Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Anthropology, Sociology
ISBN: 9781800080416
Publisher: UCL Press
Published: 2021-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Staying: the politics of compromise

‘My life is nothing special. I am a normal person with an ordinary life’, Elena, a married woman in her early fifties, told me when I asked about her life story. Through her ‘nothing special’ life, I will try to unpack women’s lives in long-term marriages with children, and the ambivalent feelings which they reveal when they recount their lives. After finishing high school, Elena worked as a secretary in a company for 20 years, and when she gave birth to her son, she left her job since she wanted to concentrate on bringing up her child. Her husband, Dimitris, is a lawyer, works long hours, returns home very late every night and spends time with his child only at weekends. ‘I always had that dream, since I was a small child, to have a family with children, to have a nice home’, Elena continued, ‘and marriage was central in that dream.’ Elena and Dimitris come from conservative families, with strict parents: ‘Tidy houses and tidy lives’, as she says. She first met her husband when they were both 19, soon after finishing high school, and they started dating and soon having sex, in secret from their parents. But after some years in this relationship, she realised that although he was a good man, she wanted to have a more social and open life, going out more, going to theatres and movies, having holidays and weekend excursions, things that Dimitris didn’t like. ‘I couldn’t compromise with the idea that I would live such a boring life and I left him.’ But after a year, in her early thirties, she came back.

Suddenly, I felt I was growing old, my friends started having children, time was pushing me to take decisions, to think what kind of life I wanted, and I wanted a child, and an ordinary life, and I came back to him and got married. Did I compromise? I don’t know. Aren’t we all living with our small compromises? Aren’t, maybe, our choices, compromises of something else?

‘He is still the same person you know. Often, I feel trapped in here’, she said to me with a sad expression. She stopped, looked at me and said quietly, ‘There are many nights when I can’t sleep and I wonder why I am still here, in this house, in this marriage.’ She stopped again, and then with relief in her expression and voice said, ‘But I couldn’t be anywhere else, I belong here.’ At other times, when we have coffee and chat with other women, you can hear Elena joking about her situation, about how unlikeable it is, but as she does so, she smiles. She has a very peculiar, sarcastic way of expressing and describing her life. Sometimes she consults with and advises other women about what to do so that they don’t need to ‘eat shit’. But in the beginning, I kept wondering: why does she stay? I was thinking that probably she was a quitter, giving

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