Well, one of us has misinterpreted Icerigger’s intent, because I assumed the question is gendered in direct response to Kimstu’s assertion that “disparities in traditional gender-role expectations making modern marriage a more attractive deal for men than for women” and Icerigger is curious about why women generally want to get married despite that.
Marriage in this society may well be a more attractive deal for men than for women, but remaining single may still be a less attractive deal for many women than getting married. In another area: men’s average pay is still higher than women’s, but “less pay” is still more attractive to many women than “no pay”.
Also, of course, people want to live with other people for a whole host of reasons that go much deeper than the question of what sort of “deal” their society is offering.
I don’t know that marriage is necessarily a more attractive deal for men. Traditionally, the expectation was that the man takes care of the woman financially. That has changed somewhat, but women still tend to “marry up”. So even if they are both working, getting married can result in a significant boost in standard of living.
But more generally, I think people of both (all?) sexes get married because they want someone to share their life and maybe raise a family with.
On the other hand, women tend to take over more of the household. So now he doesn’t have to remember to buy his mom a birthday card, change his own sheets, raise his children, or make his own doctor’s appointments.
I mean, there are exceptions, of cpurse. But I imagine women take over a disproportionate amount of household responsibilities at least as often as they “marry up” financially.
But all of this typically happens at the woman’s insistence. Which is why I started this thread.
Honestly, this was my marriage. Woman seems crazy about me, woman has a long list of things we need to do and for family and house. Woman shows less satisfaction and more contempt over the years and ultimately leaves the marriage for someone else.
My experience is that it was an emotional steamroller. I’m a man who will actually try to change. At this point I’m very reluctant to believe I have much if any control over a woman’s happiness in a relationship. Those issues seemed to be self generated by the women themselves or the opinions of other women.
So the question for someone like me is do I invest any energy in this, or either bow out of relationships or emotionally distance myself from this sort of thing since I don’t think I can control it anyway? I am sorry to believe what I believe, but I think there is a lot of truth in it.
So like, you find when you get in a reltionship the pressure of having to live a certain way . . .clean sheets, regular doctor’s appointments, remembering your mom’s birthday . . .is unpleasant and burdensome, but you try, but in the long haul its never enough?
Then you need find a woman who shares your values. Seriously. I think you are doing what i said above: a woman, in your mond, is fussy and conventional. The unconventional ones, who don’t keep house and worry about all that, are out there, but you aren’t really seeing them as canidates. You’re looking for a woman who matches this conventional model. But then you don’t really like that model.
? AFAICT it’s not supposed to be about either partner “controlling” the other partner’s happiness. Clearly, nobody can do that, nor should they be expected to.
Obviously, there do exist many happy and enduring marriages between men and women, we see them all around us. Are you trying to figure out whether it’s impossible (or at least unlikely) for any woman to be happy with you personally? That seems kind of self-hating and defeatist.
But by all means, if you’re not feeling confident at present about your chances for a happy relationship, then focus on developing a happy single life. It’s not necessary for absolutely everyone to be married or in a relationship, and IMHO there are very few people who are absolutely incapable of being happy unless they’re married or in a relationship.
I’d suggest that you stop trying to make it all about some mysterious hypothesized factor in women’s innate nature that somehow prevents them from finding long-term happiness in marriage—which is obviously counterfactual anyway, since there are plenty of women enjoying long-term happiness in marriages with men who are not you—and focus on figuring out how to make your life happy, irrespective of the presence or absence in it of a relationship partner.
I think I am worthy of a good relationship.
I am not the only good person of either gender that has this sort of issue. I am open to new experiences, but I’m not going to fix this through self improvement alone. I need to project my own desires more.
Deep down the ex is a dominant individual within her world. I could not get that to work for me, she didn’t remain happy. I did fight for things that were important to me at times. Yes, I think there are women out there who are less dominant than my ex. Most of them are less dominant than she was.
I think some things have come out through this thread. Overall, women do have a “longer list” that they evaluate when they are in a relationship. I just think it’s orientation, more of women’s personalities are focused on being social and interconnecting.
I need a deeper connection. My former GF called me an enigma. I am working on not being that way so much. I know some of the reasons why I do that and that’s something I do need to change. Otherwise it’s not going to work for me. I’m not going to try to implement “Happy wife, happy life” because I can’t. Otherwise, I’m going to continue to cycle through these sorts of relationships.
Sure, but the thing about modern marriage is that the expectation for women to (non-traditionally) contribute a significant part of household income by paid work has increased more than the expectation for men to (non-traditionally) share household tasks and childcare.
Again, I’m not saying that this general trend applies equally to all marriages, just that it exists on average.
