Gomez Addams and the Rise of Loving Your Wife
How a fictional relationship is helping define modern love.
A lot of us are familiar with the whole schtick of the “I hate my wife” comedy that permeated the 80s and 90s. Rodney Dangerfield was a major name in that particular brand of comedy, apparently never getting any respect from any of the women in his life. Some entire movies and shows revolve around this premise as their primary source of conflict.
A lot of us older millennials grew up with this brand of comedy, and it has been interesting to watch people my age rebel against it as we do with all things Boomer. The idea of marrying young for a variety of reasons, only to wind up hating our spouses in the end, doesn’t really vibe with us.
As such, we are getting married older, living together before marriage, and generally doing a lot of things after we’ve reached more emotional maturity in our lives. Gone are the days of marrying right out of high school, and marrying your high school sweetheart is a good way to wind up divorced within five years.
We are also starting to normalize divorce as a way of getting out of bad relationships. After all, a divorce isn’t a good relationship breaking up, it’s a bad relationship legally dissolving. In the past, a lot of bad relationships would’ve been stuck…
