THanks for asking! It's interesting that I never asked myself this question. When I tried to formulate what my perfect marriage would be, I realised that my own dead marriage was very imperfect -- just how imperfect I never understood until now.
My Perfect Marriage
1. Eat breakfast at home together - drink coffee and read paper together at least several times a week.
2. Do the grocery shopping together occasionally. Not a mad dash through the store to get it over with but wandering up and down the aisles to see what's new.
3. Cook dinner together once a week or so, while drinking wine.
4. Enjoy dinner out as a couple with friends -- mine and/or his and/or ours. Spend a few hours with friends over a meal.
5. Take care of the house together. This means decorating it, maintaining it.
6. Hang out at home together some on weekends.
7. Take weekend trips to beautiful places nearby. Stay at an inn.
8. Take summer trips abroad.
9. Take walks around the neighborhood together year round.
10. Share some sort of spiritual life together. Maybe go to church together.
11. SEX: (I know this is really the part you're interested in CeMar) Enjoy massages and body rubs several times a week, make love in a leisurely way.
1. I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of breakfasts we shared at home. X did not drink coffee and always had to rush out to the gym or to work in the AM.
2. We shopped together a handful of times in our marriage and then it was the mad dash variety. This to me is analagous to duty sex.
3. Almost never cooked dinner together. I came home to an empty house almost every night, dealt with the kids, made the dinner alone, he came home late to eat it, usually after it was cold. He does not drink wine, or really any other kind of alcohol.
4. He hated spending time with my friends. He is somewhat socially phobic. If my friends were there when he came home, he briefly said hello and went into another part of the house. Sometimes he was downright hostile to them. He felt uncomfortable around most of my friends.
5. I did all the housework, all the home repair and maintenance with the exception of changing lightbulbs. I mowed the lawn, planted and maintained the garden, painted rooms, hung pictures, picked out furnishings. Did most of the cooking and almost all the grocery shopping. I felt he used our home as a motel.
6. Neither X nor I was good at hanging out at home. Too restless. Working on that alone now.
7. We did trips away by ourselves a couple of times a year. Hard with young kids and his workaholism.
8. No trips abroad. X didn't like to travel outside of US. All our trips were his choice -- fine with me til I learned that I wasn't hardy enough out on the trail with a backpack strapped to my back to go sleep in the wilderness for a few days.
9. We were good at walking! X often didn't have time (too busy working) but we both enjoyed it when we did.
10. I am a church-goer, X is not. The outdoors is his church. We didn't share too much in that regard, although our values about most things were very similar.
11. Sex was the same-old same-old, twice a week, mostly duty sex on my part. Totally inadequate in X's eyes.
12. We did have great conversation together. I know we both still miss that. We were well matched intellectually, both of us love to read, we shared ideas. This was probably our area of greatest strength.
So there you have it. As you can see, the most important things to me are companionship and I notice that there was very little of that in my marriage.