Right. However, as the OP tacitly acknowledges, men often both expect women to do all that womenly shit, like make sure the sheets get changed and the fridge cleaned out and holidays go according to tradition while simultaneously scorning all that as frivolous women things.
So a woman that doesn’t do all that, who doesnt make a warm, inviting home and care for and nurture the family is generally dismissed as unfeminine or lazy or weird, but when women do all that shit they are insulted as silly, frivolous, etc., and it’s seen as a self-indulgent hobby. Not only is the man not expected to help, any more than she helps him play golf, when she spends “his” money on the family, she gets insulted for it.
MandaJo,
I mentioned upthread some of the household stuff in my marriage.
I am going to say that behavior has shifted over generations. It is not unusual at all for young men to date college educated women and arrive at their homes for the first time to find nothing in the fridge. Because performing domestic duties is not the focus of the young women’s lives at that point.
I do think there is a difference between caring about certain household specifics, and whether you are making them so through sweat equity versus cutting a check to have someone else do it. As I mentioned, we had a cleaning service. Ex also had this when she was a single woman. Again, in my circumstance the ex was a stay at home mom, still paid for the cleaning service (I paid for it really since ex did not have income.) She did more meals since she was at home. I mentioned that I did my own laundry, helped with the kids. I am of average handiness but still mowed the lawn and blew the snow, again things the ex would have been fine paying someone else to do.
Now I pay for them, some of them, in her new house, and she has a new husband to help pay for them as well. Obviously me providing funds to pay for household upkeep didn’t keep my ex interested in continuing the marriage, particularly since she could find another man whose company she preferred to do the same.
This idea is known as “choreplay” in relationship circles. I do not think that doing chores or paying for them to be done has much if any impact on relationship happiness. I suppose it could make it worse, but doing it right isn’t going to help me keep a woman around.
Im talking about something bigger than vacuuming. I’m talking about a whole value system of the “well kept house” and gracious living. Like, your value system didn’t align with that of this woman. So whar you need to do is find a woman whose day to day life looks like yours.
I think you are only looking at pretty traditional, conventional women, but there are other types.
We’re kind of off track here.
Yes, at one point during separation/divorce proceeding the ex used my supposed deficiencies in doing laundry/dishes as a reason to leave. I have maintained that these reasons were false.
Our house was fine. I mentioned something about countertops obliquely above, getting new countertops was one of the things we had to do to make the house just so. I think once she ran out of things to do with the house, she got bored with it and with me.
Ex is an antique dealer. As part of the spilt she changed up all of her furnishings, in her new house, to be more “retro” and away from the older antiques. Antiques are effectively her only interest. I did try to help her as much as I could, but I have little interest in being a dealer, so if that’s the only thing she cares about she could certainly love another man more than me for that.
Look, if a man wants to leave his 20+ year marriage for his hot young secretary, well his secretary might well be hot and young and better looking than his 20+ year older wife. I’m not going to deny what he’s seeking, even though I think he’s an ass for doing so. Or for that matter, someone leaving a marriage for their “high school sweetheart”, some prior relationship that the current partner has no chance to compete with.
This is why I say I need connection. Maybe I wasn’t connected enough with my ex. That seems to be something I need - even if I don’t need it myself or would try to make do without it, I’m more worried about the other side. Something more than what I do around the house, or even morals, or even lovemaking. Those evidently aren’t enough.
My point is that you keep extrapolating her values and priorities to “women”.
Jay-Z, if your theory is correct, your ex (Beyonce) should begin having dissatisfaction with her new husband and it should progress steadily until she is ready to leave him. Do you have any insights as to whether or not that’s happening?
Making declarative assumptions on how genders behave, is fine for a sociology class, but when it comes down to individual relationships, they are each unique. I would worry less about how “women” behave in relationships and focus more deeply on yourself, and what you may have down to contribute to the fall of your marriage, and focus on trying to not let that happen again. Sure if there were characteristics of your ex that you didn’t like, try and not date someone who also has those characteristics.
Also, you have made several comments that you still pay for upkeep on your former home and household and supporting your exes lifestyle. Do you still pay her alimony, even after her remarriage? Or are you referring to just the child support you pay for your children? If it’s the latter, I’d suggest you not refer to your child support as payments to take care of your ex wife. Because that’s not what child support is for.
I have no idea how things are going between my ex and her new hubby. If she doesn’t have a Plan C lined up, I suppose she’s stuck with him. She has gotten nicer to me over the years, called me a great father. Probably still feels guilty over what she did, though it didn’t stop her from doing it.
