Yeah, well, ya know, that’s just like, your opinion, man.
Yeah, this stuff is really hard for me. It’s very overwhelming to have to keep track of a bunch of different things. I feel overwhelmed every day.
I also feel conflicted a lot. By which I mean, I care strongly about a lot of different things. My son most of all, but even then there are some times you have to balance your kid’s needs with the overall well-being of the family. My husband, my job, my fiction writing - all important. My country. Gotta do something about the current political situation in order to be able to live with myself.
Three days a week, my husband gets my son ready and all I have to do is drop him off at school. Not having to do twenty things at once every morning helps.
Being a good parent is hard, at least it’s an added challenge right now. Yesterday night after schlepping my boy all over town he did really well during social group until the very last moment and he had a big meltdown - I really couldn’t blame him, the situation would have thrown any kid. But yes, I had to figure out how to get him out of the room and away from the source of his distress, then we sat on the floor in the hall until he found his bearings. The BCBA was there, he said I did well, which I needed to hear, because I feel helpless sometimes. I didn’t really feel like I did anything useful at all. But he said I stayed calm and didn’t give in or reinforce the behavior and he considers that a win. So that’s something I guess.
The hard thing for me right now is finding time (and energy!) to get everything else done. I have work-life balance but I struggle with life-life balance, because there’s so much to life, and I care about it all. And I’m really tired all the time no matter how much sleep I get.
I think that’s just life, though. I think it’s just doing your best to play the hand you’re dealt. The danger is when you stop trying.
Given that 50% of marriages end in divorce, I would want to know more about the parameters of the survey.
It could be a lot of those unhappy single people are single because no one wants to marry someone whose miserable.
The point is regardless of the stats, I think each individual needs to figure out what’s right for them.
I’m just thinking of the trope of the “brooding man”. Most people tend to have worries about life stuff like career, family, their relationship with their partner, their kids future, their parents getting older, medical shit, braces for the kids, all that stuff. Plenty of executives have wives/husbands and families and have to think about balancing that somehow. It’s rare IMHO that people can go through life and not have to consider any tradeoffs or have worries.
Which is what I mean by “golden retriever” men. I’ve known a few. They seem constantly happy and content because they don’t seem to have anything in their lives they deeply care about. They never met anyone they cared enough to marry or bemoan the fact one “got away”. They seem to be taken care of in some way financially so they never really had to care about work. Maybe they have some hobbies they do at their leisure. I have a few male relatives like that. They’re nice enough guys (why wouldn’t they) and they’re fine to hang out with for a bit at family events. But it’s kind of like, I don’t know. There’s not much to them.
I don’t find “brooding” very attractive in men (or anyone else) so maybe that’s why i don’t have a lot of friends like that.
Everyone has stuff like that.
I’ve never met an executive who didn’t have a spouse who took care of the home from for him (or her). My ex sister in law was on track to make partner at McKinsey. She told me that she looked at the three women who were then partners: one had a stay at home wife, another had a stay at home husband, and the third had a husband with a similarly high-end job. They had three full time nannies: the daytime nanny, the evening nanny, and the weekend nanny. My then-SIL quit and took a job that didn’t require a stay at home spouse to support it.
(She and my brother divorced, but remain on good terms. Both currently have a long-term partner, and all four of them Co-hosted a party for their younger son’s engagement, recently.)
I do think men are generally expected to “provide” financially. And women are generally expected to “nurture”. I’m not convinced it’s great for people to make those assumptions. I certainly have found it easier to “provide” than to “nurture”, and i have to believe some men are natural nurturers. And I’m sure you don’t need to brood to provide. I get that kids need role models. But are jobs “feminized” or have some professions been “de-gendered”?
Of course everyone is an individual. But the data is pretty consistent. Married men and women are happier. Married men live longer and happier. And while this study is in women it address the reverse causation concern you bring up -
In a recent study of marriage and divorce, we and our co-authors have taken on this question squarely, examining the effects on well-being, not of staying married, but rather of deciding to get married in the first place. We used data on 11,830 female nurses who were unmarried in 1989 and then compared those who married over the next four years to those who did not, and followed these groups for 25 years to examine their health and well-being outcomes—including divorce for those who married—later in life.
