But i agree with others that you know some pretty abusive women. My daughter sometimes cooks inadequate meals for us. Or food i dislike. We eat it, and thank her for making supper. And then scrounge later for a few more calories.
(Inadequate might mean she defrosted some chicken broth i made and added sliced carrot to it, and no other food. And i might suggest that I’d like something a bit more solid to go with my meal. But i eat what she served and chat at the dinner table.)
And likewise, my dad would always thank my mom for cooking dinner, even if it was packaged convenience food, and she would often accuse him of being insincere. When I got old enough to know that people do things like this, I would sometimes say, “He could have thrown it at you, you know.”
If someone cooks convenience food and puts it in front of me, I’m grateful that they fed me. I’m not being insincere.
We get takeout twice a week, and if someone else picked it up, i thank them. Because of their labor, i got to sit on my ass and have food appear on my plate.
Some of this keeping track of chores and resentments sounds like hell on earth. It doesn’t sound like these people love each other at all.
I suppose I am old fashioned. Religious or not, there needs to be dedication to the marriage itself outside what your partner is doing at any one time. Or even cumulatively. I don’t see how every marriage could always even out. Sometimes someone would have to take more of the load due to disability or whatever.
I don’t see how it’s better without that dedication. Seems worse. Because then we’re all just at the mercy of our partners. Seems worse to me.
I just read a Reddit rant by some woman who’s ready to divorce because her husband screwed up the spaghetti sauce. Of course this is only the “final straw.” Personally, I don’t think screwing up spaghetti sauce a million times is grounds for divorce. One million times zero is still zero. But of course she got plenty of You Go Girl support.
I think we have tried this model and it is absolutely failing. I am a man. Women marry men, they have to accept that they are marrying men. As I would need to accept that I am marrying a woman. I’m not going to be a junior woman. Women who want that should remain single or marry or live with other women.
I appreciate women’s intensity and enthusiasm in a relationship. Particularly early on. More problematic is some of this later stuff, seeming keeping of grudges based on minutiae. I’m not a woman. I don’t have the same way of processing a relationship. Some of these rants seem like they’re directed at all men. If so, as I have said I will bow out of the whole business. Can’t hope to meet a woman’s needs at that level.
I recognize that women are acting on their emotions. Men simply don’t have the equivalent emotions, they are built differently. I would hope that women get some benefits from the differences that a man brings. Otherwise, I guess I’ll forget the whole business.
Err, i think i understand why you are having relationship problems. Women and men have pretty much the same emotions. Different people have a different mix, of course. If you think women are somehow a different thing that’s magically different from men, and you project all sorts of weird shit onto them, you are going to have trouble in any long term relationship with a woman.
I’ve also never heard of anyone, male or female, who divorced someone over failed spaghetti sauce. But i do know a guy whose new bride screwed up a roast chicken. And not only did he never let her forget it, he told me about it, several times, decades after she left him. I think he was abusive, and i only ever heard his side of the story. He, of course, felt he was horribly wronged and it was immoral of her to leave him. But i listened to his stories about how he treated her, and thought, “holy hell, I’m glad she escaped that.”
Going back to “emotions are similar”, i have no idea why you believe that women have more “Intensity and enthusiasm” about relationships. That’s totally not what i hear from my friends, male and female, who write in private-ish chats about their new relationships. That is, I’ve been in several small group chats with people talking about their love life, privately, to a group of friends. The intensity and enthusiasm levels definitely overlap, and the most intense and roller-coaster-ish person i can think of is a guy.
I wonder what percent of people who go throw divorces generalize their anger against the opposite gender. You see it here on the Dope, when people go through a divorce, although mostly I’ve been more aware of that happening to male posters, perhaps because the demographics favor men.
In my wife’s group of friends, this year two of them got divorced and damn suddenly all men were terrible.
I’m still not sure what this is responding to? Do you mean the various people talking about how men usually do fewer chores in a household than women?
That’s NOT because someone is “keeping track”. It’s because the person who ends up stuck with all the chores is tired of doing all the chores. And I say this as the person who didn’t do my share of chores. (The best thing I’ve ever done for my marriage is to hire a house cleaner. My husband is no longer annoyed that I never clean the toilet or mop the floors, because he doesn’t have to, either.) But “keeping track” is something that only happens after someone is already pissed because the disparity is really big. That is, they were quietly frustrated by the disparity for a while, and when they comment on it and their spouse ignores their compaints, THAT’S when they start to keep track, or their spouse does.
