I am a wife, but not a Spouse. Who is? Picture Maria Shriver during Arnold's campaign to become governor of California. Picture Stedman Graham standing beside Oprah Winfrey. Picture yourself at your husband's office Christmas party, at a gathering of his relatives, or hanging out with his lifelong friends.
We all sometimes play supporting roles in the drama of each other's lives, and sometimes the role we play is Spouse. In certain relationships, this role is permanent. In many marriages, it's more fluid.
Last weekend, my husband was The Spouse. We were at a dinner party Saturday night and neither of us knew many people there. A few were my co-workers, but most were strangers. Gary and I were seated at a table with our son and another family. It was the perfect arrangement (parents can almost always find things to talk about), until I left the room for what turned into 15 minutes or so and suddenly realized I had left him alone. Moments later, he found me (talking to another mom) and asked, "Where did you go?" The other mom turned to me and said, "Julie, you need to understand. Gary's a Spouse now."
After seven years of marriage, Gary became a Spouse last year when he left a place that had been home for two decades in order to further my career. Where I now work, he is more the rule than the exception. There are many spouses who have done the same, leaving hometowns and jobs of their own for the sake of their families. They don't quite form a community, although if they organized they'd be the most powerful union around.
Without collective bargaining, the job of being a Spouse can be a lonely one.
A Spouse is often the one at the party standing by the food and drink table, wearing an invisible T-shirt with a scarlet "S" on it and the words: "I'm with him."
Which isn't to say Spouses are passive or that their lives are empty. In fact, it's because the opposite is true that the role can chafe. It's nice to hear, "Your wife is such an asset to this company" and "You're so lucky to be married to him!" (Advice: Take a deep breath and try not to debate this one). What's disturbing is that those comments are not always followed up with questions about the Spouse's interests and activities. There is an assumption that only one of you is interesting, and it's the other one.
Privately, those of us with Spouses are very aware of what we owe our partners for playing this part. The calculation is something sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls "the economy of gratitude."
It is how we recognize certain acts as "gifts" and then express appreciation for them. When you complain of being taken for granted, it is often because you have given an unacknowledged emotional gift to your partner -- like that half-hour he spent unwinding after walking through the door last night.
Hochschild offers some weightier examples of these emotional exchanges in her book, "The Second Shift," which was published in 1989 but still reflects the way many of us feel today:
"If a man doesn't think it fits the kind of 'man' he wants to be to have his wife earn more than he, it may become his 'gift' to her to 'bear it' anyway. But a man may also feel like the husband I interviewed, who said, 'When my wife began earning more than me I thought I'd struck gold!' In this case his wife's salary is the gift, not his capacity to accept it 'anyway.' When couples struggle, it is seldom simply over who does what. Far more often, it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude."
These exchanges, over time, can determine whether a relationship is thriving or operating with a growing deficit that the children will be repaying to therapists for years to come.
So how do you balance the emotional budget when one partner is going broke and the other is becoming a metaphorical millionaire? What does the imbalance do to our sense of ourselves? What does it mean for our families?
These questions are not unimportant in a country where some Spouses are second-class citizens because Visas are granted to people whose accomplishments can be counted and deposited in the bank.
It wasn't always this way. We used to value Spouses more. Sexism provided a paternalistic umbrella that shielded women and offered praise for being a good wife and mother. But once we decided to brave the elements without protection, we became vulnerable to the hailstorm of increased work and family expectations. And so did our husbands, as many of them became our Spouses.
These men bear the added burden of overcoming social expectations of their gender, as do the women who remained, or have become, Spouses when society no longer automatically casts them in that role.
Our cultural economy of gratitude values relationships less than individual achievements. Here's one measure. What do you ask someone when you first meet? Usually, it's "So, what do you do?"
Some of us live in the silence that follows that question.
So, do us all a favor. The next time you're at a party and see a Spouse, walk over to him or her and say, "I don't know very much about you. Tell me about yourself." Don't just be polite, be interested. Be sincere. Be grateful.
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