I went through that same middle age dating meat grinder, made worse by my being a widower rather than divorced (red flag!) and even worse by it being suicide (“what did you do to her” interrobanged right to my face). I dropped out to, as the advice goes, “just work on myself” but also because my corporate masters were ginning up their own meat grinder; and one at a time was enough.
The thing is, now that I’m coupled up as is my personal inclination, we’re of the mindset of “this is your special person. You want to do what you can for them. That’s your reward. And, since it’s mutual, that’s more reward than anything else imaginable. Do I really care that she leaves her grubby fingerprints on the refrigerator door? (Obviously I notice it, but no,I just wipe them away.)
I regret to say that by age 49, or close to it, most of the people of all genders who are worth being married to are already married.
There are, of course, exceptions; for multiple possible reasons. But the field’s a lot thinner than for people in their twenties. Those of us still single in our 40’s and over are single for a reason. That reason might be being a late bloomer; or being a person not to everyone’s taste but probably highly suitable for someone they haven’t found yet (and maybe never will); or having married the wrong person when young and now being divorced; or having been widowed. And sometimes it’s not wanting to be married; in which case if you’re clear at the beginning that that’s what you’re looking for (if you are), they’ll take themselves out of your dating pool, or may not have been in anybody’s dating pool to begin with. But for some significant percentage, and again this is for any gender, it’s because their expectations of a potential partner and/or their behavior towards a partner are entirely unreasonable.
So yeah – I think anybody’s going to run into a higher percentage of unreasonable people if dating at 49 then when dating at 19 or (in this society) at 29.
On a grand scale I kind of agree with you, but it’s really difficult to build and sustain a functioning society when there is a sudden drop in the birth rate. So I think it is sort of a problem. Not a problem at the individual level, but I think it would be good if we eased some of the economic pressures on people so that people who wanted to have a family actually could do that.
Also the problem isn’t, strictly speaking, too many people, it’s the unequal distribution of resources, and irresponsible environmental policy.
That does however make me think of how climate change may also be a factor. And probably social and political upheaval. I’ve heard more than one young person lament that they shouldn’t be having kids at a time like this.
Remember The Odd Couple? Oscar and Felix? Felix moved in with Oscar. Who do you think did more “chores.” I can guarantee you it was Felix. Because Oscar mostly didn’t care. Oscar probably appreciated some of the cooking and was annoyed by Felix’s neuroticism and obsessions. So it wasn’t all good. And in fact, Felix being Felix cost his marriage in the first place.
So in a household with a Felix, he is going to be doing more chores. He is also going to have more say in what is done, because that’s who he is.
So when relational and chore debates come up, I want to check if it’s really a desire to have an equal partnership, to in fact cede say, let the other person have their own strong opinions stand half the time or more, or do you just want a gofer who does everything you want to do but has no say.
Typically you are going to have to pick between someone more laid back who doesn’t challenge you, but also doesn’t care as much about what you do, to a more involved person who is going to have their own ideas about how things will be done and will argue with you. Pick your poison, and don’t take for granted those who are more laid back and agreeable.
I don’t know the Odd Couple but I think I get your gist.
I’m a little confused by this because I don’t understand how chores and decision-making need to be related.
I think of life as a series of projects, and my husband is my project partner. We both work on the project together. Sometimes one of us has our own big project and the other one needs to step up and work on the project alone. But the status quo is that both of us are working on the project at the same time, as much as we can. It’s not really a tit for tat system. It’s an “Are you doing what you can to contribute to the project?” system. It’s an honor system. It occasionally needs adjustment but for the most part it takes care of itself.
Living with someone involves compromises. A ton of them. It also involves respect for each other’s values, comfort levels, and really, everything. The only way to deal with these differences is by listening with respect to the other person. This can be very hard work. I’m not saying anything very novel here.
For me, the angry whining by cis men on this thread has destroyed my interest in it. You go on without me.
However, the “more laid back and agreeable” types also have to make it explicitly clear that they refuse to share the work that their partner considers necessary and they don’t.
Often, in roommate or spousal situations, one partner will insincerely agree to take on some of the household maintenance that’s important to the other partner, but then persistently fail to actually follow through on it, because as you note, they themselves don’t really care whether or not it gets done. That’s not being “laid back and agreeable”: that’s essentially conning your partner into a situation that’s convenient for you but unsatisfactory for them (though I would bet that in most cases it’s not done with fully conscious intent).
