'baby you do you'

this is the best thing to hear come out of my husband's mouth.

although it might just tie with him saying that the two of us shouldn't necessarily prop up our entire plan to buy a house on his graduation and eventual job because "we have two futures to think about." what's that? a marriage where i don't have to plan my life around my husband's career? no one prepared me for this in my girlhood.



on a related note, today i was skimming a blogger's "book" (so sad that blogger books never turn out) and she had a section on good marriage advice. the first ping of advice was NOT to marry your best friend, with the reason being that asking about your hair or your jeans or talking about your period should be reserved for your "real bff" which i'm guessing she's saying has to be a girl. essentially, it was bad writing for: "don't expect your husband to be your girlfriend."

now, something feminists don't talk about much (that i've encountered yet except for toni morrison and gloria naylor) but that i think about a lot is how traditional spousal relationships are HUGE nails in the coffin for gender equality. i don't know quite how to put this in words yet but the essence of what i'm describing is:

a woman is on her period and her husband tries to initiate sex. to discourage him, she says,

"not tonight, honey, i'm tired."

it blows my mind that this is an actual thing that people do. rather than warn him that she's on her period--wait, let's back up to how does he not already know she's on her period when he lives with her??--she makes up some excuse to, i assume, spare him what are apparently the gory details of even having to hear her say that her uterus is shedding its lining like the uteri of an innumerable amount of people on the earth all do every three weeks.

then again, it also blows my mind when i spend a weekend at my parents' house and realize my mom actually cooks every meal by herself even though there are three other people over the age of 18 and no one under the age of 14 living there (all male). even though i watched her do this every day growing up, i still can't believe she actually spends at least three hours of her every day on this. so maybe i'm not coming from a strong place anyway.

to be fair, not everyone likes to talk about periods. or jeans. or hair. or cars. or baseball. there are women that don't like talking about periods, just like there are men that don't like talking about periods. but men who throw up their hands and get annoyed when any kind of "girl talk" comes up get to do that and get a pass from having to take interest in other people on the planet only because society teaches them they can and that lady things aren't worth talking about because they're gross, embarrassing, or unworthy of men's time.

(interesting to note that women stereotypically don't do this. what women do is roll their eyes, smile, and say, "boys.")

what i don't understand people not getting is that we could change what we expect of men and it would be okay! actually, it would be great. by taking all of those conversations (and unavoidably, those fears, worries, stresses, joys, and intricate parts of who we are) only to our girlfriends, we are letting our husbands know that it's okay for them not to be involved in our lives on a basic level.

i think it's safe to assume that a traditional man who marries a traditional woman based on traditional criteria probably is not having a lot of intimate, gender-theory-thought-provoking interactions with women or people of different genders in general. maybe this is only true for mormons--traditionally, in the most conservative and officially, widely taught sense, we're supposed to date superficially (don't even date one on one, just in groups), and to date a LOT of people until we meet a good business partner--i mean marriage partner who checks off the items on our uninformed, gender-guided list.

this is all while not being particularly close to anyone of the opposite sex, because that could only mean trouble, of course. the traditional man gets an unexamined, unquestioned pass on understanding what it means to be female because expecting men to learn about or be interested in not just female-gendered things but actual women is emasculating and dehumanizing. even though the traditional man knows nothing of women ("what do women want, anyway?? not even they know!"), no one is alarmed by the fact that he is entering into, in a traditional relationship, stewardship over a woman.

so our traditional male has finally acquired a traditional female essentially by her respecting his masculinity in the right ways and him purposefully knowing nothing of her femininity. and what all this leads to is a traditional, pretty superficial relationship consisting of people continuing to play up their gender roles (and having a lot of traditional marital problems, which then become accepted as "woman are just that way" and "men are just that way", which then become normalized, which then become the punch lines of marriage-themed "ball and chain" jokes, which then teach the next generation how to gender and be in a gendered marriage). a man in this situation will never have any reason or framework to rethink gender roles because the only woman he knows is great! she loves traditional gender roles!

i imagine being in a traditional marriage is like never actually coming close to your spouse as a human being. essentially, in protecting the "purity" and "innocence"--or, essentially, the separation of the genders--they are rendered inherently unable to relate to each other in life, and they aren't expected to. essentially, by dancing the dance that upholds the traditional gender dichotomy a person is saying that them acting out a gender role is more important than them getting human understanding for the unique parts of them as an individual.

i guess what i'm saying is that it's not enough for feminism to talk about abuse in relationships. (not trying to belittle abuse... there's obviously an urgency to abuse that is light years away form being addressed, despite all the effort already being made.) we really do need to expect the genders to look at each other in a different way, and people in relationships should be the first, not the last, to do this. i guess i'm saying that i'm for a comprehensive and objective sexual education (including the mechanics of human pleasure, not "male pleasure = boys are visual" and "female pleasure = women are sooo emotional"). i guess i'm saying that it should be weird for women to take their problems to their girlfriends instead of their husbands, not the other way around, and also that everyone regardless of gender should cultivate wonderful friendships with everyone else, regardless of gender. it should be more normal for husbands and guys in relationships with women to be feminists than not to be feminists. in 2015, a woman should be able to let her partner know that she's on her period, and they should be as frank in return.

mostly i'm saying the genders need to stop giving each other permission to go on being respectful (or not so respectful) strangers.

also, i realize more all the time how spoiled and truly privileged i am to have wonderful friends and an amazing husband.