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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Where is gender equality here? If I was the breadwinner husband and if my wife decided not to work anymore,  I think I would lose some respect for her. Will most of those marriages end when one of the sides hit a mid life crisis? [/quote]

By our third date, my husband was telling me he only wanted to marry a woman who would continue to work after marriage and kids. I appreciate his forthrightness and as I never had any interest in SAH, we ended up getting married and being dual WOHP.  My guess is that most people discuss this extensively with prospective spouses.[/quote]

I didn't want to be a SAHM but I wouldn't marry that guy. [/quote]

Your choice, of course. I've been married to "that guy" for 25 years.[/quote]

I have been married to another “that guy” for 20+ years too. My DH explained that he wanted to build a life with a partner who would work since he didn’t like seeing his Dad stress about a job loss and his mom go out to scrape together work to pay the bills.  I am sure if it were a real issue (I felt really strongly after childbirth for some reason, I couldn’t find a job in the same city, we had elder care or SN child issues that we hadn’t accounted for), we’d have had a conversation and figured things out.  But having a man explain to you that his vision for his life matched your vision for your life is a good thing, you know?[/quote]

What if he just got offered a really great promotion, and he wanted to work 80 hours a week and make tons of money?  Or he realized that he hated his job and wanted to switch to something that was less family friendly?  The only way that either of you are allowed to make a change in your life from the time you are dating until you die is having elder care issues or a special needs child?  No one can just want to do something different?  
[/quote]

Woman here with heavy work hours but also earning 50% more than the DH. When I took my new role, I promised that my home commitments would not suffer. Why can't a guy do the same thing? We have been operating 50-50 well in the last 5 years. Besides both of us spending time with the kids, my DH has hobbies and I have just extra work that I need to spend time on. [/quote]

Same. Women do this all the time, you just don't see it because they aren't advertising it.[/quote]

Just out of curiosity, what does your day to day look like?  I would like to go back to work full time, but my husband works long hours, and I can’t really figure out how to make it work.  
He typically works 7am-6pm with two days off every other week.  Sometimes they fall on a weekend, but not always.  
Kids are elementary school and middle school ages.  Oldest has some minor special needs and homeschools.  
Right now I work 20-30 hours/week, but I don’t see how I could take a time intensive job or even a serious hobby.   I would like to start coaching high school again, but I don’t see how I can make it work.  [/quote]
Here is how we do it: We know which one of us will drop off the kids and which one will pick up for a given week based on our calendars. Usually the drop off person does not do the pick up. So, say I did the drop off, which I do around 8 am and then go to work, I usually stay at the work until 5:30 pm or so. My DH that day starts working at 7 am and does pick ups around/before 4pm.  I am responsible for the breakfasts and he is for the dinners. We don't cook from scratch everyday, prepare couple dishes over the weekend and also do healthy takeaway options during the week. If the kids have a sports/arts activity after school, the person to pick up also deals with that. When it is my turn to do sports activities, I actually continue to work at the entrance/cafe area of the sportshall. I sometimes get evening meeting calls, then I leave maybe an hour early because I will spend a couple hours later in that evening call. After the kids go to bed, which is around 8:30 pm, my DH is back to his hobby and I do maybe another hour of work (30% of the time). When none of us can do a pick up, we call a couple college students asking if they can pick up the kids. This has been working for us well. And when we work from home, we usually save an hour of commute. When I travel, I arrange the pick ups by the babysitter, so that my DH's usual routine does not get disturbed.[/quote]

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but it doesn't sound like your hours are really that heavy.  It sounds like you have a pretty standard 8:30-5:30 M-F office job with occasional meetings or responding to emails in the evenings, and occasional travel.  This sounds like a pretty typical 50 hour/wk job with a pretty good amount of flexibility.

I think you are kind of confirming my idea that a couple really cannot work more than a combined 90-100 hours/wk combined AND raise children.

[/quote]

Yes, you can. I'm the fed WFH 4 days/week, 40 hours only and I have flexible hours. My H works around 60 and travels for work but he has flexibility over his schedule too. As I said before, as long as you are highly educated and have valuable work experience, you can get flexibility.
[/quote]

60 + 40 = 100.  
You can’t work more than that as a couple and raise children.

[/quote]

Yes you can, stop with this nonsense. I can easily work 2 more hours everyday instead of wasting time here or on Sephora (like I do now) and my H can definitely do more with less Reddit and Netflix. We don't have to, so we don't. Most well-paid jobs are results driven, unless you are an MD, so nobody keeps track of the exact hours per day.   [/quote]

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