You haven’t seen this dynamic? I’ve seen it many times. The husband or boyfriend wants to make things work and the woman doesn’t. Maybe she had kids and then realized she didn’t want to be a mother. Or she doesn’t want to work and earn money. or she is emotionally unstable and needs the husband to be her rock. Or she is terrible with money while the husband tries to be responsible.
I’ve seen this dynamic many times, if anything I see it more than the dynamic of a responsible woman and irresponsible man.
But why do some of those things make you an adult? From what I can tell of this discussion, being an ‘adult’ generally comes down to 3 things. Autonomy, competence & responsibility.
Being autonomous from your parents, being financially independent, not dependent on friends, etc. is a big part of it. So is being competent and able to handle your problems as they come up. So is being aware that you have responsibilities you have to do and they generally come before fun. Its nice to sleep in, but not if you are late for work or the kids don’t get to go to school.
But of the list of things you provided, I don’t know how they are related to adulthood. Several are about diet. Food in the fridge, what you had for lunch, cooking, etc. Granted there are health concerns to poor diet, but that would be like claiming a person can’t be an adult if they smoke. I really don’t see the connection between making meals at home with adulthood. As long as someone isn’t malnourished I’d say they are doing fine. Its kind of like saying you aren’t an adult unless you change your own oil. I don’t agree, as long as it gets done and you realize why it needs to be done, you are doing fine.
I contribute to the problem too by eventually caving in. When my male coworker shamed me about not wanting to organize the baby shower, I decided I would go ahead and do it. Sure, I had organized the wedding gift collection the previous year for the same coworker and I had organized the farewell party for our boss the year before that. But I figured if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done…and then I’d feel guilty that “we” had been so neglectful.
I have also noticed that the men who step up tend to be guys in management positions.
Adults make sure the oil gets changed. A Man does it himself.
I’ve seen this as well. And not just for participating in the womany stuff, but goofy morale stuff as well. Like getting the team to wear wigs, coconut bras and grass skirts with him to a corporate meeting with 200 or so folks in attendance (I wish I could remember the context, I would have followed that boss into the depths of hell).
I suspect which version you see more of is going to depend on your own gender; being female, other women complain about their husband/boyfriend being irresponsible or useless to me regularly, but I’ve never had a male friend complain about their wife or girlfriend being irresponsible or useless except immediately before they split up. Even when I kinda know they are…
I certainly know women who complain about their husband because he won’t take them out nice places for dinner, won’t buy himself new clothes, refuses to go on the exotic holiday she wants to book, then in the next breath complain about being right at their overdraft limit. All the while their husband’s working all the hours he can (‘He never spends any time with me either!’), while they do the odd bit of part time work and immediately spend everything they earn treating themselves to something nice.
I have a big example in my family (I’ve talked about my brother and his felon girlfriend on here before) that makes this not feel rare. I can’t think of any family examples of the opposite. But my family anecdotes are just anecdotes.
Why would two such people enter into marriage in the first place? Isn’t the boyfriend/girlfriend phase where you’re supposed to figure out important issues like that? ISTM that’s when a person would realize, “geez, this guy is a sloth when it comes to putting in the effort on social niceties, I should probably move on to greener pastures.”
Sorry, but IME it’s not rare at all. IME it tends to hit once the children start school. Two come immediately to mind. OTOH there are also relationships where the woman realises she is irresponsible, looks for a dominant partner, and becomes a submissive.
In the limit, it’s basic biology: absent coercion, it’s women who choose who will father their offspring. Of course, each woman will have their own criteria.
Finally! An approach wherein I don’t immediately get classified as an infant (maybe). I don’t cook, barely clean, and don’t rebuild my own engines or dig latrines for fun, but I do at least live on my own, get myself to work, and pay my bills! (With money left over to buy all the kid’s toys and cartoon shows that I want!)
Not that I’m actually sure I really merit the label ‘adult’, mind you. I do generate enough shed hair to qualify as a ‘man’, though.
Learning to cook and clean (or how to fix cars or do home maintenance) are important life skills, but not everyone wants to do them. So you hire people to do that stuff for you if you don’t like it.
And its an arbitrary cut off. Some people grow their own foods, harvest it themselves and then can it. Other people buy it from the grocery store. Maybe the first group is more self sufficient, but it is a lifestyle choice. Why not claim anyone who doesn’t grow and can their own foods isn’t an adult?
