I look at it differently. I feel that life is too short to waste it working all the time. I’d rather enjoy my life.
Stay-at-home wife here with no kids - like others have said, Tijuana, you choose for your life, everyone else chooses for theirs. When I do work, I prefer to work part-time, because 1. I’m not as young as I used to be, and office work is very hard on my wrists and back, and 2. I do almost all of the household things, and that doesn’t change when I work, so I work part-time outside the home and part-time inside it, and my husband and I are both happy with that. There’s also a 3. I haven’t been very successful at getting a super-duper career going, so I don’t love my office work.
Life is too short to throw away lounging at home? I think life is too short to waste it on jobs I hate. It’s also too short to waste it worrying about what people like Tijuana think about our arrangement. 
ETA: And now I have to go do our weekly grocery shopping, clean the house a little, do a couple of loads of laundry, put a divider into one of the flower beds in back, pick the raspberries, do a little weeding, feed the cats, play with the cats, get more litter for the cats, make supper, clean up after supper, and then kick back with my husband after he comes home from work.
So you should throw it away working at a job you don’t want to do? That makes no sense at all.
Brace yourself for this one, it’s a doozy…not everyone finds value or self-worth in a career. Some find value and self-worth in doing charity work. Some find value and self-worth in writing the Great American Novel (that will never be published). Or in religious devotion or in shopping or in keeping a beautiful home.
People find happiness and fulfillment in all sorts of areas, not just career. As long as they’re not on the public dole to do it, I see no problem with it all.
You obviously find great value in your career. Congratulations! You’ve found what turns your crank, that’s awesome. (No sarcasm intended, truly.) But your mistake is in thinking that the same thing will turn everyone’s crank.
Ideally, marriages should be equal partnerships. That doesn’t mean that both spouses put in the same work, but they put in equal amounts of work. Though I doubt she’d be the type of woman I’d seek, I don’t think that staying home is necessarily slacking. If I could get home from work and there’s essentially no chores left, so we can spend time together, that’s great. If you live in a small house that requires little cleaning, and have no kids, chances are it’s not an unfair exchange in her favor. If you live in a larger house and have kids, chances are it’s and unfair exchange in your favor. It all depends.
But even that isn’t the same, because THEIR idea of what’s fair is up to them. What if the husband is a lawyer who brings home 200k, and the wife doesn’t really have any marketable job skills, so if she were to work, she may bring in 30k or so. Maybe she doesn’t work as hard or as long as him, but the fact that he can come home and not have to worry about chores and spend time with his wife is worth more than the extra 30k.
That’s to say, I would take issue if the wife was a Peggy Bundy who didn’t cook, clean, or do errands and sat around on her butt all day watching Oprah and eating bon-bons. But as long as both parties are contributing and they’re both happy with their own and the other’s contributions, even if it looks externally unbalanced, let’em give it a shot. Lack of stress and a healthy marriage are both priceless.
Depends on the lifestyle I suppose. My husband and I are doing well on one income–He landed a good job out of college, neither of us has any debt (besides a car), we live within our means and we have a nice apartment in a good location for us at a good price. We’re also in one of the cheaper parts of the country.
I am looking to get a job, FT or PT doesn’t matter, but the money isn’t needed so there’s no rush. Basically, if there’s no need for both spouses to work then there’s no need (and I do agree with the point raised earlier about vacations being easier to plan with only one person working. One income or two, you still need ‘we’ time) and I see no reason to bitch about people not taking jobs that someone else might need more.
I was unemployed for 6 months, and during that time - when I wasn’t looking for work - I tended to the house, mowed the yard, took care of the every day stuff. And then on Fridays, I would make lunch, pick my hubby up, and we’d have a picnic lunch in the park. Then, he’d come home in the evening to either a dinner that was waiting or was nearly done.
If we could have afforded to live on his salary alone, it would have stayed that way, and we would have both LOVED it. Both our kids are grown and out of the house, and we only have our grandson every other weekend, so it would have been the “SAHW” scenario.
I intend no snarkiness, but I sincerely don’t see the issue with it. Sure, she could be continuing a career, but instead, this opens up a potential position for someone else who needs the job and money.
I can’t read this thead yet.
goes to get some bon-bons
OK, I’m ready now.
