Isn’t that almost exactly what “invisible labor” and “emotional labor” is? Impossible to define and often needless tasks that women fill their day with?
One of my wife’s favorites from this genre is shopping on her phone. Never for things we actually need or have talked about needing. Instead, it’s for things she’s decided independently we need and then independently tasked herself with shopping for and then independently gotten resentful at me for not helping with. “I just spent hours shopping for new shoes for the kids!” Meanwhile, the kids’ shoes were fine and she never said a word to me about it until I got attacked for not helping.
As I grow older I believe a lot of that is basically wives subconsciously "hinting" the kind of attentions they would like. If you ever watched the TV show The Bear, the episode "Fishes" is a masterclass in showing exactly that.
Which is a dumb thing to do. “I make contracts with family and friends in which I do something and in return I expect something of a certain sort in return. But I don’t tell my friends and family what that is. And I don’t tell them about their part in the contract. They let me down so often it is heartbreaking.”
haha sure. Sure “treat people the way you want to be treated” is dumb and not something every 5 year old learns in kindergarten as a fundamental ethical guideline to use for the rest of their lives.
McCloskey authored a book called Crossing: a Transgender Memoir in 1999 describing transition from Donald to Deirdre. Mentioned it in multiple interviews etc.
Don't lump all the women in with yourself just because you are bad at things. For shooting specifically, women are at least as good as men, and possibly better, both on average and at the high end.
Spouses need to decide together what is a reasonable degree of cleanliness and order. You can’t just decide that you want to live in your own filth and then leave your spouse to take care of everything because she doesn’t.
That is a binary view of the world. Either your house is perfectly clean or you are living in “filth.” An attitude like that makes compromise impossible.
I am exaggerating to make a point. Couples have to decide together how they want their home to be and work together to keep it that way. The book “Fair Play” by Eve Rodsky explains in detail how this works.
Neither your spouse nor other Substackers must meet your expectations. If you do not like this thread you are free to find other threads more to your liking.
I do all of the shopping, most of the cooking and kitchen cleanup, half the laundry, and all of the garden and yard work. That makes it possible for my wife to care for her two disabled sisters. But do go on.
I was gobsmacked by that excerpt's lack of self-awareness: "yeah, my husband left his family to do a three month long internship. I'm sure he's living it up there, all alone and not (or barely) getting paid. Isn't that selfish of him? Now he can't even do the thorough and meticulous kitchen clean he used to do every night. Ladies, don't let your man take advantage of you like that"
As a single dad I have to do all the housework myself. You know what? It isn't that hard unless you make it so.
I cook almost all meals from scratch and bake our bread. I buy 50lb. sacks of flour and fill up a couple 5 gallon buckets -- lasts for months. I also have a bucket of pinto beans and one for dog food and some quarts of homemade leaf lard. All I need for groceries most shopping trips is a little meat, dairy and fresh fruits/vegetables -- like $10 worth.
My kid is big and strong and healthy as a horse. We go out at night hunting vermin with the dog for fun. Scares the crap out of the junkies in the woods.
For cleaning just get your standard janitorial tools: broom and dustpan, bucket and mop, vacuum cleaner and carpet cleaner. Get a bunch of sponges, brushes, rags and microfiber washcloths and then buy simple green (get a gallon concentrated solution), bleach, Windex and dish soap. That's all you need -- anything else is just for touch up. With the right tools and chemicals you can go to town on a filthy bathroom and have it sparkling in minutes.
I'm sure my place isn't up to Mrs. Perfect's tidiness standards, but since she isn't here to complain it doesn't matter.
It's actually not so bad being a single dad. Having a wife do your housework isn't worth the trouble if she has a bad attitude about it.
I am both the primary parent and the primary breadwinner. I sacrificed career advancement so I could work from home and be with my kids more. I do all the shopping, meal prep, extracurricular activities, etc etc etc.
It’s…not that hard. When I hear women complaining about the “mental load” and “emotional labor” and other such nonsense, I just groan and roll my eyes. Childcare and housework is by far the easiest component of my daily labor.
Hey can you say more on this topic. It kinda confirms a suspision of mine. That hardest part of having kids isn't actually the kids. Its trying to co-parent with a raging asshole that picks fights and is generally nasty and critical.
Like this gal in the OP, its not enough that her husband provides, that he is chasing excellence with his internship. He is also supposed to manage her emotions too. I have a suspison that "he doesn't do enough" is a proxy for "he isn't enough, I could have done better".
Thank you for writing this, you’ve hit on so many salient points. One place I would differ is in casting women’s resentment as secretly about having to work. I think they are craving a real kind of support at home, but not one that their husbands can provide, at least not without extremely explicit guidance.
Sorry, yeah. We evolved to co-parent with our female relatives. I can get a break from my baby with my aunt or my best friend because they are absorbed and attuned with my infant in the way only a woman can be. I am extremely blessed that my husband is so involved with our child and does an amazing job fulfilling the masculine role as well. And I want to respect the way that he parents. But, sometimes he needs something explained that a woman just doesn’t, like “you are actually singing that lullaby too boisterously.” He can course-correct from there, but I think not all women even realize these details are not man-weaponizing-incompetence they are literally man-did-not-evolve-for-this.
Agreed. My suspicion is all of this “he doesn’t do it to my standards” or “I shouldn’t have to ask” is secretly hoping he can fulfill a woman’s role. The only time I don’t have to ask is if I’m cooperating with my MIL (bless her) or mother. That’s when it hit me, what “I shouldn’t have to ask” really means. When you are working with other women who are mothers, have been mothers or apprenticed themselves under mothers (so, girls who helped their mothers, and maybe even babysat in their youths), you don’t have to ask. They just know.
