How can I convince a friend that we're not living in the 1950s?

[Martini_Enfield]

[QUOTE=overlyverbose]
Out of curiosity, do you have any idea as to how both parties present themselves when they argue about this? Does the wife (or the husband, for that matter) get hysterical or are both relatively calm? I think a role reversal might be a good idea, but I also think that rational discussion is highly underrated and that both should carefully consider how they’re framing their questions (or accusations), what their tone of voice is (screaming, calmly talking, crying) and how they can have a controlled, better thought-out discussion.
[/quote]

Typically, a fight will start over something like “Can you go and get a book for the kids?” directed at his wife who is in the kitchen cooking dinner with one of the kids tugging at her while he’s on the couch watching TV. That turns into “Can’t you see I’m busy???” and it goes from there. He stays perfectly calm whenever they fight, and she just gets angrier and angrier because he just dismisses her as needing to calm down and “get over it”. It’s not like they’re yelling at each other or anything, but there’s a lot of Angry Wife Tone involved. To be fair, their counselling is starting to encourage him to get off his ass and do things himself when his wife is busy, and his wife to stop getting angrier when he doesn’t respond the first time.

But the husband should also be willing to help. So if the wife, instead of shrieking, “I do everything for you - I cook, I clean, I take care of the kids all the time while all you do is sit on the damn couch with your hand down your pants like Al Bundy!” could say, “Hey, if I have the kids clean and dinner going when you get home a couple nights a week, do you think you could reciprocate by grabbing the groceries on your way home and helping me out by cleaning the dishes while I put the kids to bed? I’ll make a list for you - but if you could stop, that’d be awesome.”

That’s an excellent idea, and a very workable one. I’ll suggest it when we have a round of golf at the weekend. I’d try the Al Bundy comparison route, but he’s never really watched the show and I don’t want to give him ideas.

[overlyverbose]

[QUOTE=Martini Enfield]
Typically, a fight will start over something like “Can you go and get a book for the kids?” directed at his wife who is in the kitchen cooking dinner with one of the kids tugging at her while he’s on the couch watching TV.
…
That’s an excellent idea, and a very workable one. I’ll suggest it when we have a round of golf at the weekend. I’d try the Al Bundy comparison route, but he’s never really watched the show and I don’t want to give him ideas.
[/QUOTE]

Good luck to you and your friends. And for what it’s worth, a contributor to this could also be yes syndrome.

[GROSS GENERALIZATION]
Most women I know, including me, feel obligated to say yes to their husbands and family and friends when they’re asked to do something, even if they’re clearly too busy to do so or really don’t want to. Conversely, even when they think help would be nice, many women don’t ask simply because they’re used to doing things on their own or because they don’t think they’re supposed to ask for help. Most men I know have no such reservations. So they’ll ask their SO for help and their SO might say yes, even if she really doesn’t want to. That can build a lot of resentment that could have been easily avoided just by saying a polite no.

I’m not saying your friend should say no every time someone asks for help from her, but if saying yes is going to result in her feeling completely resentful while saying no will prevent her from being put in a bad spot, thinking before she agrees to help and politely saying, “I’ve got my hands full - would you mind getting the book?” could be useful, too.
[/GROSS GENERALIZATION]

This is something I still have problems with sometimes - it became even more evident to me that I was shooting myself in the foot after I had a kid because there was so much more to do. I wish there were a 12-step program for yes syndrome. I’d be one of the first to sign up.

[DianaG]

[QUOTE=Martini Enfield]
Typically, a fight will start over something like “Can you go and get a book for the kids?” directed at his wife who is in the kitchen cooking dinner with one of the kids tugging at her while he’s on the couch watching TV. That turns into “Can’t you see I’m busy???” and it goes from there. He stays perfectly calm whenever they fight, and she just gets angrier and angrier because he just dismisses her as needing to calm down and “get over it”.
[/QUOTE]

So basically he treats her like the help and then acts like she’s crazy when she gets upset? Without excusing her (because really, she should just calmly tell him to get off his ass or live without it), perhaps you should let him know that this is a dangerous way to treat someone you sleep in the presence of.

[Giles]

[QUOTE=Enter the Flagon]
They have The Dick Van Dyke Show in Australia?
[/QUOTE]

Well, they did in the 1960s.

[BoBettie]

[QUOTE=Martini Enfield]
Typically, a fight will start over something like “Can you go and get a book for the kids?” directed at his wife who is in the kitchen cooking dinner with one of the kids tugging at her while he’s on the couch watching TV.
[/QUOTE]

Wow, he sounds like a real catch. I feel sorry for her, having probably not realized this side of him until she already reproduced.

