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124 v Stacy is disillusioned. When she married her husband, Dennis, a major league baseball relief pitcher, she expected him to be just as involved in their marriage as he was in his career. However, she gradually and reluctantly came to acknowledge a growing competition between his career and their marriage. It became quite clear that his career came first—a reality many wives of professional athletes share. The sport marriage is a type of career-dominated marriage that is firmly embedded in the world of professional sports (Ortiz 2006). In career-dominated marriages, one spouse, usually the husband, performs a high-stress and sometimes high-profile occupational role (e.g., corporate executive, military officer, physician, entertainer, police officer, clergy member, or politician) in a maledominated occupational world (see Hochschild [1969] on the ambassador’s wife). Despite the increasing number of women in the workforce, the growing expectation that women will have their own careers, and the continuing trend of dual-earner/dual-career marriages, the career-dominated marriage continues to flourish in the world of professional sports. Women married to professional athletes learn through marital and emotional socialization to be responsible for the care work in the family, to enact a “wife of” role, and to participate within the marriage in a “two-person career” (Finch 1983; Papanek 1973). Wives Who Play by the Rules working on emotions in the sport marriage Steven M. Ortiz You can’t show anger in front of Dennis. So now you can’t really do anything with that anger. So it’s a short fuse. It stays right there at the surface all the time. —Stacy c h a p t e r 9 In this chapter, I focus on how women in sport marriages use emotion management as a form of usually invisible marital labor that is an essential part of the career-dominated marriage (Hochschild 1983, 1990).1 Athletes’ wives internalize and normalize an unwritten book of rules for wives of professional athletes that requires them to work on their emotions (Ortiz 1997). In order to convey the “right” emotions, these wives learn what is appropriate to feel in particular situations (“feeling rules”) and how to convey that emotion to others (“display rules”) (Hochschild 1979, 563–570). They use a variety of strategies in managing their emotions to conform to these guidelines. When what a wife actually feels does not correspond to the specific feeling rule for the occasion, she may put on a more acceptable emotional expression—smiling, for example, because the occasion is meant to be a happy one, even though she may be feeling sad about something else. This is referred to as “surface acting” and differs from “deep acting,” in which people try to conform to social expectations by working to change their underlying feelings—trying to feel happy, for instance, rather than simply looking happy (Hochschild 1983, 35–46). Like other athletes’ wives, Stacy believes she must conform to the expectations of her husband, his team organization, and his occupational world. She consciously monitors how she thinks she should feel and how she should or should not display her feelings. Additionally, she learns to subordinate her emotions to those of her husband and others in his occupational world. Emotion management enables wives to conform to or appear to conform to the unwritten rules of the sport marriage, but at the same time it can be detrimental or have costs for these women. This chapter is based on my long-term ethnographic work with forty-seven wives of professional athletes and one ex-wife (Ortiz 2001a, 2003a, 2005a). I also relied on participant observation, personal documents, and newspaper and magazine articles. In addition, I kept a journal of field notes documenting my reflections, observations, interactions, emotions, and experiences. After three full years of immersion, I spent an additional year conducting intermittent interviews as I gradually, and with great difficulty, exited from the field (Ortiz 2004). These long-term collaborative relationships put me in a rare position to observe closely the wives’ personal dilemmas, anxieties, stressors, and crises in their everyday life. I was gradually accepted by several of the wives into their world as a male insider, which was evident when I was able to establish reciprocity by becoming involved in activities such as helping with domestic tasks, running errands with or for the wives, shopping or house-hunting with them, housesitting , and attending games and team events/functions with them...

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