I find with my husband I do have to be clear explicit about the specs of the job if I want him to take it from me. But once I have down that, he knows what to do. The key is to be specific.
Yes!! A lot of millennial parents are isolated. Useless boomer grandparents on a cruise. One car so mom is stuck at home on mat leave. No friends with kids, the gals want to go to yoga and you're stuck at home.
Bowling alone, basically. But for moms. Husbands really are all they've got.
This is the kind of thing where one person can say it’s like this for me! And the other person can come back with ohhyeah well it’s like THIS FOR ME! and both can be right.
All I can say is, my “useless boomer parents” would love to be involved but they have five other kids and live 1000 miles away (which was our choice). My wife’s “useless boomer parents” are not close to being able to afford constant cruises and live a 15 minute drive away, though they have three other kids. And my wife has dozens of other SAHM’s that she knows or is related to that live within a 10-20 minute drive.
However, they just plain do not form the kind of mutually supportive “village” that you might expect. Helping the other person is seen as an imposition on you, and asking them for help as an embarrassing admission of incompetence.
When my mother had a Dr appointment, kids went to the neighbors-and they came to us in the opposite scenario. When my wife does , she wonders if I can take off work or else with great reluctance calls her mother.
maternal UBP: live 10 minutes away, see multiple times a week, grandmother is constantly involved in kids life (but less than we expected when we moved here, tbh). She does often take cruises and things and is probably closer to the stereotype here. Grandfather is in great physical condition but memory is very bad and also just isn't very good with kids in general.
pUBP: Live 1000 miles away, grandmother is basically deaf, grandfather is very mobility limited. Realistically we can't leave the kids with them for anything more than an hour for a quick dinner; they can't take care of bed time or something like that on our own.
ETA: one thing I have noticed is that it makes a generally big difference whether your parents are in their 60s or their 70s in terms of taking care of your kids (I have cautioned this to younger couples I know in terms of when to start having kids, my wife and I were both the youngest of our families and we didn't start terribly early). The mental model a lot of people operate under assumes grandparents in their late 50s/early 60s, which was probably valid at one time. But with delayed childbirth comes the related delayed grandparenthood and they just aren't as capable of doing it anymore.
I do think your last point is a good one as well-at one time, a lot of things that used to be acceptable to use your neighbors for just aren't anymore for a lot of odd reason.
Thing is when I was a kid my parents moved into an entirely new neighborhood hundreds of miles from any relatives or anyone they knew, and my mom nevertheless had far more external support than my wife does. Every so often I suspect they SOSed to my grandparents who’d then come and stay for a week, but they lived 1000+ miles away. Mostly it was just the neighbors. Very different.
My mom is Gen X and my dad is right on the border between generations. They are excellent grandparents! I'm speaking more about friends' parents, whose behavior is frankly horrifying. Seems to be a primarily white boomer pathology, too - I'm Puerto rican and there's an expectation of family obligations that runs both ways.
It doesn’t have to be parents; fellow mums and especially slightly older women in the community can be a big blessing.
But it does require deliberate action and humility to build those friendships. It’s easy for a woman to be too busy or too embarrassed to create the relationships that would help allay the business & embarrassment & feelings of being alone
This isn’t to say husbands are excused from participating! But the behaviours that make it hard to invite other women into her life can also act as barriers against her husband. Plus, there’s a high likelihood she married a less emotionally engaged husband who is less motivated to push through those barriers
I think having to work may also be a source of resentment. For many reasons (too long for this comment, but it’s probably a status thing), we have visions about how we want the home to look. Having to work compromises our ability to achieve that vision. So many women feel like they “have” to take up a second shift just to make it at least a little bit the way they envision.
Women (and men) judge women on the state of our homes. But our husbands don’t get judged the same way. The home is seen as our domain whether we work or not. Once, my mother visited earlier than I had an opportunity to pick up around the house and I heard her grumbling to my father that I didn’t even bother opening the blinds all morning (when in truth, my third (!) baby just finished napping, so the blinds were down. Like I have 3 young kids. Gimme a friggin break). So the judgment is not just coming from outside the family, nor is it imagined. Not one word about my husband.
If we cannot achieve clear counters and clean floors and dustless shelves because we were also working a 9-5 and don’t want to stay up until 11 PM doing these chores (instead of, you know, relaxing after the kids go to bed, which we all want to do instead of housework), then we look slovenly, dysfunctional, like failures in the eyes of society. For strictly hygiene reasons it’s probably alright to step on a cheerio once in a while as long as it still gets cleaned on a regular enough basis. But if you are visiting and step on a cheerio, you’d judge your host(ess).
It's quite simple: Humans didn't evolve to have women girlbossing in corporate offices for 8-hour shifts everyday. All the resentment stems from this. Everyone subconsciously expects women to carry-on with the traditional role that has been the rule for hundreds of thousands of years, even women themselves! But it's too late now, the cat is out of the bag, the female half of the species have been fed into the economic grinder to compete with men, leading to the infamous two-income trap and the economy adjusting to halve purchasing power, so now it's incredibly hard for any woman to be a stay-at-home mom unless her husband is rich or they accept comparative poverty. Not to mention that, since all women are now forced to work, a successful stay-at-home mom ends up alone and alienated, without the female support network she evolved to work with. Feminism has, wittingly or not, been a disaster for the human race.
