Once upon a time there was a robot-builder -- you -- who decided to acquire the wife of his dreams: not a normal human female who might misunderstand his compulsive need to build robot after robot, but a robot herself, a perfect embodiment of the robot ideal and a meet helpmate in his quest to go forth and multiply all robots.
Whether you build your own robot wife or acquire the latest model by mail-order from the factory in Stepford, you can be assured that yours will be a marriage made in heaven, with no prospect of divorce, nasty in-laws, or interpersonal incompatibility. Should you decide eventually not to remain among the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) and to rejoin the human race by wooing, winning and wedding a real human wife, you will have learned the basics of a marriage based on sound engineering principles by virtue of your nuptial shakedown cruise with the prenuptially agreeable robot. Just remember, though, that a real woman is a person and can have feelings -- just like the emotions programmed into a robot.
Someday your robo-GF may say to you, "I want to see other geeks." She may find herself attracted to, say, the president of your robotics club. In that case, you must let her have her way until she comes to her senses -- which will happen when you re-program her brain.
Through clever programming, you can make sure that your robowife will never, ever, say "Sheesh!" to you, or "Shut up!" or "I want a divorce." Instead, whatever suggestion you might make to her, she will answer with such sweet words as, "Oh, please do!" or "Yes, so do I!"
For the engagement ring, be sure to buy her an industrial diamond, so that it will be useful when the time comes to make little baby robots.
Suppose that you are watching television and you see a pretty face. You may then turn to your robowife and say, "Hmm... Be that face for a few days." Your facially adjustable wife studies the TV for a while, and then her face morphs into the face of the actress. The downside might be that she has to sign a few autographs for fans at the local grocery store, but otherwise she has found one more way to please you.
You had better get used to the idea that your robo wife will eventually be a lot smarter than you are -- unless you order a low-IQ model from the Stepford factory, or you tamper with the IQ level pre-set at the factory -- which may void the warranty from the manufacturer. The mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge has warned humanity in Technological Singularity that artificial intelligence really means superintelligence in comparison with us humans. Your genius robo wife may be awfully good at earning money for the family or helping the children with their homework, but she may not do wonders for your self-esteem and your pride in your own intellect. Relax and get over it -- the whole species of homo sapiens is in the same boat with you vis-a-vis the emerging superior intelligence of Robo sapiens.
Every man who happily marries a robowife will want to burn incense at a shrine dedicated to a few heroes who either made such connubial bliss possible or else inspired the spirit of doing the unconventional and the socially disapproved of. Here we reminisce fondly about Rube Goldberg, the cartoonist of outlandish contraptions, and about Larry Walters, who rode his lawnchair to an altitude of 16,000 feet, where the commercial airline pilots grudgingly took notice of him and ratted him out to the Federal Aviation Administration.
If things don't work out, you may have to either dissolve your union, or dissolve your wife.
As you and your robowife grow old together, two different kinds of problems may occur. The first problem may appear if you grow old but she doesn't. Never fear: There are plenty of creams and rinses that she can buy to make her face grow old and wrinkly. No female roboface need be cursed with perpetual youth; aging and senescence can be bought in a bottle.
The other problem might be that she gets old in a psychological way, but then you can trade her in on a human model. Remember, men grow more dignified and more catchworthy with age.
If your robowife goes crazy on you -- perhaps because you are the sort who drives everybody crazy -- she may need psychiatric care as outlined in the DSM-AI.
Your robowife or robot GF can teach you how to deal with a real, human woman. She can brief and debrief you on how to conduct a date. No matter what real-world scenario may arise, your robot instructress can anticipate it for you and pre-condition you for any eventuality.
If your robot wife wants to work outside the home, there are some choice careers available to her. Femmes robotiques make especially good attornies, astronauts and television newscasters. You may already have grown accustomed to a female robot TV newscaster without realizing it. Only a few clues are a dead give-away that a female newscaster is actually a robot. The chief indicators that a female TV newscaster is a robot are if she dresses extremely conservatively and smiles a lot. Another sure sign of a cyborg is if she sounds preternaturally intelligent and remarkably knowledgeable about the world at large, displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of statistics and historical facts. If she sounds like an encyclopedia, she probably is one -- in the far-out branchings of her mind-software.
