Originally posted by TheMissus:yeah he told me he need some space mah. After that he dun talk to me @ all and just bury himself in his work and work related journals, very boring books and magazines..he says he need to read up all that stuff so that he can become more expert in the field of the new post.
At the end of the day, best to to have a talk with your man. Get things sorted out at once.
Originally posted by artspraken11:[quote]newly wed, less than 6 mths, is it normal for your spouse to end up not speaking to u for weeks and not sleeping on the same bed as u? I think i am not really being unreasonable for thinking something crossed the line.[/quote]
Your husband got a problem with YOU, not his work. He is not telling you.
When a man sleep in living room couch, he is going out of his way to avoid his wife. That is the biggest indicator there is something very wrong.
Sorry, I am afraid this has nothing to do with his work. Its just malespeak excuse. The problem is something else.
................................................................... speechless
6 months and sleeping in another room..
seriously just appear naked in bed...
trust me IT WILL WORK
Imo, maybe he find u boring? I dunno.
Maybe your Husband is impotent
Originally posted by artspraken11:[quote]newly wed, less than 6 mths, is it normal for your spouse to end up not speaking to u for weeks and not sleeping on the same bed as u? I think i am not really being unreasonable for thinking something crossed the line.[/quote]
Your husband got a problem with YOU, not his work. He is not telling you.
When a man sleep in living room couch, he is going out of his way to avoid his wife. That is the biggest indicator there is something very wrong.
Sorry, I am afraid this has nothing to do with his work. Its just malespeak excuse. The problem is something else.
how can you say this to me? SOBS!
I asked him already, I too thought like you, I was insistent that the problem was me. Cos I cannot fathom how anyone can be so affected and upset by work until he shut off from his wife and everyone else. but he kept on insisting that it's not me and that it's his work.
And to be fair, I really do hear him telling me about his worries about work, how he feels he's not doing well and up to mark, and how he thinks he is useless blah blah. Totally new job scope, new duties that he's not done before, and new work place, etc.. feeling inadequate and male ego at work shutting down emotionally. isn't that valid??
I watched on my fav show sex and the city, it says when men are not feeling gd abt themselves (ego wise), they will shut down emotionally from their wife/gf.
This is my well meaning suggestion.
Try to seduce him. Use some effort (ie. lingerie, fluff, whatever etc etc) Do it well and properly. Do what he likes.
If he responds to your solicitations, take the opportunity to moan to him about (i) how you need his attention; (ii) how you need his emotional maintenance (iii) how you need to feel loved; (iii) how impt it is to continue to communicate. Please ensure you get the message across before the shagging concludes. If you guys have post-sex cuddling, then try to tell him this then also can.
You a newly web by 6 months, you cannot allow the relationship to continue like this.
I suggested seduction because you need to bring the message across when you command his full attention.
If the attempted seduction fails, then we need to revisit this problem through other means.
Good Luck!!!
Originally posted by TheMissus:I watched on my fav show sex and the city, it says when men are not feeling gd abt themselves (ego wise), they will shut down emotionally from their wife/gf.
Sorry, I get to the point because I mean well. I apologise if I upset you.
It is true that when going gets tough, men sometimes keep quiet because they dun want to reveal their weakness/vulnerabilities to their spouse.
However, a strong marriage is one whereby the husband confides and talks to wife about his challenges and problems. You must make clear to him that even if you do not understand, it is good to make him "open up" and talk to you.
Your earlier post says his magazines and journals are boring and dry. This is a bad sign. You need not act interested, but at least BE RECEPTIVE if he ever opens up to you. It is possible that he does not talk to you now because he feels you are not receptive to what he is reading anyway.
btw, could it be that your hubby got new girl outside? u got rule out this possibility?!!
How can I make my hubby love me more?
He is now very focused and consumed by work, which I understand is necessary for men, and I don't wish to stand in his way or disturb him. I really wish I could be more self sufficient and not depend on him emotionally. I know it's very difficult to have to feel bad when you think your wife is unhappy with you not spending enough time with her.
Interesting comparison to a u.s middle class family crisis:
In the American middle-class family of today, these influences have been extraordinarily exaggerated.
Because the middle-class marriage is based on social rather than personal attraction, the emotional relation of the wife to her husband is insecure, and the more her husband buries himself in his work, hobbies, or outside interests, the more insecure and unsatisfactory it becomes for his wife.