“Of course, one assumes those missing elements are there in great or small degree.” I would think this is the root of the problem. I have read a number of these kinds of essays, and I have yet to see any evidence that there is any love in these marriages. These women simply do not love their husbands, so the only value they derive from their marriage is financial and practical; they derive no kind of emotional value from their marriage, there is no romance, no emotional connection, no friendship, which is why they keep score. I have never once read one of these essays and seen a women lament the loss of romance or friendship with their ex-spouse. Nor have I seen one intelligent or self-aware enough to realize that it was the lack of romance and friendship that killed their marriage, instead of unequal sharing of responsibility. I suspect that reckoning with that would be more painful, in part because it would require some self-reflection as to what part, if any, the woman played in the demise of romance and friendship in the marriage. That isn’t to say that there aren’t far too many cases where the man would be almost wholly at fault. But I suspect that it wouldn’t as neatly fit into the narrative box where men are unsympathetic villains, as it is likely the case that many of these marriages started off with strong levels of romance and friendship, and the men likely also suffered as those things withered in the marriage, and those men probably did try the best they knew how to keep those things alive.
The happiest couples I know have a reasonable split of domestic labor. WFH parents would obviously do more. Stay at home parents would obviously do most (not counting parents of toddlers/infants where parenting is truly 24/7, more the leisurely life of a SAHM for a 5yo and 8yo who are in school, as an example). Couples where both parents work demanding jobs have housekeepers and/or nannies. Really as long as both are pulling their weight in the domestic domains that best suit them, they are OK. In couples where someone is not pulling their weight, that is a problem that goes far beyond someone not picking up socks in a timely fashion or whatever.
Chores are a red herring. Really. I think enough has been said about this on both sides at this point and I find it hard to believe there’s any juice worth squeezing left in this discourse. It’s NEVER just about the chores.
"If you think it is, if you’re a radical egalitarian dedicated to equalizing all forms of labor between husband and wife — equal childcare hours, equal chores, equal paid work — then you have a rough row to hoe. Almost no marriage manages this feat. Despite all the gains since the 60s, in almost every marriage, wives do more household labor than husbands."
There are relationships where roles and labor are not divided by gender as the default: gay relationships. Time use studies of new parent couples show that the nongestational parent in woman-woman relationships does more household and childcare labor than the gestational parent.
Once you see the ways that queer couples divide labor in relationships, you can't unsee the ways in which default gender norms undergird household labor issues.
But this isn't only a gender norm -- the "gestational parent" literally gestated the child and probably also nursed it, biological processes which bring on a whole litany of physical and psychological changes in the mother.
Yes, and the nongestational parent responds to that garguantuan amount of biological labor by taking on a larger share of household labor and care work. Men could have the same response as nongestational parents, but they don’t.
Then men shouldn’t be surprised when women start choosing the other option - queer relationships - or the null hypothesis (staying single). Smart women who have other options don’t want to be enslaved as a helpmate, whose mediocre hero’s journey her domestic labor must support.
And women are looking for other options. We’ve read the breathless coverage of the single cat lady crisis, but we haven’t spoken much about how queerness is becoming more and more common and more ideal for women. The fast growing LGBTQ demographic are millennial women, which isn’t surprisingly at all, given they are so deep into childrearing. I see examples everyday of newly out bisexual moms in their 30s and 40s seeking queer relationships for the first time.
It seems like the stigma of queerness, even amid a horrific backlash, is better than supporting the mediocre achievements of a man based only on gender.
It’s the path I took, and I feel freer than any female member of my family.
If women want to pull the ripcord and date each other instead, that's fine, you won't find men upset about it (except maybe their former husbands). This isn't the first generation to turn to political lesbianism.
Moms in particular making this choice are doing so at the expense of their children, though. I won't go so far as to say it's never the right choice, but it often strikes me as very selfish.
Well, they're not as supportive as nongestational parents in same-sex relationships, as the poster above pointed out. It's not good enough, no matter how much they've "improved."
In most of these situations, her real issue is “my husband doesn’t make me feel safe / lead / make me feel appreciated”. But she responds to this by taking over more & more leadership and often becoming quite critical. But this is all happening behind the scenes; measuring chores is just a way of justifying the problem
I agree that theres something being omitted in these divorce narratives. "My husband does too few chores so I'll divorce him and do... All of the chores! And raise the kids myself instead of with his help! Also I'll have spend more of my income on living space for myself and the kids (maybe the incentive is far child support checks?)!" They're not saying the husband is a resource drain or creating more work than he's doing, right? The math doesn't math, so either this is girl math or were missing some hidden variables
Yeah, it’s because it’s not really about the chores. It’s about she’s just not that into you anymore and there’s a near infinite amount of content in the culture (articles, movies, tv shows, books) telling her that when that happens, it’s because the man is secretly rotten. She may not be able to articulate that in a way that makes any sense, but all the girlboss literature she reads tells her it’s true.
The missing variables are that in addition to feeling exhausted and frustrated, she feels alone and unloved. When you add those variables back in, the math works.
Because inequitable distribution of unpaid household labor is a genuine problem that is part of the equation; it is not her job to get him to participate in an equitable manner; and no one wants to ask to be loved. These things are connected to each other.
It's possible but it's not what the woman in this article claims. But also if husbands are such a net negative then that's very strange and surprising.
I also think there is an issue about equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. If one spouse, say, has a lucrative engineering job and one spouse has a net-negative art or humanities job, I can see how this could lead to resentment on the part of the less successful spouse. When I am angry about my career I try to take a deep breath and remember that none of it is my husband's fault, I love being with him and I have it pretty good.
(Haha, I may have kind of a weird perspective on this stuff because my mom is a successful college professor and my dad was an unsuccessful writer. It was the source of some amount of tension in my family although I feel like my dad dealt with it relatively well.)
