A question on marriages / partnerships with one sole breadwinner

In My Humble Opinion
21

I have strong opinions about the narrative around this issue, which are admittedly biased based on my personal experience.

My guess is that there are scenarios where partners naturally fall into patterns of work/responsibility that feel satisfactory to both people, and the work is getting done to the satisfaction of the person not doing it. My guess is also that this is not the norm.

I am always in a bit of disbelief when I hear stories (mostly online- I have never witnessed this explicitly in my community) of partners talking about their “job as a husband/wife” as if they had no agency in how they show up in a partnership, and as if their partner has a non-negotiable set of tasks they must do because of their gender.

If you are not in constant dialog about how things are going, someone or both ones are going to be unhappy. What worked yesterday might not be working today.

I 100% believe (again, based on observation) that in households with children it is more likely though not universally true that mothers do a massive amount of unrecognized work. Even when there is good communication and awareness.

22

I never thought of tending to my children as “work”.
Sure there are/were duties that had to be performed regularly.

But a list, 1. Feed kid 2. Clean and dress kid. 3. Provide educational entertainment for kid. 4. Take kid to appointments 5. Manage kids play schedule.
This goes out the window (or did with me)

  1. Kid eats, grazes, stumbles into a piece of leftover chicken.
  2. Kid goes in tub(with tooth brush and paste), you’re there for safety, singing, game playing, splashing. Then we have fun mopping up, killing another chore in the process..oh, kids love to mop. For a couple of my kids clothing was optional. You haven’t lived until you see a nekkid 3 yo. mopping with a too big mop.
  3. Hey Lego is fun for a parent too.
  4. Go get a scheduled vaccine or dental cleaning. Oh ouchy, here let’s get a Happy meal. Maybe a pack of Pokemòn cards for a treat.
  5. Park. Thats all you need. Playtime just happens.

Anything labeled “work” is naturally gonna be pushed back on.

I can’t say, everyday was a child rearing joy. There were/are trying times in families.

House cleaning was/is my hobby. So sue me, I enjoyed it. I actually miss going through my morning clean up routine. My Mid-dau, Cook and chef, bottle washer, and all around house person does these things now. Often with me watching over and being all nit-picky. That’s gotta be worse than doing it for herself. I really don’t know I could live here without her sacrifice and yeoman like work. Dang I just made myself feel guilty. I think I’ll get her a present today.

It’s such a satisfying duty to, say completely clean out your fridge or a closet. I loved that feeling.
I always found once the floors were picked up and cleaned nothing makes a house look cleaner.
Nobody cares if under your kitchen sink looks like hell.(well, I do, but I’ll judge you silently :grin:)

I loved my gardening. I limited it to just around the house. It’s way way too much for one person to keep this property looking best. No way I could do bush hogging or gravel spreading. But I could keep a couple flower beds a kitchen garden and the lawn taken care of. I expanded that into the fruit and nut trees. Got them up and producing after that any pruning or problems I farmed out to another. (Unsolicited garden tip: bulbs, plant copious bulbs, they just keep working there under the soil waiting to delight you. Forget the ones you have to lift out and replant, get good ol’ daffodils)

I just never looked at it as my employment. God knows I never got paid. It’s just who I was.

Like any “job” if you hate it you’re gonna be unhappy at it. Not do it well and resent it’s yourself who “has” to do it.

ESPECIALLY if you think you’re the only one doing anything.

23

My initial reaction to this was agreement.

Then I realized I sure seem to enjoy going to work more than doing housework… so clearly I was wrong.

24

Well, there’s grading by effort or difficulty and there’s grading by effort or difficulty as offset by fun or rewards.

IMO/IME houswork looks better on the first metric but (decent) jobs look better on the second.

25

This. This right here is the missing piece of much of modern community life. Communities and municipalities used to have a lot more unpaid support in the form of “clubwomen”, volunteers and other forms of service by SAHMs and retirees. To a lesser extent that still happens, but it’s something that people tend to overlook when wondering what the non-breadwinning spouses in one-income couples do all day.

26

I’m curious what you feel my options are if I choose not to “put up with it”?

I find it frustrating.

I’m not a mental health professional, but I suspect my wife suffers from some sort of OCD or anxiety disorder where if everything isn’t a certain way, it will invite some sort of catastrophe. It probably has to do with how she was raised.