Part of the wife's unused emotional energy begins to be expended in her love for her son. At the same time, because of the emotional insecurity in the mother's relationship with her husband, the daughter may come to be regarded as an emotional rival for the husband's affection.
This resentment of the daughter is most likely to occur when there is some other cause of disturbance in the mother's psychology, especially if this cause is associated with her relationship to her own father.
For example, as female domination becomes, generation by generation, a more distinctive feature of American family life, the daughter's shift of attention to her father becomes less complete, and, by adolescence, she tends to pity him rather than to admire him and may become relatively ambivalent in her feelings toward both her father and mother, sometimes hating the latter for dominating her father and despising his weakness in allowing it.
In such a case, the whole development of which we speak is accelerated and intensified in the next generation, and the daughter's relatively ambivalent feelings toward her parents are repeated in her relatively ambivalent feelings toward her husband. This serves to intensify both her emotional smothering and overprotection of her son and her tendency toward emotional rejection of her daughter as a potential danger to the relatively precarious emotional relationship between husband and wife.
As a consequence of this situation, the frustrated wife has a tendency to cling to her son by keeping him dependent and immature as long as possible and to seek to hasten the maturing of her daughter in order to edge her out of the family circle as soon as possible. The chief consequence of this is the increasingly late maturity, the weakness, under-sexuality, and dependence of American boys and American men of middle-class origins and the increasingly early maturing, aggressiveness, over-sexuality, and independence of American middle-class girls.
The mother's alienation of the daughter (which often reaches an acute condition of mutual hatred) may begin in childhood or even at birth (especially if the girl baby is beautiful, is not nursed by the mother, and is welcomed with excessive joy by the husband). It usually becomes acute when the daughter reaches puberty and may become very acute if the mother, about the same time, is approaching her menopause (which she often mistakenly feels will reduce her attraction as a woman to her husband).
During this whole period, the mother's rejection of her daughter appears chiefly in her efforts to force her to grow up rapidly, and leads to premature exposure of the daughter to such modern monstrosities as preteen "mixed parties," training bras, access to overly "sophisticated" movies, books, and conversations, and the practice of leaving daughters un-chaperoned in the house with boy classmates, on the early high school or even junior high school level.
Such experiences and the increasingly frequent clashes of temperament between mother and daughter lead a surprisingly large percentage of middle-class girls to move from the home before the age of twenty.
And whether she leaves or not, sexual and emotional maturity comes to the American middle-class girl earlier and earlier, not only in comparison with the middle-class boy but even in absolute terms. We are told, for example, that the onset of puberty among American girls (an event which can be dated exactly by the first menstrual period) has been occurring at an earlier age by about nine months for each passing decade. As a result, this milestone is reached by American girls today up to three years earlier than with American girls of the early twentieth century...
... Middle-class marriage, in fact, was not romantic, for, in the middle class, marriage, like everything else, was subject to the middle-class system of values. Within that value system, middle-class persons chose a marriage partner who would assist in achieving middle-class goals of status and achievement.
A woman, with her parents' approval, chose a husband who showed promise of being a good provider and a steady, reliable, social achiever, who would be able to give her a material status at least as high as that provided by her own parents.
A man chose as a wife one who showed promise of being a help in his upward struggle, one able to act as hostess to his aspirant activities and to provide the domestic decorum and social graces expected of a successful business or professional man.
Such a marriage was based, from both sides, on status factors rather than on personal factors. The fact that a man was a Yale graduate, was trained for a profession, had a position with a good firm, drove an expensive car, could order dinner with assurance in an expensive restaurant, and had already applied for membership in a golf or country club were not reasons for loving him as a person, since they were simply the accessories of his status.
Yet middle-class persons married for reasons such as these and, at the same time, convinced themselves and their friends that they were marrying for Romantic love (based on the fact that they were, in addition to their mutual social acceptability, sexually attracted).
For a time the new marriage could keep up these pretenses, especially as the elements of sex and novelty in the relationship helped conceal the contrast between theory and fact and that the marriage was basically an external and superficial relationship. But this fact remained, and in time unconscious frustrations and dissatisfactions began to operate. Often these did not reach the conscious level, especially a few generations ago, but today the question is posed by every women's magazine, "Is your marriage a success?"
