Siberian WOMAN

What is it like being married to a Siberian woman, are they tougher than 'normal'?

I have a habit of writing late at night but Nastya likes to watch movies with me before she sleeps. I like to keep the apartment clean and organised whereas Nastya likes to carpet the floor with all the clothes she decided she isn’t going to wear that day. 

One I very much wanted to avoid and would have had my editor and wife not goaded me into providing an answer. I must tread carefully as my wife and editor are both Siberian women and I don’t want to lose this space on the Times or wake up to find I have had parts of me removed by a very angry wife.

Firstly, being married is a strange thing: two people stuck together forever and ever amen. It’s a tough business in itself. It was even harder for my wife and I as I was only granted residency six months ago and we have in fact been married for just over two years. In the past six months, our first proper period of living together as a married couple, we have had to get used to each other’s annoying habits and idiosyncrasies; it hasn’t always been fun. 

I have a habit of writing late at night but Nastya likes to watch movies with me before she sleeps. I like to keep the apartment clean and organised whereas Nastya likes to carpet the floor with all the clothes she decided she isn’t going to wear that day. I’m rather fond of playing jazz music, Led Zep and the like, but Nastya likes to play the Russian pop music. So there have been times where we both could have gladly coshed the other over the head with a blunt instrument. 

But these things are normal in marriages aren’t they? I don’t know because neither Nastya nor I have been married before; which makes it seem like I am less qualified to answer this question, because surely I would need to have been married to one woman from every other country in order to make some sort of comparison. 

Perhaps it would be better if I were to describe Siberian women?

As a Westerner there have been some cultural differences that have taken a while to get used to; and as a teacher, where I am in a privileged position that allows me to ask all kinds of personal questions of my students, I have been surprised by some attitudes. 

What is it like being married to a Siberian woman, are they tougher than normal? This is just one of the many questions I have been asked recently as a result of blogging here.

The majority of my female students think it is a woman’s place to cook for men, to clean the apartment, to look after men generally and to always look beautiful. It is their primary role to be slim, fit and sexy at all times in order to please men. 

My male students on the other hand cannot cook a single thing. None of them can even boil an egg. Their primary role according to them is to ‘provide’, ‘fix things’ and be manly. Seems a bit old fashioned doesn’t it? Because it is. 

This is why I have been discussing feminist literature with my female students and asking my male students lots of questions about cooking, then telling them how an egg is boiled. Only, my questioning and attempts to ‘educate’ so to speak can be seen by some as an attempt to subvert Siberian culture; so I have had to tread very carefully. Siberians have lived with these values for a long time and it’s probably not my place to try to change anything. 

Everyone seems happy, although I was concerned when one of my students couldn’t even contemplate becoming president of Russia when I asked her to write an essay on the subject.

‘But only men are presidents’, ‘men are stronger and wiser and better at ruling the world’. Really? I couldn’t help but feel sad that this one particular student couldn’t even imagine being anything more than second place or second best in the world. In her view men should always be paid more than women even if they do the same job. ‘Men should always be made to feel they are boss’ etc etc etc. 

Thankfully I don’t have these kinds of discussions with my wife; I don’t need to: we are equal. Nastya throws the clothes on the floor and I pick them up. I also do most of the cooking, not only because I love cooking but because I don’t want to be ‘looked after’. Equality of the sexes isn’t always about cooking and cleaning though is it. It’s about perception and integrity, dignity and morality. I don’t think my wife feels she is second best; at least I hope she doesn’t. 

The majority of my female students think it is a woman’s place to cook for men, to clean the apartment, to look after men generally and to always look beautiful. It is their primary role to be slim, fit and sexy at all times in order to please men

As you asked, I have to say that in my opinion she ‘wears the trousers’: she makes the majority of decisions when it comes to spending money, where we spend our holidays, our future plans; she even edits my work and advises me what to submit to each publisher. But this is marriage in general isn’t it? Men like to ‘appear’ as the boss when in fact women always have the upper hand; that’s how marriage works doesn’t it?

In Russia there is an expression that goes something like this: ‘Russian women can stop running horses in their tracks’. Siberian women especially have a reputation for being tough, because Siberians are generally tougher than the average human being (sweeping statement, I know). 

While I haven’t seen any evidence of Siberian women displaying super-human strength I can say that for the most part they are very stoic and hard-working. My mother-in-law for instance is a force of nature. She takes care of everything at home and grows lots of vegetables at the dacha. Although she is slow she is always in motion: watering crops, chopping wood, taking her grandson to school etc. And her mother, 87 year old Baba Ira is exactly the same. 

Although she may look ancient, in her head she is still 20; and regardless of the fact she can barely walk unaided, she still prefers to cook her own meals and likes to visit the dacha in summer too. So to answer your question regarding Siberian women being tougher than other women, I can’t exactly say for sure.

I have three sisters back home in the UK and they’re all tough as old boots; so I guess my answer is both yes and no (I’m being diplomatic here, can you tell). I can’t say anything concrete without writing even more sweeping statements, and I’m still really worried I might come across as a sexist pig (if I haven’t already).

What I can say for sure is that I have no complaints or regrets, however if my wife asks me to watch Sex and the City again, that will probably change.

In Russia there is an expression that goes something like this: ‘Russian women can stop running horses in their tracks’. Siberian women especially have a reputation for being tough, because Siberians are generally tougher than the average human being

Siberian women may appear tough, in that they are able to live in a world with an often hostile weather system, and rub shoulders with men when it comes to chopping wood, making fires for the barbeque etc., but to describe the women here as tougher than others may be going a bit far. 

They, like women all over, have to live in a male dominated world and put up with the same crap, while constantly competing for equal rights and fairness. One could argue that in general Siberian women are less tough because many (the few I have met anyway) can’t imagine a world where women are equal, and some even question why women should be equal.

In my view the ‘tough Siberian woman’ is a bit of a false cliché: my female students are probably busy beautifying themselves right now or thinking about what they should be doing to please someone else rather than what they’d like to do as people. At the same time one could argue that Siberian women are tougher than women elsewhere because they exist in such an old fashioned patriarchal society and therefore have a longer road to empowerment. I guess it all comes down to what you mean by tough? 

If you want to marry a woman who cooks, cleans, regards men as superior and thinks men are ‘boss’, then yes, you might want to look into visiting Siberia and courting a woman here, but, if you did, that would probably say a lot more about you than it would about Siberian women.

But then saying all of this, I don’t know everybody here, and I can only go on my experience with the few people that I know. I have asked many questions of the people I have come across but there is of course the fact that I know less than 0.002% of the population, or less than that, so my perception is quite limited in scope. There is the possibility that there are only a handful of people here with old fashioned views and that they all happened to be in this one place. Which would mean all of the above isn’t very common. 

To end I’ll just say this: the differences between the society I knew in Wales and the society I know in Siberia are minute, there are obvious cultural differences but in general Siberians aren’t that different from the people I know back home: they wake, shower, go to work, eat, come home, sleep etc. There are some who live up to stereotypes and some who don’t. Wales, my home country is often stereotyped as a land full of people who like to get busy with sheep. While this ISN’T true for 99.99999% of the population, there is always somebody…Let’s not go there!