called?

 

It gets even more interesting.

 

We have a gendered name for the betrayed husband – cuckhold – a term that originally meant a deceived man who ended up caring for a child born from another man. And in fact, adultery has historically (and in many cultures) been considered much more heinous when it is between a married woman and another man than when the man is the one straying from the marital bed. Which makes sense from a purely economical standpoint; a wayward wife may mean a man’s resources are going to help perpetuate another’s genes.

Yet even without the biological concern of a woman unknowingly raising another woman’s child, there are certainly plenty of men who procreate outside of marriage.

So what do we call their deceived wives?

 

When a mistress is reviled (such as by the wife), she is referred to as the “homewrecker.”

I’ve never heard of a man referred to by that term, even though it is not exclusively feminine.

 

The woman is also more likely to be called terms that shame her for her sexuality, whereas the man is more likely to be called out for his duplicity.

 

The words used extend to within a marriage. How often do we hear about a “frigid” wife being the cause of a sexless marriage? Yet Google implies that men are equally likely to be the frigid ones. Except we don’t call them that.

 

 

The language seems to favor the fooled husband on the marital side and the kept and wanton woman on the outside of the marriage. Even though those roles are easily interchangeable and are more about character and circumstance than about gender.

 

And what does that reveal about our assumptions?

Interesting to think about.

 

Have any known words to add?

Any words you would like to create?