Marriage in Russia
Attitudes towards women and marriage have changed
in Russia – but how far?
By Alexey Bayukov
There is no doubt that marriage is one of the most significant events
of human life. There is a Russian proverb: if you have no brains when
you are twenty, you are never going to have any; if you have no wife
when you are thirty, you are never going to have a wife. What does
it mean to have a wife in Russia?
Once an American friend of mine who was living in Moscow for a while
asked my advice. He was going to make more close acquaintance of a
girl, and he wanted to know what to do if she invited him to her dacha
(cottage) for a weekend and told him that only the two of them would
be there. A girl from the office where he worked had made such a proposition.
He wished to ensure that a Russian girl meant the same thing as one
in any other country would in a similar situation. I asked him if
he liked the girl. He said yes, she was quite attractive. My advice
was to accept the invitation - if he liked her, of course.
Several days later I asked him whether he had visited the girl in
question. He replied that he had been busy that weekend and was unable
to go to her dacha. When he retuned to the office, she informed him
that she had gotten married and, alas, they couldn’t meet each
other anymore. So my American friend asked me to explain why the girl
had wanted him to keep her company at a remote dacha if she was going
to marry another man. It was unlikely that she had found a fiancé
within a week after his refusal to drive there with her.
I actually didn’t see anything strange in the scenario: a girl
plans to be faithful to her husband but wants to have something else
to remember, as she knows that sex with her spouse will be her one
and only entertainment (again, if she plans to be faithful) for many
years. Of course it cannot be said that this is an official tradition
in Russia or that every Russian girl necessarily behaves this way.
No doubt, though, that many Russian men are curious as to whether
their future wives will be faithful to them after the wedding or not.
What can be said on the matter?
I think the answer to the question is that times definitely change
and that the ways of women change most of all. As elsewhere in the
world, little by little women are gaining equality with men. Russia,
like any other country, has always possessed double standards for
the sexual behavior of men and women. Nobody cared if a man had sex
before marriage or not, and people always turned a blind eye to his
infidelity afterwards. (This depended mainly on the wife’s attitude.
If she thought that she had to force her husband to be faithful, she
might make an attempt to do so.) It is unlikely that Russian traditions
in this respect were much different from those in other nations, especially
European ones. A boy should “sow his wild oats” and a girl
should save herself for her wedding night. This mentality was very
well described in one of Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov’s novels
in which knowing that his wife turned out not to be a virgin made
a Cossack really suffer. As a result the Cossack took to humiliating
and tormenting her.
____________________________
Little by little women are gaining equality with men.
____________________________
And
as in other parts of the world, Russian women began to be more and
more equal with men in their right to be faithful or unfaithful in
marriage and to have intercourse before marriage or not. Whereas in
the olden days a girl in Russia who was found not to be a virgin at
marriage could see the gates of her house painted with soot as a sign
of the gravity of her “sin,” now very few men show much
concern as to whether their future brides have had prior sexual experience
(a woman should just be clever enough not to bring up her past adventures
to her husband). There was a short-lived fashion for virgins among
the so-called “new Russians” (those who made their fortune
during Boris Yeltsin’s reforms). They looked at everything as
something that could be bought, so they viewed “buying”
marriage as a move in the order of buying a video recorder or television
set. When a man buys such a thing he wants a new device, not a second-hand
one as a rule. There were many talk shows on the topic, and some men
specifically invited for the programs (as a rule on Russian TV unemployed
actors) tried to explain why they wanted to marry a virgin. There
was not much logic in their speculations, and it soon got boring.
(However, a woman in Russia can have a special operation if she wants
to marry such a man and “become a virgin” again.)
The next step women took in their quest for equality had to do with
unfaithfulness. In this case the logic was very simple. Women figured,
“If men are not faithful to us, why should we be faithful to
them?” According to the results of a survey that I was acquainted
with, 90% of girls claimed that they planned to be unfaithful to their
husbands sometimes. That is, many of them explained that it would
be better to avoid infidelity but in reality it is often not possible.
