I ONCE asked my friend Sonia what she had learned from her marriage. Her answer was—if I were as mature then as I am today, I’d have done a better job of it. We would probably not have split up.
But what I thought to myself was the contrary. If I had been as mature then as I am now, I wouldn’t have married my husband! I’d have used my left brain. Everything he is, I am not, everything he doesn’t like, I enjoy. He likes normal, I like weird.
How could we have stood each other for 58 years? Because couples in the ’50s got married and stayed married. Through sickness or health, poverty or wealth, drought or deluge, paradise or inferno.
I used to think my tiis lang generation was such a cop-out. But as Babeth said, you have to be kinda stupid and kinda naive to survive marriage.
On hindsight, I think I was pretty lucky to have belonged to that generation. Time gave my husband and myself the opportunity to ripen, to discover the grooves where our opposites could fit, and find the tender spots in each other.
If splitting up were as acceptable then as it is today, we wouldn’t have reached this place of contentment, or enjoyed the triumph (and smugness) of having weathered so many storms, of having produced the excellent children that we have.
In the ’70s, how I envied much younger friends who belonged to the next, the Beatles generation, with their pot sessions, and their cry of Make Love, Not War! While prisoner me was chained to a rocking chair, breastfeeding baby after baby. They would tell me, why don’t you fly the coop, you’re so different from each other, why can’t you just be free like us?
In the ’50s, few wives went to work, we didn’t know how to earn a living, we’re fully dependent on provident mates. Had I wished to, where would I go? What would I eat? Could I ever see my children again? As simple as that. No choice!
Weather-beaten matron
The hippie period was volatile for young marriages. The concept of Open Marriage had already been introduced and you seemed so backward if you didn’t at least go with the idea.
But after a few years, the glamour of the flower generation began to fade as their marriages fell apart, their children suffering traumas and getting lost to drugs. It made me content to be a weather-beaten, faithful old matron.
But what really struck me in Sonia’s and my conversation was how different our answers were! It reinforced, more than ever, my suspicion that there is no rule, no prescription applicable to every marriage. It could be that in the most unlikely pairing, the crooked screw finds the right odd bolt. Couples learn to support each other’s neurosis.
Don’t ask questions
Cheloy Dans and I recalled the mores of our time which wives like us tried to subvert. Its rules: A wife’s first duty is to her husband. Live for your man. Always be home when he’s home. Wait for dinner with him, no matter how late he arrives (suck a few candies in between).
Don’t ask questions even if he smells of perfume or liquor. If he’s inebriated and throws up, wash him clean and tuck him in bed. You’ll be regarded as an ideal wife, dammit.
Don’t expect him to phone if not coming home for supper. Nor expect a call if bringing his gang home for dinner.
In a gathering of his colleagues, fade into background. Look good, dress well but not sexy. Don’t talk unless he talks first. And never, in a cocktail party, give an opinion.
Learn how to strategize, how to ask leading questions so he can arrive at what you wanted him to arrive at in the first place.
Feed your man’s ego. Let him shine. But be the power behind the throne! (Such manipulativeness would make today’s women’s libbers blanch!)
Frightening prospect
A woman’s choices today can cover either end of the rainbow. Babeth Lolarga was leery of institutions. A life like Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean Paul Sartre’s appealed to her. They lived together by day but went home to different apartments at night!
I thought I’d have my own version of it, Babeth said. So right after we married I stayed in Manila (with my parents) where I had a job. Only on weekends did I live with Rolly in Baguio (where he works). And that’s how we’ve been married for 26 years.
“Katrin and I are still very much a couple,” said Eric “Kidlat Tahimik” de Guia, of his nearing 30 years of marriage, “although I live in Ifugao and Katrin lives in Baguio. Living apart preserves our friendship. Marriages can get pretty sticky at close quarters.”
Says Peng Arriola: “If there’s any secret to marriage, it is not to be happy because you have a fine husband. It is just to be happy, period. And that means having a life of your own.”
I can’t live without you! should scare the daylights out of a man, said actress Cherie Gil. “What I’d like is someone who will say, ‘I can live perfectly well without you. But I choose not to.’”
The dear departed Odette Alcantara used to joke that “I’m going to leave you” is far less frightening a prospect than “I will NEVER leave you!!”
Full-time service
A life of one’s own may be the key to some marriages, but what about the wife who is truly happy making her husband’s life her business? She’s given up a growing career to serve him hand and foot, accompanying him everywhere, shopping for his clothes, cooking the food he likes, supervising house and car repairs, doing the driving, putting money in his wallet etc etc.
