The Perfect Wife

“The Stepford Wives” is a 1975 movie about the upscale community of Stepford where all the husbands have beautiful, robot-like wives who devote their lives to cleaning their houses and satisfying their husbands. Sounds like the perfect marriage, doesn’t it? Most of the Stepford husbands thought it was.

If you saw “The Stepford Wives,” you know it was a horror movie for the wives. When the husbands had their wives made over into what they considered “the perfect wife,” the wives themselves were completely lost in the makeover process.

Many women attempt to make themselves into “the perfect wife” in order to please their husbands. There is certainly nothing wrong with trying to do the best you can to make a happy marriage and make your husband happy. Some days it will take 100% of your effort, and other days it will take 100% of his effort, to keep the marriage strong.

When you attempt to mold yourself into someone you’re not, when you wrap your entire life around him and his needs, when you quit thinking of yourself and your needs, you’re setting yourself up for a big fall. Did he fall in love with who you are or who he wanted you to become?

Think back to your wedding day. In the standard wedding ceremony, the father of the bride or a male member of her family “hands her over” to her husband. She goes from being their responsibility to being his responsibility. Months, sometimes years, of preparation culminate in a few hours of ceremony and celebration. Then a woman is on her own with little or no training for the complicated, full-time career she expects to last a lifetime. Is this how your marriage began? More wedding preparation than marriage preparation?

Depending upon the people involved, the marital home can be a permanent residence for both partners or a temporary stopover for one. Divorce is devastating, even more so if you made yourself over to fit the image of what you thought your husband wanted in a wife, or what you thought a perfect wife should be, and gave yourself up in the process.

It’s a sad fact that sometimes a marriage will end because the husband finds someone new, someone who is very much like his wife used to be. If your marriage is shaky but not broken, perhaps it’s not too late to reclaim yourself and turn yourself back into the dynamic, independent woman he fell in love with and married.

Start putting yourself first for a change. That does not mean you should stop doing things that please him, nor does it mean tossing over your responsibilities to your children. It means taking time for yourself, developing some interests that are separate from his, and putting your needs first on occasion.

You may say that all you want out of life is to be married to him, to provide for him, to be his wife and care for his children, to be “the perfect wife.” If you are your version of “the perfect wife” but you’re not his version, you have no choice but to look deeper into your needs, past those that include him, and redefine your goals for the rest of your life, a life that may not include him in it.

If your new focus doesn’t save your marriage, if he’s determined to go at all costs, at least you’ll have a start toward getting back the “you” that got buried in “us,” “ours,” “we,” and “his.”