It is possible not to give a hoot what others think of your housekeeping but to simply enjoy making a home for someone you love. It is not necessarily a contradiction to dream of a poufy wedding gown and a corner office, or to rely on someone else as fully as you are relied upon, to put their needs before yours and know that they would do the same for you.

...[T]here are hints that the next generation is heading down this third path, this place where “wife” doesn’t come with a job description to either embrace or reject. The key to this new paradigm for women is men. Part of the reason women are baking fewer pies and shining fewer floors, and may even be backing away from the feeling that their children’s activity schedule is a measure of their own worth, is because more men are adding these and other tasks to their own to-do lists. The young men and women coming into adulthood right now consistently tell researchers that they are determined to make their marriages into partnerships and to not default to traditional gender roles at the expense of equality. (And hopefully invest less of their own identities in their children.) Of course every generation vows to do things different from its parents; what happens when real life gets in the way is the question.

These young people are getting a push in the right direction, though, in a way their grandmothers probably would not have expected. For the past decade or so, “partner” was a consolation prize, a second choice for same-sex couples who were not legally allowed to marry. But with states replacing “bride” and “groom” on their marriage-license applications with “spouse,” and with wedding officiants declaring those spouses “legally married,” the word “wife” may never be the same.