And the husband is okay with the arrangement, too (“We’re like pork and beans,” he beams). Full-time service implies the wife’s total control of the husband, but if it’s what works for that marriage, who are we to argue otherwise?
One man’s meat is another man’s poison. There’s this husband, on the other hand, who prides himself on being “objective, intelligent and scientific,” demanding complete independence of the family members from one another. He told his wife and children, You just stand on your own. You are always to be your own person.
So when Millie asked his opinion on whether she should accept a grant to Paris, he replied, it’s your life, you make your own decision. When the children asked him, what do you think, dad? His answer was the same. Make up your mind, kid, it’s your problem.
Once Millie found a bottle of Ponstan on her husband’s desk and asked him what he was taking it for. He pointed to his mouth. Root canal, he said. She never even had an inkling that he had a toothache! At a party, when asked if she could get him some food from the buffet, he snapped, I’m not an invalid!
It forced us to be strong and independent, said Millie. We knew he loved us but it can be so distressing! She almost envied Dawn, with her helpless husband, who expected her to hold his hand whenever! And so Dawn learned to hold it with her left hand and continue correcting papers with her right!
Don’t try too hard, was Maribel Garcia’s take. It’s like sleeping or trying to conceive a baby. Feverish trying achieves the opposite effect.
There should be something you like to do together, says Felice Sta. Maria. Like a hobby. Biking, gardening, bird watching, car racing, pets. Better yet, a common project. And marriages would fare better if it is accepted that one will always be put on edge by the other. Also, if one party is willing to give more.
For me it’s the capacity to be there when his/her demons are acting up, said Ning Tan. To be able to stand by and be a friend when the other has done some foolish thing. And that needs a lot of patience.
Extreme advice
The most extreme advice I’ve ever heard, though, was from a 75-year-old nurse who told my friend, “Kinukuriputan ka ng asawa mo? Kaliwain mo!”(“Your husband’s stingy with money? Be unfaithful!”)
You ask me whether I have a happy marriage? Peng Arriola retorts, “It depends on when you ask. But there’s no such thing as a perfect marriage. A wife who says hers is one must have grown up in the province, been born bobo, or is in a state of denial.”
“To some extent, I accept that there’s some luck involved in ending up with a good partner,” says Mariel Francisco. “But you have to do your share. What riles me up is when some embittered wives tell me, You’re so lucky! You married a fine man who takes care of you.
“But actually they had some pretty wild affairs with different men while married. And they would talk meanly to their husbands, rubbing in his shortcomings and his failings. Now in their 60s, alone, old, sick and miserable, these women make this drama-drama about me having all the luck!”
“A good marriage needs hard work and nurturing,” she continues. “They have no idea what a person had to sacrifice, what emotions had to be overcome just to adjust to the relationship. Because the weight of things is different for every person. Many things that are so hard for one party to accept may be no big deal to the other. And it’s draining because he can’t get it. Ano ba, he thinks, I give you a credit card, a car and driver anytime, what else can you want?”
Much of one’s married life, says Lorna Tirol, is spent trying to undo the traditional values planted by mothers in their sons.
And, said Ning Tan, “I realized that if I had followed the ‘ideals’ of marriage that had been programmed into me, my husband and I wouldn’t have been able to do the things we wanted to do. Such prescriptions were—a good husband must have a conventional job; you’ll miss out if you don’t want to have children; whither thou goest, I go, etc etc.”
“Marriage taught me not to be angry,” says Julie Lluch. “It makes you sick.”
“Good providers,” Sylvia Mayuga tells me, “are usually lousy lovers. The less reliable romantics are more imaginative (something I have yet to verify). When they’re good at one thing you can be sure they’re bad at something else. Everything’s a tradeoff.”
Revolution
According to a US feminism study, says Edna Manlapaz, it’s having a husband that makes a woman a feminist.
A new US research, offers Maribel Garcia, compares man-woman relationships of the present against Betty Friedan’s 30-year-old study documented in her book “The Feminine Mistique.” Today’s finding is that a revolution has already occurred.
It’s the women now who want more space, vacations without the spouse (nothing to do with love) which was the opposite of then when it was the husband who desired vacation without his wife.
Men today also fall in love harder (some at first sight), marry, and stay longer with their spouses. Thirty-eight to 39 percent of men want to accept the role of primary caregiver to the children, as against the previous 2 percent or so.
That’s for now, continues Maribel. As homo sapiens we’ve been morphing, adjusting, changing for 200,000 years. And we still haven’t succeeded in tracking down the determinants of a good partnership. So if the anchor of marriage is the human being, how is it possible to pin happiness down to a set of rules?
So, it’s still a kiss-to-kiss basis. Just muddle your way through, swim and scramble, climb and roll tumble, twist and turn, and slash and burn! You’ll get there.
