The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (61 page)

From a woman’s point of view: “I married my husband when he was still on the fence about having children, then used relationship blackmail (‘I intend to have children, starting by the time I’m 30. If not with you, then we’ll split up and I’ll find someone else.’) to push him over the line. I’m not proud of it and today I can’t believe my amoral chutzpah—but I did tell him that BEFORE we were married, at least, so he could have taken his out
right there. As it was, each of us gambled on [the] other’s changing his or her mind—and I won, and he’s an AWESOME father of our three.” Comment by Jamie McArdle at
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/02/abortion-would-we-change-our-minds-if-we-only-knew/71331/
.

And as a man sees it, “She and I kept our pre-marriage money in separate accounts, and the post-marriage money are [sic] comingled in joint accounts. I brought our house into the marriage, but for years I paid for the mortgage and maintenance out of my personal money, so the house stayed out of the community. I quietly started using community money to pay for the mortgage about 5 years into the marriage.”

And the same man, following up in response to another commenter who was disturbed that he had “some sort of secret relationship test that you didn’t want to let her in on”: “When I got married, of course I hoped the marriage would last. But our whole exercise of separating the comingled from the uncomingled is to prepare for when it doesn’t. It’s a wise precaution, when so many marriages don’t last. After the 5-ish years, I just felt secure enough in the marriage and in our maturity that I thought it was no longer necessary to prepare against the possibility of a divorce. Was it a test? I guess you can call it that, but it was nothing so discrete. Balancing my check book one night, I suddenly realized it was silly to keep unmingled my premarriage assets, so I stopped. The test, if you want to call it that, happened in increments and subconsciously over 5 years. Now, a banker friend did have an explicit concept of vesting. He had a pretty concrete schedule of moving assets into the community, and he stuck to it. They’re still happily married, as far as I can tell.” Comments by “garysixpack” and “yet_another_dave,”
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/02/money-talks-yours-mine-and-ours/70664/#
.

Any two people trying to get along encounter frictions that have to be worked through; any reasonable people know that the fault is never all on one side. Even in relationships with clear and very narrow limits (between coworkers, for example), people learn that they have to curb their own tempers and expectations to get along.

And a woman in a romantic relationship with a man feels an infinitely greater need to learn accommodation. Not so much because men are particularly unaccommodating, as because women are caught between two overpowering desires. On the one hand, women have a compelling need to have everything just so. We want our houses decorated according to our own taste and our kitchen utensils arranged by our own organizational principles; we want our weddings to be just like we’ve imagined since we were eight years old; we want our husbands to guess what we want for our birthdays; we want Valentine’s Day to unfold just the way we’ve secretly been hoping it would. A woman wants a man to meet a thousand expectations she has about what her man will be like. On the other hand, the ordinary woman has a real talent for generous, self-critical, even self-sacrificing, love. (Joseph McPherson, a friend who became the headmaster of a girls’ school after a long career educating boys, told me the thing that has surprised him most: girls are so eager to please—they care so much about and work so hard to meet the teachers’ expectations.) Any woman seeing a man as a potential mate is at some point going to become frustrated that he doesn’t exactly meet her expectations. She’s going to want to ask him to change. But any woman of sense is going to realize very soon that some of her wishes are unreasonable. She’s going to begin struggling against the worse angels of her nature, to learn to love more generously. This struggle, essential to happiness if you’ve got a long-term commitment you can count on, can be a fatal distraction from the task of figuring out how to pick the right person in the first place.

Which is one reason Jane Austen’s heroines don’t “work on their relationships” until they’ve got permanent relationships. During courtship, they expect men to be the ones working hard to please. (As Henry Tilney explains when he’s comparing dancing to marriage, men’s and women’s “duties are exactly exchanged; the agreeableness, the compliance are expected from him” in dancing; from her, in marriage.)

Well, the angry women’s studies professor would have just one thing right. Jane Austen was—don’t faint from shock, now—no fan of sex outside marriage. But if you think Jane Austen was, either consciously or unconsiously, in league with the patriarchy to keep women inexperienced for the benefit of possessive men, please tell me what you’re smoking. And if you think the rules Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot live by put them at the mercy of men’s greed and selfishness—in comparison with modern women like Marguerite Fields, say—please explain where you’ve been for the past few decades of the mating scene on Planet Earth.

“‘But why should you think,’ said Lucy, looking ashamed of her sister, ‘that there are not as many genteel young men in Devonshire as in Sussex?’ ...

“‘I suppose your brother was quite a beau, Miss Dashwood, before he married, as he is so rich?’

“‘Upon my word,’ replied Elinor, ‘I cannot tell you, for I do not perfectly comprehend the meaning of the word. But this I can say, that if he ever was a beau before he married, he is one still, for there is not the smallest alteration in him.’”