Every now and then I surprise myself by being surprised. I was really taken aback for a moment when I read the story about a lesbian married couple who are both pregnant. At the same time.

And yet, why shouldn’t they be was my immediate reaction after my surprise. Of course there is absolutely no reason. But the concept did take me by surprise. Which is really strange as I am totally for gay marriages and full personal rights to gay couples.

So what took me off guard then? I think it was the weirdly old-fashioned concept that in a relationship one person takes on the role of the ‘male’ and the other the role of the ‘female’. Who says it has to be that way?

In my mind gay couples still somehow seem to fit the stereotypical societal norm. You’ve got to have a him and her. So only one of the two would take on the role of mother and only one the role of father. But in this particular relationship, both women are taking on the role of mother by having babies. More or less!

It’s really like a lot of new concepts out there that are just new spins on old concepts and which often don’t develop further because they are stuck in preconceptions. So for instance a mobile phone was treated as a walk about landline phone initially. It took a while for the development to multimedia gadget to happen. We were just so stuck in the fact that it was a phone.

Now the tech savvy users send text, e-mails, browse the internet, listen to music, never mind play games and use the gadget for recording the world around them and promptly sharing it with anybody interested. Quite a quantum leap from the old Ma Bell’s instrument!

So shouldn’t we also rethink and redesign coupledom? Gay couples and mobile phones I can hear you wonder? Bear with me for a while longer and hopefully you can make the leap with me.

The modern couple and in fact the modern family has morphed into something new. Yet we still view the rules of engagement as we did with the more traditional family set-up.

We expect there to be a mom and a dad. If there isn’t a man and woman for the job then we question who will take on the function of either stereotypical ‘job’. And if it doesn’t work like that we are surprised as I was when reading the article on the lesbians.

Surely we need to take away those stereotypes now. No longer are we able to allocate roles or expect people to take them on as we want them to because that’s how it has always been.

A modern relationship can be any combination of people. As long as they love and respect each other and are great care givers to offspring whether produced by themselves or adopted, surely roles are no longer the issue?

I wonder what you might think of this? Let me know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 7:21 pm and is filed under People Stuff, Self-improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.