Another aspect that hasn’t been mentioned here, and I’m not sure how it fits in to this discussion, is something I have heard women talk about in a relationship with a man - they want to feel “safe”. Now that can mean a variety of thing: physical safety, financial safety, general safety in dealing with the outside world, emotional safety (he’s not going to beat you or cheat). So, aside from traditional division of duties, somehow I think this notion of “safety” is a factor in the “being taken care of” equation.
I would love it if my wife were more like a few of the independent female posters here! When we met as teenagers, she was very independent and that was one the the primary attractions for me. But somewhere along the way she became very VERY dependent on me. I guess I own part of that for allowing it to happen. Maybe I am just that sort of guy who is a push-over for a woman that wants to be taken care of by a man.
Sounds very relaxing, TBH. I could go for a bit of that myself. Not forever, probably. Two, three years, maybe?
I don’t really have much close personal experience of the ‘men taking care of the little woman’ dynamic - it’s a bit alpha-male, and we’re light on for alpha males in my extended family. But the opposite, honestly, is not that much fun. I pretty much divide things in this household into “things I’m making it my responsibility to make sure they happen” and “things that probably aren’t ever going to get done, and I’ve made my peace with that”
It’s exhausting, really. Zero out of ten, Would Not Recommend.
ETA: snowthx’ spots snuck in there while I was composing … yeah, that sounds basically pretty familiar, except gender-swapped. That’s basically how it works - being the Person Who Will Take Care Of All The Things isn’t necessarily a role that people actually choose, sometimes you’re just levered into it
Underlining mine. Very well said.
This is how both my wife & I see it and operate our partnership. We’re a “we”, not a “you and me”. There is some specialization, but it’s not along any notion of “traditional” gender roles and certainly not along any religiously-determined line. Who does what has morphed over the decades and we’ve each exchanged some tasks with the others. “From each according to their ability; to each accoring to their need.” is the guiding principal.
IMO “kept” is a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. kept = pet with a heavy overtone of sex-toy.
“Taken care of” in the modern era may simply be a matter of who’s the more active vs passive personality or who’s the bigger earner or better cook. More like the stereotypical comments about personality differences depending on place in the birth order: first child vs last child effect.
What “taken care of” meant to women (and men) socialized in the 1920s & 1930s is something totally different.
That a widow finds little change indicates the late husband did a nice job of providing for her financially after his death. Nice situation if that obtains. It often doesn’t.
e.g. My wife’s Dad died when she was 10. Mom remarried a couple years later then that guy died when she was 16. In neither case was there any money from the late husband / father / stepfather. The impact on the surviving widow and kids both times was staggering, not “no big deal”.
For sure by retirement age more people have life insurance, sufficient assets, etc., to keep the widow;'s life intact economically. However modern data suggests that this happy situation will be vastly less true in 30 years than it has been. Once the Boomers are gone the next generations have not been nearly as successful at saving which implies a lot more penury for widows of both sexes. I’ll leave the “why” of that alone so as not start a hijack; suffice it here that it’s a fact.
The “safety” thing is an interesting sorta-conundrum in the very much evolving nature of man-woman roles in our society.
One of the things I did not mention in silenius’ dying wife thread – because that is not the time to say, “Well, lemme tell you what happened to me” – was how for about six months after DesertWife passed, when I was out and about I’d see or hear something interesting and say to myself, “I got to mention this to her this evening… oh, crap.”
It tore the scab off each time.
When we were married I did the cooking, she did the laundry and both thought we got the better part of the deal. I could do something a little creative and she could do something that was load, start, and come back in forty-five minutes to finish it off after doing something else much more interesting.
When I married Mr.Wrek he was very much established. Older by a good bit. Had children. I came in basically from my Daddy’s house to his.
I made my way through by standing my ground on many small things.
He puts up with my goofiness and I put up with his idiosyncrasies.
It’s how we are.
A few decades in things aren’t likely to change.
We’re okay.
I’m not ‘kept’ so much as tolerated. 
Growing up as a woman in the patriarchy that is the Jehovah’s Witness faith, and hearing, “Behave modestly, weaker vessel, let the women be silent…” type of stuff for twenty years, you can understand why the whole “women should be protected from the world” mindset would rub me the wrong way.
If women need to be protected and taken care of, then by definition, women are incapable and incompetent creatures. That’s why my blood boils when anything approaching conservative gender values is presented as desirable.
And yet, every so often some single female acquaintance of mine will sigh and say, “If only I could find a man who would take care of me. Wouldn’t you love to find a man like that?”
Fuck no, I say. Whether out loud or not is at my discretion.
My mom went to college in the 50s, but only to find a husband. She didn’t, and graduated with no practical skills. She got a temp job in a “Typing Pool”, and admits she has no idea what she would have done if she hadn’t eventually met my dad: “I was raised to be dependent on a man, and was well on my way to being a lost spinster.”
That really affected me, and meant I wanted NO part of that kind of Passive Patriarchy.
To the extent that I broke up with a woman who I could just tell was looking for exactly that. I still remember giving her a ride to a big picnic with all her friends, people were yelling for us to join the softball game, and I sprinted from the car. They kept calling out to her, but she wouldn’t open her car door.
That was apparently my job.
