Continuing my Christmas theme this year, I’ll address the issue of pampering one’s spouse. I could limit this post to just spouses giving each other Christmas gifts, but there is more to it than that. There are date nights. There are times we are supposed to do special things for our spouse, sometimes done with a coupon theme. There are the “marriage encounters” to be attended. For the more eccentric, there are the joys of charting fertility together. If any of this stuff works for you and makes you all happy and plucky, more power to you.
Speaking for myself, they just seem like a bunch of frivolity. There comes a point in marriage where your spouse can have fun without you and you won’t be a worry-sick puppy. I’m not speaking of drunken frivolity with the opposite sex but a life of his or her own. I’m speaking of the point where you don’t worry about your spouse’s affections straying, and no that isn’t the wedding day. This typically doesn’t come until the financial and social pressures of children, the first real financial crisis, or the difficulties in conceiving and delivering children. This probably wholly accounts for my lack of interest in Theology of the Body; it just seems like the wrong door to view marriage. While sex is certainly pleasurable, I think at a base level you come to realize that sex isn’t that difficult to get and marriage just isn’t worth it for the sex alone. While I certainly wouldn’t condone the matter, I can now understand why a man would pay a prostitute (as opposed to have an affair) and still claim he wanted to be married with a straight face.
A lot of the things I mentioned in the opening paragraph seem to be about keeping life as it was in the first few years of marriage. Some of it just seems to be a treatment for boredom. In the earlier years of my marriage, we didn’t have the time for “date nights”, and we didn’t have the money for them anyway. Besides, we were pretty enthralled with our children. While I did give gifts in the earlier part of our marriage, they were never substantial. We never really celebrated our anniversary or our birthdays. I do try to remember flowers for Valentine’s day, but there have been years where we have not done so. Such is not to say that I don’t treat my wife every now and then and offer tokens of my love. Those moments tend to be more spontaneous though. We do spend money on frivolities, but we don’t do it under the pretense of gift giving. I’m not one to claim that you need to do the same or even that you’ll be happier for doing the same.
I sense the attempt to create a childish illusion* that frivolities don’t really have cost when I hear of spouses getting each other gifts. I’m reminded of how Valentine’s Day has turned into a primping the princess ritual in hopes of having sex. Obsessing over a gift for one’s spouse seems to be in a similar vein. A 12-year-old girl tearing petals off a flower and pondering whether a boy loves her or loves her not is cute. A thirty-five-year-old woman performing the ritual seems a bit pretentious. I suppose I shouldn’t criticize since many folks take comfort in illusion and use it as a coping mechanism. Reality has a habit of intruding on those that like to ignore it though.
* For the armchair psychologists, no, I didn’t enjoy my childhood.
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