Laundry in Marriage

There is nothing worse than doing laundry. Gilbert & Sullivan in their opera, Pirates of Penzance, have their Pirate King at one point declare "I look upon it with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation." That is pretty much the best way of capturing my view on laundry. It's not so much putting dirty clothes into a machine. Nor is it that I mind drying them in another machine. No, that's fine. The machines are great. I just wish they would make a folding machine. Better yet, an ironing and folding machine. So I've just returned from pairing my socks. From folding my tee shirts. Now I have a pile of shirts to button, some of them to iron (another detestable practice), and then hang.

Well, while I brought up my clothes from the laundry room I commented to a friend in the dorm, "Do you know what the best thing about getting married will be?" Without missing a beat he answered, "Sex?" I was of course aiming for a more sexist response but not a sexual response. I wanted to suggest that the best thing about getting married would be that she would be able to fold and iron the clothes. Of course, I'm not entirely serious. I mean, I will help...I have to. I suppose that I will be so in love that I won't mind helping her out with that. But hopefully we will come up with some sort of arrangement where she tends to the laundry and I'll be able to tend to more pleasant chores. Say, vacuuming the carpets or dusting or washing dishes. Anything but doing the laundry!

Yet in my friends response I found a very interesting outlook. Sex is certainly a big deal. Someone once said that it, the sex life, was the best thermometer on measuring a marriage's status. Maybe, I don't know. But I thought that it was a little crude. Often enough we can be rather crude (especially in a guy's dorm). We look at marriage as a monument to sex. This is due in part to our own Christianity. We are instinctively sexual beings (for more on this read up on Bertrand Russell) and the Christian faith prohibits (rightly enough) sex until marriage. Of course once married sex is to be consummated and made as beautifully ceremonial as in Song of Solomon's, or as one professor put it, as a joyous feast of erotic love.

Too many people in the Christian faith regard sex as something very dirty, especially among the female of the species. Undoubtedly sex can get dirty, but that's not the way God wanted it, or created it, to be. Sex is not the point of marriage. Of course, neither is marriage for free maid service as I get her to do my laundry.