Marriage is a series of discoveries. So it was for Stacy Ferguson, a 40-year-old immunologist, who wed her live-in boyfriend last summer and soon saw a new side of him emerge without warning. He had turned into a homebody.
The two had moved from Boston to Dallas so Ferguson could take a new job. Her spouse, a computer network engineer who worked for a large bank, arranged to telecommute from their home. The problem was he never left it. When she returned from a day at the lab, he was always there, working at his terminal or playing computer games.
In Boston, he put in long hours at his office, and she could always count on having some time around the house to herself each day. Now that was gone and it was driving Ferguson–adoring wife that she is—-a little crazy.
“I don’t think he quite gets it. He’s the kind of person who wouldn’t understand why you wouldn’t want to be with someone all the time,” Ferguson said with a laugh.
“I want to be able to blast my stereo, play bad dance music and jump up and down on the sofa or something, without anyone actually witnessing that I’m acting like a hyperactive child.”
So desperate was she for a little privacy that when her husband mentioned that a buddy had invited him to hit the local strip joints, “I thought it was a wonderful thing,” she said. “It meant he would get out of the house.”
Personal space, the cliche of the ’70s and ’80s, has resurfaced as an issue for the new millennium. The twist is that women nowadays aren’t upset about their men being emotionally unavailable. Instead, the issue is too much togetherness, whether it’s Chandler and Monica of NBC’s “Friends” staking out turf during their first year of marriage or Mayor Richard Daley and wife Maggie, who were hospitalized in December for his-and-her cases of stomach flu. The day after discharge, Daley was back at work, reportedly because his wife wasn’t too keen on him hanging around the house.
For most people, however, the issue is coming to a head because of economics. Early retirement for a chunk of the Baby Boomer population, unemployment and the rise of home-based-businesses means that some couples will be bumping up against one another in ways they never anticipated.
For some women, that’s heaven. But for others, it’s a profoundly ambivalent experience: You love your husband dearly but a part of you stills feels as if your space has been invaded.
No one knows that emotional tug-of-war better than Donna Zimmerman, a retired lab technician who lives in Vernon Hills with her husband of 14 years. Her spouse, a sales and marketing executive, has been out of work for 10 months and is launching a business from their home. Zimmerman, 56, said adjusting to the new order has been difficult.
Retired for four years, she had become accustomed to doing as she pleased. Now she had to factor her husband into the equation.
“At first, he would want to hang around and see what I was up to,” she said. “I felt guilty making a date with girlfriends or making plans with my grandchildren that didn’t include him. He’d feel guilty if he wasn’t working.”
Then something happened to restore the couple’s equilibrium: Zimmerman fractured her ankle in December and couldn’t get around easily. She stayed upstairs in their bedroom; he stayed downstairs and took over the laundry, cooking and running errands. Suddenly, it was great to have a man around the house.
“For the past two months, things have been really good because we’ve needed each other,” Zimmerman said. That and staying on separate floors have eased the territoriality issues, which seem to be at the heart of things.
“We’ve decorated this house together. It’s absolutely ours. I want him to feel at home in his home, that there’s a place for him,” she said. And yet: “There are times when he’s just sitting there watching television and flipping the remote and I could die. I want to say, go away. Go out. Do something.”
Centuries of togetherness
It’s not surprising that Zimmerman feels whipsawed. The history of marriage shows wild inconsistencies in how society tethered couples together, from the long-distance marriages of the Crusades to the submarinelike confinement of pioneer families in one-room log cabins.
According to anthropologist Helen E. Fisher, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N. J., and author of “Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce” (W.W. Norton, 1992), the first open marriages were in the hunting and gathering era. Couples were more apart than together.
“Men went hunting and could be gone for days at a time. Women traveled a great deal to other camps and villages and were gone for weeks and months at a time,” Fisher said, adding: “I’ve often thought the constant daily life of our modern world was not something that the human spirit was built to do.”
As time wore on, marriage became firmly entrenched as an economic necessity for performing “the work of life,” noted Hendrik Hartog, the Princeton historian who wrote “Man and Wife in America: A History” (Harvard University Press, $30).
“Most work, even factory work, occurred in what we consider the home until late in the 1800s,” he said. What with the need to plow fields, spin cloth, care for livestock and the like, “two sets of hands were barely enough to make a household work.”
The result, Hartog said, was centuries of compulsory togetherness—-perhaps as grating then as it is today, but considered a grim fact of life.
“There was a whole set of religious assumptions, which led people to think they had to reconcile those contradictions,” he said. The thought of living alone or leaving to be with someone else was barely imaginable.
Beginning in the 19th Century, a vanguard embraced the ideal of romantic marriage, at around the same time as the industrial revolution started sprouting workplaces. A new dynamic took hold, Hartog: “It became understood that male work occurs outside the home. This ideological shift empowered men and also served as a way for women to take control of the home as their domain as a division of labor.”
Because of that shift and all the changes of the last century, we’re awash today in what Hartog describes as “countervailing ideologies.” The traditional value of the chatelaine who runs the house persists despite more contemporary notions of marriage in which spouses are best friends. Women who were socialized in the 50s, 60s and 70s are likely to feel caught in the middle; younger women, less so. In either case, it’s very hard to discuss feeling crowded by your husband, because “people don’t have a clear sense of entitlement or rights in this situation,” he said. It’s fairly typical to want it all.
The need for space
There is one absolute, however, said William Pinsof, a psychologist and president of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, a training and counseling facility. “Regardless of whether a couple is young or old, they’re going to need their own space,” he said.
It’s a fundamental human need from which we construct our identity, Pinsof said. Demarcations such as “this is my bed, my toothbrush, my car” define who we are.
“It’s very important for people to have their own space to do with and organize as they want,” he said. And losing the external space that comes with having a job outside the home is a difficult adjustment, even when the choice is made voluntarily.
“I talk to countless women who say when their husbands retire, `I feel like now my space has been invaded now that he’s here. He’s asking me what I’m doing, who I’m calling during the day,'” Pinsof continued. Younger couples tend to be more egalitarian, but still feel the lure of traditional roles after children are born. “The bottom line is everyone needs control over personal space and time,” he said.
The most desirable solution–for some, a wildly impractical one–may be a larger home with more space. That’s how Lynne and Michael Naso, two former William Morris talent agents who formed their own business in 1997, dealt with the tension that was creeping into their marriage as a consequence of working together 12 hours a day. She was a neat freak. He, on the other hand, “thrives on chaos,” said Lynne.
The couple moved from an apartment in New York City to a home in suburban Westchester County to their current abode, on a 17-acre spread in upstate New York.
“It became much, much easier as soon as we got our space,” Lynee Naso says. Now the couple finds time to have lunch in town or take walks in the snow.
“We relish our time together,” she said. Though it defies conventional wisdom, respecting the need for space has brought them closer together.