Our analyses looked at a number of different well-being outcomes after 25 years, including physical health and longevity, health behaviors, psychological well-being, and depression, among others. Whenever possible, we also controlled for these same outcomes in 1989 prior to their marriage, along with many other social, demographic, economic and health-related variables. This helped to rule out the possibility either of confounding (that, e.g., economic advantage was promoting both happiness and marriage), or reverse causation (i.e., that the happy are simply more likely to get married).
In spite of this more rigorous design, we found that marriage has strong positive effects on these women’s flourishing. Getting married was associated with moderate increases in happiness, purpose in life, and hopefulness, and with moderate declines in depression and loneliness. However, we also found substantial effects of marriage on the reduction in smoking, heart disease, stroke, and on all-cause mortality during the 25-year follow-up (on the order of 30% reductions). These remarkably strong benefits obtain even after we factored in the real risks marriage poses: the stress of raising young (or not-so-young) children, the partial loss of self-determination (and of closet space), and indeed, the possibility of the pain and disruption posed by divorce.
Another longitudinal study for both men and women. The benefit may extend to long term cohabitation partnerships as well.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00324728.2022.2063933#d1e237
I was a management / technology consultant in Manhattan, mostly for big banks, for most of my 30 year career. Nearly everyone I know is some sort of executive or partner or whatever. They all have different approaches to trying to make it work I suppose.
That’s sort of what I’m trying to figure out with my career now. My wife isn’t going to quit her job. I still need to work and don’t want to be a permanent SAHD but logistically I can’t really go back to working crazy hours and constant travel dealing with A-holes all day long.
Do you think there may be some flaws in a study that only focuses on one female-centric industry from 36 years ago?
I don’t know if “happy” is the right word. Marriage and kids doesn’t make me walk around all day grinning like an idiot. Buy generally I would agree that marriage probably does provide a positive net benefit. “Married guy seems more stable. People see the ring people know at least somebody can stand the sonofabitch” .
If I weren’t married I would probably spend too much time drinking or being out late doing shit. And that gets a bit “unseemly” after a certain age. And I don’t love my work so much that I’d want to focus all my attention on my career.
I think the article quoted by OP discusses an important problem intelligently. I have few solutions to propose but I think many of the posts in this thread point in the wrong direction.
One poster wrote
I disagree 100%. Males and females in Homininae have had different roles, different emotions and different strengths and weaknesses for millions of years. Pretending otherwise is just the sort of nonsense that leads millions of Americans to despise “progressive thought” and then to cast their votes irrationally.
This doesn’t mean that all males are (or should be) more “masculine” and less “feminine” than all females. But differences should be acknowledged or even appreciated rather than deprecated.
Reconciling the biological differences with goals like equal opportunity is a big challenge. But pretending the biological differences aren’t real is not the solution.
For example, consider the problem of boys in ghettoes with few good adult male role models. These boys don’t tend to mimic their female role models: Instead they become malcontents.
DSeid mentions that marriage is often helpful for individuals and good for society. This is wise, but even that fact got little support in the thread.
I think your chronology is a little off there. The study in question is not “from 36 years ago”, it’s a 25-year longitudinal study that began 36 years ago and concluded its data gathering in 2017, publishing the results in 2023. I mean, you can’t analyze lifetime impacts of marriage on happiness without following study subjects for a significant chunk of their lifetimes, right?
That’s a pretty sweeping statement that’s more speculation than fact, at least as far as it concerns innate and/or invariable differences between males and females.
Do hominid males and females have some physical differences, most notably in reproductive function, size and muscular strength, including some less marked differences in their brain structures? Absolutely. Have those differences influenced how prehistoric and later human societies divided up roles and rights? Sure.
But do those differences tell us anything about the extent to which cultural norms of “femininity” and “masculinity” are innate or necessary to humans? Nope, not really. There have been societies in which male warriors are expected to shriek and weep a lot, and societies in which women going through labor are disparaged as weak or cowardly if they make any noise. There are societies in which men wear skirts and makeup and women wear trousers and carry knives. Etc., etc., etc.
