Truth be told, real love is not keeping score and realizing that men and women were designed, generally speaking, to be together.

The couples that get it, find the whole war of the sexes silly, because they genuinely they have good relationship with one another.

It's a choice and part of who you are, you choose the kinds of relationships that are right for you with the right person. Whether that is tradtional marriage, open marriage, no marriage, or what have you.

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I liked that exploration and it was the end of the piece. Bummer.

I like the idea of an equitable partnership but what I've noticed is that what it "equitable" or "equal" gets defined differently and with a gender bias regardless of the empirical reality.

Being a SAHD who never experienced the owning-class glories of the job (I'm the guy that got run away from at playgroups, yelled at in grocery stores for being a selfish man to make my wife work, chose to do it out of pure desire for the enterprise--I was underemployed, she was not, I stayed home, period--etc.), equity was a really surprising thing to try to live out. Both of us came from traditional households neither wanted to replicate in our own. We came in as equals and wanted to remain equals. Of course capitalism the early 1990's and all manner of craptasms along the way played havoc with that plan. But once I was a SAHD I learned the rules of the game are largely perception based.

I've often had to counter the accusations of "sloth" or "competence" with the issue of "how is it defined?" Clearly I was cleaning daily, the offspring was fed, clean, happy, thriving, the dog was walked and insane as always, bills got paid, the admin of the house was to the status quo so why was I getting the bidness all the time. I had to find out and while my intuition was good enough for me it wasn't for her, so I went empirical to try to find out.

For me, "Clean" means "the absence of dirt," or at least any dirt that is removable or harmful in some manner. Sometimes you just have to throw shit out and start over. But Clean didn't mean that same thing to my mate, it meant, "when I do it myself." Her social conditioning by her working class mom in a conservative household meant, woman does it, it's clean. man does it, woman must clean it. I did an experiment to test this, documenting with photos and dates and times for three months. I had her right there on the record, re-cleaning things I'd done daily. And, her memory of those three months is, 'I have to do all that extra third shift work, buddy.' The experiment documented some other things like timing and schedule adjustments, priorities, etc. Mostly I realized even when there are legitimate empirically documented changes in behaviors, perception is still largely a social construct too and as long as perception remains tied to gender, the "Other" gender will be stuck with a crapshoot.

I'm convinced equity is still the goal, but as long as our social constructs and personal repetitions exist, change will be slow indeed.

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I put an asterisk next to living together, because "living together", to me, means living pretty much as you would in a marriage, but without the papers, etc. "Living together" would not be, IMO, living with and/or off your parents and renting an apartment so you can get together for sex. That is a good way of staving off a rude awakening. Starting a marriage with even the possibility of the thought "I've got you now, you can't get away" in the back of one or both of the partners' minds is not a good start to a marriage. I think "engagement" is a good idea, but not the old-fashioned kind where you only see the pretty part of your partner and are always careful to hide any "warts" in your own personality. If people do it this way, by the time they get married, I think they will feel a lot more confident about their marriage and about each partner's standing in the marriage, about mutual respect, to say nothing of just knowing their partner better all-around before actually signing the papers.

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Ideas and experiences are emergent. Institutions aren't. We still struggle to divest ourselves of (organised) religion itself as a societal institution. What hope have we of reforming our perceptions regarding the core ideas/truths/function of marriage?

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