Reply to If H takes this job, it’s going to break me.

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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][quote=Anonymous]Wait it out my fanny.  Are you some doormat SAHM who's congratulating herself on how much crap she put up with for decades?  Sorry but allowing yourself to be mistreated ks not a solution, it's a failure.[/quote]

Um, no, and I'm not sure what your vaginas has to do with this.  [/quote]

So your advice is for OP to do all the work herself, allow herself to be treated disrespectfully by a lazy and irresponsible man, let him waste their money, this goes on for decades, and at the end what's the prize?  Still being married to a jerk who's slightly better?  No thanks.[/quote]

He sounds immature. That tends to improve over time.

Where I'm coming from with this is, I did have a husband that didn't do as much housework as I felt he should and also was irresponsible with money. At some point I decided to stop nagging and just accept the situation.  It was not easy and it was not fair.  Fast forward about 10 years- he is now a much greater contributor to the household-- does all cooking, shopping, schlepping the kids around, and a non-terrible amount of cleaning. (I still do more cleaning.)  And, his income is now extremely high, high enough that he is still able to make silly purchases or lose money in predictable ways and it doesn't impact us at all.  I dislike clutter, so I don't love this trait, but it isn't a crisis like it was before. So yes-- people can and often do have a difficult time in the first part of marriage and then go on to have a great marriage.

It sounds like she's done and is leaving him, and that's also a path forward. But this is something that is a fairly common problem in relationships, and if you read the research on it, it does tend to improve with time, and in later life actually flips, with men doing more housework than women in retirement age.   [/quote]

But what if he didn't improve?  What if he never made money?  Would it be worth it then?  Seems like a big gamble, especially if retirement security is on the line.[/quote]

Yeah, that was a gamble. My retirement wasn't on the line though, we were financially okay in that department, along with paying for college, etc.  After devoting a lot of time reading studies on the division of housework in modern American families, I decided that it was likely to improve and focused on that.  It's hard to visualize the counterfactual, how I would have felt if we were still dealing with this. But I tend to be data driven and the numbers for married people are generally better than unmarried.

If my husband never made money at all, I wouldn't have married him. Financial security is a huge factor to me.  He was always a good earner, just an even better spender until he made so much it'd be difficult to spend it. [/quote]

So you married an immature man who treated you badly, but that's ok because money?[/quote]

He treated me poorly in a way that the majority of men treat their wives poorly.  In most American households, women do the majority of housework.  So, uh, yeah, like most women in hetero couplings, who stay married, I tolerated this suboptimal yet common condition until it subsided. My decision to do so was less about money and more about wanting to be married to a man.   [/quote]

Okay no.  It may be true that in most couples women do the majority of housework, but for a lot of them it's *on purpose*, agreed to, and peaceful..  It's a smaller proportion of couples who have that dynamic because the man is immature, lazy, disorganized, disrespectful, uncaring, etc.  Stop acting like those marriages are the same, they aren't.

It's sad that you felt you needed a man that badly.  I'm sad for the younger version of yourself.[/quote]

You think that women just *want* to do more work? Like they walk in and say "no, Chad, don't do the dishes! I want to!"  It is peaceful because women know the deal- that men are not likely to pull their weight in that regard, and they are tired of beating a dead horse.  It's always disrespectful, uncaring, etc.

Thank you for your sympathy.

[/quote]

If they are SAHM or work part time, yes I would think that is definitely and explicitly the deal.  The question is not "In how many households does the woman do more".  It's "In how many households does the woman do much more despite working full time and going to therapy and constantly exhorting her DH to do the things he explicitly agree to do?". And that's a far smaller proportion.[/quote]

On the contrary, when women outearn their husband, they do even more housework than in couples where the woman earns less. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/05/02/housework-divide-working-parents/

Are these women just like, obsessed with working? Is that it? Has nothing to do with the fact that men are cultured to regard it as women's responsibility? [/quote]

I don't know, probably some of them are unahppy and others of them have their reasons, but I do know it's abnormal for a.man to behave like OP's husband, being lazy and yelling and doing hardly anything in the face of therapy and repeated requests.  [/quote]

I suspect that OP is more persistent about this issue than most women, as I also was before I made peace with it. Can we at least agree that it is not normal to write love letters thanking your spouse for cooking dinner? That's an unusual level of engagement on this topic.  And, like most men are cultured not to do housework, women are cultured to do it.  So this is probably not an issue that is brought to the surface in the way it is in OP's (and was in mine at first).  So he sounds like a prick but maybe a lot of marriages would look like this if women weren't all out there cheerfully and consensually doing more than they should have to.   [/quote]

Yuck. Go back to 1955 with this asinine take.[/quote]

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