THE MARRIED LIFE
We all enter marriage with unconscious expectations of what our spouse should be like based on our past experiences. A man may expect the admirable traits that his mother has, while a woman may emulate certain traits of her father. On the other hand, if the parents were not good role models, people often seek the opposite of what their parents were (even if they fail in this attempt).
My husband Tom’s mother was an excellent housekeeper and a good cook. Her home was always immaculately clean and she worked hard to keep it that way. These were qualities I emulated, while at the same time it seemed to set a high precedent that I wasn’t sure I could live up to. Tom assured me that this was not his main priority, though to this day he is more meticulous about house cleaning than I am, and he still prefers the type of meals his mother cooked while he was growing up.
Wanting to please my new husband when we were first married, I asked him, “What is one of your favorite meals?” He said, “Spaghetti!” Tom loves spaghetti to this day. So I was determined to make the best spaghetti ever. I got out my new cookbooks, which we got for wedding presents, and I began making different homemade spaghetti sauces. Sometimes they took hours to prepare.
Each time I made a sauce Tom would say, “This is good, but not as good as my mother’s.” Needless to say, I found that frustrating to hear. Finally, one time when we made a trip to Tom’s family home I asked his mother how she made her spaghetti sauce.
She said, “Oh, I just use Ragu!”
“Ragu?! You must be kidding,” I thought.
So, I put the cookbooks away and I started using Ragu. It was simpler anyway. It’s really not that Ragu is the best spaghetti sauce there is, it’s just that that’s what Tom was used to. So he likes it the best.
For my part, I used to tell stories about my father, who is a great man in my eyes. Tom, who in many ways is different from my father, would sometimes say, “Your dad is a hard man to live up to.” I didn’t want to pressure Tom to be just like my father, just like I couldn’t be just like his mother.
Sometimes in the diocesan marriage tribunal, where I work, I see the opposite happen. People want their spouse to be the opposite of what their parents were. Say a woman grew up with an alcoholic father. She may determine that she would never marry an alcoholic, only to do just that. Or someone from an abusive home will marry an abusive spouse. Sometimes it’s a matter of what they are used to, even unconsciously. It takes a clear choice and a lot of support to break those kinds of patterns.
Expectations can be hidden. We may not even be aware of them ourselves, but somehow being married brings them into the light, because our spouse has different expectations than we have. It’s good to identify our expectations and moderate them, grow into them or change them. The Holy Spirit can help us with this as it takes grace to change.
After all, I may still use Ragu, but I add things to make it better!
Mary Duddy is moderator of the tribunal of the Diocese of Honolulu.