But unconsciously, long before this, realization had been growing that the marriage relationship was not based on love, which must be a recognition and appreciation of personal qualities, not of status accessories. Without personal feeling based on such personal qualities, the relationship was really not a personal relationship and was really not based on love, even when the partners, with the usual lack of introspection associated with middle-class minds, still insisted that it was based on love.
The consequences of such unconscious recognition of the real lack of love in the bourgeois marital relationship, in a society that never stopped reiterating in song, cinema, magazine, and book the absolute necessity of love for human happiness and "fulfillment," will be examined in a moment.
Three generations ago the bourgeois wife rarely became aware of her frustrations. She was largely confined to her home, was kept too busy with children and housework to find much time for meditation on her situation or for comparison with other wives or the outside world generally.
Brought up in a male-dominated family, she was prepared to accept a similar situation in her own life. This means that her outside contacts and her general picture of the world came to her through the screen of her husband's vision of these things.
The decrease in the number of children in middle-class families and the spread of labor-saving devices, from vacuum cleaners to frozen foods, gave the bourgeois wife increasing leisure in the 1920's and 1930'5.
Enterprising editors like Edwin Bok filled that leisure with new slick women's magazines (like the Ladies' Home Journal). Popular novels and, to a lesser extent, the early movies, dramatic matinees, and spreading women's clubs allowed women to build up a vision of a fantasy world of romantic love and carefree, middle-class housewives with dazzling homes and well-behaved and well-scrubbed children.
By 1925 the average bourgeois housewife was becoming increasingly frustrated because her own life was not that pictured in the women's magazines. Her increasing leisure gave her time to think about it, and her more frequent contact with other wives encouraged her to raise her voice in criticism of her husband whose financial inability to provide her with the life she came to regard as her due seemed to her to justify her desire to nag him onward to greater effort in pursuit of money.
To him this became nagging; to her it was only an occasional reminder of the expectations under which she had entered upon the marriage relationship....
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/20.html#75
Originally posted by Nikar 3:btw, could it be that your hubby got new girl outside? u got rule out this possibility?!!
he dun even have the 'bandwidth and time' for one woman, how to have for 2 women?
Originally posted by artspraken11:Sorry, I get to the point because I mean well. I apologise if I upset you.
It is true that when going gets tough, men sometimes keep quiet because they dun want to reveal their weakness/vulnerabilities to their spouse.
However, a strong marriage is one whereby the husband confides and talks to wife about his challenges and problems. You must make clear to him that even if you do not understand, it is good to make him "open up" and talk to you.
Your earlier post says his magazines and journals are boring and dry. This is a bad sign. You need not act interested, but at least BE RECEPTIVE if he ever opens up to you. It is possible that he does not talk to you now because he feels you are not receptive to what he is reading anyway.
Yea but they're work-related journals and magazines. How is it possible for it not to be boring? He is not a professional comedian. when he is buried in the boring magazines and journals in the living rm, and I go there and try to cosy up with him, say I want a peck from him and a hug, he always says he got no mood (he not happy at work, feels he's struggling) and will not really engage me. he just ignore me and continue reading.. sometimes he will engage me for 1/2 a sec.
to be fair, these next 2 yrs are extremely crucial for his career.. and I ought to be very understanding.
I posted here to understand more of 1) the male psyche and how their ego reacts to stress from work, and how work can change and affect men 2) how i can cope better in this situation without angering or bothering him. So far I have received advice which I will take like buy the book by John Gray, and occupying my time with other frens and going for spa treatment
I intend to do the sex thing you advised me this wkend, hope he'll respond. I think sex will definitely bring a couple closer together, it always does. But I read a news article that when men is feeling down, they also lose their urges.
my dear missus, unfortunately, I think unless he changes his character and approach to work fundamentally, u'll ALWAYS have this problem. You know why? Because our career will always be progressing and we'll be learning more, doing more, having heavier responsibilities as time goes by. So are you going to tell yourself that it's not going to happen again after he learns his present job function well? It'll repeat.
Career pressures and aspirations will always be there for us male or females. Key thing is how to make that clear distinction and know how to switch off correctly after work. Girls usually have this problem more. Men are usually better at this, able to make a clear distinction between work and personal time. Apparently, your husband needs more help in this.
