What Happened to Eden

When you get engaged at nineteen, people have a lot of concerns. I probably should have had more concerns myself, to be honest.

My teen years were pretty wild, so I didn’t feel like I had a lot of wild oats to sow when I was in college. As long as I can remember, friends and family referred to me as an “old soul.” I took this to describe maturity, but it’s possible it actually meant “boring before her time.” Like I said – I got a lot of the exciting stuff out of the way young. I was ready to chill a little.

To their credit, my family didn’t belittle us or laugh when we got engaged. They wanted to be sure we were making the right decision, and insisted we wait until we graduated to get married. That sounded more than reasonable and would give us a nice long engagement to test drive playing house.

When there were no major bumps in the road and it became clear we still intended to get married, a family member gave me a book she thought would help me prepare to be a wife. Maybe she thought it would be so antithetical to the independent woman I was at that time in my life that it would make me think twice about getting married so young, or maybe she thought it would teach me how to be a good wife, I’ll never know.

The book was an instruction manual for good wives that had just come out, but read like 1950. I remember diving into the idea of what I’d now call light submission. Your husband is the head of the household. He’s tired after a long day of work, don’t ask him any questions or tell him about your day until he speaks to let you know he’s ready to talk. Don’t be difficult. Make sure he’s fed well and has a pleasant home to return to each night, or he won’t want to come home at all. Make an effort in your appearance. Cut things off your own to-do list to cater to his needs.

My parents were divorced. My grandparents were happily married until they died, and she was a homemaker, so this must be the key, right? The way to be a good wife was to never nag, do fewer things for yourself and your career to make time to do things for your husband, and feed him until he bursts.

And so, I did. My husband gained about a hundred pounds over the course of our eighteen year relationship. I became a pretty decent cook after much trial and error. If he didn’t agree with something, I deferred to his opinion. I tried to become as unobtrusive, subservient, and low maintenance as possible. I’m still a human person, so it’s not as though I was perfect, but efforts were made.

The teachings in this book were so ingrained that seventeen years later, when I felt like something was going on with my husband, getting a “you’re being ridiculous” from him was enough to shut me down. I knew in my bones something was up, but my first thought when he said that was don’t nag. A man doesn’t want to come home to a woman who nags him. If he says I’m being ridiculous, I am being ridiculous.

All the obvious red flags I would gently bring to his attention would get shot down, and I’d go right down with them. Who would want to live with a person who is constantly accusing them of cheating? I don’t want to be a spouse who snoops, so I just have to trust him.

Of course, he was cheating on me, I was not being ridiculous, but it took me so much longer to find out because of this damn book. I never want to be in a relationship where I try to sneak onto someone’s phone or into their email. I don’t want to be a nag, or shrill, or all the other things we say about women. I coddled him because it seemed to be the consensus for how to keep your husband happy. I was busting my ass for a man having an affair, in the end.

I don’t know what the moral of the story is, here. I don’t remember him being gifted the book about being a good husband by the same author, and if he did I’m positive he didn’t read it. He never read anything someone else suggested he read, only books he wanted to read first. Was that the problem? He didn’t have his own manuel? Or that I took mine so seriously?

Or maybe the moral of the story is cheaters will cheat no matter how submissive and traditional you try and make yourself. Cheaters cheat because that’s what they do, not because of the person they’re with.