Most arguments about chores are really about standards *- it doesn’t happen very often that someone who is happy with the kitchen floor being mopped once a week (Oscar) expects that the other person mop it every day (Felix). Oscar doesn’t care if it’s mopped every day , so why would he expect Felix to mop it that often? It does sometimes happen the other way around , that the person who thinks it should be mopped every day expects the other person to mop it every day. And “mop every day person” is probably also “fold the laundry in this particular way” person.
What ends up happening is one of two things - Felix decides what the standards are or there is some sort of compromise. If Felix sets the standards, that can go two ways - either Felix does most of the work OR Felix sets the standards on his own and expects Oscar to do half of the chores Felix’s way. Which is what is meant by a “gofer who has no say” . Oscar is expected to do half the chores but has no say in how they are done.
And if you and your husband have similar standards , you probably will have no idea of what I’m taking about and you are very lucky.
* This doesn’t apply to every chore - diapers need to be changed when they are wet or dirty , there really isn’t any room for different standards.
Sometimes it’s about different ideas about what needs to be done. I once shared a house with somebody who thought the house should be vaccumed daily, and was annoyed at me because I never did the vacuuming; which I didn’t because he’d always done it long before I thought it was necessary. But when I pointed out that I was the only one emptying the compost and cleaning the toilets and I’d been considering that a trade for his doing all the vacuuming, he said he just didn’t think those things were necessary – so he thought he was entitled to say that they didn’t count. He thought I needed to do half of what he thought was necessary, but he didn’t think he needed to do half of what I thought was necessary. And he thought he was entitled to decide what was necessary.
(We stayed friends, though not housemates; I’ve visited him when he was living alone, and his toilet has always been clean. I’ve never asked him how that happened.)
– I don’t, by the way, think that was purely because of our genders. I expect there are women with his attitude, and men with mine.
You’re right and I certainly do not give myself a free pass. I can be difficult, but I do try to be an honest, caring, burden-sharing partner.
Contrary to what @Ulfreida wrote, I’m not angry. Disillusioned and quicker to spot the many red flags but not angry. On the contrary, I’m actually feeling more serene than I’ve felt in decades because I now focus on the many things that make me happy and refuse to put up with the countless examples of entitled, manipulative BS I’m confronted with. It’s liberating.
Perhaps younger people have come to the same conclusion much, much earlier than I did, in which case, good for them. The ones I know seem to be putting a lot more thought in their life choices than I did at their age.
We are a unique case, I think, because I used to be very messy. I have ADHD and unfortunately it hits hardest when it comes to domestic labor. On top of this, I was very, very depressed when we first met, so depressed it was hard to get out of bed much less clean up. And my husband’s cleanliness standards were higher than mine. So he did a lot of housework for a long time.
Things have changed since. I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 34 and started taking stimulants. Suddenly cleaning house is easy. Now I want everything clean, and my standards are closer to my husband’s. And we have a small child and ironically our house is cleaner than it’s ever been. During the week my husband has very little bandwidth to clean, so I clean more.
My husband wasn’t resentful in those years but I kind of cringe when I realize how little I contributed, and I don’t mind doing a little more today.
I think if there is a big disparity in cleanliness standards, yeah, most people are going to have a hard time. That we didn’t is a credit to my husband’s empathy.
So, despite being in my 50s, I have friends in their 20s - and two kids of my own that are in their 20s…so “old fart whose watched the younguns”
They can’t afford children, and are intelligent enough to understand that. Moreover, they almost universally have no desire to bring children into a world that appears to be burning. So there isn’t the “lets get married and have kids” motivation.
They’ve watched their parents have good relationships - and seen that that is work (every one of them has parents who are still married). They’ve also watched their parents friends divorce in ugly and messy ways, leaving them worse off financially than before - see point #1 - this generation can’t afford financial risk.
There is enough of a culture of hook ups and self pleasure that you don’t need to be in a relationship to get off. So that “well, I’ll get laid regularly” is off the table. AND, they have again, paid attention…a committed relationship is not a guarantee of a healthy long term sex life.
Even just living together carries risk - two names on a lease and you break up with six months left on the lease? Who can afford that. Better to take a roommate that doesn’t come with relationship baggage - you can generally tough it out with someone you’ve taken in dislike easier if there wasn’t a romantic connection.
Relationships take a lot of emotional work and time. And it isn’t that they aren’t capable of it, it is that they don’t see the reward of a romantic relationship as worth the work - unless they find someone really special. With two people who don’t want a lot of work, you end up with a lot of short term serial monogamy - or not even that.
The younger women I know don’t make the compromises made even by feminist me and my 80’s generation feminist friends. They have really strong personalities. They don’t pick up after themselves until they want to, much less pick up after someone else. They aren’t willing to pretend to like football, or put their career aside to move for his. They think the easiest way not to lose yourself over the course of your life is (and in hindsight, they are right) not to get married and have kids because a woman often does lose herself when she does these things.
