This weekend, I read an article in the New York Times Magazine called The Marrying Kind. In it, Lisa Belkin takes a look at how the roles in marriage — specifically the role of the wife — have changed from her mother’s generation, down to her generation, down to my generation.

Belkin explores the stereotypical ’50s housewife who baked pies and sewed and did all the Leave it to Beaver things and how that has changed in today’s couples. She has some startling facts — only 16% of British women can make their own pie crust, compared to more than half their mothers who could, according to a supermarket survey and only 25% of young women today can poach an egg without the help of a kitchen gadget, while 75% of their mothers could (I can do the latter, but not the former).

But Belkin’s article is not another run-of-the-mill today’s wife wants to find the perfect career/mother balance, instead it takes a different look at marriage. It looks at how my generation tends to approach marriage as a partnership.

And it’s not because women are changing what they’re doing, it’s because of the men their meeting and marrying.

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.

I re-read those couple paragraphs at least a dozen times.

It all makes sense to me, but it’s something I don’t think I ever consciously realized that it was what I wanted, or expected, in a lifelong mate.

I’ve never been a particularly “domestic” woman. I don’t tend to clean my apartment on  a scheduled basis (I only do the dishes once a day because if I don’t, then I have nothing to eat off of). I don’t sort my whites from my colours (I swear it’s just to save on change, though). I don’t really cook (well, not until recently).

While marriage is not in my immediate future, the relationship I have with my partner right now is that of a partnership. Sure, I do most of the cooking, but he does a lot of the cleaning and laundry. And we both want one another to be successful professionally.

There is no expectation for either one of us to settle, or to fall into a pre-determined gender role. We wouldn’t want it that way. Partly because we don’t fit into those gender roles as individuals as it is: I’m a girl that likes sports and doesn’t do my hair or makeup, he’s a guy that like fashion and style and art.

But it’s the fact that our relationship is built on being partners that really makes us stand together. I don’t think I would want a marriage to be different than that.

Belkin says a lot of people my age use the term spouse or partner because of that. Right now I call my boyfriend my partner, because it seems silly to be calling him my boyfriend at my age. However, when and if I do get married, I will admit I don’t want to be considered someone’s partner or spouse — I want to be their wife. Being a wife may not carry the same roles and expectations as it has in the past, that word still means something to me.

I don’t think it’s necessarily that my generation is redefining marriage, so much as we are redefining the terms attached to that marriage — specifically what it means to be a wife or a husband.

After all, to have and to hold is still there, even if the pie is store bought nowadays.