Since women doing more housework approaches a law of nature, it seems like a major problem when a husband doesn't compensate by contributing more outside the home. Very easy to see how a woman in that arrangement would become resentful.
I really do believe that most of this rhetoric is just an unconscious way of complaining that the husband hasn’t done enough by making it possible for the woman to stop working
I don’t know. It seems to me that in that case, a lot of women’s psychology would just raise the bar on them. We can afford to hire cleaners so I don’t have to scrub the bathroom? Well, then I must be a failure if my family ever has to eat one single store-bought baked good ever! And my husband is a chauvinist bum if he doesn’t vacuum so I can spend more time baking, I mean fair is fair.
Or as noted chauvinist pig Betty Friedan said, “Housework expands to fill your available time.”
I think the latter is a really important point and needs to be talked about more. Men don't work that way. We set out to do a job, do it, then move on to what we want to do. Women find or create new work to do as they go.
It’s a competitive thing. Women’s status is tied to her looks before she’s married, then by the state of her home after she’s married. By having a clean house she demonstrates either competence (look! She can juggle it all! Her house is a hotel!) or status (look at all the help her husband can afford, leaving her to look pretty and dignified instead of scrubbing toilets to make sure there’s nothing crusted on the toilet bowl for the guests to see). By the very nature of having little kids, that’s hard to achieve. I’m not saying you MUST adopt this frame to be virtuous, but no one likes to be low status. It’s a painful place to be. And from a resentful wife’s perspective she is relegated to either low status, or endless work to stave off low status, if her husband doesn’t see housework the same way she does. It takes a very self aware person to be able to shrug it off and realize that a lot of this is in our heads.
It’s also a part of with a mother. To notice what needs to be done without being asked, and doing it (otherwise our babies are screwed. They can’t tell us they’ve pooped or their onesie is crusted with three feeds worth of spit up, or there’s a hair wrapped around their pinky. We have to notice). So yes, women, especially after motherhood, get into a mode of perpetually noticing and doing. and I have a feeling we don’t get to be selective about the targets of this noticing and doing. It’s just a mental filter at this point. My husband is capable of focusing on a video game with mess around him, whereas for me, it all cries out to me like a blaring siren. I can’t vidya until the mess is sorted. Mess is very distracting to me.
Sick to death of whinging women. I know I have done more domestic labour than most females ever will- coming from a large family and have a not so large family but more than the average. I have never minded - families don't work if people don't chip in - but I do mind public whinging from females who seem to think changing nappies or washing dishes is beneath them.
I should have said privileged young wet behind the ears entitled white females. Sensible females, like sensible males, realise creating a family demands we all chip in.
Another commenter mentioned lesbian couples. Gay male relationships highlight the other side of the coin here. Gay men have lower divorce rates than straights, who in turn have lower divorce rates than lesbians. I think, as far as gender averages go, there's something to the notion that men enter marriages intending to make sacrifices for their spouses, whereas women seek to make sacrifices for their children but view their spouses in a more utilitarian light. A generalization, obviously! But it does make me grateful to be a man married to a man. I can't imagine resenting my husband for needing to be taken care of. It's what I signed up for, just as he signed up for taking care of me!
I do the most because I work the least outside the home and care for our daughter. I don’t resent my husband because firstly I really like him (and love him of course) and it means we get to do fun stuff when we’re all together. Additionally he has grown up unlike some of the men my friends describe they’re married to, he doesn’t need to be asked to do things that obviously need doing, he appreciates what I do and he respects me as an equal partner. I think some men know what they should be doing to support and willfully choose not to, this does breed resentment (I was married before to one of these men) and its miserable! So yes it will be unequal but that’s ok if you respect each other and what you both provide.
Or even in situations where the guy does more than enough! The person who doesn’t make any money naturally ends up with a greater share of domestic duties, which, I think, can be a letdown for them especially if they were raised AND socialized to pursue worldly success! One has to learn to focus one’s gratitude in the right direction. (This was supposed to be a reply to your comment up there…it’s down here because of my dumb phone.)
Two thoughts:
-- I can do a chore in about a tenth of the time it takes my spouse to do the same chore
-- Many women hold themselves to a standard of perfection in cleaning; most men don't care if the place is a bit messy.
"He doesn't spend as much time cleaning as I do" is a self-own.
Another issue is women inventing work for themselves that no one asked them to do, then becoming frustrated when no one helps them with it.
Isn’t that almost exactly what “invisible labor” and “emotional labor” is? Impossible to define and often needless tasks that women fill their day with?
One of my wife’s favorites from this genre is shopping on her phone. Never for things we actually need or have talked about needing. Instead, it’s for things she’s decided independently we need and then independently tasked herself with shopping for and then independently gotten resentful at me for not helping with. “I just spent hours shopping for new shoes for the kids!” Meanwhile, the kids’ shoes were fine and she never said a word to me about it until I got attacked for not helping.
Did you buy the original shoes that were fine?
"Hey everyone, I made brownies!"
Me: checks diet, groans
As I grow older I believe a lot of that is basically wives subconsciously "hinting" the kind of attentions they would like. If you ever watched the TV show The Bear, the episode "Fishes" is a masterclass in showing exactly that.
Yes this is called “treating people the way you want to be treated”
Which is a dumb thing to do. “I make contracts with family and friends in which I do something and in return I expect something of a certain sort in return. But I don’t tell my friends and family what that is. And I don’t tell them about their part in the contract. They let me down so often it is heartbreaking.”
