I haven't even figured out how to customize this blog, but for the first time in a long time I've wanted to weigh in on an issue dear to my heart and about which I've been writing for twenty-five years: the transformation of briliiant, sexy, beautiful women into Wives. (I'm late on this, I know, but only because I'm not blog-savvy yet; my "posts" have always been cast in print, or on someone else's site--articles for Match, or Yahoo.) So....that said, I was struck last week by something I saw on the Bill Maher show last week about the Spitzer debacle, and it was the one time I felt moved to say something.
There they were, a montage of six couples, including Silda and Michelle, and Dina McGreevey and Suzanne Craig. Each of these beautiful women had a weirdly similar look, as if she'd been put through a sort of reverse makeover, an insidious process of undoing that had left her looking not just beleagured--who wouldn't be?--but more generic and familiar and sad; as if , in undergoing the socially mandated process of becoming a good wife (and a good political wife, which only adds more goodness-pressure) she'd lost something wild and lawless, something clear in her and essential to her very being--that womanly vitality no doubt her husband once found irrrisistible.
"New Rule," Bill Maher began, on that delicious last segment of his show. "On the day you face the press about your extramarital sexual escpades, leave the wife at home. She's already humiliated. And now you're going to drag her in front of every legitimate media outlet known to man? And For News?!" Yes, a good point. But here's what got me: Maher's next words, uttered against the backdrop of the drawn faces of these wives: "Besides,these pricture don't say, 'Look at my wife, still by my side.' They say, 'Look at my wife. Can you blame me?'"
We're talking about the likes of Michelle Paterson and Silda Spitzer here, two women who are hardly in the "Now take my wife....PLEASE," category of "wife," by any stretch of the imagination. These are the best and brightest; the smartest, prettiest, savviest and, yes, even the youngest! These are women wholse accomplishments and looks and position are the envy of other women! So what IS IT about them that can be joked about?
It's this: The kind of rigidity that's come over them; the vigilance in their expressions--that look of protectiveness toward men that they learn as dutiful wives, combined with the blurring of their own best interests; a goodness and carefulness that comes over the faces of even the youngest most autonomous of women once they're sanctioned by society; a lack of spontaneity that becomes a lack of vitality that all too often becomes, finally, a lack of self.
"Why don't I feel like ME anymore?" so many fantastic newly married women asked me when I was researching my book on the high rate of depression among even the youngest American wives. They still ask me, many years later, with such regularity that I became trained as a therapist so I could find out more and answer them responsibly and helpfully. The process begins the moment the rock goes on a woman's hand, if not the moment the word "marriage" floats by her consciousness. She begins to speak differently--even to her husband-to-be; to oversee him a bit; watch over his calorie intake; his drinking. She even starts dressing differently--dumps her short skirts; the tight camis--all in the name of wifely propriety. Nothing drastic; nothing, really, even noticeable. Until, of course, it is. She begins to wonder why she doesn't feel beautiful anymore. Or sexy. Or fun. This isn't some glitch I'm noticing, this wifely blurriness that starts as "I'm married now; I have to look and act it" and becomes over the years, "Yikes, I don't even know who I am anymore!" It's an epidemic. And it's not about aging. And it's not funny. It's about what I call matrimorphosis: morphing into a wife.
One of the best things we can do for a woman when she marries is to avoid rehashing the old stuff that came up in the Spitzer case--whether a wife should leave or stay (that's her business, not ours); whether men will or should or can stop cheating (give it up); whether it's her fault he cheated (omigod, THAT old ridiculous idea again); or--and this one killed me--whether a wife should stay home with the kids or pursue her own career (the worst of all)--and give her a really useful wedding present. We can alert her to the fact that, even as she may want marriage more than anything in the world, and even though everyone applauds her, the price of admission needn't be the trading in of her womanliness, her wildness, her self for some selfless, stiff devoted wife. We can tell her she may not believe it now, but that it can happen to the best women. We can tell her it's a trade she'll be done in by. And as proof, we can show her the faces of these women who weren't forewarned.
--Dalma Heyn