These people need marriage counseling, not friendly advice. If I were in your shoes, that’s the only advice I would give them. One thing I WOULD advise her, though, is to make sure she has some money squirreled away for the day when the whole mess blows up so that she’s able to get out if she needs to.

He sounds like he’s on a power trip. Aww, works 50 to 60 hours a week? I hope he’s in a coal mine or breaking rocks all day if he works those hours and is useless the rest of the week and can’t contribute to the household chores and child rearing. And yes, I work about 70 hours a week average. I still manage to do laundry, dishes, vacuum, cook and clean up (as does my husband). I guess it’s because neither of us sit on our asses watching TV waiting for someone else to do it. We both live here- we both work hard, earn money, and contribute to running the household. If my husband ever demanded that I stop what I was doing (cooking dinner) to go do something else while he sat on his ass, I’d laugh until I was blue in the face. Then I’d probably kill him. BTW, we had our 10th anniversary this past weekend, FWIW.

[overlyverbose]

For whatever it’s worth, it doesn’t sound to me like the husband is being malicious about being an ass. I don’t disagree for a second that he’s being an ass, but it sounds like he just doesn’t get it and needs a clue.

The only reason I’m playing devil’s advocate here is that after my son was born, I found myself in a similar situation. My husband wasn’t the type to sit on the couch and declare “Poor me!” after working a full week - we both work full time and I’m pretty certain he’s fully aware I’d hit him with a brick if he did that.

However, he would ask me to do things at inopportune times when I was already doing five other things and I would say yes. My husband has a very different upbringing than I do - he was born in India and had servants until he was in college. It never occurred to him to clean or cook or the effort that went into it until we got married. Even after that, we rocked along pretty well until we had a kid when there was a heck of a lot more to do.

We’d fight about the same damn thing ever weekend when I’d be run down not just from work but from keeping up with our growing kid and my husband’s need for help when he was supposed to be watching our son. Finally, I realized that I have just as much responsibility to say no to him as my husband does to give me the common courtesy of noticing when I’m already busy and not asking me to do more.

We sat down, had a calm talk about it and, though we still argue occasionally about it, the level of irritation on both ends has significantly gone down, I get a heck of a lot more help without even having to ask and we’re both much calmer.

So I guess I’m giving the husband in this situation the benefit of the doubt by assuming (in perhaps a Pollyanna-ish manner) that he’s just a clueless ass and not a misogynist ass. (I don’t think I spelled that right.)

[Trunk]

We’re not getting much from this guy’s point of view. It’s getting presented as, "look at this caveman’s caveman mind.

You know, Soap Operas haven’t been run continuously for 50 years because no one is watching them.

I know plenty of couples in which the woman stays at home all day while the man is working and when he comes home, he gets the kids, he gets a chore, he gets to light the grill. Her shift is over, brother. His second shift is just starting.

Just how “part time” is her “part time”? Is it from home?

@Martini

His wife is very unhappy about the situation, and says that it wasn’t that way when they got married. It’s been a comparatively recent development, not helped by the rapid increase in the cost of living here. Their children are starting Primary School and there are a whole host of additional expenses there, and their budget was already stretched pretty tightly, and suddenly they’ve got NO money for anything at all, and he comes home from working 50-60 hours a week and wants to know why dinner isn’t ready and how come the kids haven’t had a bath yet etc. Most of what Manda JO has posted is a pretty accurate assessment of the situation, incidentally.

50-60 hours is a lot of fucking work.

Are the kids actually at home all day, or have they already started school?

Here’s how he’s looking at this: maybe she works that 8-12 shift and he works an 8-6 shift. Maybe when he gets home from his 8-6 shift, he’s wondering what the hell she’s been doing from 12-6.

Doesn’t look like the vacuuming got done. Oh, she went to the post office and picked up the kids? well, how long did that take? A couple days later, maybe she says, “when I was with Susie the other day” and it turns out she’d actually met her friend for coffee that afternoon.

My wife is full-time, too. So, we have a pretty even division of labor. But, I have a couple of buddies, and the only reason they haven’t said, “you know, every and now then it would be nice to have dinner waiting” is because the wife has his balls in a mason jar.

[DianaG]

[QUOTE=Trunk]
Here’s how he’s looking at this: maybe she works that 8-12 shift and he works an 8-6 shift. Maybe when he gets home from his 8-6 shift, he’s wondering what the hell she’s been doing from 12-6.

