Really? You think men don’t have social groups outside of home and work, and you think that traditional expectations of male behavior aren’t reinforced in those groups as well as at work?
Again, I think part of this is just a double standard where male conformity to gender roles tends to be just accepted as natural and/or inevitable (unless it’s something that can be blamed on women, like women expecting men to do the paying on dates or to kill spiders in the house).
Female conformity to gender roles, on the other hand, tends to draw criticism as unnecessary and pointless, with a subtext of ”silly women fretting about being expected to do these things that no one’s actually MAKING them do”.
Yes really. My brush paints broadly but not in absolutes or without greys on its palette. As a general leaning and the research that @icon alludes to is readily available.
I get it. Our son is on the autism spectrum and has social challenges sometimes. He also just completed his first year of middle school at The Swanky School. My wife sounds a bit like you in that she runs herself ragged trying to “check all the boxes”. I think you mentioned up thread you were raised by a working class father? My wife is similar in that her parents are kind of rural working class and didn’t have much money or sophistication. Even though she went to a fancy private school I think maybe she has a feeling of constantly having to prove she belongs there?
My working theory is we men don’t replace our friends and extended family with our spouse. It’s just that between work and helping with the kids and the household, there simply isn’t enough time in the day. Unless maybe you happen to live in a community where you have a group of families who have known each other and raised their kids together for decades.
I think it’s a challenge that is exacerbated by two working parents with demanding jobs. Even if I can get away for an evening, it’s challenging to line up a “man date” with one of my buddies.
Right, but remember the wife has died in this scenario. But I think it’s true in both directions. From what I read, loneliness is problem for a lot of people.
Ahahaha. I have a couple of problems here. My family didn’t have a lot of money and definitely no sophistication as I was growing up (we were on better financial footing by the time my sister was growing up, who has fewer of these specific issues though she has other ones) and I have very judgmental parents (particularly my mother). So there’s a combo of a) a lot of realizing I don’t fit in the sophisticated milieu and b) understanding up close and personal what it’s like when someone side-eyes other people’s families.
I think many people aren’t super judgmental (and I tend to be better friends with people who aren’t), but enough will make some kind of judgment (and heck, I do too, because of my upbringing, though I try not to let it affect me) that occasionally I’m like, “well, at least we need to weed the yard, I know if I saw someone’s yard and it looked like that I would be tempted to make some kind of judgment about that family.”
Though in general I don’t really run myself ragged trying to check the boxes, I mostly just fail at checking them and then feel bad about it, lol. Now I’m older, the kids are more in charge of their own friends, and I’ve got people who are not so judgmental in my life for the most part, so it’s much less of an issue than it used to be when the kids were little and I was petrified that their social development was all going to be on me.
Women – and again, as @DSeid said, this is a broad brush – tend to form social groups in whatever milieu they have. Every school my kids have gone to until high school (when they commnicate with their own friends autonomously), I’ve been expected both by the other women and myself to join in some sort of social group to facilitate the kids getting together. Even in high school I’m involved in carpooling conversations. I’ve become part of social groups that involve the kids’ extracurriculars (and sometimes remain in them even when the kids are no longer doing the extracurriculars). I’m currently now in social media spaces where kids are getting together for summer plans. Not to say that men aren’t involved in these groups – they are! there are a couple of men I text regularly about these things in fact! – but as a group they tend to be less interested and less committed.
(The exception is my church, where the men are just as committed as the women to their respective social groups, and it really is a stark contrast with what I see in the rest of my life. My church actually does have an expectation of male behavior that involves much more extraversion and commitment to sociality than most societal milieus in which I think men typically find themselves.)
Do you still have little kids? Yes, there were about ten years when my husband and i had no social interactions to speak of outside of work and family. Then the kids get older, and take less time. And we returned to things like a weekly bridge game. And we started doing things like a weekly square dance night. And we started throwing occasional parties and inviting a bunch of people over. And going to parties other people invited us to.
And now I’m galavanting around the world doing social things related to my hobbies. He doesn’t enjoy travel (or socializing) as much as i do, but he travels a lot for volunteer work, and has clearly made friends with some of the people he volunteers with.
That’s interesting. While there are certainly men who are very active in social activities in my synagogue (cooking for the meals on wheels program, volunteering with the refuge resettlement group, attending adult education…) all those activities that I’ve seen have many more women who are socially engaged than men. Every one of them is open to both, and has both men and women, but there are just more women. And no, i don’t think it’s because the men have less time. I think it’s because on average, women are more drawn to community activities.
Every school my kids have gone to until high school (when they commnicate with their own friends autonomously), I’ve been expected both by the other women and myself to join in some sort of social group to facilitate the kids getting together. Even in high school I’m involved in carpooling conversations. I’ve become part of social groups that involve the kids’ extracurriculars (and sometimes remain in them even when the kids are no longer doing the extracurriculars). I’m currently now in social media spaces where kids are getting together for summer plans.
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Is this common? I grew up with landlines and my parents were not directly involved in my school social life. If I didn’t make lots of calls to my friends and their parents and beg my parents for time and rides, I would have just been alone by myself.
