"Do wives today expect too much?"

Rosamund Pike, who plays the scheming and unhaaaappily married Amy Dunne in the hit thriller Gone Girl says that today’s dysfunctional marriages are the result of impossibly high expectations. Here below is a candid look at the marriages of five authors across five decades.

From The Telegraph: Do wives today expect too much?

I’ve pulled out the main bullet points here below. This is anecdotal of course, the experience of specific individuals, but pay close attention nevertheless to the increasing stridency across the decades, especially the latter two decades, and then ask yourself again if you think marriage is a good deal for men in any shape or form.

Penny, 1960s

• He married at 23, she was 21

• “For girls, a wedding was a dream come true, the beginning of a shared life with someone you loved. We didn’t really think far beyond that.”

• “I knew the deal, and it enchanted me; I would look after him, and he would look after me. But our roles were very clearly defined. He would organise our lives, do the gardening and the heavy stuff, putting up shelves and fixing things when they broke. My job was to keep house, to shop, cook, iron and clean. And in due course, look after the babies. Babies were most emphatically women’s work.”

• “Weekends were for the men to enjoy, to play with their children if it suited them, but more importantly to rest from their tough weeks; and the nights were for them to sleep. Paul hardly ever changed a nappy, or got up in the night, or did any cooking… …That was how it was.”

• “And that saw us prettily happily through; until death us did part.”

Hilary, 1970s

• “I lived with my husband, Don, for over a year before we got married.”

• “Things were definitely changing around that time, though, with feminism touching most women of my generation in some way – even if they didn’t describe themselves as feminists.”

• “Don did no chores or childcare. I remember a moment when we had been living for over a year in a rented house in Hollywood – where my husband was working at the time – and a visitor asked him for a towel. Don had no idea where the towels were kept.”

• “But the legacy of feminism meant that now there was the real excitement among my friends that we didn’t have to stay at home like our mothers and look after the children. We could have jobs and careers, too – although we wouldn’t be paid as well as our male counterparts, and still are not.”

• “…couples were still expected to socialise together. I would very rarely have been asked to a dinner party if my husband was away. Nor was there any of the “girls’ night outs’’ you see today.”

• “I am still trying to train Don – after 40 years – to do things around the house without being asked. But it’s not going well.”

Libby, 1980s

• Both married at 30

• “Our generation at 30 (we both were) had taken on the idea of being a team, both working, equal rights…”

• “I think we both expected it to last for life.”

• “As to household chores, at first I cooked because officially I knew how, but he rapidly outclassed me and has been the cook ever since. Nor did it seem odd that he did housework: an extension of his DIY and decorating skills. But I am better at money and mortgages and so forth…”

• “Social life? We had work friends in common, and sailing friends; but it did not occur to us – or our contemporaries – that either would give up the ones we used to know before, of either sex.”

• “…even at 30, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was a biological clock, and we never discussed whether we’d have children at all until two years later…”

Anna, 1990s

• “I knew marriage wasn’t a bed of roses. And yet, curiously, I was an idealist. I imagined we’d create our own modern fairytale.”

• “I was literally a Cosmo girl: features editor of Britain’s then bestselling women’s magazine. So, without being too specific, my standards were high, and I married the man who ticked all the requisite boxes. My mother had taught herself to cook, for my father. I scorned the idea of the little wife, in a pinafore, cooking. But I was secretly traditional. I wanted to ''make a home’’ – only not by the old, gendered methods.”

• “When our baby was born, I assumed I’d be in charge as I’d bothered to read some books. Phil did the male thing of not paying close attention (while being perfectly capable), and would fall asleep while our son swung in his swing-chair. But when he stopped being frightened of fatherhood, he was good at it.”

• “This was what I wanted: his care, time, understanding, i.e. a family man, there for his family. I craved security, but in the sense of everlasting love rather than being financially provided for: I didn’t expect to sit pretty, like a Siamese cat on a cushion. I presumed we’d both work; both pay for a cleaner, have fun, laugh a lot.”

• “His colleagues were horrified when he proposed: as if I were a dragon, carrying off their prince in my teeth. I determined not to crush his spirit and Phil spent our first year of marriage partying with mates. Then one morning, I found him comatose on the floor, and chucked a bucket of water over him. I was so lonely. This crystallised what I expected from him: respect, companionship, physical and psychological togetherness. We worked very hard to get there.”

Judith, 2000s

• “When I decided that I wanted to get married, I set about achieving my goal with methodical single-mindedness. It’s what I do.”

• “My boyfriend and I had been together for 11 years; and bless him, he had intimated a permanent union almost from the first wild tumble”

• “I wanted a baby, so I needed a husband. Quaintly old-fashioned, I know, but no less audacious and calculating for that. So, how did I get a ring on my finger? I set about being lovely. Ladies, I wasn’t just a bit lovely, I was remorselessly, inexhaustibly lovely for a full six months. If I wasn’t batting my eyelashes, I was letting him watch Time Team. I rustled up the vile public school puddings he loves. I visited Bovington Tank Museum with him. It was crashingly obvious, jaw-droppingly overt, but despite being the cleverest chap I’d ever met, my soon-to-be-groom was entirely unaware of my machinations. And so we were wed.”

• “It never occurred to me that I would lose my identity, be suddenly consigned to domestic servitude or forgo weekends away with my friends. I was in my thirties and a fully formed, really quite bossy grown-up; my husband knew what he was getting (albeit he thought it was the top-of-the-range lovely version). And while I can’t remember the actual vows we made, I’m pretty sure obeying and washing his socks wasn’t one of them.”

• “I multi-task and am generally the hyper-vigilant Queen of Everything. Not because I’m expected to be or because it’s an index of devotion, more because I can’t help myself.”

• “…we both work, we both cook… …and I sort out the mortgage and utility suppliers and do the supermarket run and then there are the school uniforms and the house insurance.”

• “Sharing a bed and a life is one thing; power-sharing quite another.”

Bryony, 2013

• “What did I expect when I married my husband last year? I expected a wife, and boy did I get one. Harry may sometimes be bearded and he may most definitely be male, but in all other respects, I expect him to play the kind of role a man would have expected of his other half in, say, the 1950s. Or perhaps even the Victorian era. Harry cooks and cleans and runs me baths; I often say that he has more in common with a carer than a husband.”

• “I do expect a lot of my husband, and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. My mother expected nothing of hers, and she got nothing in return… …grossly unfair… …And I told myself I would never, ever let it happen to me. So my husband and I split all of the domestic tasks and childcare.”

• “I do sometimes treat my husband like a colleague, if only because he used to be one, and I’d tell him anything I’d tell my girlfriends.”

• “…my generation are marrying later, and not walking down the aisle with the first man we meet…”