Psrhea: Sexual Politics: Another Man's View

Sexual Politics: Another Man's View
David Kennedy

“Don’t Try To Change Him”

God I love my wife…

A few months back, my wife – whom I’ve been married to for only a little over a year now but oh how blissful that year has been – went to a bridal shower.

Now, before I go any further, let me give you a little insight into why an otherwise common wedding ritual is of particular note because my wife was in attendance. Before marrying me, my wife, throughout her life, has been a frequent guest at an obscenely large number of weddings and their associated activities. Friends, family, friends of friends, co-workers, friends of co-workers, friends of friends of co-workers, co-workers of friends of family – it just did not matter. If somebody my wife was remotely acquainted with was getting married, no matter how many times removed, she seems to have been the recipient of an automatic invitation to all events having to do with the wedding festivities.

My wife had been to so many weddings that she has become somewhat of an expert at wedding protocol even without benefit of the plethora of bridal periodicals that are in abundance. In the three years prior to our nuptials my wife even managed to drag me to a few ceremonies, always with a critical eye to style and protocol and seemingly never to just do something as radically mundane as have fun. Now a cynical person (which I am) would believe that somebody who went to so many weddings was vicariously yearning to be wedded herself. But that is another story entirely.

Anyway, when it came time for her to be a bride, my wife was the proud beneficiary of her friends’ munificent largesse. By the time I met my wife most of her friends were married. So, if I had to venture a guess, for some inexplicable reason her friends were especially pleased with the fact that she was finally getting married. My wife wasn’t the recipient of just one bridal shower – she had four separate bridal showers. Given by four different sets of friends. At four different locations. Given on four consecutive Saturdays.

You can’t make this shit up.

So needless to say under the circumstances, my wife is somewhat of a self-proclaimed expert at weddings and wedding functions – and bridal showers.

This particular bridal shower she attended a few months back was held at a formal tearoom, and somewhat dressy attire was the dress of the occasion. Now I’ve only heard about some of the things that are customary activities at bridal showers; I don’t have first-hand knowledge. But if I were to gauge how the event went from what my wife told me afterwards, this particular shower was somewhat of a disappointment. Keep in mind, though, that this may just be my wife being overly judgmental and using her own showers as a yardstick.

Anyway, to get to the point, at some point during the festivities, the hostess of the shower asked everyone in the room to give the blushing bride to be a quick word of advice. Among the gift giving and myriad of games to choose from to play at a bridal shower, I found this to be a somewhat peculiar activity because, even though just women usually attend showers, not everyone present is married or has ever been married. Witness my wife, who before marrying me attended at least a score of showers as a single woman. So what would be the point of asking for good marital advise if there is a surety that some of the women in attendance have either never been married or as divorced women clearly could not give sound advise empirical advice?

But I digress. As each women gave their small pieces of advise, it was clear to my wife that nothing of any real value was being offered. Most of what was said by all the other women was the kind of nonsensical, esoteric, ethereal, spiritual mumbo jumbo that was of no empirical use in the real world. Things such as, “Be good to each other”, and “Have a spiritual relationship with God”, and “Keep the lines of communication open,” were some of the worthless drivel that was offered up. It has dawned on me that when presented with a situation in which saying something worthwhile is out of the question, people will resort to platitudes to make themselves sound authoritative, banal clichés that really have nothing to do with the subject at hand. The aforementioned statements were proof of that.

Clearly my wife was just as disgusted by these inane declarations as much as I was hours later when she told me about them.

When it was my wife’s turn to offer marital advise, however, she did not resort to such platitudes. Instead she gave this new bride-to-be the most useful and practical advise of anybody at that shower. My wife simply stated: “Don’t try to change him. You know who it is you are marrying and what he is about.”

The classic refrain that is normally heard by most men is, “Why is it women thing they can change us” (us being men)? I don’t know if that is really true or not, but you hear it often enough from men mostly to believe there may be a certain element of truth to it – at least in the minds of men. Lets for the moment assume it is true.

From personal experience, my first wife tried to “change me.” I quickly became aware of the lengths we men will go to try to please our women (emphasis on “try”). Because of this zealous mission on my first wife’s part, we were at each other’s throat not even a week after the wedding. Not to say my marriage to her was all bad, but the valleys certainly outnumbered what few peaks there were (I wouldn’t even characterize them as peaks, but rather very small hills). And the valleys were usually a result of her trying to “change me.”

