Being a Wife

What does it mean to be a wife?

On August 10th, 2012, I became a wife. For the first time in my life, I felt like a metamorphosis had occurred. I was no longer a girlfriend or a fiancée or even just a me. I was an us. I was a wife.

Throughout my life, my thoughts on what it meant to be a wife have evolved and changed. When I was a little girl playing house with my friends I believed a wife stayed home and raised the children so the husband could make the money. When I was a young girl, I thought being a wife meant being sexy and desirable by your husband. When I was a teenager, I believed a wife was a woman who worked hard all day, just to come home and work hard all night; her priorities switching from bringing in an income to providing meals and love to her family.

Now that I have achieved the official title of wife, I find myself struggling with just what it means to actually be this female counterpart of a married relationship.

In my marriage, my husband and I are nearly equal earners when it comes to household income. We share duties in the house, but I feel more pressure now that I am a wife to keep the house clean and make the meals while my husband works long days in his job. I sometimes forget that I am also working long days at my job, but it suddenly feels as though that doesn’t matter. I want him to come home to a house that is clean with a warm meal on the table and an apple pie cooling on the window sill. I suddenly want to be June Cleaver.

At a Christmas party not long ago, a few of the women gathered and discussed life at home. Everyone took their turn talking about how much better their life would be without their husband. He didn’t help raise the kids. He didn’t know Johnny was allergic to peanut butter. He would rather be hunting than helping run the house. The lists went on and out. One girlfriend even ventured as far as to say that she could do a better job caring for the family if they her husband wasn’t around at all.

Newly engaged, I kept quiet, listening to their plights and their woes, silently feeling the dread creeping in. When I left that night, I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness. Tear burned in my eyes as I felt doomed to feel this way about my soon-to-be husband someday, too. When I got home, I crawled into bed with my then fiancé, and confided in him about the night.

“Promise me that won’t be us,” I whispered to him, still holding back my sadness. “Promise me you won’t ever feel like you’d do better without me.”

A year into my marriage, I have caught myself on more instance than I am proud to say out loud badmouthing my husband. He doesn’t clean. He never helps with the housework. I bet he doesn’t even know we own a vacuum.

When I have caught myself in these moments, I have had to pull myself away from the gossip and away from the negativity and collect my thoughts. I don’t for one instance believe I could handle this life without my husband’s companionship and support. I don’t for even the blink of an eye take for granted the hard work he is putting in to creating a stable financial future for us. Most of all, I know he never doubts how much I put into our life, either. We are a team. This is why we became a husband and a wife.

Still, there is a social stigma I feel pulled into over and over again; the stigma that says that wives complain about their husbands. Wives do more for the family. Wives lead a thankless life, and just grin and bear it.

I hate that, within a year, I have already let this poison creep into my mind. As with any poison, it is hard to remove once it has entered the blood stream. I do what I can from day to day to readjust how I perceive our roles and our relationship. The thing I have to keep reminding myself is that being a wife doesn’t mean I have to give into the sitcom version of married life. I need to keep reminding myself that my husband and I bring different talents and different views to our new life together.

And that is just the thing: it is our life. It isn’t anyone else’s – so why should I feel pulled into the negative vortex of ‘my husband is just a beer-drinking, ball-scratching, football-watching goon’?

Being a wife means being a partner. Being a wife means still being who I was the day I said ‘I do’. Being a wife means being a friend and companion; a confidant and a shoulder to cry on. It means celebrating successes, encouraging though failures, and communicating, communicating, communicating.

Being a wife is no different than being that shy girl he courted through letters and emails. Being a wife means being me.