Dr. Eva Marcuschamer Stavchansky
How do we women want to be accompanied?
Most women marry for companionship and children, but children are not simply considered a blessing as they also include economic and emotional problems that we have to deal with.
Surveys indicate that after a few years of marriage, almost all women are less satisfied with the partnership with their husbands. With the arrival of children, men feel the need to work harder and better, and many wives begin to feel the loss of marital intimacy. When the children grow up and reach adolescence, let’s say after 20 years of marriage, only 6% are still very satisfied and 21% are very dissatisfied. However, it has been found that once children become independent, many of the marital problems diminish.
All we know now is that women are looking for more than just good sex; they are looking for love, respect, friendship, common interests and companionship. The question is, if there is no sexual gratification, companionship, emotional stability and children, why marry?
In the 1960s there was the idea that women’s employment should be lower than men’s and that they should submit their professional needs to those of men. By the 1970s, in many households, both partners were already working, but women continued to bear the greatest burden of household and child responsibilities, a situation that prevails to this day and which has become one of the greatest conflicts between working couples.
Men have gradually become more responsible towards domestic chores, and it has become apparent that the more educated men are, the more they participate at home. Among the intellectuals, mutual help exists more than in the middle and lower class couples where husbands still think that women are responsible for domestic tasks.
There is another social revolution that is taking place and at a much slower pace in Mexico, the participation of children in domestic chores.
Today, we see more men taking care of the household and successful women working because they are more productive than men. What is notorious is that there are two groups that have found it difficult to change the way they think about gender issues: the upper and lower classes, most of whom are housewives. In the middle class, however, both members of the couple work.
Why do women like to work?
Because they do not want to be financially dependent on their husbands. Women will continue to be considered the second sex while being financially dependent on men. Some women remember their mothers asking their fathers for money and having little to say about family finances. It is true that the more financial resources a spouse brings to the marriage, the greater the negotiating power of the couple. And it is the power that affects the decision-making that any couple must make, from career advancement to the division of domestic work.
Another assumption is that women work because they don’t want to be trapped in the house, they don’t want to be part of a small world. The more educated women are, the more they seek to expand their horizons.
In addition to the increased lifespan of women, the parenting period is very short. If women become pregnant at 30 and life lasts until 80, they only spend a third of their lives as mothers. Many even stop working while their children are young and then return to work.
Today there are good marriages with minimal or bad sex and bad marriages with exceptional sex, before love made sex possible, but today young women have sex with several men and then fall in love and then decide to live together. However, sex and love are not the basis for a long lasting relationship, common interests, values and goals, mutual respect and moral commitment can be as valuable as sex, love or money in maintaining a union are required.
And while most couples today enter marriage on an equal footing in professional and work circumstances, married life is not truly egalitarian. There have been many surveys, interviews and evaluations indicating that husbands have a more positive view of marriage than their wives. Singles have more problems than married women, while women are better off single than married. And this may be because women are more stressed than their husbands because of their work and family obligations and also because they care for their children, their elderly parents and even sick relatives.
When the couple divorces, the woman loses more financially, they generally lower their standard of living by 27% while the men increase it by 10%. And this is because the mothers get custody of the children, and the help they receive is not enough, besides the fact that the women earn 75% of what the men earn, having custody of the children hinders their professional performance.
In second marriages, the husband will most likely marry someone younger than his former wife, and the wife will marry someone her age or older. Unfortunately there are fewer male candidates because there are more of older women than older men, so widows marry less than widowers. Another difference between men and women is the ability to reproduce; a woman in her fifties loses the chance to become pregnant, while men remain fertile almost all their lives.
Women have other advantages. They live an average of seven years longer than men. In addition to being able to carry children within their bodies, they establish a unique connection with their children through pregnancy and breastfeeding. They have more friends and relate better to men than vice versa.
One thing we have learned in the last 30 years is that marriage is not the only possibility in life, first because women are no longer financially dependent on men, and therefore, no longer have to marry to survive. It has been seen that women entrepreneurs marry less.
There is a phrase that says the more women are paid, the less they want to get married’ and what happens is that more than marriage, maternity has become a problem for working women given the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers. While the single woman earns 90% of what a man earns, a woman with babies earns 70%.
We are living in a time when there have never been more people living alone, more couples living together without marriage and more homosexual couples living together. There are cities and countries where laws exist for couples who live together without marriage in order to have equal rights. Also, more and more women do not want to have children. On the other hand, there are more single mothers as 40-year-old women choose to have a child without marrying the baby’s father. This has its consequences because it has been seen that these children will grow up with more financial deprivation than those who are raised by a two-parent family.
What does a woman expect when she gets married? At least 50 per cent of marriages that last a lifetime, people usually continue to marry forever in 86 per cent of cases; children are no longer expected to hold the couple together because children are known to create conflicts in a marriage, marriages that overcome the problems of children’s education are likely to achieve a strong union and this will depend on the degree of intimacy they achieve. Being the most intimate witness to another person’s life is appreciated over time and a couple will eventually have to overcome the problems of their children, the infidelity of one or both of them, the death of their parents, the struggle of their children as they grow up.
While it’s true that many spouses end their relationship when one of them has an affair, others don’t, because many people think their union is very special, even if they have extramarital relationships. In addition, since many people start their sex life before marriage, it is hoped that they will be in a monogamous relationship after the wedding. We all have temptations, men and women today have the same possibilities of being unfaithful. But infidelity does not always lead to divorce or permanent bitterness, a marriage relationship is not always a matter of sex, and often an extramarital relationship unites the couple after the event.
How do we relate to men? Through our relationship with our mother…..