I remember reading about “silent contracts” when reading about toxic relationships. It’s a toxic behavior.
haha sure. Sure “treat people the way you want to be treated” is dumb and not something every 5 year old learns in kindergarten as a fundamental ethical guideline to use for the rest of their lives.
You may be right.
I am totally guilty of this. Fortunately, my husband is a saint and after 30+ years of marriage knows how I operate :)
This. They consider chatting on the phone while washing dishes at quarter speed the same as male giterdone focus.
Deirdre McCloskey is a male to female trans. So definitely masculine!
McCloskey authored a book called Crossing: a Transgender Memoir in 1999 describing transition from Donald to Deirdre. Mentioned it in multiple interviews etc.
Don't lump all the women in with yourself just because you are bad at things. For shooting specifically, women are at least as good as men, and possibly better, both on average and at the high end.
maybe they're shooting his auto 12 gague
Deirdre McClosky is awesome
This is meant as a joke: Caitlyn Jenner proves that men are better than women at everything, even being women
Spouses need to decide together what is a reasonable degree of cleanliness and order. You can’t just decide that you want to live in your own filth and then leave your spouse to take care of everything because she doesn’t.
That is a binary view of the world. Either your house is perfectly clean or you are living in “filth.” An attitude like that makes compromise impossible.
I am exaggerating to make a point. Couples have to decide together how they want their home to be and work together to keep it that way. The book “Fair Play” by Eve Rodsky explains in detail how this works.
You made your point in your first sentence. Your second sentence was gratuitous, and belies an attitude that make compromise impossible.
No need to tone police. If we are going to, I found the tone of most of the comments to be condescending. Do you agree with my point?
Neither your spouse nor other Substackers must meet your expectations. If you do not like this thread you are free to find other threads more to your liking.
I do all of the shopping, most of the cooking and kitchen cleanup, half the laundry, and all of the garden and yard work. That makes it possible for my wife to care for her two disabled sisters. But do go on.
Go fuck yourself
Must be handy with tools
I was gobsmacked by that excerpt's lack of self-awareness: "yeah, my husband left his family to do a three month long internship. I'm sure he's living it up there, all alone and not (or barely) getting paid. Isn't that selfish of him? Now he can't even do the thorough and meticulous kitchen clean he used to do every night. Ladies, don't let your man take advantage of you like that"
Barging in just to say I'm happy to see you here. I hope you're doing well 🫡
As a single dad I have to do all the housework myself. You know what? It isn't that hard unless you make it so.
I cook almost all meals from scratch and bake our bread. I buy 50lb. sacks of flour and fill up a couple 5 gallon buckets -- lasts for months. I also have a bucket of pinto beans and one for dog food and some quarts of homemade leaf lard. All I need for groceries most shopping trips is a little meat, dairy and fresh fruits/vegetables -- like $10 worth.
My kid is big and strong and healthy as a horse. We go out at night hunting vermin with the dog for fun. Scares the crap out of the junkies in the woods.
For cleaning just get your standard janitorial tools: broom and dustpan, bucket and mop, vacuum cleaner and carpet cleaner. Get a bunch of sponges, brushes, rags and microfiber washcloths and then buy simple green (get a gallon concentrated solution), bleach, Windex and dish soap. That's all you need -- anything else is just for touch up. With the right tools and chemicals you can go to town on a filthy bathroom and have it sparkling in minutes.
I'm sure my place isn't up to Mrs. Perfect's tidiness standards, but since she isn't here to complain it doesn't matter.
It's actually not so bad being a single dad. Having a wife do your housework isn't worth the trouble if she has a bad attitude about it.
I am both the primary parent and the primary breadwinner. I sacrificed career advancement so I could work from home and be with my kids more. I do all the shopping, meal prep, extracurricular activities, etc etc etc.
It’s…not that hard. When I hear women complaining about the “mental load” and “emotional labor” and other such nonsense, I just groan and roll my eyes. Childcare and housework is by far the easiest component of my daily labor.
I always thought Simple Green was a fake thing only sold through government channels , like Skilcraft pens, until I found it in a store one day.
Hey can you say more on this topic. It kinda confirms a suspision of mine. That hardest part of having kids isn't actually the kids. Its trying to co-parent with a raging asshole that picks fights and is generally nasty and critical.
Like this gal in the OP, its not enough that her husband provides, that he is chasing excellence with his internship. He is also supposed to manage her emotions too. I have a suspison that "he doesn't do enough" is a proxy for "he isn't enough, I could have done better".
We must end no fault divorce. It merely subsidizes bad behavior.
Thank you for writing this, you’ve hit on so many salient points. One place I would differ is in casting women’s resentment as secretly about having to work. I think they are craving a real kind of support at home, but not one that their husbands can provide, at least not without extremely explicit guidance.
Say more?
Sorry, yeah. We evolved to co-parent with our female relatives. I can get a break from my baby with my aunt or my best friend because they are absorbed and attuned with my infant in the way only a woman can be. I am extremely blessed that my husband is so involved with our child and does an amazing job fulfilling the masculine role as well. And I want to respect the way that he parents. But, sometimes he needs something explained that a woman just doesn’t, like “you are actually singing that lullaby too boisterously.” He can course-correct from there, but I think not all women even realize these details are not man-weaponizing-incompetence they are literally man-did-not-evolve-for-this.
Agreed. My suspicion is all of this “he doesn’t do it to my standards” or “I shouldn’t have to ask” is secretly hoping he can fulfill a woman’s role. The only time I don’t have to ask is if I’m cooperating with my MIL (bless her) or mother. That’s when it hit me, what “I shouldn’t have to ask” really means. When you are working with other women who are mothers, have been mothers or apprenticed themselves under mothers (so, girls who helped their mothers, and maybe even babysat in their youths), you don’t have to ask. They just know.