Two of my younger friends did marry and have kids. One had a surprise pregnancy and in the old fashioned “do the right thing” married her. The marriage has been falling apart since. The other seems to have made a good choice and the marriage - with two kids - is going strong. Both of them are men who have more “old fashioned” ideas of society.
I suspect this is the generation that will marry in their 50s to resolve loneliness.
I’m 60 and I have many friends in their late 20s and early 30s and I think that all of your points are valid. I also think that the issues were exactly the same when I was in my 20s.
I think the experience and reasons probably vary greatly depending on one’s level of educational attainment and financial security. If you are a well educated woman with a good job and no kids, you have less need of a partner than if you have economic hardship, little education, children to feed, etc. Which is why I think you’d probably see a stark difference between relationships across classes.
It’s actually quite difficult to pull off parenting these days if both partners work. School schedules have no regard for working parents, the cost of childcare is staggering, and less engaged grandparents means less of a safety net when something needs to be done. There’s also a much higher expectation of child supervision than when I was growing up. When I was a kid I got home from school at 3:30pm and was often alone until bedtime. I started staying home alone at age seven. This worked much better for working parents. And there was greater community buy-in for the welfare of your child so your kids could roam free range for hours and all you knew is they’d be home for supper.
We’re in an age of intensive parenting in part because there is no longer any choice. And with the skyrocketing costs of childcare and medical care, it’s just not attainable for many people.
Maybe. But being in my early 50s myself and having witnessed many relationships play out over the years, I think the one commonality is that people in their 20s are always young and still trying to figure shit out and what they figure out will play out in various ways over the next several decades depending on any number of factors.
Sure everyone in their 20s says they never want to settle down or have kids or they’re all hung up on bullshit political causes that probably have nothing to actually do with them.
But from what I’ve seen over the years is that eventually most people settle down. Usually as they hit their 30s and start to feel the passage of time. They get more secure in their career and their finances. They find someone they think they want to take a chance with for the rest of their life. They start feeling too old to be goofing off with 20-somethings still trying to figure their shit out.
Nonetheless, there can be cultural shifts in popular perception of what “growing up” requires. Just because you’ve noticed a general tendency “over the years” doesn’t mean that that tendency can never change.
(You might also want to dial back a bit on the dismissive implication that people who have never married are just “goofing off” or “still trying to figure their shit out” or “all hung up on bullshit political causes” or in some way just failing to “grow up”. In this vast world there are actually many different paths to “growing up”, and no, not all of them require marrying and/or having kids.)
As an anecdote. I have 5 cousins on my mother’s side, the oldest of which is in her early 30s, two younger siblings. The youngest of us all is my sister at 21. Two are engaged. I am the only one not in a long-term (>2yr) relationship. On my father’s side I have 9 cousins, all older than me (Gen X and Millenials). Two of them are not married.
One thing that a lot of women may not be aware of is how exhausting it is to many men to achieve that consensus, which is why I for one schedule some household tasks that I want to do for when my wife is away. An example for a very minor task where the total effort involved rises as a soon as you need to perpetrate a conversation about it.
(a more onerous task is cooking, which I envy my wife for because I let her alone while she is doing it, while she is at my elbow as soon as I do something in the kitchen. I sometimes dream of my wife’s being away for a week or two so I can learn to cook something more complicated, from cookbooks, without being talked at).
Bringing down the thrash, when my wife is away - total effort 100% - relaxed after that:
:: goes down and up stairs three times, bringing trash down, relaxed and content::
Bringing down the thrash, when my wife is at home - total effort 500%: - mentally exhausted after that
What are you doing?
I thought I’d bring down the various trash. General garbage, compostable and paper is scheduled tomorrow Are you sure paper is scheduled for tomorrow too?
I seem to recollect so, but anyway it does not hurt to bring it down even if it is collected next week. I’d rather not look on the online schedule right now because that’s an unnecessary expense of time. Are you sure? OK, you’re taking general garbage, compostable and paper. Best you take it all at once so you need to go only once.
No, I prefer going three times because with my arms full I cannot see my feet on the stairs, also I might drop something. You are always thinking about catastrophes; that means going down and up stairs three times rather than once
Thank you for reminding me about that, but I prefer it that way. It’s my time that I am expending. Climbing stairs is good for my health. I’d like to begin with it now. Are there any other parameters that we need to talk about? OK, be that way.
:: goes down and up stairs three times, bringing trash down, gnashing teeth::