I used to be like you. Figured men and women were mostly the same. I am writing from my experience, what I found differently. Yes, my ex did some somewhat stereotypically female things, particularly when the marriage was ending. Including conspiring with a female relative of her on the divorce. This woman was a toxic woman, pretty sure she was more than willing to “dish” against me and the marriage. I never had anything against her personally, this toxic relative. She always seemed a little off, was always the golden child with their family because she was the oldest. My ex even basically admitted this relative is garbage, but well, she’s family.
As far as hating women, I have never said anything against my former girlfriend. I have mentioned that the issues there stemmed from some mutual betrayal issues and otherwise it was logistics. Frankly, I was probably lucky to make it as long with her as I did, and it may have been my overall emotional distance that made that possible.
Even with her… I am not a fighter in relationships. I’m too determined at self improvement and feel too much shame to not want to eliminate sources of conflict. But one time I did have a fight with the GF, and she basically ate it up, was as warm and connected as she ever was with me.
My parents were very much alike and emotionally conservative. The only time I ever heard my mom criticize my dad, and it wasn’t really a criticism of him, was that they were too much alike.
Now I do suspect I may be deliberately seeking out situations where there is a lack of connection intentionally. That’s something I have to work on, the choices I am making. But yeah, not every situation is like what I saw with my parents.
Of course there has to be give and take in a relationship, and of course whatever system of shared responsibilities that works for two individuals in their individual relationship is fine, as long as they’re both happy with it.
But trying to shrug off concerns about systemic imbalances in domestic burdens between husbands and wives as trivial “minutiae” or “keeping track of chores and resentments” or a mere artifact of women’s “different emotions” seems like dismissive gaslighting.
Sorry if you don’t want to hear about it, but this is a real and pervasive problem in modern society: you can’t wave it away by complaining that modern women just aren’t sufficiently “dedicated to the marriage”.
Being able to take on one’s fair share of the mental load and organization/management tasks of running a household does not make one a “junior woman”, or even a senior woman. Men are just as capable as women are of running a household, and are just as entitled as women are to expect fair sharing of responsibilities and compromises.
Has nobody noticed that members of all-male militaries for generations managed to maintain quite high standards of organization, cleanliness and tidiness without turning into “junior women”? The drill sergeants who taught those standards to new recruits weren’t exactly notorious for their effeminacy and delicate refinement, either.
No, but as has been repeatedly stated, they’re directed at the traditional patriarchal society gender expectations which constantly try to indoctrinate all men with the beliefs that managing a household is “women’s work”, that women are innately unreasonable and inexplicably emotional and make big fusses over nothing, and that women are a monolithic group who all have the same “way of processing a relationship” and similar “emotions”.
The combination of modern gender egalitarianism with traditional patriarchal expectations of gender roles within marriage is absolutely failing.
We can either get rid of gender egalitarianism, or we can change our expectations of marriage. But in the process, unfortunately, a lot of well-intentioned people in marriages are inevitably going to get hurt.
I’m struggling with this, too. What kind of stereotypically female things? Spending a lot of time grooming herself? Taking bubble baths? Carrying a purse?
“Conspiring” with one’s relatives against the spouse one is trying to leave isn’t “stereotypically female”. It’s pretty normal for people to lean on their family when their marriage is failing. Both male people and female people. Except for people who don’t get along with their families – they “conspire” with their friends, usually their same-sex friends, when their marriages are failing.
Your experience involves a few specific individuals, and you’re trying to generalize from that to men and women as groups.
As I said, there are definitely societal/cultural gender stereotypes that try to prescribe specific gendered rules of behavior for all men, or for all women, and some of those behaviors are pretty damn toxic. (And yes, there are plenty of toxic gendered-behavior rules for women that many women conform to. Socially imposed patterns of toxic behavior are by no means limited to men.)
But that doesn’t mean that women as a group, or men as a group, are those gender-stereotyped behaviors. You will never make any progress relationship-wise if you insist on viewing potential partners generically as “women” whose behaviors and feelings are determined primarily by their being “women”.
Being aware of socially imposed norms for female behavior is one thing, but imagining that those socially imposed norms are “just the way women are” is another.
I mean, it’s probably true that on average, men are from mars and women are from venus, or whatever. But that overlooks SO much about real people and their individual traits, concerns, emotions, etc.