I find with my husband I do have to be clear explicit about the specs of the job if I want him to take it from me. But once I have down that, he knows what to do. The key is to be specific.
Yes!! A lot of millennial parents are isolated. Useless boomer grandparents on a cruise. One car so mom is stuck at home on mat leave. No friends with kids, the gals want to go to yoga and you're stuck at home.
Bowling alone, basically. But for moms. Husbands really are all they've got.
This is the kind of thing where one person can say it’s like this for me! And the other person can come back with ohhyeah well it’s like THIS FOR ME! and both can be right.
All I can say is, my “useless boomer parents” would love to be involved but they have five other kids and live 1000 miles away (which was our choice). My wife’s “useless boomer parents” are not close to being able to afford constant cruises and live a 15 minute drive away, though they have three other kids. And my wife has dozens of other SAHM’s that she knows or is related to that live within a 10-20 minute drive.
However, they just plain do not form the kind of mutually supportive “village” that you might expect. Helping the other person is seen as an imposition on you, and asking them for help as an embarrassing admission of incompetence.
When my mother had a Dr appointment, kids went to the neighbors-and they came to us in the opposite scenario. When my wife does , she wonders if I can take off work or else with great reluctance calls her mother.
FWIW, my Useless Boomer Parents (UBPs):
maternal UBP: live 10 minutes away, see multiple times a week, grandmother is constantly involved in kids life (but less than we expected when we moved here, tbh). She does often take cruises and things and is probably closer to the stereotype here. Grandfather is in great physical condition but memory is very bad and also just isn't very good with kids in general.
pUBP: Live 1000 miles away, grandmother is basically deaf, grandfather is very mobility limited. Realistically we can't leave the kids with them for anything more than an hour for a quick dinner; they can't take care of bed time or something like that on our own.
ETA: one thing I have noticed is that it makes a generally big difference whether your parents are in their 60s or their 70s in terms of taking care of your kids (I have cautioned this to younger couples I know in terms of when to start having kids, my wife and I were both the youngest of our families and we didn't start terribly early). The mental model a lot of people operate under assumes grandparents in their late 50s/early 60s, which was probably valid at one time. But with delayed childbirth comes the related delayed grandparenthood and they just aren't as capable of doing it anymore.
I do think your last point is a good one as well-at one time, a lot of things that used to be acceptable to use your neighbors for just aren't anymore for a lot of odd reason.
Thing is when I was a kid my parents moved into an entirely new neighborhood hundreds of miles from any relatives or anyone they knew, and my mom nevertheless had far more external support than my wife does. Every so often I suspect they SOSed to my grandparents who’d then come and stay for a week, but they lived 1000+ miles away. Mostly it was just the neighbors. Very different.
My mom is Gen X and my dad is right on the border between generations. They are excellent grandparents! I'm speaking more about friends' parents, whose behavior is frankly horrifying. Seems to be a primarily white boomer pathology, too - I'm Puerto rican and there's an expectation of family obligations that runs both ways.
It doesn’t have to be parents; fellow mums and especially slightly older women in the community can be a big blessing.
But it does require deliberate action and humility to build those friendships. It’s easy for a woman to be too busy or too embarrassed to create the relationships that would help allay the business & embarrassment & feelings of being alone
This isn’t to say husbands are excused from participating! But the behaviours that make it hard to invite other women into her life can also act as barriers against her husband. Plus, there’s a high likelihood she married a less emotionally engaged husband who is less motivated to push through those barriers
Little Richard's Itsy Bitsy Spider is the best version! Infants love it! Rock on!
Bro what’re you even talking about. You’ve left two absolutely deranged comments on here about how women are incompetent. Cut that out
None of that please.
I think having to work may also be a source of resentment. For many reasons (too long for this comment, but it’s probably a status thing), we have visions about how we want the home to look. Having to work compromises our ability to achieve that vision. So many women feel like they “have” to take up a second shift just to make it at least a little bit the way they envision.
Women (and men) judge women on the state of our homes. But our husbands don’t get judged the same way. The home is seen as our domain whether we work or not. Once, my mother visited earlier than I had an opportunity to pick up around the house and I heard her grumbling to my father that I didn’t even bother opening the blinds all morning (when in truth, my third (!) baby just finished napping, so the blinds were down. Like I have 3 young kids. Gimme a friggin break). So the judgment is not just coming from outside the family, nor is it imagined. Not one word about my husband.
If we cannot achieve clear counters and clean floors and dustless shelves because we were also working a 9-5 and don’t want to stay up until 11 PM doing these chores (instead of, you know, relaxing after the kids go to bed, which we all want to do instead of housework), then we look slovenly, dysfunctional, like failures in the eyes of society. For strictly hygiene reasons it’s probably alright to step on a cheerio once in a while as long as it still gets cleaned on a regular enough basis. But if you are visiting and step on a cheerio, you’d judge your host(ess).
It's quite simple: Humans didn't evolve to have women girlbossing in corporate offices for 8-hour shifts everyday. All the resentment stems from this. Everyone subconsciously expects women to carry-on with the traditional role that has been the rule for hundreds of thousands of years, even women themselves! But it's too late now, the cat is out of the bag, the female half of the species have been fed into the economic grinder to compete with men, leading to the infamous two-income trap and the economy adjusting to halve purchasing power, so now it's incredibly hard for any woman to be a stay-at-home mom unless her husband is rich or they accept comparative poverty. Not to mention that, since all women are now forced to work, a successful stay-at-home mom ends up alone and alienated, without the female support network she evolved to work with. Feminism has, wittingly or not, been a disaster for the human race.
