Published Articles
By Dr. William R. Morrow

“Kitchen Counter Battle”

With the advent of more partnership marriages, husbands are now more frequently found in the kitchen. It used to be that, in the traditional marriage household, the man pleaded ignorance about how to fix a meal for himself. This antiquated husband probably thought a can opener, if he by chance ever saw one, was some kind of tool to fix car radiators with. In other words, he stayed away from domestic operations, hid in the garage when he could, or went hunting for wild boar to feed his family. His excuse was that he had more important things to do. Kitchens were off limits to the man, possibly by mutual agreement. Many wives, owing to male dominance, were happy to reign as queen of the inside of the house, with the kitchen being the command central and base of her operations. Those were your mothers and grandmothers. An endangered species. There may be fewer of them left than there are manatees. Those traditional women had their space, were highly skilled, and were normally not bothered by a husband wandering through, unless he was lost or wanting to borrow her private pair of scissors.

But, if you haven't noticed, times have changed. Husbands and wives are sharing kitchen duty. Nevertheless, there are a few transitional households, where wives have jobs outside the home, and are still expected to do all the domestic stuff. Some hapless males pretend they don't know how to cook. Some working wives have not quite found their new identity. Embedded traditions defy change, and the old male-female domestic roles resist adaptation as if these centuries old agrarian customs were instincts of the dung beetles mating rituals.

The fully evolved marriage, in terms of division of household labor, offers today's modern couples both advantages and disadvantages. Progress brings with it new frontiers of conflict in the home that our ancestors never had to cope with. There are no instruction manuals on how to establish new rules of engagement in certain areas where the evolved woman and the equally evolved man have to come face to face. In the new era, the kitchen has, in my view, become the arena where new roles are tested. Perhaps even symbolic of the way couples are struggling in the process of adjusting to the modern household. Right there on the kitchen counter the battle lines are drawn. The front lines are ever-changing as one partner gains ground and the other partner falls back momentarily. CNN would want to know about this, and document the details. One partner is bound to be more adamant about keeping the kitchen counter clean, and looking like no one ever lived there, let alone used the facilities. This one commands the neatness troops, and guards against stray crumbs or an unwashed cup lurking near the sink. The other partner, responding to the energy field of opposites, seeks to utilize the pots and pans in no particular order. He or she moves about the kitchen in a flurry of unpredictable activity. There are wild mixtures of aromas and incomplete projects. These more spontaneous types appear to have no sense of timing, often turning out gourmet peanut butter sandwiches from a chaotic staging area. Anyone who has benefited from this cooking style would never guess the crazy counter top scene from which it comes. Whose counter top is it, really? No one knows. It remains a kind of no-man's / no-woman's land, the scene of an ongoing battle. It is the price of progress, and, in my mind, a sign of healthy development of the modern marriage.

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