Doesn’t look like the vacuuming got done. Oh, she went to the post office and picked up the kids? well, how long did that take? A couple days later, maybe she says, “when I was with Susie the other day” and it turns out she’d actually met her friend for coffee that afternoon.

[/QUOTE]

Are you shitting me?

If I was married to a man who expected me to account for all my time to the point where I felt compelled to lie to him about having coffee with a friend, I’d be way too fucking depressed to vacuum.

[Trunk]

You’d only be lying to him about having coffee with your friend if you were PRETENDING you were so busy that you couldn’t actually do your share around the house.

[muldoonthief]

[QUOTE=Martini Enfield]
Typically, a fight will start over something like “Can you go and get a book for the kids?” directed at his wife who is in the kitchen cooking dinner with one of the kids tugging at her while he’s on the couch watching TV. That turns into “Can’t you see I’m busy???” and it goes from there. He stays perfectly calm whenever they fight, and she just gets angrier and angrier because he just dismisses her as needing to calm down and “get over it”. It’s not like they’re yelling at each other or anything, but there’s a lot of Angry Wife Tone involved. To be fair, their counselling is starting to encourage him to get off his ass and do things himself when his wife is busy, and his wife to stop getting angrier when he doesn’t respond the first time.
[/QUOTE]

You know, this could have been me several years ago, though not quite that extreme. When we started having kids, my wife became a mostly SAHM - she worked 4-6 days a month. I was pretty oblivious to just how much work kids are, and more importantly, how much they interfere with everything else you want/need to get done.

Before kids, my wife and I would both have goals for the day, and barring natural disaster, reasonably expect to get most or all of them done. Once you have kids though, all that goes out the window. Need to go grocery shopping? Oops, the baby just projectile vomited across the car. Want to sit down and watch a show? Sorry, the baby decided to cry unconsolably for a few hours. Just cleaned the kitchen? Wow, look how far oatmeal can fly. Small kids are really just a daily occurring natural disaster.

It was really hard for me to understand at first how frustrating that could be. All I could see was that my wife was home all day with the kids, while I was at work, yet we’re still out of orange juice (I put it on the shopping list YESTERDAY!!!), there’s nothing ready for dinner, and dirty laundry is just piling up. The thing that fixed it for me (assuming I’m fixed of course) was spending 5 days with the kids while my wife went on vacation. That’s what it took for me to get how much time you wind up spending with the kids, rather than doing the things you used to be able to do. So I’d really suggest your friends do that. And it’s important that the wife goes AWAY. Just trying to switch roles with both of them still in the house won’t be nearly as effective.

[Ludy]

[QUOTE=Trunk]
We’re not getting much from this guy’s point of view. It’s getting presented as, "look at this caveman’s caveman mind.

You know, Soap Operas haven’t been run continuously for 50 years because no one is watching them.

I know plenty of couples in which the woman stays at home all day while the man is working and when he comes home, he gets the kids, he gets a chore, he gets to light the grill. Her shift is over, brother. His second shift is just starting.

Just how “part time” is her “part time”? Is it from home?
50-60 hours is a lot of fucking work.

Are the kids actually at home all day, or have they already started school?

Here’s how he’s looking at this: maybe she works that 8-12 shift and he works an 8-6 shift. Maybe when he gets home from his 8-6 shift, he’s wondering what the hell she’s been doing from 12-6.

Doesn’t look like the vacuuming got done. Oh, she went to the post office and picked up the kids? well, how long did that take? A couple days later, maybe she says, “when I was with Susie the other day” and it turns out she’d actually met her friend for coffee that afternoon.

My wife is full-time, too. So, we have a pretty even division of labor. But, I have a couple of buddies, and the only reason they haven’t said, “you know, every and now then it would be nice to have dinner waiting” is because the wife has his balls in a mason jar.
[/QUOTE]

Well using your example here would be a breakdown of the day

8:00 – 12:00 Both Mom and Dad are at work

12:00 – 6:00 Dad at work
Mom getting groceries, cleaning the house, picking up the kids, making dinner

6:00 – Bedtime Dad feet up with slippers and pipe watching TV relaxing
Mom doing the dishes, getting the kids ready for bed, maybe getting lunches ready for the next day

So Mom is really working 3 shifts with no downtime and Dad gets to relax with drink in hand. This does not compute. So if she wants to take the afternoon off I don’t blame her. After all that would make things balance out a bit, now wouldn’t it?