Thinking that we can extract reliable detailed signals about what males and females are “naturally” like, in their behavior and feelings, from the overwhelming noise of culture-specific gender norms is a delusion. That’s why cultural stereotypes of “masculine” and “feminine” are not very useful concepts in trying to set goals for what human beings should be like.
This type of naive inference is exactly the sort of signal/noise confusion that I’m talking about. You’re assuming that the behavior of boys in such a subculture is somehow directly determined by biology alone, as though pervasive cultural norms of gender stereotypes somehow suddenly don’t apply just because there’s a dearth of positive male role models.
Our entire society is sending implied and explicit messages to boys from day one that they are supposed to conform to male behavior norms, that behaving in “female-coded” ways is suspect and even contemptible. And then when boys whose role models of male behavior norms are mostly negative nonetheless resist imitating female role models instead, we jump to the conclusion that “duhhhhh people, it’s innate biology, boys just naturally have to behave that way!” Patriarchy is a hell of a drug.
I get that. But it’s still a study consisting of nurses who would have presumably been in their early 20s in the 1989. In a way it’s sort of seeing if a group of women were happier being married to a doctor or cleaning bedpans for 30 years.
One of the big factors in evaluating happiness is you have to consider the cultural norms. Like is the alternative to marriage you live in a shitty apartment by yourself eating microwave dinners for one because everyone else is married? Or is there a vibrant community of other singles who get to focus on their careers, friends, and hobbies they actually enjoy?
Like before I left my last job a random woman on the elevator at Morgan Stanley made a comment to me about how it felt like her life was one big slog of work during the week then dragging the kids around on the weekends. That’s a random-ass thing to complain to a total stranger about on Monday morning and not exactly a sign of someone who loves family life.
Also, I’m not sure “happiness” is really the best metric for evaluating life. You can’t expect to be happy all the time and often you have to do things that don’t make you happy. That’s sort of the “golden retriever” problem. The dumb vapid dude who just sort of lives for whatever makes him happy at the moment.
I guess the way I would describe it is that my kids do provide a lot of happiness. Whether it’s “more” I can’t say, but it feels more meaningful.
Hold up - golden retrievers are some of the smartest dogs alive! The “dumb, vapid dudes” of the dog world are Afghan hounds.
As the only data point yes. (Study by the way was published just two years ago; it began in ‘89.) As part of a massive body of evidence, with its specific strengths being its large n, its long term follow up, and its longitudinal design that eliminates the reverse causation issue? Nope. Also the other cited study - by itself subject to criticism that it is just in one Nordic culture - but consistent with men and women both in a large longitudinal study that long term committed partnership results in more happiness on average.
And this does come back to the original OP theme: individuals left behind socioeconomically, increasingly somewhat weighted to being male, are not having these long term committed partnerships as often. It contributes to unhappiness and shorter healthspan.
?!? Are you seriously implying that you think all the subjects in this study who got married had wealthy doctor husbands and were able to live a life of leisure without working for a living anymore? Is that what you think the study results are reflecting? What information about the study details is giving you that impression?
It does track with what studies suggest about the happiness benefits of marriage being more significant for men than for women. The hypothesized explanation is that on average, men get increased emotional and domestic support in marriage as compared to singlehood, while married women on average are the ones providing that support, thus increasing their labor burden.
On the contrary, I think happiness is definitely the best metric for evaluating life, but I think it really has to depend on how you define “happiness”.
I would argue that the ability to accept and adapt to hardships, and find joy in the moment and contribute to the happiness of others irrespective of how difficult your own life is, is a sign of profound strength and moral integrity. Yeah, you don’t want to be stupidly oblivious to the fact that problems exist, but I think acknowledging problems and trying to resolve them doesn’t mandate being “brooding” or “conflicted and stressed”.
One of the worst aspects of the cultural norms of toxic masculinity, IMHO, is the way they sabotage and undermine men’s capacity to be happy irrespective of some imposed metric of “success”. Yes, everybody needs the basic ability to maintain themselves and help other people, and everybody needs some kind of goals to help them grow as a person. But this constant pressure gnawing away at men’s self-esteem and contentment because of arbitrarily imposed standards of “male achievement” is a bad thing.
