What wives worry about

I admit it – I am a Nervous Nellie, a worry wart when it comes to the people I love.

Not neurotic, of course, just overly anxious when it comes to certain – very specific – things which might happen to them when we’re not together.

Like car accidents.

I worry a lot about car accidents.

We used to live in a small rural part of Minnesota (can you say oxymoron?), and, I swear, every time I heard an ambulance siren I would do a quick inventory of loved ones. By the time the kids got old enough to drive, it was a well-known fact that if I heard a siren, they could expect a call.

Even now, several continents and thousands of miles away, I still insist that loved ones call and let me know when they’ve arrived safely while traveling.

Worrying tends to be circular in my little world. I worry most about those closest to me – my husband and kids and immediate family, then my dear friends, followed closely by close friends, causal friends, old friends and finally people I might recognize if I passed them on the street. I tend not to spend much time worrying about that latter group, btw.

I bring up worrying because of a couple articles in the local papers this week – all of which brought up the fact that Saudi wives seem to expend a lot of time and energy worrying about the (in)fidelity of their husbands when they leave the kingdom sans family.

Of course, none of the women – or articles for that matter – actually came out and said that Saudi men are unfaithful, philandering sex maniacs when they leave home, but that’s surely what they wanted to say.

Several of the wives admitted they worried their husbands would come back from their travels with AIDS, for example.

Mmmm.

That’s not something a woman worries about unless she thinks (knows) her husband is having sex without her!

(And btw, some of the women actually DID contract AIDS from their philandering husbands, so the fears were obviously warranted.)

My husband’s job used to require a lot of travel – he was gone several days every other week – and in all that time, I never once worried that he would “become the victim” of AIDS. (Seriously, victim implies lack of accountability – these guys are getting what they deserve imo!)

Nope, I worried that he wasn’t sleeping or eating properly, I worried that he would forget to take his medicine. Sometimes I worried about bad weather where he was, and even that he’d miss the plane. Once when he was in Vietnam I even spent a few minutes worrying about his physical safety, but I didn’t waste even a fraction of a second worrying about what kind of deadly STD he would bring home as a souvenir of his travels.

Personally, I just don’t understand that mind set.

But then again, my culture doesn’t give my husband a free pass to remain on the market after marriage. It doesn’t gloss over male infidelity by calling it a “holiday” marriage, polygomy or some other nonsense, basically turning a blind eye to sexual promiscuity and prostitution.

My culture doesn’t issue get-out-of-your-pants-free cards to half the population, while shackling the other half with archaic systems of shame and family honor, and threats of stoning – or even worse, spinsterhood.

And my culture doesn’t prevent me from speaking my mind when it comes to expectations of faithfulness and love, commitment, monogamy and respect in intimate relationships.

No wonder all I have to worry about is car accidents!

What does marriage mean to you? What does it look like? Is there such a thing as one kind of marriage, or are marriages as individual as the people who enter into them?