“Of course, one assumes those missing elements are there in great or small degree.” I would think this is the root of the problem. I have read a number of these kinds of essays, and I have yet to see any evidence that there is any love in these marriages. These women simply do not love their husbands, so the only value they derive from their marriage is financial and practical; they derive no kind of emotional value from their marriage, there is no romance, no emotional connection, no friendship, which is why they keep score. I have never once read one of these essays and seen a women lament the loss of romance or friendship with their ex-spouse. Nor have I seen one intelligent or self-aware enough to realize that it was the lack of romance and friendship that killed their marriage, instead of unequal sharing of responsibility. I suspect that reckoning with that would be more painful, in part because it would require some self-reflection as to what part, if any, the woman played in the demise of romance and friendship in the marriage. That isn’t to say that there aren’t far too many cases where the man would be almost wholly at fault. But I suspect that it wouldn’t as neatly fit into the narrative box where men are unsympathetic villains, as it is likely the case that many of these marriages started off with strong levels of romance and friendship, and the men likely also suffered as those things withered in the marriage, and those men probably did try the best they knew how to keep those things alive.
The entirety of modern feminist discourse is about removing agency from women when it is convenient.
Hence the lack of self-reflection noted in your comment.
Schrödinger's Feminist: a woman is simultaneously a victim and empowered, until something happens. Then she chooses which state benefits her the most.
The happiest couples I know have a reasonable split of domestic labor. WFH parents would obviously do more. Stay at home parents would obviously do most (not counting parents of toddlers/infants where parenting is truly 24/7, more the leisurely life of a SAHM for a 5yo and 8yo who are in school, as an example). Couples where both parents work demanding jobs have housekeepers and/or nannies. Really as long as both are pulling their weight in the domestic domains that best suit them, they are OK. In couples where someone is not pulling their weight, that is a problem that goes far beyond someone not picking up socks in a timely fashion or whatever.
Chores are a red herring. Really. I think enough has been said about this on both sides at this point and I find it hard to believe there’s any juice worth squeezing left in this discourse. It’s NEVER just about the chores.
"If you think it is, if you’re a radical egalitarian dedicated to equalizing all forms of labor between husband and wife — equal childcare hours, equal chores, equal paid work — then you have a rough row to hoe. Almost no marriage manages this feat. Despite all the gains since the 60s, in almost every marriage, wives do more household labor than husbands."
There are relationships where roles and labor are not divided by gender as the default: gay relationships. Time use studies of new parent couples show that the nongestational parent in woman-woman relationships does more household and childcare labor than the gestational parent.
Once you see the ways that queer couples divide labor in relationships, you can't unsee the ways in which default gender norms undergird household labor issues.
But this isn't only a gender norm -- the "gestational parent" literally gestated the child and probably also nursed it, biological processes which bring on a whole litany of physical and psychological changes in the mother.
Yes, and the nongestational parent responds to that garguantuan amount of biological labor by taking on a larger share of household labor and care work. Men could have the same response as nongestational parents, but they don’t.
"Men could be women, but they aren't"
Then men shouldn’t be surprised when women start choosing the other option - queer relationships - or the null hypothesis (staying single). Smart women who have other options don’t want to be enslaved as a helpmate, whose mediocre hero’s journey her domestic labor must support.
And women are looking for other options. We’ve read the breathless coverage of the single cat lady crisis, but we haven’t spoken much about how queerness is becoming more and more common and more ideal for women. The fast growing LGBTQ demographic are millennial women, which isn’t surprisingly at all, given they are so deep into childrearing. I see examples everyday of newly out bisexual moms in their 30s and 40s seeking queer relationships for the first time.
It seems like the stigma of queerness, even amid a horrific backlash, is better than supporting the mediocre achievements of a man based only on gender.
It’s the path I took, and I feel freer than any female member of my family.
If women want to pull the ripcord and date each other instead, that's fine, you won't find men upset about it (except maybe their former husbands). This isn't the first generation to turn to political lesbianism.
Moms in particular making this choice are doing so at the expense of their children, though. I won't go so far as to say it's never the right choice, but it often strikes me as very selfish.
Children raised by gay parents have similar or improved outcomes as straight parents. https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2023/03/06/kids-raised-by-same-sex-parents-fare-same-as-or-better-than-kids-of-straight-couples-research-finds/
Men could be supportive, but they aren’t.
Total nonsense.
Men are more supportive now than at any point in history and women have never been angrier about it.
Well, they're not as supportive as nongestational parents in same-sex relationships, as the poster above pointed out. It's not good enough, no matter how much they've "improved."
Men aren't "non-gestational parents". They're men. You're proving the point.
Those terms are not mutually exclusive.
Men & women are not interchangeable, so unsurprisingly a husband & wife don't handle chores like a 2-man college fraternity.
In most of these situations, her real issue is “my husband doesn’t make me feel safe / lead / make me feel appreciated”. But she responds to this by taking over more & more leadership and often becoming quite critical. But this is all happening behind the scenes; measuring chores is just a way of justifying the problem
I agree that theres something being omitted in these divorce narratives. "My husband does too few chores so I'll divorce him and do... All of the chores! And raise the kids myself instead of with his help! Also I'll have spend more of my income on living space for myself and the kids (maybe the incentive is far child support checks?)!" They're not saying the husband is a resource drain or creating more work than he's doing, right? The math doesn't math, so either this is girl math or were missing some hidden variables
Yeah, it’s because it’s not really about the chores. It’s about she’s just not that into you anymore and there’s a near infinite amount of content in the culture (articles, movies, tv shows, books) telling her that when that happens, it’s because the man is secretly rotten. She may not be able to articulate that in a way that makes any sense, but all the girlboss literature she reads tells her it’s true.
