It may be his duty to put up and shut up and keep on doing the late night feeds and the early morning commuting, but it’s hardly very appealing. Nor is insisting on these duties a very clever way of trying to hold on to a husband, if that is what a woman wants.
Try a little tenderness, she thinks:
When you want to please your child, or your lover, you think hard about what might make them happy and then do it. It’s not a chore, or even if it is that hardly matters; it’s an act of love or of loyalty.Act like you like him and would like him to stick around? How retro. My objection to feminism in its present incarnation is less philosophical (although it is that) and more that I can't. take. the whining. If we're to live in a world where women are more like men, I at least demand the positive side effect of more stoicism and taking it like men. But no, we have to hear the most privileged of all generations (by any measure: opportunity, wealth, time-saving devices -- do you scrub the stains out of your power suit on a washboard down by the river?) blather on tearfully or angrily about how "stressed" and "overwhelmed" everyone is all the blippity blippity time.
I think that my generation, and later ones even more so, have been led astray by romantic 1960s notions of sincerity and authenticity; it began to be believed that in the name of existential good faith and psychological well being individuals ought always to act and speak in accordance with their feelings — telling it like is and letting it all hang out. So sex without passionate desire — the boffe de politesse of a kindly marriage — is inauthentic.
Similarly, talking without expressing all one’s resentments and expectations and anxieties is a kind of insincerity, or dishonesty even.
Yes! And she notices that this is mere self-centeredness, which is the opposite of love.
But this rather adolescent attitude is entirely at odds with the tolerance, discretion and generosity of body and spirit needed in a good marriage.Yes, yes, yes. Not to mention it's just tedious and durned annoying. Not only to others, but to yourself --if you dwell on the little trials of daily life, you magnify them. Whereas, as Pope Benedict was saying just this morning, gratitude goes a long way:
God's mercies accompany us every day. It is enough that we have a vigilant heart to perceive it. We are too inclined to take note only of the daily cares that are imposed on us, as sons of Adam. But if we open our hearts, then even immersed in our daily concerns, we can continuously see how God is good with us, how He thinks of us in the small things, thus helping us to deal with larger problems.