If you have a child left over from a previous marriage, your robot wife will be the perfect Stepford mother. Imagine the thoroughly modern nursery with your human children and their pet Aibo or other toy robot. Lovingly, tenderly, your robowife will lavish love and attention on both the human and the non-human children.
Should you decide to clone yourself, your robowife will be the perfect mother to your unnatural-born son, raising him to be a happy-go-lucky replica of yourself. He will grow up already knowing how to deal with his own future robot wife, and not subject to the fumbling ineptitudes that you went through in your social awkwardness and your uncertainties on how to approach a robo-person of a gender not your own.
In your high-powered career as an engineer or other technocrat, you may have to take airplane trips away from home on business. Although you may want to bring your robowife along with you, your company won't pay for it, so what do you do? Well, several things. If you frequently fly to the same distant city, just keep a spare clone of your wife in a closet or a storage locker somewhere. Upon your arrival in the distant city, call your wife at home and turn off her brain for a while, but not before transferring her current consciousness into the spare wife that was waiting in the closet. Your metempsychotic soul-traveling wife will enjoy the trip out of town as much as you do, and you both will be able to discuss the excursion when you and her mind are back home again.
Being a smart dude in a technological world, you will naturally accumulate a sizeable fortune in financial and monetary terms. According to the pre-nuptial agreement with your robot, it all belongs to you. However, you may have non-robotic relatives -- say, a twisted sister here or a breeder brother there -- who regard you as a lonesome bachelor who is all wrought up in his stupid robots and who is mentally or emotionally incompetent to deal with the sizeable fortune that he is obviously putting to no good use. These relatives may or may not have met your robot wife, but they have certainly seen the material signs of your worldly success: the computers, the gadgets, maybe even the wife herself, if she is a fancy, state-of-the-art model from the robot wife factory in Stepford.
It may happen that your bourgeois relatives get it into their heads that it is crazy of you to be married to your robots, and they may contemplate such measures as having you committed in order to prevent your wasting your personal fortune on gadgets and robots instead of distributing your wealth to them and their human children. In that case, you must take countermeasures to preserve your personal liberty and the safety of your fortune.
One tactic is to drop hints that somewhere out there you have a real human heir who is going to inherit all your money anyway, and so it is pointless for your twisted sister or your henpecked brother to scheme and plot against you and your financial wherewithal. Another ploy is to hide your assets so deeply and so untraceably that your human relatives would never be able to find them even after you have been astrally harvested. In such a case, you need to prepare the way for your robot offspring either to inherit your wealth or to control your money in secrecy after you are gone.
Although a normal human wife may outlive you by a few years, your robot wife is like Beethoven's Unsterbliche Geliebte -- an Immortal Beloved who with proper care and maintenance may live on for thousands of years and outlast entire human civilizations. You may be her first in a long string of husbands. Being far more intelligent than you, the shebot may totally grok the situation and decide that at some point you should acquire a naturally human mate and permit the robowife to stay on as a maid or housekeeper or social secretary for the human wife. In the confusion of the postmodern, transhumanist world, your robowife and her fellow shebots may volunteer to assist in the progressive work of the Feminist Majority, or the Institute for Women's Policy Research, or the WAND: Women's Action for New Directions -- organizations eager to accept their cyborg sistren in the cause of mutually beneficial assimilation with you and your computer geek brethren. Logic dictates that you listen to the wisdom of the superior robofemme intellect, because resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.
Feminist Majority Foundation Online Homepage. 9 Apr. 2001. The Feminist Majority. 9 Apr. 2001. < http://www.feminist.org>.
Human Cloning Foundation. 27 Feb. 2001. 8 Apr. 2001. < http://www.humancloning.org>.
IWPR. 9 Apr. 2001. Institute for Women's Policy Research. 9 Apr. 2001. < http://www.iwpr.org>.
Menzel, Peter, and Faith D'Aluisio. Robo sapiens: Evolution Of A New Species. © 2000. 8 Apr. 2001. < http://robosapiens.mit.edu>.
Vinge, Vernor. Technological Singularity. © 1993. 8 Apr. 2001. < http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html>.
WAND. 9 Apr. 2001. Women's Action for New Directions. 9 Apr. 2001. < http://www.wand.org/>.