The missing variables are that in addition to feeling exhausted and frustrated, she feels alone and unloved. When you add those variables back in, the math works.
If that's her issue then why bring up chores and whatnot? That's enough to work with and can be addressed directly.
Because inequitable distribution of unpaid household labor is a genuine problem that is part of the equation; it is not her job to get him to participate in an equitable manner; and no one wants to ask to be loved. These things are connected to each other.
So hypothetically if he does way more of the household labor will she still feel unloved and alone or not?
Technically you'd have to ask her about everything you and I have speculated on so far, but we still managed to make some statements somehow
In many cases the husband does appear to be creating more work: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6560646/
It's possible but it's not what the woman in this article claims. But also if husbands are such a net negative then that's very strange and surprising.
I also think there is an issue about equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. If one spouse, say, has a lucrative engineering job and one spouse has a net-negative art or humanities job, I can see how this could lead to resentment on the part of the less successful spouse. When I am angry about my career I try to take a deep breath and remember that none of it is my husband's fault, I love being with him and I have it pretty good.
(Haha, I may have kind of a weird perspective on this stuff because my mom is a successful college professor and my dad was an unsuccessful writer. It was the source of some amount of tension in my family although I feel like my dad dealt with it relatively well.)
Since women doing more housework approaches a law of nature, it seems like a major problem when a husband doesn't compensate by contributing more outside the home. Very easy to see how a woman in that arrangement would become resentful.
I really do believe that most of this rhetoric is just an unconscious way of complaining that the husband hasn’t done enough by making it possible for the woman to stop working
I don’t know. It seems to me that in that case, a lot of women’s psychology would just raise the bar on them. We can afford to hire cleaners so I don’t have to scrub the bathroom? Well, then I must be a failure if my family ever has to eat one single store-bought baked good ever! And my husband is a chauvinist bum if he doesn’t vacuum so I can spend more time baking, I mean fair is fair.
Or as noted chauvinist pig Betty Friedan said, “Housework expands to fill your available time.”
I think the latter is a really important point and needs to be talked about more. Men don't work that way. We set out to do a job, do it, then move on to what we want to do. Women find or create new work to do as they go.
It’s a competitive thing. Women’s status is tied to her looks before she’s married, then by the state of her home after she’s married. By having a clean house she demonstrates either competence (look! She can juggle it all! Her house is a hotel!) or status (look at all the help her husband can afford, leaving her to look pretty and dignified instead of scrubbing toilets to make sure there’s nothing crusted on the toilet bowl for the guests to see). By the very nature of having little kids, that’s hard to achieve. I’m not saying you MUST adopt this frame to be virtuous, but no one likes to be low status. It’s a painful place to be. And from a resentful wife’s perspective she is relegated to either low status, or endless work to stave off low status, if her husband doesn’t see housework the same way she does. It takes a very self aware person to be able to shrug it off and realize that a lot of this is in our heads.
It’s also a part of with a mother. To notice what needs to be done without being asked, and doing it (otherwise our babies are screwed. They can’t tell us they’ve pooped or their onesie is crusted with three feeds worth of spit up, or there’s a hair wrapped around their pinky. We have to notice). So yes, women, especially after motherhood, get into a mode of perpetually noticing and doing. and I have a feeling we don’t get to be selective about the targets of this noticing and doing. It’s just a mental filter at this point. My husband is capable of focusing on a video game with mess around him, whereas for me, it all cries out to me like a blaring siren. I can’t vidya until the mess is sorted. Mess is very distracting to me.
Sick to death of whinging women. I know I have done more domestic labour than most females ever will- coming from a large family and have a not so large family but more than the average. I have never minded - families don't work if people don't chip in - but I do mind public whinging from females who seem to think changing nappies or washing dishes is beneath them.
I should have said privileged young wet behind the ears entitled white females. Sensible females, like sensible males, realise creating a family demands we all chip in.
Another commenter mentioned lesbian couples. Gay male relationships highlight the other side of the coin here. Gay men have lower divorce rates than straights, who in turn have lower divorce rates than lesbians. I think, as far as gender averages go, there's something to the notion that men enter marriages intending to make sacrifices for their spouses, whereas women seek to make sacrifices for their children but view their spouses in a more utilitarian light. A generalization, obviously! But it does make me grateful to be a man married to a man. I can't imagine resenting my husband for needing to be taken care of. It's what I signed up for, just as he signed up for taking care of me!
I do the most because I work the least outside the home and care for our daughter. I don’t resent my husband because firstly I really like him (and love him of course) and it means we get to do fun stuff when we’re all together. Additionally he has grown up unlike some of the men my friends describe they’re married to, he doesn’t need to be asked to do things that obviously need doing, he appreciates what I do and he respects me as an equal partner. I think some men know what they should be doing to support and willfully choose not to, this does breed resentment (I was married before to one of these men) and its miserable! So yes it will be unequal but that’s ok if you respect each other and what you both provide.
Or even in situations where the guy does more than enough! The person who doesn’t make any money naturally ends up with a greater share of domestic duties, which, I think, can be a letdown for them especially if they were raised AND socialized to pursue worldly success! One has to learn to focus one’s gratitude in the right direction. (This was supposed to be a reply to your comment up there…it’s down here because of my dumb phone.)