HOWEVER, if he had a long history of deliberately ruining food to get out of cooking, or even hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes in order to get out of laundry, that might be the last straw, and is of course indicative of other issues in the relationship.
The affair came in late 30s which is pretty typical for that sort of thing. My experience doing significant reading about infidelity is that women are far more prone to this time of life type affair that isn’t going to be repeated. Men are more apt to be serial adulterers, they more often repeat their patterns. She also referenced when she was leaving me for her current husband that she needed someone strong for when she was having the kids, and now she needed someone more fun. There I am reminded of the women that say they need four different types of husbands at different stages in life.
50 Shades Of Grey. Yeah, nothing stereotypical about that.
To her, I was a stage in life. She feigned it well.
GF was not all that stereotypical. She was hurt by her affair. Had difficulties bonding with me. She wanted me to get therapy which I did to some extent. She likely needs some therapy herself. Don’t think she ever got any. Needs some if she wants a longer lasting LTR. Maybe she doesn’t, I don’t know.
So yeah, the GF wasn’t stereotypical. But I’m folding these two together because of my own concerns about my future LTRs and the fact that I can’t just walk in and be Mr. Good Guy or whomever I’ve been and have things work out. At the end the GF could not love me. I have to think about that if I’m going to have something work out for me.
Plus there are my own bonding issues. The more relationships I have, the tougher that’s going to be for me. The spectre that my ex will likely IMO have it work out with the guy she left me for. I suppose we shouldn’t compare, but we have kids and I have to do some joined activities at times, it’s not like I never see her. If I don’t have something lasting, that’s not going to go well for me. That’s why I need to start to do more planning, rather than just rely on my own efforts.
I have seen just as much “emotional” behavior from men in life as I have from women. There are different ways that individuals express particular emotions, but I really don’t see how one gender acts on emotions in any significant degree than the other.
I’ve seen as much bad behavior from guys after divorces as women. My former BIL was terrible after their divorce, including an unbelievable level of malicious compliance.
You see mature people and immature people, but you don’t see one gender with a monopoly on either of those.
Yes, I would say both are equally emotional. On average there would be differences on how the emotion is deployed. I suppose a man becoming a lifetime Star Wars fan from seeing the movie at age 12 is emotional. Violence for men.
I don’t think the average man uses violence in a relationship. I’m talking about vindictive or other immature behaviors, and I think both genders have that in spades.
It’s interesting that apparent examples of women’s emotional behaviors include getting divorcing over spaghetti sauce while men’s emotional behaviors include getting attached to Star Wars.
I would like to have a friendly, loving relationship with a woman before it’s all said and done. I would like someone to be there with me as I get older, which is not too far away.
I was going to say that chores shouldn’t matter since I haven’t even lived with a woman since my divorce. One thing that unaccountably bugged my former GF were a couple of repairs to my house (she never lived here and was hardly ever even here, I went to her place 98% of the time.) She came across as selfish sometimes, couldn’t give with me 50/50. Somewhat surprisingly, she actually got less selfish towards the end of the relationship, as I think she’d developed more feelings by that time and was trying to bond with me more before she just couldn’t. But at one point she just refused to come to my place any more and she was never here again. So on the chores bit, it’s quite concerning to me that any potential relationship would rupture over “chores concerns” when that sort of thing can be hired out or easily fixed. At it could maybe be, except that I’m trying to do it with someone I also am trying to have a romantic loving relationship with. I don’t think the two can be that easily separated.
Anyway on the chores thing with her there were things she let go at her own place, which is why I didn’t take her reaction as being objective but more related to other issues, like the heightened emotions of a relationship.
So with my former marriage being effectively obliterated due to my ex leaving me for the love of her life, I’ve got a bit of a hole there. The issues my GF had are a concern for me as to bonding. This is why I’m posting here, why I need to change my dating approach.
Now the neighbor lady awkwardly hit on my after her boyfriend left. I was still winding things down with the GF then. Then she got a new boyfriend and is pregnant now. I suppose I could jump into some situation like that and maybe we’ll make it if everyone holds their breath.
Somehow I think people who are in love can get past the housework. My mom loved my dad. Dad’s job was not that great, he had to work too many hours. But they were happy. I don’t think there were a lot of conversations about housework. The house was not that big. Mom did not work except for occasional part time stuff. The men of that generation that I knew mostly did manual labor type stuff. My parents both grew up on farms.
I want to be loved for me and not just be in a relationship where someone is getting some transactional benefit, or just a phase for them.