Wow – I just got pitted and my name was never even mentioned.
I’ve been a housewife for 22 years. My kids are grown now and out of the house and I could go back to work if I wanted, but I don’t especially want to. Any job I’m qualified to do or interested in would mean working weekends and, since my husband works and travels during the week, our weekends together are all we have. And he likes for me to be able to travel with him at short notice if he’s going somewhere good…
Anyway, what I do with my life doesn’t seem like any of your business… Why don’t you give us all an exact rundown of all the particulars of your life, so we can tell you exactly what you’re doing that pisses us off.
Oh, and I just read my husband your post and he says, “Fuck you.” Particularly for the ‘fucking slackers’ comment, the ‘lazy bitches’ comment, and the ‘screw[ing] the maid’ comment. He says that you were wise to insult his wife in an anonymous message board thread instead of to his face – because, although he is, in your words, a ‘moron,’ he’d have knocked you on your ass for talking to me that way.
In other words, undirected outrage over an issue that is of no impact upon you. Issues much?
I can’t say that I’d care to stay home and do nothing, but if I could find some romantic partner/sugar mama who was willing to fund me writing my sprawling, Pynchon-esque Great American Novel and/or go back to school for that graduate physics degree, I’d go for that… As it is, I have the prospect of working for another 30-40 years in a job that is pretty meaningless and doing work that, however celebrated it might be in the moment, will add up to a sum total of, “Who? What? Why?” five minutes after I retire. The Puritan work ethic, despite being pounded into me from an early age, holds no substantial appeal and detracts from the time and energy I could spend doing more creative and interesting things instead of grinding out paperwork, attending reviews, and trying to make rockets not fall over. I’d be a stay-at-home ‘wife’ in a heartbeat, provided all the other parameters are compatible. And I can mix a hell of a martini to boot. I’m not going wear pearls while vacuuming, though.
Stranger
But… but… they complete the ensemble.
The town I lived in in New Jersey had a good number of stay at home wives. A lot of them spent a lot of time organizing the annual town street fair for charity, volunteering at the schools, doing work in churches, and generally making the town a very nice place to live.
As for having too much time on one’s hands, somebody is spending effort worrying about the career prospects of people he has never met. It is amazing how some people with no experience about a situation consider themselves experts.
I’ll wear a sgian dubh with a kilt…how about that?
Stranger
This is pretty much what I was going to post. Depending on their respective salaries, her working may not bring in enough to significantly change their lifestyle, whereas her not working may make them both a lot happier. Her from not having to work at a job she doesn’t like, him from being freed from all the household tasks they’d normally have to both do after work and on the weekends. If she gets more out of the arrangement than he does, so what?
Yeah, but your job is to be here on the Dope to entertain us, and you’re good at it, so you don’t really count. 
I would love for my wife to be able to stay home and pursue whatever interests she had if we could afford it. Unfortunately, I think my wife has a stronger proclivity for being productive than I do, so she’d be the one hauling in the big bucks while I spent my time doing volunteer work and bowling. 
You don’t qualify for the OP’s rant. He’s talking about women who decide that they just don’t want to work. They have no kids nor disabilities to speak of.
{adds bon-bons to shopping list}
That’s HOT! ::fans self::
Now, if I could get paid for THAT…
Wow. That’s pretty much me. I wouldn’t work a day if I could get away with it. I still curse my parents for not being wealthy and gifting me with an enormous trust fund.
:eek: Dude, that’s just crazy talk.
No. No, no, no, no, no - life’s too short to waste it frittering away your time at some idotic job.
I work because I have to, not because I am enamored with the concept. Lounging now - I am a HUGE fan of lounging.
I hope he’s not serious, because let me tell you, you’re definitely going to have to get a job if your husband is in jail for battery.
I know this probably comes off as pedantic or pussy-assed in some way, especially in light of my generally chaotic and macho attitude around here, but the truth is, I see a lot of people on message boards, when the issue of someone insulting their woman comes up, talk big about how they would kick so and so person’s ass. And in an ideal world, in my opinion, you’d be able to. Unfortunately we do have a justice system in America that doesn’t look kindly upon people kicking other people’s asses over mere verbal exchanges, so you have to be really, really careful in these enlightened times we live in.