But what I thought to myself was the contrary. If I had been as mature then as I am now, I wouldn’t have married my husband! I’d have used my left brain. Everything he is, I am not, everything he doesn’t like, I enjoy. He likes normal, I like weird.
How could we have stood each other for 58 years? Because couples in the ’50s got married and stayed married. Through sickness or health, poverty or wealth, drought or deluge, paradise or inferno.
I used to think my tiis lang generation was such a cop-out. But as Babeth said, you have to be kinda stupid and kinda naive to survive marriage.
On hindsight, I think I was pretty lucky to have belonged to that generation. Time gave my husband and myself the opportunity to ripen, to discover the grooves where our opposites could fit, and find the tender spots in each other.
If splitting up were as acceptable then as it is today, we wouldn’t have reached this place of contentment, or enjoyed the triumph (and smugness) of having weathered so many storms, of having produced the excellent children that we have.
In the ’70s, how I envied much younger friends who belonged to the next, the Beatles generation, with their pot sessions, and their cry of Make Love, Not War! While prisoner me was chained to a rocking chair, breastfeeding baby after baby. They would tell me, why don’t you fly the coop, you’re so different from each other, why can’t you just be free like us?
In the ’50s, few wives went to work, we didn’t know how to earn a living, we’re fully dependent on provident mates. Had I wished to, where would I go? What would I eat? Could I ever see my children again? As simple as that. No choice!
Weather-beaten matron
The hippie period was volatile for young marriages. The concept of Open Marriage had already been introduced and you seemed so backward if you didn’t at least go with the idea.
But after a few years, the glamour of the flower generation began to fade as their marriages fell apart, their children suffering traumas and getting lost to drugs. It made me content to be a weather-beaten, faithful old matron.
But what really struck me in Sonia’s and my conversation was how different our answers were! It reinforced, more than ever, my suspicion that there is no rule, no prescription applicable to every marriage. It could be that in the most unlikely pairing, the crooked screw finds the right odd bolt. Couples learn to support each other’s neurosis.
Don’t ask questions
Cheloy Dans and I recalled the mores of our time which wives like us tried to subvert. Its rules: A wife’s first duty is to her husband. Live for your man. Always be home when he’s home. Wait for dinner with him, no matter how late he arrives (suck a few candies in between).
Don’t ask questions even if he smells of perfume or liquor. If he’s inebriated and throws up, wash him clean and tuck him in bed. You’ll be regarded as an ideal wife, dammit.
Don’t expect him to phone if not coming home for supper. Nor expect a call if bringing his gang home for dinner.
In a gathering of his colleagues, fade into background. Look good, dress well but not sexy. Don’t talk unless he talks first. And never, in a cocktail party, give an opinion.
Learn how to strategize, how to ask leading questions so he can arrive at what you wanted him to arrive at in the first place.
Feed your man’s ego. Let him shine. But be the power behind the throne! (Such manipulativeness would make today’s women’s libbers blanch!)
Frightening prospect
A woman’s choices today can cover either end of the rainbow. Babeth Lolarga was leery of institutions. A life like Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean Paul Sartre’s appealed to her. They lived together by day but went home to different apartments at night!
I thought I’d have my own version of it, Babeth said. So right after we married I stayed in Manila (with my parents) where I had a job. Only on weekends did I live with Rolly in Baguio (where he works). And that’s how we’ve been married for 26 years.
“Katrin and I are still very much a couple,” said Eric “Kidlat Tahimik” de Guia, of his nearing 30 years of marriage, “although I live in Ifugao and Katrin lives in Baguio. Living apart preserves our friendship. Marriages can get pretty sticky at close quarters.”
Says Peng Arriola: “If there’s any secret to marriage, it is not to be happy because you have a fine husband. It is just to be happy, period. And that means having a life of your own.”
I can’t live without you! should scare the daylights out of a man, said actress Cherie Gil. “What I’d like is someone who will say, ‘I can live perfectly well without you. But I choose not to.’”
The dear departed Odette Alcantara used to joke that “I’m going to leave you” is far less frightening a prospect than “I will NEVER leave you!!”
Full-time service
A life of one’s own may be the key to some marriages, but what about the wife who is truly happy making her husband’s life her business? She’s given up a growing career to serve him hand and foot, accompanying him everywhere, shopping for his clothes, cooking the food he likes, supervising house and car repairs, doing the driving, putting money in his wallet etc etc.
And the husband is okay with the arrangement, too (“We’re like pork and beans,” he beams). Full-time service implies the wife’s total control of the husband, but if it’s what works for that marriage, who are we to argue otherwise?
