Is "wife" is a dirty word?‏

Another day, another mistress exposed. I've stopped counting (could there possibly be more?) but last week all the extramarital relations were a little hard for me to ignore. In case you missed it, one of Tiger's many gals leaked all his raunchy, albeit pornographic text messages (warning: they're not breakfast cereal reading material).
Senator John Edwards's obscure mistress Rielle Hunter ruined any chance of public sympathy with a photoshoot in which she cavorted sexually around her child's bedroom.
And golden girl Sandra Bullock discovered what no woman ever wants to discover - that her husband had been doing the nasty with a woman who is covered in full body tattoos, sports enormous fake breasts and appears (from photos posted all over the internet) to have a penchant for dressing up as a Nazi in her spare time.
All this in one week? Yikes. So it might be understandable that I can't help but be a little distracted by all the marital disarray ...
Sure, we can pontificate for hours over whether or not the mistresses all knew that their new squeezes had partners already, were married with kids and would never consider leaving their families. We can debate for yonkers what the heck runs through the heads of these seemingly vacuous women who get ensconced with such men. We can question their motives and whether they really thought that their casual sex buddies were going to dump their wives. But in the end we always seem to come to the same conclusion: Who knows? Who cares?
What we do know, though, is that while these women cause a heck of a lot of heartache, pain and financial ruin for everyone involved, the photographic evidence points to the unavoidable truth: these women are not exactly supermodels. In fact, when it comes to the recent cases at hand, the "other women" are rather off-putting.
Usually we just skim over the surface of this icky issue, but today I felt the need to delve a little deeper in the psyche of it all. What I found during my research travels was an old tome written by Michael Drury (who is a woman despite her name), who in 1965 interviewed an anonymous old mistress at length to discover what exactly goes on inside the minds of those who screw up relationships for the rest of us.
The result? Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress - 110 pages of lessons a mistress garnered during her tenor as a man's "other woman".
The anonymous mistress puts forward an interesting argument. She said that mistresses get the best lesson of all as to how to forge a brilliant relationship with a man. And they do it by getting an inside peak into the wife's myriad mistakes.
"Mistresses have to learn like anybody else from observation and mistakes," she says, "and it is often wives who prove the ablest teachers, both by what they do and fail of doing - or of seeing."
Mistresses know all too well that there is to be no berating, scolding, nagging, urging him to talk or demanding him to change while she is in his company. She seems to know her place, bites her tongue and, instead, is "immediately and intensely caught up in [the] man" creating what the anonymous mistress describes as a "magnetic field" when the two of them are together.
One strength of a mistress is apparently "her paradoxical gift of restoring native loneliness" for the man she's bonking. And wives would be surprised to learn that the mistress's role isn't all revolved around sex.
"Wives might be amazed to know how much time a mistress spends listening; cooking favourite dishes; selecting a gift or her own clothes to please; developing her knowledge of many things from medieval art to fly-casting; seeking out new places to go; caring."
The mistress acknowledges that, while women like her have nothing to do with a man's feeling about his wife - "they are simply not on the same plane" - she does say that wives are getting it all wrong. "Everything is for tomorrow," she says, describing the communication the wife usually has with her husband, "the children's education, the bigger house, next year's promotion, retirement, the long focus upon some event not yet arrived. A mistress lives perhaps too much in the present, but this very immediacy, physical and spiritual, is a lodestar."
She adds, "More than one man has said, or thought, that with his mistress he at least knows himself alive."
This all definitely got me thinking: has "wife" become a dirty word?
A girlfriend of mine is concerned that this is just the case in her parent's marriage. She fears her mother has given up being seen as attractive by her husband.
"She doesn't care what she eats, what she wears or how she grooms herself," my concerned friend explains. "It's weird - but it's like she's given up any hope of ever being seen as attractive in my father's eyes ever again."
How many wives feel the same? Do wives become a little complacent over their looks, leave the bathroom door open, dress in tatty old clothes to watch a DVD on a Saturday night, and generally stop caring about attracting their man?
Sure, it's all a big effort, and yes, always having to put on a "show" for your man would take a heck of a lot of willpower and hours on the Pilates reformer bed. But Jeanann Pannasch, a writer for the website YourTango, says that, while women often want to foster closeness by talking about things such as the "time of the month", their toilet habits and how many times they may have vomited from a stomach bug, she wishes it were a little different when it comes to her own relationship.
During a skiing trip with her husband, he asked her how many times she'd vomited from a stomach virus. She suddenly realised that, while she didn't really want to talk about the icky bathroom disaster with her husband, after six years of marriage they had already opened that proverbial bathroom door a long time ago.
When all she could muster was, "I'm your wife", she suddenly realised that "wife" actually made it seem as if she should be sharing her bowel movements with him after all.
She writes: "After all, I wasn't his 'girlfriend', 'lover' or 'fiancee'. And wife, let's face it, is a dirty word - and not the good kind of dirty. A wife might buy your toilet paper. She might wash your underwear. She's expected to be the willing, concerned ear, listening like your mommy would, to the details of your popped blisters."
Over the course of her story, she decides to explore all the ways in which to bring back the girlfriend-boyfriend dynamic. After all, Pannasch says, thinking of herself as a "girlfriend" alludes to the fact that there's a "willingness - or desire - to impress".
She explores how to "find the erotic in the same home where we change dirty diapers", and finds the solution is to keep some things (including bathroom habits) to oneself.
Her conclusion? "For better or for worse, 'girlfriend' signifies that he still has to work, or at least think - and 'wife' doesn't."
Perhaps, if more couples started caring again and acting more like boyfriend and girlfriend and less like shrews or old maids, marriages would still hold the same zing, chemistry and sexuality as at the beginning of the courtship.
And maybe, just maybe, the mistress would no longer have a place in our newspaper columns ...