27

I don’t have any children of my own, but years ago I spent a week taking care of my nieces (two pre-teens and one infant). It was about as difficult as I expected, but I didn’t realize just how much of my time it would really take. Between taking care of the kids and minor household chores, I really had very little time for myself and to top it all off I felt a bit isolated as I wasn’t spending any time with other adults. It really helped me gain a greater appreciation of what it meant to be a stay-at-home parent.

That said, I would expect the stay-at-home parent to do the bulk of domestic chores. I would not expect the working parent to complete divorce themselves from household chores unless they also wanted a divorce from their spouse.

28

Perhaps.

I would be pretty annoyed about a spouse who thought my role was to be both breadwinner and complete domestic servant so their role could be self-selected volunteer groups out in public at a time and schedule of their choosing.

Damned nice work if you can get it. But my first impression is the only way to get it is to find a sucker for a spouse.

29

If her name isn’t Peggy Bundy, then yes.

30

My wife stayed at home to raise our daughter. I helped with the chores. She did laundry and general straightening. She did most of the cooking, but I did it from time to time (especially in summer, when we grilled). I did the dishes most of the time. She took care of the kid during the day; I would help out in the evening.

31

When I WFH I often find myself doing clean-up chores in between calls and whatnot. I actually get a certain Zen-like satisfaction in straightening up the place and doing housework. Or at least I am indifferent to the tasks as just something that needs doing.

My wife OTOH housework seems to create almost something like a panic response.

The closest thing I can think of is the “Manhattan Mom” persona. Usually it’s a woman married to a wealthy professional where she mostly focuses on drinking Mimosas with her girlfriends while most of the heavy lifting is performed by nannies and cleaning ladies and whatnot. If she has a job, often it’s more like a hobby.

More often, I see both parents working and they will hire help simply because between work and kids they just don’t have enough time in the day.

32

I lived in a little, affluent, town in NJ, and we had a big street fair once a year and lots of activities in the many churches all run by SAHMs. Plus, when the school had a meeting for parents, it was packed. This was over 30 years ago.
Now it is harder and harder to get volunteers for clubs.

As for the more general problem of housework, if one spouse is at home at the other is at work, it is hard to run the vacuum cleaner at night when the kids are asleep, the time before that spent with homework, etc. I love to cook, but when I was working if I had done it we wouldn’t have eaten until 9 pm most nights. When my wife started to work it was mostly freelance writing which she did at home, so she could start dinner at a reasonable time.
Now I’m retired I cook a bit more than half the time.

33

In my first marriage, I was the sole breadwinner 95% of the time. My ex-wife did have a part time retail job for a few months before she got pregnant, and then that ended.

I still contributed at home though. Before we had a kid, I would clean the house (dishes, laundry, picking things up, etc.). It would feel weird not to. After our daughter was born, I did that, and also helped raising our daughter. I shared time trying to get her to fall asleep, fed her, and so on. I was even the primary diaper-changer as long as I was home, because it didn’t gross me out as much as it did my ex. I’m glad for all of that, because otherwise I would have missed out on a lot of time with my oldest daughter. And later, after my first wife and I divorced, my daughter and I ended up on opposite sides of the country, so that time I’d had with her as a baby and toddler was even more important to have. If I’d just been a “you take care of the kid, I bring home the money” type of person, I don’t know if we’d have had the bond we have. (My oldest is turning 20 this year, and we are still close, or at least as close as you can be with someone you only see in person every once in a rare while.)

I’ve also been on the other side. I once lived with a woman (fiancée though we never married) for six months, and due to some very unfortunate circumstances I was unemployed for that entire time. But she had a well-paying job as a lead nurse at a major hospital, so we had no financial problems, and I had no need to work. I was freaking miserable. I was pretty young (22) and it was a revelation to me that being able to stay at home every day and not worry about money was a nightmare. I did my best to keep busy; I cleaned, did yard work, and so on. But it destroyed my self-esteem. I needed some kind of work to feel like I had a purpose, and being the live-in maid didn’t work for me.

