With Good Reason

Attitudes towards women and marriage have changed in Russia – but how far?

There is no doubt that marriage is one of the most significant events of human life. There is a Russian proverb: if you have no brains when you are twenty, you are never going to have any; if you have no wife when you are thirty, you are never going to have a wife. What does it mean to have a wife in Russia?

Once an American friend of mine who was living in Moscow for a while asked my advice. He was going to make more close acquaintance of a girl, and he wanted to know what to do if she invited him to her dacha (cottage) for a weekend and told him that only the two of them would be there. A girl from the office where he worked had made such a proposition. He wished to ensure that a Russian girl meant the same thing as one in any other country would in a similar situation. I asked him if he liked the girl. He said yes, she was quite attractive. My advice was to accept the invitation – if he liked her, of course.

Several days later I asked him whether he had visited the girl in question. He replied that he had been busy that weekend and was unable to go to her dacha. When he retuned to the office, she informed him that she had gotten married and, alas, they couldn’t meet each other anymore. So my American friend asked me to explain why the girl had wanted him to keep her company at a remote dacha if she was going to marry another man. It was unlikely that she had found a fiancé within a week after his refusal to drive there with her.

I actually didn’t see anything strange in the scenario: a girl plans to be faithful to her husband but wants to have something else to remember, as she knows that sex with her spouse will be her one and only entertainment (again, if she plans to be faithful) for many years. Of course it cannot be said that this is an official tradition in Russia or that every Russian girl necessarily behaves this way. No doubt, though, that many Russian men are curious as to whether their future wives will be faithful to them after the wedding or not. What can be said on the matter?

I think the answer to the question is that times definitely change and that the ways of women change most of all. As elsewhere in the world, little by little women are gaining equality with men. Russia, like any other country, has always possessed double standards for the sexual behavior of men and women. Nobody cared if a man had sex before marriage or not, and people always turned a blind eye to his infidelity afterwards. (This depended mainly on the wife’s attitude. If she thought that she had to force her husband to be faithful, she might make an attempt to do so.) It is unlikely that Russian traditions in this respect were much different from those in other nations, especially European ones. A boy should “sow his wild oats” and a girl should save herself for her wedding night. This mentality was very well described in one of Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov’s novels in which knowing that his wife turned out not to be a virgin made a Cossack really suffer. As a result the Cossack took to humiliating and tormenting her.

And as in other parts of the world, Russian women began to be more and more equal with men in their right to be faithful or unfaithful in marriage and to have intercourse before marriage or not. Whereas in the olden days a girl in Russia who was found not to be a virgin at marriage could see the gates of her house painted with soot as a sign of the gravity of her “sin,” now very few men show much concern as to whether their future brides have had prior sexual experience (a woman should just be clever enough not to bring up her past adventures to her husband). There was a short-lived fashion for virgins among the so-called “new Russians” (those who made their fortune during Boris Yeltsin’s reforms). They looked at everything as something that could be bought, so they viewed “buying” marriage as a move in the order of buying a video recorder or television set. When a man buys such a thing he wants a new device, not a second-hand one as a rule. There were many talk shows on the topic, and some men specifically invited for the programs (as a rule on Russian TV unemployed actors) tried to explain why they wanted to marry a virgin. There was not much logic in their speculations, and it soon got boring. (However, a woman in Russia can have a special operation if she wants to marry such a man and “become a virgin” again.)

The next step women took in their quest for equality had to do with unfaithfulness. In this case the logic was very simple. Women figured, “If men are not faithful to us, why should we be faithful to them?” According to the results of a survey that I was acquainted with, 90% of girls claimed that they planned to be unfaithful to their husbands sometimes. That is, many of them explained that it would be better to avoid infidelity but in reality it is often not possible. Of course it could be argued that the women were being frank when they responded to the survey (though it may have been the case that 100% of them intended to be unfaithful and 10% just lied or, on the other hand, they underestimated their own merits in the sense of morality). Nonetheless, we can take it as a fact that female infidelity has become quite widespread in Russia.

The only problem is that while experience before marriage, for women as well as men, is accepted by most people these days, it is much more difficult to find consensus on male and female unfaithfulness. Men have tried to argue in their usual way that it is much harder for a male to be betrayed by a spouse, but it seems such an argument is no longer convincing even to them.

Anyway, after marriage a Russian women’s life changes greatly. I have corresponded with many girls, and as a rule after marriage they can no longer write to other men. It is impossible for them to explain to their husbands that they have a friend. I have a friend in Sweden and I once asked her who is more important for a Swedish woman – a husband or a friend. The question was posed half in jest, but the woman responded that she would consult her friends and relatives on the matter. Recently she informed me that everybody replied that a friend is more important. And indeed, some time later her boyfriend (who was not an ethnic Swede) became a bit jealous of our correspondence. She wrote me about it, and I began to worry that it could spoil our friendship. However, she told me not to worry: she could have one hundred husbands or none, but I would remain her friend. If her boyfriend did not agree to that, he would no longer be her boyfriend.

For a Russian woman a husband is definitely much more important than a friend. Actually, what I would call a “classic” woman is a woman in an Eastern country who thinks a man is more valuable than she is. Some time ago I corresponded with a girl from Iran. She was amazingly beautiful. In Russia men often fear such girls because they are used to having a lot of men at their feet and become a bit arrogant as a result. The Iranian girl had a very nice character, and I never sensed any arrogance on her part while talking to her. I moreover always got the feeling from her letters that I was esteemed just for the fact of being male. Say for example I wrote to her that I was a feminist. She might consider feminism the stupidest thing in the world, but as a man I had a right to do anything I wanted and it should be OK with any decent woman.

Things are quite different in Russia. A Russian woman has an opinion of her own on every subject. Russians like to argue as it is, but for a woman it is really a point of honor to prove to a man that he is wrong and she is right. It would be fine if she wanted to be equal to a man. But feminism (I know that feminism has become a four-letter word for many even in the West, but I use the word just to designate a movement of equal rights for women) is extremely unpopular in Russia and our women want to be women, not persons equal to men.

It is very difficult to depend on somebody and argue with him all the time, all the more so because Russian women are extremely dissatisfied with their men. A modern Russian man is considered by women as too feminine, lazy, liable to lie on the sofa reading the paper or drink beer with friends instead of doing something in the house in the sense of hammering nails in the wall, which was always a man’s duty in our tradition. Not that you order a man around when you need something hung up on the wall. A man is the one who must do it. And this hammering of a nail is the first thing you will hear from a Russian woman if you talk to her about Russian men. Probably this is the main reason Russia holds the world record when it comes to divorce. Of course, there are women who stand on their own two feet – I have heard that up to 90% of owners and managers of small firms are women. But it is not easy for them to find husbands either, since often men feel humiliated if their wives earn more than they do.

All in all, I would say that in every aspect of our culture Russians are much less pragmatic than people in the West. I would give as an example another observation on Russian life by my American friend. In the USA, he explained to me, when you talk to a woman she always says something like “Alabama? Oh, I was there with my husband last summer” or “You like omelets? My husband does too.” It is not that you get the exact details of her vacation in Alabama or her omelet, but you learn right away that the woman is married. So if you plan to invite her to a restaurant and then to your place this information may be useful. What unpleasantly surprised my friend was that the only way to discover whether a Russian woman was married was to ask her about it. And since he didn’t know what is socially acceptable to inquire about in Russia, there was no way for him to know the girl’s marital status.

So a little question could have spared my friend a lot of angst!