Edit - I’m on my phone and I have no idea why the quote formatting broke. I give up.
I was actually shocked that this part of my post had any pushback at all. The part that I had expected to be argued with was the flip side - that the other edge of that sword of caring about being a community member is caring about being a community member in good standing … caring about their evaluation of you, being impacted by the standards the community sets. Again not that men do not at all, but that relatively more men care less about that so long as they feel comfortable in their work and partnership (if not family) roles.
For the “active families” in my church, yeah, I feel it’s pretty equal in commitment. (There are substantially more women than men in general who are active in my church, and families such as my own where I’m a member but my husband is not.) But you gotta realize that my church bakes in a LOT of structure to make this possible. Just for starters: a) a patriarchical structure, so that men are generally the ones in positions of power BUT those positions of power are also the ones that take the most time commitment, b) young men are very strongly culturally encouraged to go on missions where they are without their families for two years and have to learn how to talk to strangers and have companions and groups of other missionaries they have to learn how to get along with, c) is rather gender-segregated, so there are activities that are wholly men-organized/attended which forces them to engage. I guess there are certain social groups, like the reading book club, that skew enormously women, and probably women do more social things than the men, but I would say the (active) men are as committed, if not as overall social.
My husband’s church, for example, which doesn’t have all that baked in, is much more like your synagogue.
There’s probably some truth to that. A year or two back, I was watching something from the manosphere online with a man reacting to another video of a woman complaining that she couldn’t find a husband. The woman doing the complaining was in her late 30s or early 40s, attractive, and was saying she had a degree, a good job, had a decent salary, but still couldn’t find a man. The manosphere host simply said something like, “Men don’t care about any of that. We don’t care about your job or how much money you make.” And then he went on about her making a choice to focus on her career and now that she’s in her late 30s or early 40s it’s too late because single men her age prefer younger women.
Well, yeah, that’s exactly part of the point that @msmith537 is trying to get at, I think. I, a woman, am all “I need to be involved in this social network and carpooling and such otherwise my kids’ lives will be blighted!!” and @msmith537, I’m guessing, would be more like “eh, is this necessary? No it is not, I’m not going to worry about it unless my kid pushes it.”
But it depends on ages, again. Like now I’m much less involved with my high schooler’s social life; kid won’t even tell me who her friends are, lol. (Now I’m part of a – much more attenuated – social network partially in self-defense so I and the other parents can find out things! LOL.) For the elementary schooler I still have to be involved because kiddo is in private school and he needs a ride to get to any friend’s house, and also he and his friends try to coordinate playdates but it never works because invariably if they try to schedule something someone has a conflict. When I was growing up we never had any of these extracurriculars so it was pretty easy to schedule things (or would have been if I’d had friends, which I didn’t).
It’s different from when we grew up with land lines and unannounced “pop ins” asking if soandso can come out to play.
My town might be a bit different as it’s a small walkable city where half the parents commute into Manhattan. My kids are 12 and 9 so most of their socializing is play dates or birthday party events when they have time between after school activities.
I once asked Mrs. Odesio not to mow the lawn because I felt as though it made me look like a deadbeat husband. Is that silly? Yeah. When I see women mowing the lawn on my street my first thought isn’t that they have a deadbeat husband or a lazy son, so why should I be worried anyone might think that of me? But there I was, embarrassed that my neighbors saw her mowing the lawn while I was inside.
I mean, if that’s really the case, is it any wonder if increasing numbers of women are deciding that marriage to a man just isn’t worth it?
If the honest message for women (and I’m sure there are a lot of men who don’t feel this way, but there also seem to be plenty of them asserting that this is the default baseline position for men in general) is ”It doesn’t really matter to us how intelligent, honorable, reliable, competent, successful, fulfilled, interesting, etc. you are as a person. What we want from a woman for marriage purposes is conventional youthful attractiveness, so without that you can just forget about getting married”… then… why bother?
It used to be that marriage was such a socially mandated determinant of a woman’s individual worth that most women would do their best to jump through all the hoops required, irrespective of how personally demeaning or burdensome they might be. Nowadays, though, that seems like a pretty big sacrifice to make just for the rapidly diminishing social validation of ”some man was willing to put a ring on it”.
Again, I’m personally convinced that most opposite-sex marriages are a lot more mutually respectful and appreciative than this “livestock-auction” stereotype would suggest. Nonetheless, the data do suggest that women as a group are getting less enthusiastic about opposite-sex marriage, and ISTM that this persistent livestock-auction stereotype may have something to do with that.
If society is genuinely concerned about increasing numbers of men remaining unwillingly unmarried and facing prospects of lifelong childless loneliness etc., then I think there’s going to have to be significant rebranding of conventional male attitudes towards, and expectations of, marriage. ”We just want a wife to look like Margot Robbie and leave us in peace when we get home from work” is no longer cutting it as a sales pitch.
But typically when there are guys walking women back to their dorms it’s precisely because recent events/circumstance warrant it. IE: There have been assaults or attempted assaults in the vicinity. Normally, you’d be right. But in the circumstance I’ve described, I am.