Today, my current wife and I both have good careers. We make decent money; not “we can do and buy anything we want any time” kind of money, but the kind of money where we don’t have to stress about finances all the time. We share household duties, though in a weird way; I tend to do the everyday things (I do stuff like dishes, laundry, pick up after everyone) and every now and then she goes crazy and does some huge cleaning project on something. We’ve raised our daughter together, and I was lucky to already be experienced when she was born as I was already a pro at things like diaper changes (again, I was the main diaper-changer), feeding, swaddling, soothing a kid to sleep, etc.

I think having a balanced partnership has been a lot smoother and more stable than my previous relationships were, where either I was the sole breadwinner, or my partner was.

34

A truly bizarre take on family and society!

If my wife went back to work as an Accountant or an Industrial Engineer, we’d have more money, but neither of us care much about getting a couple hundred thousand more. We’d both be less happy, but we’d have the approval of someone on the internet. I will ask her to get right on LinkedIn, start networking and brush up on all the AI buzzwords. The world needs that more than a little more health, wellness and community well being.

35

Yeah. My husband was a stay at home dad for a while, and took care of all the household stuff. I did some dishes and some laundry and other minor household work, but basically, he made sure everything got done, and was the primary parent of our children.

That was glorious!

My work is much more satisfying, and honestly, less stressful, than doing housework.

I’d start with couples therapy. We found some stress points that were really easy to fix, and some other issues that required more work. I think we are both happier for it.

36

Yes @msmith537 , you need to figure this untenable situation out.

What does she say about it?

37

Whoooooaaaa. I don’t think anybody here is advocating for a non-breadwinning spouse (or a breadwinning one, for that matter) to be unilaterally deciding what the spousal roles in the marriage are going to be.

Yes, I’m aware that that happens in some marriages, to the frustration of whichever spouse it is who’s not getting equal input into the decisions, but I don’t think it’s being endorsed as a positive model for marriage by anyone in this thread.

38

My mother was a SAHM until her youngest was 12 or so. She did most of the housework (can you believe she dusted and vacuumed the whole house every day). My father worked from 8 AM to 6 PM six days a week. He felt he needed the overtime to live even an upper lower class (or maybe a lower middle class) lifestyle. My mother did all the wash with a wringer washing machine and hung the clothes to dry, in the basement from late fall to early spring, in the back yard the rest of the time. Once my father was hanging clothes in the back yard and a neighbor ragged him for doing women’s work. He said, “I don’t need to prove my masculinity.” The thing was that my father came home tired. He certainly helped with the raising of three children, but most of the housework was my mother’s job.

As for me, my wife was a grad student and TA until our first was born and then she chose to drop out and become a SAHM until our youngest was 10. During that time, she did most of the housework, although I did some cooking and nearly all the cleaning up of dishes. Then she got a job and I helped more although we soon hired a cleaning lady to come in for a half day a week and do all the heavy work. Eventually, my wife’s superior said she was thinking of going free-lance (they were translators, French to English) and would my wife want to join her. After that she worked from home (illegally in our town to have a home-based business) but we still had a cleaning lady. We are both long retired but we will still have house cleaners and they save our lives. Meantime, dementia is slowly taking my wife and I have taken over nearly all the cooking and cleaning up and a lot of the clothes washing.

39

Beck’s ol’Grannys advice for couples

“If you don’t like how things are done around here, do it yourself!”

40

I’m not your therapist and there is a ton I don’t know about your situation, so I don’t know what your specific options are. YOU are the one who has to figure that out. But individual and/or couples therapy, talking to your spouse about what you’re feeling and asking her about her feelings and behaviors, considering identifiable, manageable ways to make changes you both agree to … that seems like where you might want to start. If it’s really bad, separation/divorce? Not my call.

I will say that glib “try therapy” advice, as if that is a simple solution, isn’t necessarily helpful. My mother went back to school and became a clinical therapist while I was in high school - as a result, I was “therapy-bombed” all the time and I knew all of her therapist friends from the mental health center where she worked.

She used to say, “the reason most other people become therapists is because they are trying to solve their own problems - therapists (but not me) tend to have a lot of unresolved issues.” Without knowing my mother, you can’t really get a feel for the irony, but let’s just say a truck-load of irony meters could burst into flame from that projection.

Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying “get therapy” is easy to suggest, harder to implement successfully. But it can help. Everyone knows therapy is hard work; just don’t discount the difficulty of step one, which is finding a therapist who is a good fit.