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How To Be The Perfect Wife

This title sounds like an article that probably appeared in a nineteen fifties lady's magazine. It probably talked about spotless houses, baking cakes, and smiling sweetly when your bear growls at you. The sort of article that told women that they should bow down before the mighty husband and not bother their pretty little heads about anything more intellectually strenuous than darning the beloved's socks or weighing out the ingredients for baking. It was the type of rubbish that put a generation of women on tranquillizers.

There is no such thing as a perfect wife, there never was, it was all a figment of someone's imagination. Women, despite what some men would like to believe, are human and therefore imperfect. Too many women still try all their lives to be this impossible and non-existent ideal.

The truly perfect wife would be impossible to live with. One woman was so house proud that if her poor husband came home from working after 8pm he got no supper as she did not want to mess up her beautifully tidy kitchen. So that poor man after working hard all day, earning the money that paid for that beautiful kitchen and her beautiful home, ate bread and cheese for supper.

A marriage is a partnership and a wife is an equal partner in that partnership. These days many women work outside the home and some earn more than their husbands. Some couples have changed roles completely and it is the wife who is the breadwinner and the husband who stays at home caring for the children and running the home.

It is impossible to be perfect but this should not stop wives aiming to be the best wife they can be, but this has little to do with whether or not there is dust under the sofa. A wife should be her husband's helpmeet as he should be hers.

We need new standards for a new age and to stop perpetuating the "perfect wife" myth, there is no such thing. There are only millions of women doing their best, to juggle a job, family life, marriage, housework and all the complications that those roles involve. They do a pretty good job for the most part and do not need the extra stress that this sort of myth put upon them. We owe it to girls growing up now to kill the "perfect wife" myth once and for all and not to try to push them into straitjackets because they will be better women for allowing them to grow into their full potential. They will strive to be the best they can be rather than some idealised fairy tale rubbish of what someone thinks they should be.

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