[quote=Blogstar][quote=CA renter][quote=scaredyclassic]I know guys who work super hard at home and at work and are seen as basically not team player contributors.
Then post divorce the ex wives can complain of the tribulations of being a single mom while their former husband’s continue to do tons of shit.
Females believe their contributions are denigrated by men and society.
Guys feel the same[/quote]
I’ve seen two couples like this, where the husbands work outside of the home, then come home and help the kids with homework and various activities, do housework, etc…and the wives are not appreciative.
OTOH, I’ve seen far, far more couples where the men only work outside of the home and expect their wives to do almost everything else WRT the house and children, etc. Doesn’t matter how uneven the workload is (when the wives have far more work), the men feel perfectly justified in leaving their responsibilities at the door and living life as if income-earning should be their only contribution to their family’s well-being. How njtosd described her grandfather’s life is very similar to how many men behaved. Is it really any wonder why so many women were miserable in their marriages? Do you honestly not get why they were unhappy and why some might have chosen to “find themselves” after the kids had grown?[/quote]
That’s not is happening by and large. Married men work more hours than married women. Often times the work is more dangerous and physically demanding. And bearing and caring for young children is incredibly demanding, both physically and emotionally. Now that we have a broad mix of work /stay at home gender designs What I see is that the person who works less does more domestic stuff than the longer harder working person. If they work similar amounts domestic chores are still usually shared along some pretty traditional gender lines or there is a lot of overlap but it’s not often an unbalanced situation. It has always been that way and always will be.
You just want to make the case that men are worse at being partners for women than the other way around and it’s a crock. But no one ever changes.[/quote]
Right there, you are exposing your bias. When you claim that men “work more hours” you’re implying that domestic chores don’t count as work. The statistics show the opposite from what you’re saying.
“A new study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that across the developed world, women do far more of the unpaid domestic work that keeps households running, even when they’re also putting in many hours at work. Men, it’s true, tend to put in more hours at jobs than women do, but when you add together the total number of hours of work, both paid and unpaid, women worked more than men in all but a handful of the developed countries the OECD included in its analysis.”
And I would argue that the imbalance was far worse 30-50 years ago…when men thought that their only contribution should be wage-earning. All too often, they’d just go to work, come home, kick their feet up on their favorite ottoman, and wait for the woman to bring them their drinks and serve them dinner (and look attractive while doing all of this, and be ready for sex where his “needs” were of primary importance). All the while, the women were expected to do all of the child-rearing, cooking, cleaning, shopping, attend to all of their family care/social duties, etc., which is more than a full-time job when you have a family. These women often had NO time off, much less nights and weekends where somebody else would tend to all their needs. These are the women who would divorce later in life because they wanted to “find themselves.” It’s particularly true when they were married to men who provided zero emotional support for their wives throughout their marriages because they believed that “women have (female) friends for that.”
Having said that, men have come a long, long way in the past couple of decades. We see more men at the parks, picking up kids from school, in the grocery stores, etc. And while the chore/work gap is definitely closing and becoming more balanced, we’re still not there, yet.
And, Russ, you’re making the mistake of implying that I’m talking about my own personal situation or “speaking for my gender.” That’s not the case. Before the housing bubble (and this is why I clued into the housing bubble so early in the first place), I studied family formation trends and their effects on the economy. What I’m stating comes from research, not personal opinion.
