Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Give me a break! He's not a bay-bay!

While reading up on the recent Austrian-incest-prisoner info I came upon this really STRANGE article on CNN's Website:

By Sarah Jio
(LifeWire) -- Kristen Rounds, 26, admits that she's a little gaga over her man. "I'm like his mommy," the Monterey Park, California, resident says with a laugh about her fiancé, a first-year medical student.
Case in point: She picks out his clothes before they go out, styles his hair, makes his lunches (complete with "I love you" notes inside) and takes it upon herself to apply the toothpaste before handing him his toothbrush each night.
And then there's bathing. "When he's in the shower, he calls me in to wash his back," says Rounds, a publicist.
Over-the-top behavior? Rounds says no way. "He loves to be taken care of."
It's a scenario familiar to many relationship experts, who say that first comes love, then comes marriage, and then comes the husband in the baby carriage.
Nurturing gene on overdrive
Women find themselves mothering their husbands because of societal pressures to be the ultimate woman, says Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
"We've been taught that the way to show love is to do for others," she says. And, according to Schwartz, some women believe that the more they nurture, the better a woman they are.
"I was at a dinner party once," she says, "and I watched a woman lean over and start cutting up her husband's meat."
A bad idea? "It can work for some people," says Les Parrott, a clinical psychologist, an author on marriage and relationship topics, and a professor at Seattle Pacific University. He describes one couple he knows: "She packs his suitcase for him and takes care of him like a little kid. But it works for them."


This is so funny, yet sad too! What else are we going to do to make society even lazier than it already is? I may be weird, but I see marriage as a partnership, not a servant-ship. The whole idea of treating a husband like a child is only destined for damage.

Why do women feel like that they have to "baby" their husbands? Personally I don't think it is due to oxytocin, which the article later describes as the hormone that makes a women feel tender and loving towards her children and that may be the reason why women treat their spouses this way. Whatever! I think women deserve more credit--We are more than "emotional, hormonal child-bearers." I certainly won't feel pressured to baby any man ir order to keep him around.

Bottom line: There is a difference between "help" and "babying." Like I said earlier, marriage is teamwork. Saying "I do" means that both husband and wife are devoted to helping each other out for the rest of their lives, not cutting their food or putting the toothpaste on their toothbrush every night. Marriage is give and take, both parties should take care of each other. What's with this one-sidedness anyway? This is 2008, not 1808.

What do you think? Let me know.