Marriage is Based on Equality

Is marriage sexist? I would say no.

While it is possible to look at marriage in a negative way, its status as the ultimate expression of love remains as it always was and it is both needed and desirable for couples today.

There are some who point at human history, especially patriarchal history, and view marriage as a product of that society. Marriage back then was just a transaction, the wife was just a chattel and all her worldly possessions belonged to her husband. She had no rights as such so it has been argued that it was a system of female bondage. The fact that “husband and wife” originally was written “housebond and waif” in English tends to support this view.

However, this view ignores the spiritual and relational reality of marriage today, plus it reduces marriage vows to something unimportant, as though any words will do at the wedding.

After all, what is marriage?

It is an institution where two people promise each other to be together until death and to do all they can to ensure this promise comes true. The wedding itself is the ceremony that records the promise, and the vows spell out the ways they should do all they can to ensure the promise comes true. Marriage vows don’t happen once – they must be repeated every day and decisions must be made that honor those vows. These decisions can be as mundane as who’s going to wash the dishes today to the big stuff, like what career moves one should make to support the continuation of the marriage. Holding down a job which involves lots of traveling and staying in hotels overnight should be stopped for a career that allows the partners to live together and share their lives without the two of them being separated by distance for long periods of time.

I believe my marriage to my wife is an intertwining of souls where we become one and this can and should only be separated by death. I made my promise on my wedding day, and I want to keep it until the end. This relationship is necessarily different to being boyfriend and girlfriend or something less than that, such as friends with benefits, a “doesn’t count” guy or just a one-night stand. What makes it different is that cast-iron promise. I must make absolutely every sacrifice necessary to maintain it until death. What is lacking in other forms of relationship is they are on an “until further notice” basis.

However, I can understand how marriage can sometimes appear sexist. My own marriage is a good illustration. I had a very nice wedding and lived with my wife for many happy years and we are still together now. For the first nine years, I felt our marriage was doing OK. I had a steady job, we had enough money to treat ourselves once in a while and bringing up our son added to our joy.

Then my wife was diagnosed with lung cancer. With its two-year life expectancy, suddenly my dreams of 30 or 40 years of marital bliss looked like they were going to drastically cut short. With this news, my wife announced that she was unhappy and bored in our marriage. She had been giving me hints, but I hadn’t been paying attention. I was boring in bed and she wanted to relocate back to her hometown to be cared for by her family. I was shocked and dismayed but wanted to continue my promise to make every sacrifice necessary to maintain it. She told me she felt like she was just staying at home and that she felt like she was my servant rather than my wife.

I felt bad about this. She had been my first girlfriend and I had been a virgin on my wedding day, saving myself for her. She was the first woman I’ve ever known. I immediately embarked upon searching online for sex and relationship advice. Regarding my relationship, I found out I had basically made every mistake in the book, including really simple stuff that most other guys would have made when they were 16 or younger. There wasn’t really much I could do about that – other guys were meeting girls at that age and so had a 15-year head start on me. Sex-wise, I found out I was still an absolute beginner level – still leaning my elbows on her hair, so her hair got pulled when she moved her head to the side, not knowing how to French kiss and a whole bunch of things. Concerning orgasms, I would just give her intercourse and blindly hope she would have one. I had tried a few things but nothing had happened.

When I found out information on how to give women orgasms, I was absolutely floored. On the one hand, I was deeply and profoundly grateful for what I found out. Nevertheless, it was still dramatically and substantially different to anything I had done before.

I suddenly realized there was absolutely no way I could have learned this with the trial-and-error approach I had been using. Giving women orgasms is a definite piece of knowledge that needs to be taught. It is not something you just stumble across by accident. Either you know how or you don’t. It’s a skill-set. There are ways to do it. If you don’t know the ways, you can’t do it. That’s that. The fact was, I didn’t know how. Why not?

I began to feel angry and resentful – not at my wife but at society in general. This sort of information is incredibly important for my marriage and I hadn’t been given it. What’s the reason? I felt angry this society we live in had blithely watched me walk down the aisle and make my marriage vows in front of God and His congregation, promising commitment until death, while at the same time denying me this knowledge and expecting me to make the best of it.

The fact is, THERE IS NO WOMAN who wants 50 years of orgasmless sex or even wants to sign up for it. I felt I had signed up for something without being given all the information necessary to make a success of it. How can I possibly maintain my promise without this information?

Further, there were lots of other things I later found out I hadn’t been told, besides orgasms, on a wide range of marital issues. I felt aggrieved by this situation. WHY HAD I NOT BEEN INFORMED?

So what about all these other married men? They must all suck in bed, too. I found there are large numbers of women, married or in relationships, incredibly bored and teed off with the whole marriage thing.

Further, other married men didn’t seem to be in a hurry to learn this stuff. They slapped women around, drank beer, wasted time and basically faffed around. The divorce rate is 50% – and you want to know why? These guys.

Since then, I have been struggling to return my marriage to the way I originally intended it to be on my wedding day. I have now been married for 15 years. My wife has lived 6 years with lung cancer, something I am very grateful for but the time limit pushes on.

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Marriage doesn’t have to be sexist. It will be as sexist as you want it to be, guys. If you’re just going to sit there drinking your beer not caring about her pleasure or how she feels, if you just treat her like a servant to sweep your floor and cook your dinner, if you give her 2-minute sessions of painful, orgasmless sex for years on end and you’re chill with this, then don’t be surprised that your marriage is sexist.

On my wedding day, I was happy and delighted this woman is my life partner. I intended to have a wonderful life with her. I intend for her to have amazing orgasms and mind-blowing sex. I intend our lives are filled with unending intimacy and bliss. I’m still committed to my vows. However, I was not given the information I needed to make this happen, thanks to a society who couldn’t care less about women’s pleasure or how women feel because we live in a society that doesn’t value women or treat them as human beings.

I believe marriage is an honorable institution, and that it possesses in itself nothing innately sexist. However, living in this patriarchal world, husbands should try their level best to ameliorate the negative effects of this society.

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