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“When I am gone, who will cook his food?”
You have to be kidding me. Tell that dumb bastard to cook his own food.
My father never learned to cook, even after my parents divorced. He was raised in an era where it simply wasn’t done. His mother and his sister and his cousin always made sure that he had a meal on the table both before he was married, and after. If no one was around to fix food for him, he ate out. It was just The Way The World Was Supposed To Be.
I can remember my aunt getting very flustered whenever I walked into her kitchen and tried to do something for myself, like getting a beer out of the fridge or scraping and rinsing a plate and stacking it to be washed. She always reacted as if I was committing a crime against nature.
My mother, on the other hand, made sure that my brother and I learned our way around the kitchen. She also had a career. My father’s female relatives never liked her. :)
That was my grandparents, although not quite so extreme. My grandfather had a few things he would/could cook, like eggs in the microwave and cornbread. The cornbread was horrid. He had no sense of smell after a tumor removal, so he relied on texture, so he doubled the cornmeal and halved the flower.
After he died I helped take care of my grandmother for the last year and a half that she stayed in her own home. I took pride in the fact that she frequently, and genuinely complimented my cooking. Any time she tried to get up to help, I reminded her that she’d been cooking for other people her entire life. It was time to return the favor. She’d sit back down with a smile.
My grandpa is a widower in his 80s, and he had to do the cooking when grandma had her stroke. He didn’t do too bad, considering he’d never had to do the cooking before. (unless you count cooking the fish he got from the lake or making fudge every christmas) Thankfully, he has relatives and friends who look in on him now. I think he would’ve liked learning to cook as a young man. We don’t do boys any favors, not teaching them their way around the kitchen. I would hope this practice is changing with the generations. My husband and son like to cook.
This is assuming any one of the parents knows how to cook and teaches the children how to do it. I didn’t learn from my mother, I don’t know how I learned to cook. I don’t like to cook, that’s what I learned from her. My father can’t and, as far as I know, doesn’t try to cook but he can heat things up, I think he learned that from my mother.
My mum is at best an unenthusiastic cook, and my dad has 4 or 5 dishes that he cooks and that is all, and a couple of those are special things that he does only once a year. Somehow between them they managed to produce three kids who all cook well and enjoy it. I’m not quite sure how that happened.
This wasn’t so bad. Hard to tell of course but the women seemed to think they get something out of this situation too, like clothes and economic stability, and more the wives, less the work for one indiviual. Of course it’s a problem there’s a society where women are rather couraged to marry instead of educate themselves and make their own money in the first place.
I thought having a 3-day celebration was kind of weird. We think we are so different in America, but we have women so wrapped up in the ideal of being married that they start planning from a very young age and have a dream of a wedding day and not so much emphasis on the marriage itself. It’s still an economic arrangement of keeping a home and raising children primarily (I’m not talking about gendered division of labor but however 2 people manage to cooperate all of it), and while finding someone you love very much to do that together is a higher priority, this video made a point of exposing the reality of the situation to all the players many times – one more wife to help with the housework, a young woman taunted about choosing to be married and losing her youthful bliss, and the father paying a dowry, which was highlighted in the clip as the most important part of the “ritual”. Then they all danced about it. In America, about marriage, we downplay all the drudgery and reality. Marriage is adulthood, shared responsibilities in the home, and we still cling to rituals like fathers giving their daughter away and having her change her name. I should also say, adulthood is adulthood whether you are married or single, keeping a home in general is kind of a drag and it’s hard to get out of having to do it, so partnership of some kind can always be a good thing in any culture. These women in the video didn’t have choices, that’s the only difference. I saw on the “news” earlier this week about American women who plan their whole wedding before they even know who they are going to marry and years before they may even meet him, because we are taught to dream about that day to be the goal in life, the best day we’re ever going to get and it has to be so wonderful. Reality doesn’t sink in.
Yeah- being a single, working homeowner, I have to do it all myself. The full time job, all the finances, two acres of landscape to keep up, house repairs, maintain several vehicles, feed and care for my twelve “kids”, all the shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing, vacuuming, etc, etc, and I still have time to goof-off here.
Sometimes it’s a drag, but I still couldn’t be happier!
Anyone needing more than one partner to help maintain a family is not doing their part IMO. Especially someone with (probably) nowhere near the number of responsibilities the average person (American citizen?) has to deal with.
But, it’s their tradition and everyone seemed to be OK with it.
I assume the number of children one sires may dictate the need for additional help.
Anything for a 3-day celebration, right?
I suspect that keeping house in a place with no running water or electricity, and cooking over a fire is somewhat different to keeping house for us. There were shots of women carrying water and firewood and pounding what I assume is grain, all of which are heavy, time-consuming tasks we never even have to think about. There was an electrical supply cable and a light bulb on the mosque, but there didn’t seem to be evidence of electricity in the houses.
You’re right. Some of their routines are more involved and labor intensive than ours, but I was thinking more about the fewer number of routines and different tasks they accomplish compared to most of us.
I would be shocked if the average African wife doesn’t have a far, far more labour intensive life than the average Western wife, with far, far less time for (and variety of) leisure activities. Think about the work involved in washing clothes without a machine, for example. Or making clothes – No sewing machines, no clothes shops. Or cooking without modern appliances. Or growing a crop. Or fetching water.
Depending on the man’s um…appetite, this *might* actually result in each woman giving birth to fewer children, or at least spaced a bit farther apart.
So what do the guys with no wives do? Go to a village where the women are cheaper? Go to prostitutes?
In India they import women from nearby poorer countries.
There are also issues with British Indian and British Pakistani girls being sent to their parents’ home countries to be married against their will.
Similar things happen in the U.S. It’s not just the women who are told whom they must marry- I personally know two different guys from India who were packed off home by their families to marry women they’d never met. One of them already had a fianceé he was planning to marry here in the States.
In those arranged marriages there is usually money involved. Again, what do the guys with no means to support a family do? I’m guessing prostitutes.
I kind of like the idea of three husbands…
When I saw the title of this article, I felt certain it was about Newt Gingrich.
Having been married and divorced twice, you can keep your weddings. Marriage bliss is like religion- a delusion. With a divorce rate of 40 to 50 per cent in western society I have to say that those odds are way too small to guarantee happiness. When I look around at relatives and friends relationships I see very little contentment in their lives. Instead, a lot of hatred, bickering, abuse and petty put downs of each other. Is this what we would want for children yet to be born? Sorry, but I live in the real world of insanity and chaos. My view after 63 years. Signed: Mr. BITTER
I, on the other hand, have just secured the right to legally marry my partner after 20 years of waiting, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Sure, no marriage is perfect, but some of us are quite happy being married. You might have a different perspective if you had had to fight for the legal protections that marriage offers.
It is better to have the option to marry and choose not to exercise it if that is your wish, than to wish for the option and not have it.