I shared my 'Wives Tale' on my Blog, 9/8/09. Phil is one of my wives husbands...see the awesome article Phil wrote about his wives wives. A man's perspective on his wife having a wife. Thanks Phil!
Wives have wives - and that's healthy
Phil BronsteinMonday, October 26, 2009
My wife has a wife. More than one, in fact. She has a whole harem of wives. I like it that way, and so does she.
This is not about some perverse polygamist ranch cult in flannel shirts and bonnets, coke-stoked threesomes or even white bread voyeurism. These are wives without sexual benefits.
They don't need them. These women - most with boyfriends or husbands and kids - have found such a deep kinship with each other that they use the term "wife" as the only expression that sufficiently describes the true intimacy and richness of their relationships.
On her show last week, Oprah Winfrey said, "Every mom needs a wife," an update of an old feminist joke from the '60s. Well, Oprah, right here in the Bay Area, birthplace of cultural trends, some moms do have wives. And the network is growing.
"When one falls, the other takes care of the children and puts Epsom salts in her bath," a local wife named Sally wrote on her blog. "I love the men in my life, but my wives are there when (things) stink. They feed me, bathe me and push me when I think I can't go further."
"The use of 'wife' does communicate very much what women are doing and how they're giving to one another with that kind of depth," says Bay Area researcher Judie Donaldson, who has done doctoral work on women's lives at Southern California's Fielding Institute.
"What I've experienced in initial conversations," Donaldson says of a major project she's beginning on women and their relationships, "is that a level of intimacy and support evolves that's closer than many (traditional) families. Women have a thirst for this."
These women regularly cook for one
another's families, take care of their wives' kids, show up at births and deaths, pull each other into or out of tubs in times of trauma and perform emergency emotional resuscitation when their wives are in deep postpartum or divorce depression.
Sure, it's a little weird when a woman yells, "Wife!" at another woman across the grocery store aisle. Even in Whole Foods.
But it's a trend that, in very practical ways, makes women happier and healthier.
A Harvard Medical School study found that a lack of "wife"-level ties can be as hazardous as smoking or obesity. Genuinely close female relationships also help women recover faster from the death of a spouse, the study says.
Other medical research shows benefits that include breast cancer patients four times less likely to die of the disease, and a reduction of blood pressure and heart disease risk. UCLA researchers discovered that wife networks reduce stress significantly.
This is all good news for women.
Some men, however, worry they're being replaced. Some of my wife's wives' husbands have groused to me about it, sounding like Ricky Ricardo when he's discovered Lucy and Ethel in the thick of some goofball plot.
But they're missing the point.
If I'm stuck at work and the kids are going nuts at home, or we're sucked into one of life's many riptides, I know whom to call to help make it better. Now that's really Big Love.
Phil
Bronstein's column appears on Mondays. E-mail him at
pbronstein@sfchronicle.com, and read his blog at sfgate.com/blogs/bronstein.
This article appeared on page A - 19 of the San Francisco Chronicle
