Now that I am working again, this is the only area of our lives where traditional roles hold us in such sway. Otherwise our partnership is remarkably equal. My husband does as much or more of the actual floor-time of parenting. He cleans more than I do. He does all the cooking. Given this, and given that I am someone who takes equality between the sexes so seriously, shouldn't the fact that I seem to enjoy a certain kind of helplessness bother me? Feminism, for all that the word has fallen out of fashion, is ubiquitous enough that it feels vaguely shameful for a woman to want to feel protected.

My husband, on the other hand, feels no counterpoint to my feminist crisis. I am solely responsible for our finances, a job that, while many women do it, might be considered the traditional purview of a man. Yet my husband doesn't find it emasculating that he hasn't paid a bill in as long as I haven't changed a light bulb. On the contrary, he's relieved.

Perhaps my lack of concern with my home repair incompetence is nothing more than a vestige of that patriarchy I spent so much time reading about and demonstrating against in college. Maybe I'm not as much of a feminist as I think I am. After all, I stopped working and stayed home with kids for years, and neither my husband nor I even considered for a moment the possibility that he would do the same. Maybe I enjoy feeling inept with a hammer and a screwdriver because part of me thinks that's how girls are supposed to be behave.

But I don't think so.

I think this has more to do with the nature of marriage. In every union roles are assumed, some traditional, some not. My husband used to pay his own bills, I used to call my own repairman. But as marriages progress, you surrender areas of your own competence, often without even knowing it. You do this in part because it's more efficient for each individual to have his or her own area of expertise, but more as a kind of optimistic gesture. By surrendering certain skills you are affirming your belief that the other person will remain there to care for you in that way.

This kind of capitulation is not without its pitfalls, of course. Every woman who has given over the financial reins only to find herself divorced and penniless knows its dangers. Still, one of the wonderful things about an intimate partnership is the division of life, the parsing out and sharing of responsibility.

One of the tragedies of a lost love is the collapse of this system, and the confrontation of the ways we've allowed ourselves to become dependent. When I think of Stacia alone in her house, learning for herself the things that she once relied on Matthew for, my heart breaks. Stacia is a strong and able woman. Of course she can put together a cabinet or unplug a toilet. So could I, if I set my mind to it, and checked out a few books on home repair from the library. My heart breaks because this enforced proficiency is symbolic of Matthew's absence, of all the ways in which she and her daughter must do without the man on whom they would still rely if only fortunes were different, if only that driver had taken the corner more slowly.

I suppose that you could argue that this is precisely why we shouldn't give in to this seductive loss of expertise. You could even argue that we could view the end of a relationship as an opportunity to become stronger, to relearn or learn new skills. I don't know. I do know that I am not going to be picking up a hand tool anytime soon. I will continue to pay the bills; my husband will unclog the toilets. That is the way our marriage works; that is the bargain we struck without a word. My only wish is that I could take a page out of his book and refrain from feeling guilty about it.

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