The Significant Other as Civilizer

Stephen Crane published a short story "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" in 1898. The marshal of a Wild West town, who used to spend his days having duels with the local drunk, returns home with a bride. 

He returns home, moreover, on the train. 

And he isn't wearing his gun--he went to be married, after all. When he encounters the local drunk in front of his house, then confesses he is unarmed and married, the drunk is so demoralized by this sudden advent of civilization that he slinks away. 

Crane, who was born after the Civil War, is extolling and bemoaning the closure of the West. It is no longer a dangerous, anarchic, free environment. It has been tamed, and it has been tamed through marriage. 

Granted, Crane's image of the West is itself somewhat mythic. However, many folks in the nineteenth century believed that the American West could be civilized through domestication--hence the advertisements for brides. That practice was far less common than it appears in literature. And it was truly more an idea than a truth: women (from the East) would bring morals and civilization when they arrived in deserted prairies (as opposed to bringing with them adventurousness, exhaustion, mental illness, and toughness). 

In reality, religious and family and town groups brought their cultures with them when they migrated as social units, men and women together. 

However, the idea of the civilizing significant other is a hard trope to shake! It shows up in more than romance, being the underlying idea of The Odd Couple. 

In romance, it isn't exclusive to male-female couples. In Cherry Magic, Kurosawa is more of a spender than Adachi; Adachi has to keep him on the straight and narrow. In Never Let Go by Saki Sakimoto, Haruto cleans Miyabi's apartment and makes him food, which is a nice reversal of tasks since Miyabi is the omega, the male character who can become pregnant. Miyabi is living in a near-feral state because his family chucked him out. The "civilizing" here is mostly a matter of socialization.

However, if members of the couple are too extreme--obsessively clean; inexcusably filthy--the relationship may become unbelievable. There's the Love Boat episode where the couple of the week have broken up because one member of the couple just won't put stuff away. And the Friends episode where the beautiful woman Ross dates has such a messy apartment, rats have moved in under the trash. 

If the civilizer is expected to do all the work--in order to inspire someone else to change their habits and do part of the work--the relationship will stop being funny and become annoying. 

That is, if the civilizer is suppose to be a kind of pep rally squad for the non-civilized (whether or not the non-civilized wants it)...well, I suppose there are couples who enjoy that sort of thing but it strikes me as incredibly tedious. Take care of yourself, stop being dysfunctional, and stop making things harder for other people seems a much better starting point.