I don't mean to say the old days were uniformly golden or anything like that. There were just as many idiots in the world then as there are now, and in the sort of situations that involve abuse of whatever sort it's definitely a good thing that there are better options than living with it or getting abused by society instead. But in a world where most people were obliged to work in the sense of manual labor, it made sense to have the presumably stronger partner doing the heavier (farming etc) things and the woman who may be smaller and better at endurance over time than brute strength doing what amounts to a longer shift but a less strenuous one. It's just that this sort of system breaks down when people abuse it, and when the conditions of life change.
But my point was really meant to be that marriage (or dating, when viewed as either a substitute or a trial run) requires huge amounts of co-ordination between the sorts of ideas we usually leave unspoken. That it's the problem of unspoken assumptions, because you don't necessarily realize that all these things are things you have to discuss or compromise on because they're often the things you just assume are the way the world works, and you have to find someone else whose world works the same way, or learn to be ok with it changing. And at least for me, it's the unspoken assumptions that are hardest to re-align because you don't even notice they're there. My contract probably wouldn't look like anybody else's, because someone else would have thought other things were more important to specify.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2007-07-10 09:54 pm (UTC)But my point was really meant to be that marriage (or dating, when viewed as either a substitute or a trial run) requires huge amounts of co-ordination between the sorts of ideas we usually leave unspoken. That it's the problem of unspoken assumptions, because you don't necessarily realize that all these things are things you have to discuss or compromise on because they're often the things you just assume are the way the world works, and you have to find someone else whose world works the same way, or learn to be ok with it changing. And at least for me, it's the unspoken assumptions that are hardest to re-align because you don't even notice they're there. My contract probably wouldn't look like anybody else's, because someone else would have thought other things were more important to specify.