He was “a friend” during our courtship. I met him a couple of times. He was in the process of a breakup in his LTR because he refused to marry or have kids with the woman he was with. She wanted that, so she left him and married another guy. When he decided he wanted to be a step-dad, I was shoved out the door by my ex.
Deep down, my ex ALWAYS preferred this man to me. That’s why they are together. This is why I am so testy on some of this stuff, to be used in the manner I was.
As far as the money goes, child support is based on placement and income differential. When we got married, my ex actually earned more money than me. She quit working once we had the kids. I had to impute some income to make the child support burden less severe. Ex is capable of working, just chooses not to because she wanted to develop an antiquing business in the long run and doesn’t want to do anything else. I don’t have this luxury. Given the circumstances of the divorce, hell yeah I wish she had gone back to work.
What I have found through divorce is that if there is a stay at home situation, the faithful partner usually gets ripped off. If the faithful partner is the income earner or the one staying at home, the cheater gets all the better of it. I would recommend any married person to be very careful of being on either side of a stay at home situation.
The rest of child support goes to me not having 50-50. Most men get 50-50 nowadays. I didn’t because the ex contested it and my lawyer told me she had advantages due to the kids being young and her being a stay at home mom.
So my reasons for paying support, I don’t feel any regret or shame in questioning that. I have told you the reasons. I take my kids extra every chance I get. I don’t need to pay to not see my kids.
So for future relationships, maybe “two can live as cheaply as one” but one can also rip off the other one. No merged finances ever again.
Not all women do what my ex did. I’m more concerned with my relationship with my ex GF since we both were cheated on. There was no one left to pick up the slack, just too much damage on certain issues. That may be an issue for me going forward. This is a situation where relationships can’t always be 50-50. I think I’d be better off in a relationship with someone who hasn’t experienced the same level of betrayal. I’ve known other relationships with that feature. This is the type of thing I’m trying to plan out as I hope for a successful LTR.
Why would a woman think she has to buy birthday cards for her husband’s mother, or make his doctor’s appointments? He’s a big boy, and if he wants those things to happen, he can do it himself.
Sometimes, I want to ask women, “Was someone holding a gun to your head?” (and in fact, I have).
It’s not an issue of somebody being forced to do household management and emotional labor at gunpoint. The issue is that when an adult is being shiftless and irresponsible about basic tasks, the other adult in the household is likely going to catch some kind of shit on account of it, no matter how they try to cope with it.
Sure, why not just let a shiftless and irresponsible spouse go for years without doctor’s or dentist’s appointments because he can’t be bothered to manage his own healthcare? Well, because at some point he’s likely going to be, say, stuck without imminently needed data from a recent physical. Or worse, with some medical condition that got worse through neglect. And then his problem is to some extent the whole household’s problem, even without counting the defensive accusations of "Well why didn’t you remind me?!?’
Or why not let your spouse ignore his mom’s birthday if he can’t be bothered to remember it? Again, one person’s irresponsibility tends to come back on their partner. Married couples very often interact socially as a team—sending wedding presents from “the Joneses” rather than from “Bob Jones” or “Mary Jones” individually, party invitations from “the Joneses”, birthday cards from “me and Mary” or “me and Bob”.
And usually, it’s the wife who is expected to take on those social-housekeeping tasks, and it’s frequently the wife who gets blamed if such tasks don’t get done. It’s not necessarily that wives are eager to take on the responsibility of managing all such tasks, it’s just that wives tend to be less likely to irresponsibly neglect such tasks while assuming “oh, I guess Bob will do it”.
Sure, shiftless and irresponsible spouses, of whatever gender, may not be literally holding a gun to their spouse’s head. But they are (often not even consciously) putting pressure on them with the prospect of other (much more minor, but still annoying) negative consequences.
If you want the organization of a household to run reasonably smoothly, and if your spouse is selfishly bailing out of the innumerable routine tasks that have to be done, then you have a choice between (a) just doing it all yourself, and (b) trying to “parent” your spouse into pulling their weight as though they were an uncooperative teenager.
Or, you can just decide that you signed up to parent children but not your fellow adults, and dump that spouse’s immature feckless ass. Which is one reason that a lot of fed-up wives are the ones to initiate divorce proceedings.
If her only interest is antiques, and you’re not interested in them, I’m confused as to why you got married in the first place.
Again, this is a reason to be testy about your ex in particular. Not about women in general.
Looks to me as if the problem is cheating, and has nothing to do with whether one partner is a stay-at-home.
In addition to what @Kimstu said, I’m guessing that, in some marriages/partnerships, that’s just part of division of labor that they’ve mutually agreed upon, and it works for them. And in others, that’s the way their parents (for example) did it, so they assume that’s the way it’s supposed to work.