Posts tagged wife
Hitched: I’m A Married Motherf**ker! - The Frisky
Last night, my husband (!) Patrick and I were having Hawaiian martinis at Roy’s Waikoloa Bar & Grill (which is to Hawaii the way Chili’s is to Texas) when he asked me, Was it all worth it? Was all the stress and the arguing and the pressure worth it, to have a wedding instead of sneaking down to the courthouse or eloping to Las Vegas?
I had my answer ready, because I’d been thinking on it since we drove back to our hotel in a pick-up truck covered in dicks on Saturday night. My answer was: yes. All of the bullshit and the pressure and the stress was completely worth the experience of being married in front of all of our closest family and friends.
I felt strong and beautiful and happy and supported, in that pick-up truck covered in dicks. I felt blissed and blessed, in that pick-up truck covered in dicks. I felt like the exact thing that I’d wanted to happen had happened. The whole reason I’d consented to a capital-W Wedding in the first place was that I knew I needed other people to affirmatively answer the question, “Hey! Did you guys hear that?” about the fact that I’d met a man I loved and that I wanted to share my life with. I told myself I would do a Wedding because doing a Wedding would make my commitment to Patrick and our existence as “Patrick and Andrea” in the world more solidified and more real. And that shit actually happened, ya’ll.
There’s so much to hate about mainstream wedding culture — the consumerism, the gender policing, the fucking consumerism, the body-shaming, did I mention the consumerism? — but perhaps the wedding-related narrative that pisses me off more than any other is the idea that men are incapable of being interested in weddings and must be coddled and babied so that their delicate wedding-hating sensibilities are not offended. Apparently the men of Austin are so addled by the idea of marriage that they need a separate “Cufflink Lounge,” where they can “relax, play pool and more,” away from all that awful gross icky nasty wedding things ewwwwwww! I presume there are Axe-scented smelling salts at the ready in case some guy sees a slice of white cake and faints.
“Wife.
What does that even mean? “Wife” is easily the wedding-related word I’ve thought about least since getting engaged in September. And yet, when we’re married in April, a wife is what I’ll be.
The word itself doesn’t have immediately positive connotations for me. You say “wife,” and what I imagine is a long-suffering Alice Kramden or permanently put-upon June Cleaver. A string of women in skirt-suits standing stoically next to their husbands during embarrassing adultery-related press conferences. I think of bland casseroles in the oven. I think of screaming kids in the yard. Picket fences and that kind of shit.
You say wife? I don’t think of Andrea Grimes, freelance journalist, Scramble with Friends champion and cat lady, sipping Knob Creek over ice at the end of a long day before settling into an “Antiques Roadshow” marathon. I don’t think of Andrea Grimes, happily partnered feminist who loves to make party snacks on sticks and go to mid-day yoga. I don’t even think of Andrea Grimes, a woman in love with a man she’s marrying in two-and-a-half months.
In their most damning pop culture iteration (which, if you’ve got a free weekend, check out The Meaning Of Wife for a fantastic background thereon) wives are, first, white ladies. Women of color have been classically cast, in real life and in media, as sexually loose and then by definition, unwifely. And these white wives? They’re asexual, unappreciated domestic workers whose whole existence centers on tasks that begin, grudgingly, in the bedroom and end at the mailbox at the end of the front walk. They are tied down by child-rearing and housework, but simultaneously supposed to want nothing more than to do only those things.”
