What would be the perfect romance between a man and woman?

I can ask this and recall all these Cleaver-family images in my head, quickly spitting them all out of my brain with one disgusted YUCK.

WHAT IT ALL COMES DOWN TO, in any relationship, is the daily living; the day to day interactions of sharing life. Now when this involves friends or couples of the same sex, things are relatively simple. I say "simple" because KNOWING that there is only one gender present, it is obvious that daily issues have to be discussed and that chores have to be divvied out, and that agreements on housekeeping and who reads the newspaper first and who cooks when and who pays the bills.....EVERYTHING is a clean slate from which to start figuring stuff out. What I am trying to say, is that...nothing is ASSUMED.

Yes, assumed. That awful word. I personally do my best not to relate to this word and STILL end up partaking of it. You see, what the problem is, is that in the "normal" heterosexual relationship, all of a sudden there is this code to live by. This long list of assumptions as to who does what. True there are many variations on this theme, some of the engendered stereotypes getting less typical. Living in the good ol' US of A, though, we KNOW what our society thinks about who does what.

You see, even in the age of working women....there are "Supermoms." There should be no need for the "Supermom" title [working 8 hour days and coming home to do ALL the household chores AND take care of the kids (while the husband comes home to rest)]. Where is the originality? Where is the teamwork of the average couple?

As male/female couples begin their daily lives together, whether married or not, they constantly have to either accept the slate that society has given them to read, or they have to WIPE the damn thing clean and start all over again. Since it appears that this slate is metaphorically a dry-erase board that someone wrote on with regular markers, some of the rules and lessons on it are a lot harder to wipe off. Some of the rules even never completely disappear, the color still tinting the backdrop; but they CAN be written over. With stronger colors. And the knowledge that we can ignore the outlines of what USED to be there.

So back to the original question: what would be the perfect heterosexual romance?
The answer: you figure it out.