Best thing is, talk to your husband's views/attitudes towards his careers when he's settled down better.This attitude/approach of his has to change definitely.
If not I can picture, you 10yrs down the road, neglected, and some guy will just come along and sweep u off your feet. U'll not hv a fulfilling loving marriage and sex life for sure. Good luck.
all the best!
He cannot switch off. He told me before.. I dun feel hopeful of him changing successfully or willingly something that is so fundamental in his character.. honestly have you ever changed successfully something very basic in your character? When I look back I dun think a lot of our basic characters have changed much.. we have changed outlooks, views, what we like to do, lifestyle due to age, but not really character. I dunno how to approach this thorny concept of bringing up to him and requesting him to change. what if he says to me he knew fully what 1) what his character was 2) what his career entails when he married me, and thus how can I expect or ask him to change now?
He's someone who'll commit unreservedly and give every ounce of himself to his work so that he can be successful and better than his rivals. When he isn't, he feels crushed. he told that when he received his O level results long ago, he was very devastated cos he put in effort but he got 9A1 and 1A2.
rubbish la.
where got ppl so uptight about work, 100% type. its just an excuse. If he got time to eat/shit/bathe/sleep, sure he got time for his wife. it is a question whether he wants to, and whether he can make it part of his lifestyle. how much time do women really need anyway? just a kiss/greeting now and then, and random pat on the backside, or playful flirt, it is the small things that keep romance going, and it does not take much mental or time committment. again, it is whether the man got the heart to do all this.
for men, job is a convenient excuse only.
the problem is not his job.
Just wondering, we all know how he is like now, but how was he like before marriage? I believe that if you know him well enough through your time spent with him all this while, maybe you can read his emotions & body language and deduce the problem?
Originally posted by artspraken11:rubbish la.
where got ppl so uptight about work, 100% type. its just an excuse. If he got time to eat/shit/bathe/sleep, sure he got time for his wife. it is a question whether he wants to, and whether he can make it part of his lifestyle. how much time do women really need anyway? just a kiss/greeting now and then, and random pat on the backside, or playful flirt, it is the small things that keep romance going, and it does not take much mental or time committment. again, it is whether the man got the heart to do all this.
for men, job is a convenient excuse only.
the problem is not his job.
how to not eat/shit/bathe/sleep? u want him to start smelling when he goes to work??
the thing is, if work not gd = ego battered= no mood.. for my hubby he is someone with super high expectations of himself.. so maybe it doesn't take the usual breaking point of others, he will reach this stage. For you lets say you tio cancer or lose all your $$$ and job overnight + bankrupt and not only that owe $$$ to loanshark some more, can you still able to "kiss/greeting now and then, and random pat on the backside, or playful flirt"??
Originally posted by -Wanderer-:Just wondering, we all know how he is like now, but how was he like before marriage? I believe that if you know him well enough through your time spent with him all this while, maybe you can read his emotions & body language and deduce the problem?
he was like this before, but just that there wasn't anything at work for him as new/challenging as this situation until now. previously everything's quite smooth sailing.
I dont really know how to help you.
I was once like you hubby, career minded and neglected a faithful and hardworking lady in a relationship. I was only attempting to build a better and more secure future, be the best that I should rightfully be, could be and must be.
I thought she understood. I gave her full freedom, to make friends, go out and splurge and thought she would be happy, but to leave me to my aspirations for us .
She wanted to go shopping with me. I felt it was a waste of my time, window shopping and not going in for the purpose of buying specific item. She wanted a holiday with me in Europe, I paid for everything, for her and her family members instead. She wanted dinners, I took her to the nearest avaliable hawker centre for fast food, gooble up my food and quickly leave to get back to my projects.
Prior to going steady, I was only a subordinate. Life was more carefree and romantic. But after making a committment with her, my work was recognised and moved up, bearing more responsibilities.
In time, the responsibilities never ended, it got piled up more, and my neglect to her grew worse. We slowly drifted apart. The alarm bells were all there, only that I thought she will always be my side. I need not go into the ending, everyone will know how it would eventually end.
