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By Root 434 0

pink business suit, and matching pumps, you still needed Ken. What’s a Barbie without a Ken, after all? (Although Barbie famously split with Ken in 2004, only to reunite with him again. How very telling. Even doll couples have their ups and downs.) You never once imagined Barbie as a single, successful girl, happy to be single, even if just for a little while. There would be no alone time for her. Ken was coming home with Barbie whether he, or she, liked it or not! As if that wasn’t sad enough, you played with them in your room for about twenty minutes, then married them off and moved the forced couple into their very first apartment, fashioned out of a shoe box. Better days were ahead for them, though. Thanks to your favorite aunt, they were able to move into their very own Malibu beach house and drive up in a pink convertible Corvette. By the end of this cute little charade, you were stuffing toilet paper down Barbie’s dress, instantly impregnating her and, after a fifteen-minute gestation period, whammo—Ken Jr.! Ken and Barbie had it all, including a swinging marriage where all was apparently cool. They always stayed together, even after Barbie cheated on Ken with G.I. Joe and Ken got it on with Hawaiian Barbie, when your cousin brought her along during your sleepover.

Not very long after creating this soap opera, you stopped adding to it and started all over again. This time, you had them meet at a different place and changed their outfits. You even cut Barbie’s hair. This was about the time you realized that your mother’s curling iron wasn’t as effective on plastic hair and that Barbie’s new bangs would always stick straight up. With a marker, you changed the color of Ken’s hair from blond to black, colored Barbie’s lips with your red marker, and their courtship would start anew.

As children, we never saw the pretend marriage of our inanimate plastic dolls through anything beyond the birth of Ken Jr. and the swapping out of new clothes. All that mattered to us was the wedding, with its white flowing makeshift dress fashioned from toilet paper, and the immediate spoils thereafter. That’s when the dolls had permission to dry-hump each other. Ken would mount Barbie and do the Malibu hustle. (Don’t act like you didn’t do this with your dolls. Every girl did.) Once the kids, the house, and the car came into play, we quickly grew bored and created a new scenario, a whole new life with different hair and clothes. We never once took the time to nurture the relationship between this anatomically absent pair of perfect people. That’s what marriage meant to us. The rush-up to the wedding, a baby, and then…you got nothing. This stunted cycle has set millions of little girls everywhere on a pattern that has managed to replicate itself in their adult lives. We dream of getting our Ken, having the lovely wedding (and the dryhumping), and babies, but after that…we got nothing. We don’t exactly know what to do.

For starters, here’s an obvious difference between the two: your wedding lasts for just a few hours, but your marriage, if handled correctly, is meant to last a lifetime. There are all sorts of planning books for weddings you can buy at your neighborhood bookstore and Web sites dedicated to the preparing for your big day, but where are the books and Web sites dedicated to the arrangement of your entire marriage? Where’s the big emphasis on keeping it alive? We’ve all heard of Brides magazine and Modern Bride. There’s Contemporary Bride and Southern Bride, but where on earth is Wife magazine? How come no one bothers to focus on what it really takes and means to be a wife? Sure, there are things for wives and husbands—classes, courses, self-help books, an abundance of material. But that stuff gets nowhere near any of the attention as all things bride related. You usually have to hunt for the stuff about keeping a marriage together. There’s nothing glamorous about it, so it’s usually kept out of view until needed. Unfortunately, by then, it may be too late.

But, oh, the attention we give to the wedding! We imagine our gown and