A female-led marriage is a difficult thing to explain to people outside of that situation. Well, explaining is actually quite easy; getting people who live more conventional lives to understand is the difficult part.
So considered Gerald Townsend as he drove his pregnant wife Veronica home after their trip to the local hardware superstore, the back of their trailer full with heavy-duty timber.
From his point-of-view, why would anyone not want to be in a relationship like this? He was a self-made, successful and wealthy bachelor before he and Veronica had met and it was delightful to at last meet a woman who was so clearly on his level in every respect. Every woman from his past was either subpar in terms of either intelligence, ambition or independence. Then there were the transparent gold-diggers. He got all he could out of all of them and moved on before it got complicated.
Veronica, on the other hand, was highly ambitious, smart and plainly not after him for anything other than himself. They had met at a business convention and he found it refreshing that she had made the first move. Well, kind of. In fact, she had made the first move by telling him to ask her for dinner. There was a dry humour to her manner and he very much appreciated that Veronica cut straight through any bullshit.
It also helped that he was intensely attracted to her. Their chemistry was instant. She was a physically impressive woman — 5’10” and curvy with a mane of curly strawberry-blonde hair and vibrant blue eyes. The fact that she had large breasts was obvious, but he was most attracted to how strong she looked. Until the moment he saw her, he assumed that his preference was for petite girls. But she fell into the physical category that he later discovered to be referred to on the Internet as “Thick: Athletic”. As he was over 6 feet tall and a regular gym-goer himself, he had grown tired of the young girls he could throw around and liked the fact that she appeared to be more of a challenge. The other thing that turned him on about her was their age difference — he’d never been with an older woman before and she was six years older than him, almost to the day.
After the convention and a relatively short period of long-distance dating, they both knew that this was a very rare connection that was working very well and decided to move in together. ‘We can only try,’ Veronica had said, ‘If it doesn’t work, we will chalk it up to experience and move on like adults: without bitterness or tribulation. If it does work, then we won’t have wasted any precious time.’ Gerald couldn’t argue with this, especially as he was able to work from any location within his company and hers was undoubtedly a nicer house than his — large, with a substantial garden, dual garage, basement and 12-person outdoor jacuzzi.
Female-Led Relationships, or FLR, was not a term Gerald had previously been familiar with. He had noticed that during their time together she had been the one to make most of the day-to-day decisions about the running of the home and the destinations for their weekends away. He largely agreed with her decisions so there was never any reason to debate them and the fact that she was happy to make decisions without consulting him meant that he could take a lot of the brainpower out of the hours when he wasn’t at work. The tasks that she assigned him when he was at home were a pleasure to fulfil because she only asked him to do things that were reasonable and within his means to do. If something required an outside expert, she would employ the right person to do it — generally of decent repute. A cowboy never stepped foot in their home.