Men are getting told all the time that they’re supposed to be tall and strong and powerful and able to impose their will on situations and have a hot loving wife in a stable marriage with kids who never want for anything financially due to their high-achieving and remunerative career. Oh, and they need to drive an impressive car. If they have a hobby, it’s supposed to be something that shows off their wealth and/or their physical fitness, and ideally includes impressive awards of some kind for their achievements. If they’re really into their hobby and/or profession for some intrinsic aspects of it that interest them, instead of for the achievements it brings them, then that’s “nerdy” rather than “manly”. Above all, men are supposed to be admired admired ADMIRED, and if they’re not admired then they are by default humiliated.
And if they ignore those expectations and just go about their business enjoying their life, then they’re disparaged as dumb vapid golden retrievers.
Not that being a woman is always a walk in the park, mind you, but I sure am glad at least I don’t have to deal with all the toxic masculinity expectations bullshit. I’d be brooding and conflicted and stressed too if I were getting that dumped on me.
Tangentially – oh gosh I remember those days. It is tough and you think you’re not useful at all because you can’t see in the moment how things are getting any better, and you look at all the other kids and THEY don’t seem to have these problems and what are you even doing, anyway? But the BCBA is right, you did well, even when you don’t think you’re doing anything you are giving your son a template for how to behave and keeping him secure while he does, and that is very definitely a win. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Heh, my husband never seems to feel conflicted about stuff like this, actually. I mean, I think part of it is that he is more conflicted than he looks and he just doesn’t show his emotions as much (we’ve talked about this), but also I think he doesn’t think about this kind of thing nearly as much. I was the one who was always reading the parenting books and researching how to parent and looking around at the other parents and so on. A large part of that is no doubt gender expectations, and I think also some of it is that he had parents he thought overall did a good job whereas I was always trying to grab the things I liked from my parents and discard the large amount of stuff I didn’t.
I do all the kid/family social scheduling (school stuff, extracurriculars, playdates), which I feel is a lot! My husband does the bills, car, groceries, which I admit it’s nice not to have to do. We split supper, though it is often a weekday/weekend split me/him.
“Less marked”? On the contrary, the differences in our brains are much larger than in our bodies. The proportions of grey and white matter vary between the genders by large amounts, and the various components of the brain work differently enough together that brain scans can easily see the difference. Mentally we are a lot different than we appear on the surface, not less; our conscious minds present a facade that has little to do with the underlying reality.
It’s just mostly asserted otherwise for political and emotional reasons. The Right just wants to consider women inferior, while the Left asserts that humans are all blank slates that can be hammered into perfect ideology-bots. And people in general don’t like to acknowledge that our conscious minds are as shallow as they are.
One of my biggest heroes is Anne Braden.
I don’t think of her as someone who is modeling femininity in a particular way, but it is important to me that she’s a woman. In the same way, it’s important to me that she’s a white Southerner. Those are both aspects of my identity, and she offers a model of how to be brave and just in the context if those identities.
Sigh. We’ve been over this.
Do you think if I teach my son (by example) that it’s ok to shriek, weep, wear a skirt/kilt, and carry a knife around, that’s going to help him (or me) be successful, happy, and well adjusted in our society? 
I think it’s fine to tear down gender-norms if they are arbitrary and meaningless. But declaring all cultural gender-norms as “meaningless” isn’t particularly useful either.
A man should aspire to more than being intellectually superior to the smartest dog.
I’ll stay away from declaring them meaningless, but arbitrary is a great description. Gender norms around clothing, hair, ornament, color are inherently arbitrary. Being stoic or demonstrative about feelings (or gatekeeping what type of demonstrative feelings are acceptable) is also arbitrary.
There is frightfully little about the gender norms we currently have that are vital to the success of the species. It’s just convenient to have pigeon holes to put people into, and we have a tendency to attack those who are different than us, so everyone wants to have enough sameness to avoid being labeled an outsider. Whether that sameness results in men wearing skirts or pants is arbitrary.