‘80s Marriage: 2 Jobs, 1 Kid and No Time

Sociologists generally agree that the most important social change that has taken place in this country over the past two decades is the growing percentage of working women.

Latest figures compiled by the U.S. Bureau of the Census show that in the United States in 1985, 62% of women with children under 18 were in the labor force. Muriel Mabry, who is president of Orange County’s Women’s World International and close to the local employment scene, says “that figure is probably much higher in Orange County.”

A lot of attention has been paid to how all of this affects our children, but only recently have we begun to look more closely at how it affects the relationship between marriage partners. There are two schools of thought on this point. One says that the main hope for reducing the escalating divorce rate is the fact that marriage partners aren’t around each other a lot anymore and therefore don’t have as much to fight about. The other school says the whole society is likely to go to hell in a handbasket if we don’t do something about the growing dysfunctionality of the American home.

My wife and I both work. Until recently, we both worked outside the home. Now I do much of my work at home, which I suppose makes us less typical, but not much. We’ve been aware of the fact that we don’t see much of each other--especially during the week. So we’ve looked for ways to do something about it that are compatible with the demands of the workplace, an 11-year-old child, a bubble-headed dog and an old house that creaks and groans. For the enlightenment of other married couples facing the same problem, here are three of the ideas we’ve tried--and how they worked out:

* The tete-a-tete lunch. Business lunches have become de rigueur in the kind of high-tech society we have in Orange County, so we reasoned: Why not turn lunch into the business of occasionally getting reacquainted with one’s spouse? This would detract nothing from the business day, since we both have to eat lunch anyway.

Certain logistical problems arose. When one partner is accustomed to eating a hearty lunch at noon and the other a cup of yogurt at 1:30, someone has to bend on timing. Then there is the matter of whether to have a quick lunch in the company cafeteria or meet over a glass of Chardonnay in a splendid restaurant, complete with candles on the table and men in vests talking in confidential tones to women one suspects are not their wives. Finally, there is the matter of agenda. Should we talk about our work, our finances, the problems in China--or try to simulate the confidential tone at the next table.

We haven’t really answered any of these questions definitively yet, even though we’ve tried them all. What usually happens is that on Sunday night--full of optimism and hope--we make a date for lunch on Wednesday. Then about 11 o’clock on Wednesday morning, my wife phones.

“We’ve got a crisis here, and I can’t get away until about 2:30. Would that be OK?”

“No, it wouldn’t be OK. I had a bowl of oatmeal at 6:30 and I’m starving.”

“Well, if your stomach is more important than our relationship, then go eat. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

“I’ve got a tennis game at 2. If we could just do it early. . . . “

So we have a quick lunch on Thursday. Just before I leave the house, I get a letter that our variable mortgage rate has been kicked up. Most of the lunch period is spent figuring out how we are going to pay the increase. I’m still hungry when I leave, and we decide to go the candles-on-the-table route next time, however long it takes.

* Cocktail hour. My wife’s guilt over being a career woman has always required her to “pay attention” to the 11-year-old kid when she gets home from work, whether he wants attention or not. Since he’s not usually around anymore, we decided to have a cocktail hour to exchange the vicissitudes of our day over a cool drink.

In our system, whoever gets home first--which about 95% of the time is me--starts dinner so it is ready by 7:30. Cocktail hour is set for 6:45, earlier if possible. A typical cocktail hour goes something like this: My wife calls at 6:30 and says she’s on her way home. I make her a gin-and-tonic and a martini for myself. On the rocks. An olive and a twist both. She arrives at 7:10, breathless (we live 10 minutes from her office), explaining that a crisis arose as she was going out the door. She stops to check her mail and lingers over a Spiegel catalogue.

When I get restless, she tells me to fix her a drink while she changes. I tell her I made the drink 20 minutes ago and the ice has now melted into the gin. When she reappears, we have seven minutes before dinner. Just then, the 11-year-old kid shows up, asking to be drilled on state capitals since he has a test the next day. Guilt takes over my wife. When they get to Montana, I smell the food burning, and I eat in surly silence while they babble about geography, which neither of them knows much of anything about.

* Pillow talk. The theory here is that when the kid goes to bed, we’ll have quiet time to talk. We’ll go to bed early and lie there and talk about our day. The first hitch is that the kid never gets to bed when he should. There’s always a reason, of course, and his lasting power is awesome. But he finally gets down, and we have (yawn) quiet time. In the middle of an explanation of a writing problem I had that day that is searing my soul, I become aware of measured breathing. She struggles to the surface two or three times after that, but the cause is lost. I go back to the sports page I was reading while I was waiting for the cocktail hour to start.

As you can see, we still have a few bugs in these ideas. They show enormous promise on paper, but there seems to be something lacking in the execution. We’re working on it.