One man’s meat is another man’s poison. There’s this husband, on the other hand, who prides himself on being “objective, intelligent and scientific,” demanding complete independence of the family members from one another. He told his wife and children, You just stand on your own. You are always to be your own person.
So when Millie asked his opinion on whether she should accept a grant to Paris, he replied, it’s your life, you make your own decision. When the children asked him, what do you think, dad? His answer was the same. Make up your mind, kid, it’s your problem.
Once Millie found a bottle of Ponstan on her husband’s desk and asked him what he was taking it for. He pointed to his mouth. Root canal, he said. She never even had an inkling that he had a toothache! At a party, when asked if she could get him some food from the buffet, he snapped, I’m not an invalid!
It forced us to be strong and independent, said Millie. We knew he loved us but it can be so distressing! She almost envied Dawn, with her helpless husband, who expected her to hold his hand whenever! And so Dawn learned to hold it with her left hand and continue correcting papers with her right!
Don’t try too hard, was Maribel Garcia’s take. It’s like sleeping or trying to conceive a baby. Feverish trying achieves the opposite effect.
There should be something you like to do together, says Felice Sta. Maria. Like a hobby. Biking, gardening, bird watching, car racing, pets. Better yet, a common project. And marriages would fare better if it is accepted that one will always be put on edge by the other. Also, if one party is willing to give more.
For me it’s the capacity to be there when his/her demons are acting up, said Ning Tan. To be able to stand by and be a friend when the other has done some foolish thing. And that needs a lot of patience.
Extreme advice
The most extreme advice I’ve ever heard, though, was from a 75-year-old nurse who told my friend, “Kinukuriputan ka ng asawa mo? Kaliwain mo!”(“Your husband’s stingy with money? Be unfaithful!”)
You ask me whether I have a happy marriage? Peng Arriola retorts, “It depends on when you ask. But there’s no such thing as a perfect marriage. A wife who says hers is one must have grown up in the province, been born bobo, or is in a state of denial.”
“To some extent, I accept that there’s some luck involved in ending up with a good partner,” says Mariel Francisco. “But you have to do your share. What riles me up is when some embittered wives tell me, You’re so lucky! You married a fine man who takes care of you.
“But actually they had some pretty wild affairs with different men while married. And they would talk meanly to their husbands, rubbing in his shortcomings and his failings. Now in their 60s, alone, old, sick and miserable, these women make this drama-drama about me having all the luck!”
“A good marriage needs hard work and nurturing,” she continues. “They have no idea what a person had to sacrifice, what emotions had to be overcome just to adjust to the relationship. Because the weight of things is different for every person. Many things that are so hard for one party to accept may be no big deal to the other. And it’s draining because he can’t get it. Ano ba, he thinks, I give you a credit card, a car and driver anytime, what else can you want?”
Much of one’s married life, says Lorna Tirol, is spent trying to undo the traditional values planted by mothers in their sons.
And, said Ning Tan, “I realized that if I had followed the ‘ideals’ of marriage that had been programmed into me, my husband and I wouldn’t have been able to do the things we wanted to do. Such prescriptions were—a good husband must have a conventional job; you’ll miss out if you don’t want to have children; whither thou goest, I go, etc etc.”
“Marriage taught me not to be angry,” says Julie Lluch. “It makes you sick.”
“Good providers,” Sylvia Mayuga tells me, “are usually lousy lovers. The less reliable romantics are more imaginative (something I have yet to verify). When they’re good at one thing you can be sure they’re bad at something else. Everything’s a tradeoff.”
Revolution
According to a US feminism study, says Edna Manlapaz, it’s having a husband that makes a woman a feminist.
A new US research, offers Maribel Garcia, compares man-woman relationships of the present against Betty Friedan’s 30-year-old study documented in her book “The Feminine Mistique.” Today’s finding is that a revolution has already occurred.
It’s the women now who want more space, vacations without the spouse (nothing to do with love) which was the opposite of then when it was the husband who desired vacation without his wife.
Men today also fall in love harder (some at first sight), marry, and stay longer with their spouses. Thirty-eight to 39 percent of men want to accept the role of primary caregiver to the children, as against the previous 2 percent or so.
That’s for now, continues Maribel. As homo sapiens we’ve been morphing, adjusting, changing for 200,000 years. And we still haven’t succeeded in tracking down the determinants of a good partnership. So if the anchor of marriage is the human being, how is it possible to pin happiness down to a set of rules?
So, it’s still a kiss-to-kiss basis. Just muddle your way through, swim and scramble, climb and roll tumble, twist and turn, and slash and burn! You’ll get there.
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