Now I walk alone on sandy beaches, staring at the beautiful sunsets, wishing she was by my side again. But she is gone, far far away. I took her love for granted. She is not a toy, to play with when I want, and put aside when I am busy with something else. She is a human being, capable of emotions and feelings.
She gave me her all, but all that i gave in return was emptiness and loneliness. I had been cruel and heartless in my ignorance and immaturity. She deserved better. I realized this too late. I have it all now, yet it seemed so empty as I watched the sea waves cascade and disperse over my feet in the gathering twilight......
PS: I doubt if you will be successful talking with him. He is blind to all in his focus to be the best, as I once was - thickheaded and stubborn. It will only cause him to feel that you are demanding, which is not true. All you seek is warmth and love, and companionship,.espacially in a marriage.
The only way to change him is to walk out and ask for annullment of the marriage, but believe me, it will definately make him see the light but it will also destroy him, for he will be like me, finally see the world crumbling around him and lose his mind if he is not strong enough. He does love you, which is why he is building up his career now.
It will also destroy you too and make you lose faith in the sanctity and hopes that marriage will bring. It was love that brought you 2 together, and it will be love that drove you both apart under unreconcilable differences and expectations of what love is.
Unless you are willing to be patient, and let his career take centre stage for the moment, and give him your support, even if it means you take 2nd place in his life, until he reached his apex and starts to slow down, and then enjoy the life that you had hoped for, with more enjoyment in better maturity.
May you make the right decision, have a clearer mind and reconcile with your expectations and have a good marriage.
Cheers.
I think if you want to have a closure on this matter. You need to talk to your husband heart to heart.
If it's possible you could talk to his parents for advice.
I havn't been following this thread, so I am not sure if you had a heart to heart with him. But one thing you could be sure of, after the talk you pretty sure gets what he have in mind. Is he tired of you from just 6 months or it's really work related. We can't make judgement from just your side of the story.
You are a smart woman, be it tonight or anytime soon, strike a conversation with him. If he can't even make time for just a talk, I am pretty sure where your marriage is heading to.
actually, artspraken11 is correct when he says "rubbish la. where got ppl so uptight about work, 100% type."
from what you (Missus) says, your hubby seems to be like 24 hours thinking about work.....this is just insane.
is his attitude towards you slowly like this, or is it sudden (change abruptly overnight etc)?
also, when a guy behave like this so coldly, i personally won't rule out the possibility of him having affair outside. for all u know, this "work" crap is only a sham.......a show.
u 100% sure he's really working so hard? or is he pretending only? got "check him out"?
on the other hand, seriously, anytime you need a boy toy or toy boy, just PM me. i'll make sure you regain your pride as a REAL WOMANand make you feel like a Queen, by treating you the way your hubby is supposed to treat you, and i don't mean sex.
I wonder...if he is already like this before both of you got married, didn't you ask yourself whether you can live with such a man?
Did he show this personality of his when both of you were dating? Did you go into marriage fully aware of how it will turn out in the end? Or did you go into marriage hoping you can change him?
I think this problem of yours has something to do with expectations as well. For example, you expect that first year of marriage will be lovey-dovey, and as a result, assign some sort of behaviour that you would like your husband to exhibit during this period of time. When this expectation did not materialize, you get disappointed and frustrated as a result.
And you got angry when one of the forumites mentioned: "Your husband got a problem with YOU, not his work. He is not telling you." I suggest that you do not get angry but really look into the root of the problem. If need be, have a heart-to-heart talk with your husband about why he is so concerned with his job to the extent of neglecting you. Make him realize that life is not just about his job. If he works so hard in order to provide a good life for you and him, what's the point if you are neglected and not happy?
Originally posted by xtreyier:I dont really know how to help you.
I was once like you hubby, career minded and neglected a faithful and hardworking lady in a relationship. I was only attempting to build a better and more secure future, be the best that I should rightfully be, could be and must be.
I thought she understood. I gave her full freedom, to make friends, go out and splurge and thought she would be happy, but to leave me to my aspirations for us .
She wanted to go shopping with me. I felt it was a waste of my time, window shopping and not going in for the purpose of buying specific item. She wanted a holiday with me in Europe, I paid for everything, for her and her family members instead. She wanted dinners, I took her to the nearest avaliable hawker centre for fast food, gooble up my food and quickly leave to get back to my projects.