[DianaG]

[QUOTE=Trunk]
You’d only be lying to him about having coffee with your friend if you were PRETENDING you were so busy that you couldn’t actually do your share around the house.
[/QUOTE]

How is it that 50 - 60 hours at the office is a lot of work, but 50 - 60 hours at home caring for small children isn’t? Ever done it? I’ve done both, and I’ll tell you right now that I spend way more time not working “at work” than I ever spent not working at home.

[Trunk]

[QUOTE=Ludy]
Well using your example here would be a breakdown of the day

8:00 – 12:00 Both Mom and Dad are at work

12:00 – 6:00 Dad at work
Mom getting groceries, cleaning the house, picking up the kids, making dinner

6:00 – Bedtime Dad feet up with slippers and pipe watching TV relaxing
Mom doing the dishes, getting the kids ready for bed, maybe getting lunches ready for the next day

So Mom is really working 3 shifts with no downtime and Dad gets to relax with drink in hand. This does not compute. So if she wants to take the afternoon off I don’t blame her. After all that would make things balance out a bit, now wouldn’t it?
[/QUOTE]

No, you’re not allowed to just fill in the blanks of my scenario with the woman working, and the man having a drink and a pipe.

Shit, if we’re just making up scenarios

How about,

8:00 - 12:00 Both Mom & Dad are at work.

12:00 - 6:00, mom comes home from work, decides to eat some chocolate and watch Ellen because she deserves it. All right, I need to pick up the toys. Well, it’s 2:00 and I need to get the kids at 3:00. That’s not really enough time to get started on anything, so maybe I’ll just catch “Days of Our Lives”.

Gets home with the kids at 4:00, and runs into the other Mom’s out on the street. Decides to stand around shooting the breeze while the kids roll in the dirt.

Oh, look guys, Daddy is pulling up.

“Honey, how do feel about pizza delivery? It will only cost us about what you’ve worked for for the last 4 hours.”

“You know sometimes it might be nice to have food when I get home.”

“Well, maybe you need to tell it to a time machine.”

[DianaG]

[QUOTE=Trunk]
12:00 - 6:00, mom comes home from work, decides to eat some chocolate and watch Ellen because she deserves it. All right, I need to pick up the toys. Well, it’s 2:00 and I need to get the kids at 3:00. That’s not really enough time to get started on anything, so maybe I’ll just catch “Days of Our Lives”.
[/QUOTE]

On behalf of moms everywhere, bite me.

[Trunk]

[QUOTE=DianaG]
On behalf of moms everywhere, bite me.
[/QUOTE]

Then, on behalf of dads tell Ludy to go fuck herself. That was in response to the bullshit she posted.

[Czarcasm]

[Official Moderator Underoos On]DianaG and Trunk-on behalf of the rules for this forum, knock it off.[/Official Moderator Underoos On]

[Ludy]

[QUOTE=Trunk]
Then, on behalf of dads tell Ludy to go fuck herself. That was in response to the bullshit she posted.
[/QUOTE]

Wow, just wow. I need to sit back and digest that mind numbing post for a minute.

Ok now lets talk like grown ups.

Lets go back, waaaayyyy back to the OP’s situation, it is the reason we are even talking about this in the first place.

Remember when the husband was watching TV and asking her to do something as simple as getting the kids a book, while she was busy cooking dinner. That she was expected to work all evening. So if she is working all morning with her paying job and all evening with her kids and house than why the hell can’t she relax during the afternoon! And even if you are not scrubbing toilets at the same time looking after kids is work. Just as hard as sitting at the office.

So lets toss your ridiculous and insulting little situation out the window.

[Quartz]

This 50-60 hours. Is it on 5 days or 6? If he’s clocking 55 hours of work in 5 days, then he’s likely away from the house 13 or so hours a day (half-hour commute each way, half-hour lunch), and that’s a lot and I wouldn’t call his behaviour unreasonable in that case.

[DianaG]

Even though it means that she was either working or alone with the kids for 55 - 60 hours? Why is it reasonable for *him * to want to relax, but not for her?

[Dangerosa]

Look, lets not just make stuff up here. ME actually knows these people - this is a good friend of his. It seems fairly likely that if the situation were “my friend works his ass off 60 hours a week while his wife works a part time job, watches soaps all day and can’t manage to keep the house clean, and then whines at him that he doesn’t pitch in - what can my wife and I do to help their marriage” that would have been in his OP.

I’m not saying there aren’t women who do that (cough - my ex-sister in law - cough) - there certainly are. But there is no reason to jump to that case here.