I have a feeling that this entry might get a little long.  They do that when I’ve been up for a day, caring for a stray dog that found its way to our house.  (Strays tend to find me.  I’m okay with that, especially when they come in the cutest little puppy-package ever, and despite the fact that we have three already and I only have two hands.)

Yesterday…er…well, the day before, technically….when I was in the bookstore looking for books on the whole Wifely thing, my first thought was to hit the self-help section.

So I did.  And while I found several shelves of books on relationships, ranging in topic from how to marry the perfect man and how to change the perfect man you married, all the way to how to dump a man and be okay about that — I really didn’t find much on how to be a wife.  What to do, how to act, what all goes into it.  That kind of thing.

The religion section, shelved in the next aisle, was a little different.  By way of comparison, there were twenty-seven books on how to be a devoted wife.  (And, I might add, precisely ZERO on how to be a good husband.  Clearly, the Christian publishing industry thinks that either men don’t read or that it’s the women that need all the help.)

I eventually scrapped the idea of finding written inspiration and retired myself to the cooking section instead, but I did spend some time looking at a few of the books, which seemed to me to be diametrically opposed to one another.

The self-help books were all about what you could do, as a wife, to make your husband behave better.  The blame was squarely on the shoulders of the men in the relationships — they didn’t clean up after themselves, or they didn’t attend to your needs, or one of a host of sins that they were making.  The “inspirational” section’s books took a different tack, of course.  Most of them were about the biblical idea of marriage, and what it entails in order to be pleasing to the God they were talking about.  Much of the book I looked through had to do with the idea of submission, and what the wife’s responsibilites are, and about how the husband is always right unless he’s asking the wife to do something that would be a Sin, capital-S.

Between these two very different volumes, I had the thought that marriage in this day and age is a confusing thing.  It’s almost like there are two different ideas of what marriage even is.   The secular crowd has the whole idea of partnership of equals, each pursuing his or her own goals and ambitions separately and partnering on the decision-making.  The religious marriage is one of heirarchy and responsibility to one another — the woman, agreeing to marry a man, is taking a job, of sorts.  And it’s a job where she will always have a “boss” in her husband.

It also occurred to me that the divorce rate in this country is insanely high.  They’re saying (the ubiquitous They Who Know Statistics, I mean) that it’s somewhere around 60% of couples married today won’t still be married when they leave this earth.  That’s a little scary, and putting the two-and-two together made me a little angry.

Partnerships are hard to maintain.  Equal partnerships even moreso.  Look at businesses that are partnerships if you need an example of that — sooner or later, one of ‘em is going to either leave or be profoundly disgruntled at the other’s show of power, since they were supposed to be equal.  Without a Final Say Person, decisions are either made by consensus or not made at all. After all, there are only two choices and no deciding votes.

So why are we encouraging married couples to put themselves in a position where there’s no deciding vote, without a religious framework to say who’s in charge?  Which led me around to the fact that there are entire legions of people who think that marriage is outdated as a concept anyway, and for secular people, not really relevant anyway.  The word “husband” has that whole animal-husbandry connotation, and most modern women wouldn’t want to feel “kept” or “shepherded” anyway, because we’re taught that we’re equals in everything.

So who’s wrong?  The people who say that women should be equals in a marriage or the people who claim that wives should be submissive and subservient in all things to her husband of choice?  (Not subservient as a person, but within the context of the marriage itself.)

I’d intended to vent here a bit about the idea of submission being distasteful — and franky, a little scary — to me personally, but the philosophy behind it is fascinating to me.  It all comes down to what kind of a wife I want to be and what kind of a life I want to live, really, in the end.

I’m still not sure what’s right, though.