Marriage is more difficult to manage well than other situations in life because there are many roles involved in any one marriage and because the nature of the relationship keeps changing. Unlike many other social situations where roles are clearly defined, within marriage the roles are often shifting and confused. Which role is played at any one time depends both on deep internal needs and desires and on the circumstances operating in the marriage at the time.
Four basic roles are seen in most marriages. The first is the mother-son role. It seems to be a feature of female behaviour from childhood onwards for a woman to want to care for the things she loves. She expresses her love in very practical, often domestic, ways and wants to be loved in return for her efforts. If her caring and loving activities are ignored or rebuffed then she fears she is being taken for granted and bad emotional tensions build up. She interprets her husband’s lack of appreciation as a lack of love for her. This caring she needs so badly to express is a form of mothering. Some men, as we have seen, cannot allow themselves to be dependent and they thereby deprive their partner of a major source of satisfaction. In reality all men need some mothering from their wives, but if this behaviour oversteps the mark and becomes bossy and overbearing as opposed to loving and caring, many men cannot cope, and they rebel. Such marriages often take on a new lease of life if the man is ill or has a coronary, for example. Now his wife is really needed in her mothering role. She comes into her own and her husband loves her for it. Even when her husband is dead and her children gone, many such women channel their mothering role into caring for others or for animals.
The arrival of children disturbs the mother-son role in many marriages and this is why so many problems arise around the time of a first baby. Many a woman is quite happy mothering her husband in the early years of marriage. Once a baby comes along though he has to share this mothering with someone else and many men become jealous. They may become depressed, have an affair, or indulge in other disruptive behaviour. However if both partners become involved in caring for the child whilst making an effort to maintain their own relationship the marriage is actually enriched.
The other side of the mother-son coin is the father-daughter role. Some women do not believe in the worth of this role — asserting that it simply amounts to men being dominant and paternalistic. This view unfortunately deprives their men of a vital function they feel the need to fill in relation to their wife, that of pleasing, protecting and providing for her. Many marriages work for a good deal of the time in this role without friction, and the father-daughter role-play is implicit rather than obvious. This works well because the man is not endlessly dominant and the woman endlessly submissive — there is a shifting dominance within the overall roles. Some women, once they have children, start to call their husband ‘Daddy’ along with the children. Such women have reverted to the blissful stage of their own lives when they are happy to be loved unconditionally by their father, whose rules and regulations they accepted, but within the confines of which they knew they could get their own way most of the time. They flirt with their husbands continuously, whilst at the same time regarding them as someone whom they can trust always to love them unconditionally.
Some women find such a picture quite disgusting but most of those who adopt this role find that it suits them best. In this role they boost their husband’s self-confidence and he in turn feels strong and behaves better both to them and to their children.
The third, and probably most basic, role is the friendship role. This is discussed later.
The fourth role is the lover role. The emotional aspects of loving are discussed elsewhere as are the physical aspects but here we ought to look at the damage that is done even before the couple meet and marry. We saw in Chapter i how Western child-rearing tends to make sex out to be rude, nasty or even dirty, and then we wonder why it is that teenagers start on their careers as lovers with negative ideas. It is important because the way we behave in the lover role greatly influences the way we behave as parents, and the vast majority of married couples have children.
A lot of research has proved beyond doubt that a woman’s sexuality is inextricably tied up with her mothering abilities and, vice versa. A woman who is at ease with her body, who is orgasmic, and enjoys intercourse and her relationship with her husband, also finds childbirth, breastfeeding and the rearing of babies easier and more enjoyable. This all has deep implications for the way she thinks of and cares for babies. A woman who is a good lover is almost always a good mother, so it makes great sense for couples to work together to ensure that the woman enjoys all aspects of her sexuality so that her confidence and enjoyment of them are boosted. Researchers have shown that some women experience clitoral enlargement whilst giving birth and may consciously experience birth and breastfeeding as sexually arousing. A woman’s sexuality is not simply manifested by her intercourse performance; it is a continuous facet of her personality, expressed by her clothes, the way she walks and sits, her hairstyle, the way she cares for and feeds her babies and what she does with her husband. To confine the concept of a woman’s sexuality to her performance in bed is to misunderstand the whole subject and to underestimate women as highly sexual creatures in everyday life. Most men are guilty on this count, at least to some extent.
So, being good lovers and encouraging each other in the lover role is very important, not only for immediate pleasure but also as a rehearsal for and reinforcement of the parenting role. A woman who is a good lover often behaves in a loving, motherly way towards her husband before and especially after intercourse and a man who is a good lover practices his powers of tenderness and affection, which can then be shared with his children.
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