THE SYNDROME OF (SOME) MARRIED WOMEN
Environment: A room. In it there are some badly stuck posters on a wall. It is a room occupied by a few faded and disheveled women with decadent expressions on their faces.
On the odd poster you can see women with hairstyles in strange geometric shapes: triangular, rectangular — and octagonal. There are some women standing in this room — and others who are seated. The former have a ‘hypertrophy of the pinna’ — or in other words, an excessive enlargement of the auditory organs. The latter have rather well developed organs of verbal communication.
There is a man, also standing. He is too well dressed, too well groomed and too talkative for the occasion.
One of those present says to another: “My husband is a doctor. I met him when he was studying the third semester of his degree. Being in the eighth grade, he came to realise how wonderful I was. Having started wooing him, I very subtly told him, call me when you graduate. On another occasion, in view of his insistence, I recommended that he seek me out after winning a lottery prize. Very honestly, it was based on an old phrase of my mother’s: marriage is a lottery.”
Another assistant in the room, who was attentive to this woman’s comments added: “My mother let me see that men were not the wonder that a woman might expect, but that marriage was an economic arrangement for the woman who wanted children and did not want to work. For me, particularly, it seems absurd to underestimate marriage as a mere enterprise with an economic purpose. Personally, on some occasions, marriage seems disadvantageous for the woman who works and wants to improve herself, since she not only has to work professionally, but often has to educate children and take care of her partner as if he were just another child in the home. I suppose that in some of these respects a considerable number of men have changed…
“I believe it is absurd, these women who repeat incessantly: “because my husband… oh, and my husband… and he earns so much… and he thinks this and that …”. I observe this characteristic and feel it is a demonstration of emptiness and lack of a personal project. It is somehow living an alien life.”
These women are the “marriage professionals.”
It’s like a case I know of… two sisters whose father encouraged them — forced them even — to learn English, French, play cuatro, maracas and guitar. Every three months he would throw a little party at their house and make the poor little sisters sing until all present were bored to tears.Then, the lord boasted that his daughters were a tremendous match! I wondered: is it necessary to learn so much cuatro and so much maraca, to wash dishes and scrub floors?
Marriage professionals are those who cook wonderfully, who laugh when one must laugh to please, who think only of the successes of their husbands, who complain about an increase in the price of potatoes, who do not like to read — and who prefer not to think too much.
This last characteristic is one of the few intelligent traits they have… but it is a trait that appears not out of conviction, nor after a deep analysis of the way in which life should be taken — but out of conformity.
These are women who before getting married were one thing — and after getting married become different people. It is as if they believe themselves to be more important — but the importance they feel is not their own, but depends on who they marry.
This constellation of characteristics is the ‘Married Woman Syndrome.’
