Reply to SAHMs and marriage dynamics?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a big law partner and a lot of my male colleagues have wives who are SAHMs. I'm not super involved in their marriages, obviously, but just from hearing how they talk amongst themselves, it seems like a lot of them lose respect for their wives. All conversations become about the kids or the household, and they start seeing their wives more as a mother to their kids than a true partner and equal. They do love their wives, and I think their marriages are mostly happy, but it does sometimes feel like they see their colleagues (male and female) as their peers and their wives as a step beneath - and that's with the good ones. As you probably know, cheating is rampant in big law. This may be unique to law, and big law in particular, where people tend to make their career their personality and most of their self worth. [/quote]

Yes - I have also seen this from male friends of mine. Not until 40s - I think it’s based on the kids being at school full time and the wife is still like - spending the day walking a dog and saying stuff takes up the whole time. Women get super mad when you suggest this but when so many women work and raise school aged kids it creates a cognitive dissonance [/quote]

I am in my 40s, and my wife is a SAHM with school aged kids. I don't feel this way at all. When I see the families with two full time parents with multiple kids, it creates no cognitive dissonance at all because they seem overstretched and generally pretty harried and unhappy. So, yes, we could have more money if my wife worked full time, but I don't think it's worth and am glad she doesn't. I know several other men in my same circumstance, and I never hear that they wished their wives would work more. So it is all anecdotal, but I doubt you are really seeing this from your male friends, or you just have a different social set than I do.[/quote]

I am not one of the PPs but I would consider that you probably would not hear your male friends talking about their dissatisfaction even if they had it. I worked for years in heavily male-dominated environments and as one of the few women, men confided in me in a way they didn’t confide with others. I remember several “please don’t tell anyone but…” conversations over the years. So I think both you and women you are responding to can both be right: you don’t hear their unhappiness, and the women you are responding to do, and it can be the same group of people.

I actually didn’t like being in that role and deliberately moved away from it: I ended up staying home myself for a period and then gravitating towards work that had a better male/female balance. But while I was there, I saw and learned a great deal about male unhappiness. It wasn’t inappropriate, and they certainly weren’t mean about their wives (they clearly loved them) but I saw a side of them that I’m pretty sure they didn’t show a lot of people.

This is actually a professional issue for women who work in male-dominated environments: the only woman gets put unconsciously in an an “office therapist” role. I was too young to realize it at the time, I just knew I didn’t like it. It’s only been years later that I’ve understood that this is a not uncommon work dynamic that nowadays women are warned about in professional conferences and such.

I’m just saying that people are complicated and I think men can simultaneously be proud and happy about having a SAHW and also very stressed and unhappy about it. It is very possible to hold all those feelings at the same time. [/quote]

I definitely agree with your last paragraph but the original PP said they lose respect for their wives. I’m sure some do but that’s very different from being happy about the pros and bummed about the cons. I feel the same way about the very fact that my husband has a job that makes it much harder for me to work anything more than a hobby job. [/quote]

I’m the PP and I definitely remember sensing a lack of respect from some of them. Not really talking badly about their wives, just more not really talking about them as if they were independent adults. But like I said, it’s been awhile and I was young and I probably missed some nuances. Honestly it makes me kind of mad for those wives years later. [/quote]

NP here and I think the ones whose wives had kids later and leaned out of a good career (and often still kept a foot in the field) were talked about differently than the ones whose kids had wives earlier and whose careers never really launched and had kids early after a couple years of working in a job like admin assistant or teaching assistant. In the first case, the husband kind of knows the wife could step it up if absolutely needed and the wife has seen enough of the working world to truly understand how to be supportive. In the second case, these things aren't true. [/quote]

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