By Stephen Smoot
Since the advent of mass media gaining hold over the culture, as well as people’s mores and behaviors, advice comes out from time to time on how to have and hold onto better relationships with parents, siblings, spouses, children, and more.
Most of this advice comes not from psychological or scientific experts, but from those with either some experience with relationships – or at least with reading about them.
Modernists particularly enjoy savaging texts such as “The Good Wife’s Guide” from Housekeeping Monthly in May of 1955.
The bulk of the advice centers on how a wife should greet her husband when he arrives home from work – if he arrives home from work. Of course this decade saw men working outside of the home and women running the household and raising the children.
Of 18 tips offered by this seven decade old guide, 14 involve how a wife ought to welcome her husband home. Four of them are not directly about that, but are somewhat related to it.
Because the article overtly refers to specific, and almost ossified, gender roles, the anachronistic tone will almost always first inspire ridicule. More has been written since then to make fun of the notion of a “Good Wife’s Guide” than was put into creating them in the first place.
Yet behind the cloak of old timey gender language and references hides some true wisdom about how spouses should treat each other in a quite underrated point in the day – the transition between work and home life.
When put into a modern context where either the man or woman could work outside the home, or take care of the children and home life, much of the advice makes more sense.
“Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready, on time, for his return” reads the top listed piece of advice. Although not specifically ranked, having a hot meal on the table when one’s spouse gets home was considered a fundamental. On television shows, such as “All In the Family,” show writers would use the lack of a dinner waiting on the husband as a sign of deep trouble in the relationship.
Other pieces of advice describe how a person should greet their spouse when they come home from the workday. It says to “take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he arrives . . . be fresh looking . . . and a little more interesting to him.”
The article also advises the wife to tidy up, make sure the house is a comfortable temperature upon his return, and get the children cleaned up and presentable.
Greeting the spouse when they walk in the door the right way is considered paramount. “Be happy to see him. Free him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first.”
“Don’t greet him with complaints and problems,” it also adds.
Not all of the advice is wise. A few of the points work against the idea of marriage as a partnership when it discourages wives from complaining if their husbands come home late – or not at all. Spouses have every right to not be blindsided by their partner not coming home, especially if it involves pleasure and not work.
Also, it goes a bridge too far to tell a spouse that he or she should guide the person who just came in from work to a comfortable chair, to their bed, or somewhere else while speaking “in a soothing and pleasant voice” unless there is something unusually wrong.
The core of the advice points, however, center on making the transition from work life to home life as easy and pleasant as possible.
And one cannot say this strong enough. A stay at home husband can and should follow this advice when their wife works a full time, and likely stressful, job outside the home.
Professional and personal, especially family, lives require different mindsets. Moving from one to the other can be mentally jarring, especially if there is no recognition of the need for a smooth transition from one to the other. While the stay at home spouse and parent often does work as hard as the spouse who spent their day outside of the home, work does not equal home and hearth as a comfort zone for the mind and body – even when the kids are driving one nuts.
Even with the dated language, try to see the wheat of wisdom buried in the chaff of sexism. The point lies in making sure that spouses understand that little things that married people do for each other make the biggest difference, in understanding that one of the most important minutes of the day comes when one sees their beloved for the first time in eight or nine hours.
And giving the spouse who labors outside the home the first opportunity to decompress allows him or her the opportunity to release the work stresses before engaging with those of the home. It gives them time to reset their brains from work to family or household and allow them to find that home mindset again that will enable the best of both spouses to partner together and tackle the problems they both share.
And both spouses have a shared responsibility to recognize and to treat that first minute together as special. The spouse coming home, should he or she not see or experience exactly what they hoped, should give the other the benefit of the doubt rather than complaining about everything they see, hear, and experience when they first get home. Put any complaints on the backburner and talk about them when both are settled in and in a better state of mind.
A wife will appreciate a hot meal waiting for her when she gets home as much as her husband would. She would also likely enjoy a few minutes respite from home problems when she decompresses after a long day dealing with issues at work before hearing about anything negative that happened with her household.
In other words, almost all of the same advice applies equally whether the husband or the wife work outside the home.
All that said, true respect and love rest on treating marriage as a partnership, as a division of labor, as a mandate to love and respect each other, and to recognize the times when one must put the other first.
And remember that the big picture of marriage is composed of endless numbers of pixellike little moments that can bring about a picture of harmony, or of dysfunction.