Some people love mowing the lawn. Some people hate it and would rather just hire someone else to do it.
To me one of the markers of adulthood is realizing that your personality and wants/needs don’t always align with what society at large says they should be, and being ok with that. Being able to resist shame and peer pressure because you have self awareness is a marker of adulthood (which again, comes back to autonomy).
I agree with this, but I also think one of the markers of adulthood is owning your shortcomings and not expecting a judgement-free existence. I don’t think the person who comes into work dressed like he just slept in a dumpster is necessarily more “adult” than the person who has been shamed and peer pressured into looking more presentable. However, I think if a person acknowledges they are a slob and accepts the social consequences that follow from that, then he is displaying a pretty mature attitude.
I know I am an adult, but I also have child-like ways. If my parents tried to call me out for being a “woman-child”, I would tell them to kindly and respectfully STFU. But I am not going to pretend that I am just as mature as anyone else. I am sufficiently mature, but I can admit I have areas where I can and should grow more.
I agree, there are obligations within society. You can’t have terrible BO and be rude to everyone out in public, then get upset when people don’t like you. If you accept the consequences of this behavior, more power to you. But as you said, you can’t expect to be anti-social without having to deal with anti-social consequences.
However with concepts like car maintenance, home maintenance, food preparation, etc those are individual preferences people do at home by themselves. Their decisions in these areas do not impact other people. And again the cutoff is arbitrary. One person may do zero home maintenance. Another may do basic home maintenance. Another may do advanced home maintenance. Another may have built his entire home himself. Where is the cutoff between adult and child?
I guess to me autonomy is an important part of adulthood, but I define autonomy different than some other posters. Some other posters feel autonomy means cooking your own meals, mowing your own lawn, fixing your own car, repairing your own home, cleaning your own messes, etc. That is fine, but I don’t agree. If you are financially autonomous and can hire other people to do these things for you, you are just as much an adult, especially if the reason you hire someone is because you don’t like doing them yourself and consider spending the money less unpleasant than doing the task. Self awareness and the ability to make your own decisions, even ones that can lead to social stigma (as long as you are aware of the risk of social stigma and accept it), is a good marker of adulthood.
Someone can hire someone to wipe their ass at $1000 a wipe and be willing to bankrupt themselves just because they don’t want to be bothered doing it themselves. So while I agree in general about one’s domesticity not being a good indicator of one’s maturity, I think as with everything else there is a limit when it should okay to say “yeah, that person is a bit of a baby” without necessarily being a big meano.
I thought we’d decided that that “be willing to bankrupt themselves” was the deciding factor between adults and full-grown children. If you aren’t living within your means, whatever those means are, then you’re immature (apparently, by this definition). If you can pay for your frivolities, and do so, then people have to mock you for your looks instead.
Not gonna lie. I don’t care if someone can afford to spend $1000 every time they need their hiney wiped. I’m probably going to have negative judgments about them and make some inferences about their personality regardless… Maybe this means I am judgy. I am OK with this. But I think every adult is entitled to have their own rubric for assessing maturity. They just don’t need to broadcast it.
In some militaries, like the Canadian military, personnel queue in the mess hall according to rank; The lowest ranks first and the highest ranks last. In other militaries, the way things work is the opposite. The former tend to do better than the latter.
Does the person associate being stronger with taking or giving?
IMHO, my transition from boyhood to manhood involved taking over my financial independence, it wasn’t a clean cut, but a tapered one, it involved paying off my student loans (much smaller in those days, getting a car and paying my rent), getting involved with someone that got pregnant with my child, I was just outta graduate school and wanting to run wild, didn’t work out as I planned, but guess what, I grew up, and 29 years later, we’re happily married, my total transition into manhood was when I realized my father wasn’t some disconnected overlord, he actually knew what he was talking about, and he became my closest confidant and one of my closest friends…I miss him every day…now my sons’ first call is to me…he was wise, I learned so much from him…
For me though, as **Monstro **hinted at earlier, part of my transition to adulthood is realizing people who seemed like infallible adults when I was growing up really aren’t all that wise and sometimes are really just clueless and ignorant.
I feel like part of my transition to adulthood is learning that there are areas in life where my parents, aunts and uncles really don’t know what they’re talking about and have no credibility. And not in a teenage ‘I know everything’ way either. You see people you used to put on a pedestal show themselves to be as deranged as everyone else and to realize that in situations A,B,C they are informed and credible, but in situations X,Y,Z they are not.
