Everything was prepared for the perfect marriage. Family and friends of the couple saw them in an example of love and trusted that there would be a lasting relationship of those that few are seen in these times of social networks and internet, they had invested many millions in the preparations and hundreds of invitations had been sent out for what promised to be the feast of the year.
Just a day before the wedding, without infidelity or anything like that. Just a sincere conversation between the two. Maria del Mar, the bride slammed the door on everything and deeply wounded but equally convinced of the decision she was making, she told Carlos, her boyfriend, that everything lived and planned between them was finished once and for all. Nothing that he could have said or done that night served to change the decision made. He was the eldest of three male brothers from a Mexican middleclass family of deeply Catholic traditions. Carlos was a family of patriarchal customs, where the father always occupied the head of the dining room and where food was served first to Dement, following the order of age from oldest to youngest. For many years, Carlos’s mother, although she had studied public accounting but could not work because her husband forbade it.
He had been taught that the man of the house was the one who should work and that the function of women was to take care of household activities, that a man could not take the reins of his home himself and his wife should work. It must be a shame for him. And indeed, it was Carlos father that had three children, all boys, was forced to agree to his wife to work because he could no longer sustain the family economy. However, the right to work for that woman was not exactly a factor of liberation because she did not rest from her activities as a housewife. On the contrary, multiplied by two the daily effort she had to make.
In addition to cooking and cleaning the house, she had to attend every day for 8 hours to a lowpaid job as a bank teller. The rules dictated by her husband made it even unthinkable that her children, all of them men, were going to sell you their masculinity. By collaborating with the mother with some of the household activities, Carlos and their brothers were internalizing this patriarchal macho logic typical of our societies, which assigned to women domestic functions and the upbringing of children and reserve for men the exclusive right to work. Over the years, Carlos entered to study a University career in a public institution. There he found a new and different world, apparently different from those strong traditions in which he had grown up a world of dangers such as drugs and radicalized political groups.
But also a world of freedoms where women express themselves supposedly on equal terms with men and where nonheterosexual people express their sexual orientation without complexes. A world that had a tremendous impact on Carlos turned him into a person who believed himself different and distant from the religious culture of which he was heir. He began to listen to other music, read other books, and declared himself a free thinker, capable even of daring to question the unquestionable rules imposed by his father in his home. And it was in the midst of this new world that Carlos met Maria del Mar. Like him, she was the eldest of three sisters, but unlike him, she had not had the opportunity to grow up next to a father because he abandoned her mother shortly after she was born.
Although her mother was also a woman of deep Catholic and traditional convictions, the small detail of growing up without a father figure weighed heavily on the education of Maria del Mar. It would end up differentiating her deeply from Carlos. She had taken care of her from an early age to take care of household activities, from the kitchen to the care of her sisters because her mother had to work hard to afford her daughter’s education. Despite these differences, Carlos and Maria del Mar agreed on their musical and literary tastes and their apparently shared vision of a life of desires for a free and more just world. They lived their University careers sharing together every free time they had to enjoy.
By the time the graduate was approaching, Carlos and Maria del Mar, despite their age, began to make plans to marry. In reality, the wedding was a Catholic formality that they preferred to avoid. Faced with the importance that both parents attached to that Sacrament, the young people decided to accept just to finally obtain what they wanted so much sharing life together. But all those future plans had a problem that they would be aware of too late. In reality, Carlos and Maria del Mar had never lived under the same roof, perhaps because of an unrecognized influence of that tradition from which both came.
Perhaps due to economic limitations, however, the truth is that the young people decided to marry without first having lived together. Blinded by the deep love they professed for each other, they believed that this critical step would only be the continuity of the beautiful love story that they had starred in until then. After graduating, in each having obtained a stable job, Carlos and Maria del Mar embarked on preparing what should be the wedding of the year. They continued to live, each with their parents. To invest their salaries in the ceremony, they hired the best musicians in town, rented the largest and most elegant party hall, and sent invitations to each and every friend and family that each of them had been accumulating throughout their lives.
For all who knew them, that marriage would be the perfect finishing touch to an equally perfect relationship that was advertised for life. However, the expectations of their own and others were destroyed by a conversation between the bride and groom just one day before the appointed date. In a romantic dinner, which was expected to be the last action of the details of the new life they were about to begin, Carlos showed that all that free thinking thought forged over the years in College was nothing more than mere appearance. For him, this was a stage of youthful rebellion that had already been overcome. Real life was much more serious than those dreams of freedom and was governed by the traditional codes that had always worked.
So in planning his future as a husband, Carlos began to give a reality bath to Maria del Mar, communicating to her with all naturalness as if it were the most normal thing in the world. What he expected of her breakfast in bed, toileting, the kitchen, shopping, the weekly market, cooking each and every meal, dinners in restaurants would have been in the past, because what was now involved was to save for when the children were born. And as if repeating what had been the reality of his house in his childhood, he hoped that Maria del Mar would take care of all that while also working in a job for 8 hours a day. Maria del Mar deeply loved Carlos, but it was a love that for her could only be on condition that it was in freedom. If what that relationship dictated was instead the submission to one of its parts, for her it would no longer be about love.
And no matter how strong the desire to be next to the other was, the healthiest thing was to cut the link, no matter what others could say. And so she did, communicating her disappointment to Carlos, deciding to end the marriage compromise. As Maria Delmar explained, the words of Carlos did not simply express a slight difference between the two that could be overcome with dialogue. That plan for the future that he had presented to her was nothing but a manifestation of Carlos true macho nature. Maria del Mar understood that she had fallen in love with a person who did not exist because what for her were the most essential and profound convictions of freedom by which to judge every human being, those that had United her to Carlos for him turned out to be a passing fashion typical of a stage that had remained in the past.
There’s nothing Carlos could say or do at that time change. The firmness of the decision taken by Maria del Mar, who, although judged even by her family for ruining a marriage already practically done, felt reassured by the decision taken for any price to pay for her freedom was fair to her. Carlos understood the lesson. Times have changed and the role of women should no longer be that of domestic, enslaved person, but that of a human being with full rights with equality of conditions.