What bothers me about this is that once they are married, Hadley's only duty in life seems to be being a wife. She sometimes cooks and cleans, but eventually she hires help to do these chores.

Similar to most women today, I get up and go to work and then come home nine hours later to tackle dinner, dishes, laundry, cleaning, yardwork, car maintenance, etc. Once you toss exercise into the list, there aren't very many minutes left in the day for 'being a wife'.

The crux is that 'being a wife', or more importantly, being a good wife, is crucial to holding everything together.

I don't know where I am going with this. By no means am I interested in 'being a wife' full time. I think I'm more just frustrated with the lack of time for me to devote to being caring/supportive/attentive to Daniel. With me working weekend to pay off the car repairs, and with Daniel working evenings on his correspondence courses, I don't expect us to be able to improve on anything until after April.

But I do want to keep this in mind, because it's crucial for us to be able to move forward in our relationship. I'm starting to think about my biological clock, and there's no way I'd consider babies before marriage, and Daniel is in no place to propose, and I'm not going to propose to him because he's already expressed concerns about the long-term workability of our relationship. So I'll leave that up to him to decide when he's ready.

Anyhow, I'm adding up the years, and I'm starting to run out, so the sooner I can bring more attentiveness to the relationship the better.

But then I'm thinking that I'm probably not going to change my habits, so if I'm wasting my time here then he better friggin' tell me.

Argh. OK. So Hadley only has to focus on being a wife, and then slowly their relationship falls apart because all she has to do in her life is dote on him, and obviously that's not very healthy. And in my example things aren't as great as they could be because I cannot seem to find time to 'dote'. There must be some perfect level of dotivity - maybe that's my new year's resolution: to achieve a moderate level of doting that supports both a loving relationship and a career.