Prior to going steady, I was only a subordinate. Life was more carefree and romantic. But after making a committment with her, my work was recognised and moved up, bearing more responsibilities.
In time, the responsibilities never ended, it got piled up more, and my neglect to her grew worse. We slowly drifted apart. The alarm bells were all there, only that I thought she will always be my side. I need not go into the ending, everyone will know how it would eventually end.
Now I walk alone on sandy beaches, staring at the beautiful sunsets, wishing she was by my side again. But she is gone, far far away. I took her love for granted. She is not a toy, to play with when I want, and put aside when I am busy with something else. She is a human being, capable of emotions and feelings.
She gave me her all, but all that i gave in return was emptiness and loneliness. I had been cruel and heartless in my ignorance and immaturity. She deserved better. I realized this too late. I have it all now, yet it seemed so empty as I watched the sea waves cascade and disperse over my feet in the gathering twilight......
PS: I doubt if you will be successful talking with him. He is blind to all in his focus to be the best, as I once was - thickheaded and stubborn. It will only cause him to feel that you are demanding, which is not true. All you seek is warmth and love, and companionship,.espacially in a marriage.
The only way to change him is to walk out and ask for annullment of the marriage, but believe me, it will definately make him see the light but it will also destroy him, for he will be like me, finally see the world crumbling around him and lose his mind if he is not strong enough. He does love you, which is why he is building up his career now.
It will also destroy you too and make you lose faith in the sanctity and hopes that marriage will bring. It was love that brought you 2 together, and it will be love that drove you both apart under unreconcilable differences and expectations of what love is.
Unless you are willing to be patient, and let his career take centre stage for the moment, and give him your support, even if it means you take 2nd place in his life, until he reached his apex and starts to slow down, and then enjoy the life that you had hoped for, with more enjoyment in better maturity.
May you make the right decision, have a clearer mind and reconcile with your expectations and have a good marriage.
Cheers.
I think he hits pretty near on the nail.
Originally posted by Ah Chia:Interesting comparison to a u.s middle class family crisis:
In the American middle-class family of today, these influences have been extraordinarily exaggerated.
Because the middle-class marriage is based on social rather than personal attraction, the emotional relation of the wife to her husband is insecure, and the more her husband buries himself in his work, hobbies, or outside interests, the more insecure and unsatisfactory it becomes for his wife.
Part of the wife's unused emotional energy begins to be expended in her love for her son. At the same time, because of the emotional insecurity in the mother's relationship with her husband, the daughter may come to be regarded as an emotional rival for the husband's affection.
This resentment of the daughter is most likely to occur when there is some other cause of disturbance in the mother's psychology, especially if this cause is associated with her relationship to her own father.
For example, as female domination becomes, generation by generation, a more distinctive feature of American family life, the daughter's shift of attention to her father becomes less complete, and, by adolescence, she tends to pity him rather than to admire him and may become relatively ambivalent in her feelings toward both her father and mother, sometimes hating the latter for dominating her father and despising his weakness in allowing it.
In such a case, the whole development of which we speak is accelerated and intensified in the next generation, and the daughter's relatively ambivalent feelings toward her parents are repeated in her relatively ambivalent feelings toward her husband. This serves to intensify both her emotional smothering and overprotection of her son and her tendency toward emotional rejection of her daughter as a potential danger to the relatively precarious emotional relationship between husband and wife.
As a consequence of this situation, the frustrated wife has a tendency to cling to her son by keeping him dependent and immature as long as possible and to seek to hasten the maturing of her daughter in order to edge her out of the family circle as soon as possible. The chief consequence of this is the increasingly late maturity, the weakness, under-sexuality, and dependence of American boys and American men of middle-class origins and the increasingly early maturing, aggressiveness, over-sexuality, and independence of American middle-class girls.
The mother's alienation of the daughter (which often reaches an acute condition of mutual hatred) may begin in childhood or even at birth (especially if the girl baby is beautiful, is not nursed by the mother, and is welcomed with excessive joy by the husband). It usually becomes acute when the daughter reaches puberty and may become very acute if the mother, about the same time, is approaching her menopause (which she often mistakenly feels will reduce her attraction as a woman to her husband).