Of course it could be argued that the women were being frank when
they responded to the survey (though it may have been the case that
100% of them intended to be unfaithful and 10% just lied or, on the
other hand, they underestimated their own merits in the sense of morality).
Nonetheless, we can take it as a fact that female infidelity has become
quite widespread in Russia.
The only problem is that while experience before marriage, for women
as well as men, is accepted by most people these days, it is much
more difficult to find consensus on male and female unfaithfulness.
Men have tried to argue in their usual way that it is much harder
for a male to be betrayed by a spouse, but it seems such an argument
is no longer convincing even to them.
Anyway, after marriage a Russian women’s life changes greatly.
I have corresponded with many girls, and as a rule after marriage
they can no longer write to other men. It is impossible for them to
explain to their husbands that they have a friend. I have a friend
in Sweden and I once asked her who is more important for a Swedish
woman – a husband or a friend. The question was posed half in
jest, but the woman responded that she would consult her friends and
relatives on the matter. Recently she informed me that everybody replied
that a friend is more important. And indeed, some time later her boyfriend
(who was not an ethnic Swede) became a bit jealous of our correspondence.
She wrote me about it, and I began to worry that it could spoil our
friendship. However, she told me not to worry: she could have one
hundred husbands or none, but I would remain her friend. If her boyfriend
did not agree to that, he would no longer be her boyfriend.
____________________________
I once asked her who is more important for
a Swedish woman – a husband or a friend.
____________________________
For
a Russian woman a husband is definitely much more important than a
friend. Actually, what I would call a “classic” woman is
a woman in an Eastern country who thinks a man is more valuable than
she is. Some time ago I corresponded with a girl from Iran. She was
amazingly beautiful. In Russia men often fear such girls because they
are used to having a lot of men at their feet and become a bit arrogant
as a result. The Iranian girl had a very nice character, and I never
sensed any arrogance on her part while talking to her. I moreover
always got the feeling from her letters that I was esteemed just for
the fact of being male. Say for example I wrote to her that I was
a feminist. She might consider feminism the stupidest thing in the
world, but as a man I had a right to do anything I wanted and it should
be OK with any decent woman.
Things are quite different in Russia. A Russian woman has an opinion
of her own on every subject. Russians like to argue as it is, but
for a woman it is really a point of honor to prove to a man that he
is wrong and she is right. It would be fine if she wanted to be equal
to a man. But feminism (I know that feminism has become a four-letter
word for many even in the West, but I use the word just to designate
a movement of equal rights for women) is extremely unpopular in Russia
and our women want to be women, not persons equal to men.
It is very difficult to depend on somebody and argue with him all
the time, all the more so because Russian women are extremely dissatisfied
with their men. A modern Russian man is considered by women as too
feminine, lazy, liable to lie on the sofa reading the paper or drink
beer with friends instead of doing something in the house in the sense
of hammering nails in the wall, which was always a man’s duty
in our tradition. Not that you order a man around when you need something
hung up on the wall. A man is the one who must do it. And this hammering
of a nail is the first thing you will hear from a Russian woman if
you talk to her about Russian men. Probably this is the main reason
Russia holds the world record when it comes to divorce. Of course,
there are women who stand on their own two feet – I have heard
that up to 90% of owners and managers of small firms are women. But
it is not easy for them to find husbands either, since often men feel
humiliated if their wives earn more than they do.
All in all, I would say that in every aspect of our culture Russians
are much less pragmatic than people in the West. I would give as an
example another observation on Russian life by my American friend.
In the USA, he explained to me, when you talk to a woman she always
says something like “Alabama? Oh, I was there with my husband
last summer” or “You like omelets? My husband does too.”
It is not that you get the exact details of her vacation in Alabama
or her omelet, but you learn right away that the woman is married.
So if you plan to invite her to a restaurant and then to your place
this information may be useful. What unpleasantly surprised my friend
was that the only way to discover whether a Russian woman was married
was to ask her about it. And since he didn’t know what is socially
acceptable to inquire about in Russia, there was no way for him to
know the girl’s marital status.
So a little question could have spared my friend a lot of angst!
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