As an example, my first wife wanted me to quit drinking entirely. Not on unreasonable request really, but her reasons had nothing to do with my alcoholic intake and more to do with economics; going out and drinking with the guys on a regular basis was an expense we could not incur given our economic situation at the time. It wasn’t that I disagreed with my first wife – in fact, I stopped going out and drinking entirely, and after a certain degree of counseling cut my alcoholic intake drastically to my current level of one six-pack a week at most consumed at night before bedtime – but what bothered me was she had no problem with the enormous amounts of caffeinated and sugar-loaded soda I was drinking, a habit that for me was far more addictive – and far more expensive.

Needless to say my first wife’s efforts to “change me” failed miserably, which probably explains why I have a new wife.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that part of the growth process, whether one is married or not, is change. A person realizes as they get older that things about his or her life must either change or come to an end entirely. With growth come ever-increasing responsibility, and with that ever-increasing responsibility comes the need -- more times than not self-discovered without any prodding from anybody else, least of all a spouse – to let go of most of the activities and personal characteristics that are increasingly deemed inconsequential.

I’d like to think that I would have realized on my own that my alcoholic intake would have decreased significantly. I believe this because after my divorce I realized on my own that the soda intake had to decrease as well (I was never an alcoholic; both psychiatric counselors have told me so).

Can a woman change a man? Not to the degree that any woman thinks she can. Whether you grow and mature on your own or with a loved one, change is something that a person realizes he or she must make as they go along.

There are clearly times when a man realizes that the personal change a woman is asking him to make is not just good for the wife but good for the husband and the marital unit as well. As an example, I used to smoke cigars. My wife asked me years before we got married to quit smoking. I love cigars, and I probably always will; the craving never goes away. But two days before our wedding I smoked my last symbolic cigar, and haven’t picked on up since. I was finally mature enough to realize that she was not giving me a make or break ultimatum. I could just as easily have kept smoking past our nuptials, either in the back yard or away from the home, because she knew going in that I smoked cigars. But I stopped because, pushing 40 years of age, continued smoking could have become a very big health risk (besides, those 19 tobacco CEOs lying before Congress really pissed me off).

Would I have quit without my wife asking? Maybe later rather than sooner, but eventually. Would she have still married me had I not quit? I have no doubts that she would have.

The point here is that my wife knew who I was and what I was before she made the conscious decision to marry me. Does that mean that out of stubbornness I will not make any personal changes within the marriage as I get older? Of course not. One of the keys to a successful lifetime union is not so much that you change as you go along but that you grow as you get older – and preferably grow together. Believing that a man will change or that a woman can change him is counterproductive and often times destructive. Rather, recognizing that the man a woman is marrying will grow along with her is the fundamental key.

That having been said, any person should know whom it is they are with. One of the primary reasons this particular woman is my wife is because she displays characteristics and idiosyncrasies that I clearly lack and hope to someday attain. Will those change? I certainly hope not but if they do I can’t imagine them changing for anything other than for the better.

Are there things I don’t like about my wife? Sure, but they are no more than pet peeves, inconsequential little idiosyncrasies I am able to overlook and deal with on my own – a distinction I was out of immaturity incapable of making during my first union, and as a result it mattered. So she leaves the dishes in the sink with little particles of food swimming in a puddle of water. Rather than stewing and flying off the handle about it like I did twelve years ago I just clean the dishes and the sink, move on and don’t say a word. Besides, I’m sure she can’t stand the hard rock I often listen to, but she just closes the bedroom door and does her own thing.

Like I said, small idiosyncrasies. If there were really big concerns that a woman has, such as a man’s wavering eye or irresponsible use of money or penchant for not paying the bills or doesn’t ever want children, then those are pretty big relationship-altering things, which should cause a woman to question why she is marrying him to begin with.

Beyond that, a woman should know who it is she is marrying, and based on that not try to change him. If who he was is what you wanted to marry to begin with, then what he is and how he is should not be a major concern during the marriage. I’d bet a dime against a dollar that he knows what you are about before marrying you, and accepts you just as you are, warts and all.

David Kennedy has been making noises and finding the evidence of things not seen for most of his forty years. This would be less of a problem for him if he could just find someplace that sells Riddilin and Prozac over-the-counter – cheap!