A typical thought that arises when women feel the uncertainty of how to deal with competing aspirations and goals is that “something has to go”. Either I must simply resign myself to being ‘stuck’ in a marriage, or I must leave the marriage in order to do or have other things that are important to me. When there is a knawing sense of dissatisfaction and lack of personal fulfillment, it is easy to feel that the husband, or the marriage itself must be to blame. These feelings arise more easily when a woman feels expectations around doing all the household work—cooking, laundry, dishes, cleaning—in addition to working 8 hours, while the husband feels that when his workday ends, his work is done.
Did I made a mistake by marrying? Or did I make a mistake by marrying this person? To find something that works for me, maybe I should cut my losses, leave the marriage, start down a different path, or find a different spouse.
In this series, we want to explore other options. Instead of leaving being the only option, we’d like to explore the question “How do I make this work?” We believe this is an important question for women who are committed to their marriage but find themselves struggling with multiple roles, the expectations of others, and their own feelings of dissatisfaction.
We will explore self-identity and self-awareness, realizing that a woman’s roles and sense of identify probably change more drastically when she marries than the man’s identity. We need to understand the identities of “he”, “she”, and “us” in a marriage, and how a woman can be grounded in her own identity as well as being part of the marriage. There are boundaries to be explored. Then there are the skills needed to balance multiple high-value things and have them work together: self, the relationship, career or work, interests and hobbies, family, and other relationships and friendships.
This may not be a simple process or a quick fix, but it gives us the possibility of retaining multiple things that are very valuable, and being able to successfully balance them in the long term.