During this whole period, the mother's rejection of her daughter appears chiefly in her efforts to force her to grow up rapidly, and leads to premature exposure of the daughter to such modern monstrosities as preteen "mixed parties," training bras, access to overly "sophisticated" movies, books, and conversations, and the practice of leaving daughters un-chaperoned in the house with boy classmates, on the early high school or even junior high school level.Such experiences and the increasingly frequent clashes of temperament between mother and daughter lead a surprisingly large percentage of middle-class girls to move from the home before the age of twenty.
And whether she leaves or not, sexual and emotional maturity comes to the American middle-class girl earlier and earlier, not only in comparison with the middle-class boy but even in absolute terms. We are told, for example, that the onset of puberty among American girls (an event which can be dated exactly by the first menstrual period) has been occurring at an earlier age by about nine months for each passing decade. As a result, this milestone is reached by American girls today up to three years earlier than with American girls of the early twentieth century...
... Middle-class marriage, in fact, was not romantic, for, in the middle class, marriage, like everything else, was subject to the middle-class system of values. Within that value system, middle-class persons chose a marriage partner who would assist in achieving middle-class goals of status and achievement.
A woman, with her parents' approval, chose a husband who showed promise of being a good provider and a steady, reliable, social achiever, who would be able to give her a material status at least as high as that provided by her own parents.
A man chose as a wife one who showed promise of being a help in his upward struggle, one able to act as hostess to his aspirant activities and to provide the domestic decorum and social graces expected of a successful business or professional man.
Such a marriage was based, from both sides, on status factors rather than on personal factors. The fact that a man was a Yale graduate, was trained for a profession, had a position with a good firm, drove an expensive car, could order dinner with assurance in an expensive restaurant, and had already applied for membership in a golf or country club were not reasons for loving him as a person, since they were simply the accessories of his status.Yet middle-class persons married for reasons such as these and, at the same time, convinced themselves and their friends that they were marrying for Romantic love (based on the fact that they were, in addition to their mutual social acceptability, sexually attracted).
For a time the new marriage could keep up these pretenses, especially as the elements of sex and novelty in the relationship helped conceal the contrast between theory and fact and that the marriage was basically an external and superficial relationship. But this fact remained, and in time unconscious frustrations and dissatisfactions began to operate. Often these did not reach the conscious level, especially a few generations ago, but today the question is posed by every women's magazine, "Is your marriage a success?"But unconsciously, long before this, realization had been growing that the marriage relationship was not based on love, which must be a recognition and appreciation of personal qualities, not of status accessories. Without personal feeling based on such personal qualities, the relationship was really not a personal relationship and was really not based on love, even when the partners, with the usual lack of introspection associated with middle-class minds, still insisted that it was based on love.
The consequences of such unconscious recognition of the real lack of love in the bourgeois marital relationship, in a society that never stopped reiterating in song, cinema, magazine, and book the absolute necessity of love for human happiness and "fulfillment," will be examined in a moment.
Three generations ago the bourgeois wife rarely became aware of her frustrations. She was largely confined to her home, was kept too busy with children and housework to find much time for meditation on her situation or for comparison with other wives or the outside world generally.Brought up in a male-dominated family, she was prepared to accept a similar situation in her own life. This means that her outside contacts and her general picture of the world came to her through the screen of her husband's vision of these things.
The decrease in the number of children in middle-class families and the spread of labor-saving devices, from vacuum cleaners to frozen foods, gave the bourgeois wife increasing leisure in the 1920's and 1930'5.Enterprising editors like Edwin Bok filled that leisure with new slick women's magazines (like the Ladies' Home Journal). Popular novels and, to a lesser extent, the early movies, dramatic matinees, and spreading women's clubs allowed women to build up a vision of a fantasy world of romantic love and carefree, middle-class housewives with dazzling homes and well-behaved and well-scrubbed children.
By 1925 the average bourgeois housewife was becoming increasingly frustrated because her own life was not that pictured in the women's magazines. Her increasing leisure gave her time to think about it, and her more frequent contact with other wives encouraged her to raise her voice in criticism of her husband whose financial inability to provide her with the life she came to regard as her due seemed to her to justify her desire to nag him onward to greater effort in pursuit of money.
To him this became nagging; to her it was only an occasional reminder of the expectations under which she had entered upon the marriage relationship....
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/20.html#75
Good read for you.