A Marriage Made in Heaven: Or Too Tired for an Affair by Erma Bombeck

Author:Erma Bombeck
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Relationships, Humor, Form, Marriage & Family, General, Topic, Family & Relationships, Marriage, Marriage - Humor, Essays, Marriage Humor
ISBN: 9780061092022
Publisher: HarperTorch
Published: 1993-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Sexual Revolution

It was a bad week. The rubber broke in the elastic waistband of my favorite slacks. The power went off and I lost everything in the freezer. A story in the newspaper said that marriage was going out of style.

Well, didn't that just put the frosting on the cake. After serving nearly a quarter of a century in this institution called marriage, it was now passé. It's like cleaning an oven the day before it catches fire.

Most of us in the neighborhood were hanging tough, but already news of divorces had begun to circulate from people who had racked up a lot of years together. The very thought of infidelity titillated us. We had all read "Diary of a Mad Housewife" and devoured the advice columns— especially the one telling about a woman who set down rules on what to do if a married man had a heart attack in your apartment while making love. She was as cool and clinical about it as if she was listing instructions on how to get the rust out of your steam iron.

The closest any of us had ever come to an indiscretion was Cindy. Her butcher leaned over one day and whispered, "Are you ready for a tryst?"

Cindy thought he said "trip" and shouted back, "Not until the last two weeks in August when Ed gets his vacation."

When someone asked me once if I ever thought of leaving Bill, I asked, "Where?"

Outwardly, we seemed smug and secure about our marriages. Inside, there was a nagging feeling that the winds blowing across the plains of suburbia were bringing changes to our lives. The roads into the cities were being traveled by more and more women who were working outside of the home. The farmlands were dotted with fast food emporiums. Those of us who stayed at home and resisted minimum wages had only one figure who could lead us out of the wilderness into the 21st century—Phil Donahue.

He lived across the street from us for about five years, and I watched his career rise to national attention. Phil was everyone's husband who might not always understand the problem, but was willing to listen. He was honest and open and his TV show provided us with a menu of personalities who challenged us to think. He was one of the first men to publicly play to the intelligence of women on the home front and say, "You're better than you think you are."

We were all glued to the TV set the morning in 1973 when a pretty, blonde Florida housewife, Marabel Morgan, appeared on Phil's show to guide us back to the road of sanity where she thought we belonged... a magical place with picket fence and tie-back curtains... a place where we could become the title of her book, "The Total Woman."

Marabel was touted to be an antidote for the madness that prompted wives to leave their husbands and children and to pursue their own ambitions outside the home.

"What would your husband see if he came home within the next ten minutes?" she charged.

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