Our own space

 

Subject: Our own space.

Do we get up out of bed because we have to. Do we promote our lives 'by being busy', making appointments to be somewhere else, rather than being in the comfort of ones own bed. Is it a Lutheran  prophecy that "the devil makes work for idle hands" and are we are to scared to loaf around and be idle since someone has decreed it unhealthy. 

Of course it is unhealthy lying in bed all day. The muscles atrophy and become weak, our internal organs such as the lungs deteriorate through lack of exercise, fat builds up in the heart and hampers us in all kinds of ways but still it's lovely to lie in bed reading or, as I do, writing a blog about why I shouldn't feel bad sitting in bed. 
The bedroom is our refuge, it always has been ever since we were tiny. It was our space away from the rest of the family. Undressing and being  naked was the domain of the bedroom and bathroom, both had doors and an unwritten code of entry. 
Marriage causes a major dislocation in this special appreciation of 'individual space '. The bedroom once the provider of a respite from the world outside is subsumed in the notion that the one you love is happy to share you and all your traits, warts and all, supposedly, in a union made in the eyes of God.  
As the shine wears off and the idiosyncratic nature of your partner becomes clearer, it  in some cases, leads to separate bedrooms, and we learn once more, the pleasure of our own privacy.
It's this elemental privacy which is important. Watching films on television where it's depicted that the greatest sin in marriage is keeping something from your partner , as if the two of you were the same as one. The instinctual separation of male and female interests according to taste is now a days an anathema to the modern school of thought which wishes to bring the gender differences into one unwholesome sameness. It's apparently unhealthy to stray far from the interests of ones partner, there has to be a sharing in everything, a tiptoeing, hand holding symbiosis in which, like two peas in a pod  you share your deepest, darkest secrets on the assumption that the other person is interested and that the gender 'neutral' obsession we have these days will kick in and intellectualising will win the day.
If boys are brought up as boys and girls as girls, (unfortunately another concept currently under threat),  and the overriding obsession that 'rights' trump everything, including gender alignment, and it is insisted we ignore the evidence before our eyes each and every day, another element of fake social engineering is thrust upon us and collectively we become the poorer for it.  Perhaps in the not too distant future, genetic engineering will come up with some hybrid which will make this so but up till now, vive la the difference say I.
Obviously the stiff righteousness of the Victorian norm has been superseded by a more egalitarian system of identifying individual rights and trying to meld some individual differences into one but the move to remove all the difference, differences which in essence provide the spark which galvanises everything, will be lost and is a bridge far too far.