One life ...

man cooking, originally uploaded by - di.

Then quite suddenly a young woman, if she marries, has to diverge completely from this way of life, while her husband simply goes on toward the goals set in college. She is expected to cope not with ideas, but with cooking food, washing dishes, doing laundry, and if she insists on keeping at a job, she needs both a lot of energy and the ability to organise her time. If she has an infant to care for, the jump from the intellectual life to that of being a nurse must be immense. "The work" she may long to do has been replaced by various kinds of labour for which she has been totally unprepared. She has longed for children, let us say, she is deeply in love, she has what she thought she wanted, so she suffers guilt and dismay to feel so disoriented.

Husbands these days can and do help with the chores and, far more important, are aware of the problem and will talk anxiously about it - anxiously because a wife's conflict affects their peace of mind. But the fact remains that, in marrying, the wife has suffered an earthquake and the husband has not. His goals have not been radically changed; his mode of being has not been radically changed.
Extracted from 'A Journal of a Solitude', by May Sarton.

This appealed to me not only because May was writing of the fates of two of her best and most talented writing students but because it tapped into my past.

I will never forget my ex-husband telling me that I wasn't entitled to half of the proceeds from the house because he had earned the money over the years, as we followed his career from city to town.

Women often fail, or are not encouraged, to think about what will happen if a marriage comes to end. Obviously there are many men who also lose everything except their pants in a divorce but it's so important to be careful with educating our selves to survive alone in the world. I'm not sure that there is anything more important ...

Note: no men were harmed in the creation of this photograph however it was Gert who was doing the baking. I found a good man.