A Marriage Agreement

Marriage, as they say, takes two to work. Gender roles should not exist in marriage because it would only bring conflicts to the relationship. Couples need to become partners while still maintaining their individuality. They need to learn how to make decisions with the other person in mind. If not, the marriage will most likely turn into a divorce with the couple thinking that this is the best solution.

Alix Kates Shulman, in her essay entitled A Marriage Agreement, believes that everything can be worked out if couples only knew how to work around each other. She proves this by presenting the audience with their Marriage Agreement in which both she and her husband explicitly detail each other’s chores and responsibility.

The author admits that the agreement was a little formal; however, it worked for their marriage (p. 181), and this is what is important. The couple decided to make an agreement after realizing that they have grown too accustomed to their everyday chores wherein the wife did everything from taking care of the children to cleaning the house while the husband spends time away from his family to make some money.

This is what most couples have become, which makes their marriage fall apart. Shulman writes how verbal agreement to delegate tasks and share duties will not work and that a written agreement will make it easier for couples to adjust to the new divisions of their responsibilities.

However as good as the author’s narration of how they delegated the tasks, for overall effectiveness of convincing readers of the effectivity of such delegation the author must present proof and comparison of the advantages of such agreements. The essay simply indicates in passing the effectiveness of such delegations without further proof or solidification and therefore, becomes weak in persuading its readers.

The main article starts off with introducing the current situation of marriage life in America. It starts off by imprinting an image to the readers on how overworked and lopsided the delegation of domestic responsibilities is towards women. It was presented in a way that is very academic stating statistics and quoting researches.

This acts as a clear introduction of the featured author’s feminist view of how household responsibilities must be shared among spouses. The article then goes on saying how better it is for families that do not follow the traditional delegation of household work than those who are not willing to share the duties and responsibilities of taking care of home and family (p.179). All these up to this point were presented in a very clear manner with the intent of the author to convince her audience of how sharing responsibilities is beneficial to marriage life introduced smoothly.

However, from this academic level of argumentation, the article presents an essay that is a personal account of a marriage life. This essay is supposedly the main argument of the article but for some reason, it does not provide much strength to the stated arguments. Rather, it simply gives a glimpse of how to spread evenly responsibilities without much proof of its effectivity. This is the main flaw of the essay as it does not strengthen the main article.