My wife is spunky and independent-minded by nature, but also has a strong maternal instinct. Once I got my law degree and our sons started being born, we pretty quickly reached a consensus that I would work outside the home and she would stay home. We divide up household chores, though: she cooks, I clean up. She does the gardening, and I do the mowing. We both do the laundry and household cleaning and dusting on a pretty equal basis. I handle recycling and take out the trash. I pay the bills, more often than not, but I certainly don’t hide the checkbook from her. She stays on top of paperwork from the boys’ schools and usually is the one who walks the dog.
It’s worked out well for us; we just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary, and I’m a very lucky man.
The name is silenus; there is no “i” in the middle.
I still have my wife but remember that same feeling when my Dad died. The difference is when Dad was alive I probably thought that once every couple of weeks, but now I think that about 10x / day with my wife. Not looking forward to that experience.
Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m generally on your side here. My wife and I have a very happy very equal relationship in every way. Your JW upbringing, like the other extra conservative sects, e.g. LDS, etc., certainly brings out the worst of all this.
As to your second quoted paragraph, laziness is a lot of it. I’d rather win or inherit $5M than work hard enough to earn enough to save $5M. If someone of any gender had a spouse who made enough money, they could spend their days pursuing art, or a hobby job, or whatever fulfills their soul instead of whatever puts food on the table. Nice work if you can get it.
At a low enough price to your pride and your freedom of action. Total fealty to some abusive jerk is IMO / IYO too high a price. Enjoying what one perceives as the lion’s share of the bargain between two people may not be too high a price. It all depends on which aspects one values and which one doesn’t.
As to the first quoted paragraph I’ll tiptoe into the waters that there’s a logical difference between incapable and “less capable” and between incompetent & “less competent”. At certain specific things and certain specific interests. Excluding the middle is almost always a logical fallacy. But …
It’s very easy for legit differences to be inflated into wholesale prejudice and discrimination; this is a greasy icy slippery slope here. Whose end-state is the assholic absolute patriarchy of the JWs, LDS, Muslims, and other religious fundamentalists. And any number of plain old socially conservative male chauvinist pigs. So you’re rightly well-motivated to fight back to absolute level equivalence between the sexes. Which is, thankfully, the direction our society is slowly moving, albeit with some backpedals along the way.
I can do any/everything necessary to get through my life. My wife can do any/everything necessary to get through her life. You can too. So can most people not crippled by learned helplessness or genuine disability.
“Can” is different from “can do easily” or “is happy doing”. Individuals have differences. Burdens shared are burdens reduced.
Well said. And, as Lincoln remarked, “Most people are about as happy as they decide to be.”
People in relationships should take care of each other and not control each other. This isn’t gendered or specific to romantic partnerships.
ETA: … I took the direction of “less” from Two_Many_Cats2’s own choice of direction: “in-”. Obviously a more accurate and honest way to say that is differently-abled.
Far more important than that is differently-aptituded. It’s a commonplace that women, on average, have different interests than men on average. We each tend to relatively excel in our interests versus our disinterests. Which is chicken and which is egg is an interesting discussion in its own right.
Hehe. I checked my gf’s car and truck tires over the weekend. She could physically perform the simple feat, but she could never figure out how to put the air-compressor away, wrapping everything up so it all fits in the case again. So I do it.
She also likes the image of me taking care of her. When we’ve taken her family out to dinner she always mentions on the way to the restaurant that dinner is “on her”. But, when the check arrives she never notices, so I take care of paying. At some point, days or weeks later, she’ll usually remember and get cash from an ATM to reimburse me.
Please tell me you just left her there for the whole picnic… Trapped inside an unlocked car by her own silliness.
I’ve never got the appeal.
I remember an incident a few years ago, where I was at my allotment (like a community garden, if you’re not familiar), quite late in the evening, when an elderly guy- I’d say in his 80s- walked up to me and told me I needed to go home now. He was going home, you see, and I was the last person there, which meant I would be there without A Man. I’d never even seen him before- there were about 500 people who had plots (this was like a Tuesday in October, so dead quiet), and his was some distance away, but apparently, in his head, he’d been protecting me for the last hour or so. My response was a sort of confused laugh, and a ‘I’m fine here by myself, I’m here myself all the time’, which apparently offended him, and he got actually angry at me before finally storming off. It seemed especially silly as I was actually working as a bouncer at the time.
I told a few female friends about it, expecting them to be as confused as me, and one responded with ‘Aww, how sweet! What a lovely guy, keeping an eye on you like that!’ even after I’d pointed out that he hadn’t come over to say ‘I’m going home now, are you OK on your own?’ he’d literally come to try and kick me out, because obviously as a helpless woman, I wasn’t safe to be in a -locked, fenced- site without A Man. In some women, the wish to be thought helpless apparently goes deep.
Here’s a different take I just remembered.
Back in my late 20s in USAF I knew a female officer same rank and age who had a different job but worked down the hall in the same building as I did. We became lunch friends, but neither had any interest in becoming BF/GF. Why not? I really wasn’t her type, and she wasn’t my type. That works.
What was her type? The great big 6-foot plus muscular galoots. The beefier the better as long as none of it was fat. She was especially fond of Marines, of which we had a few. She was small as women go, but smart and independent.
I asked her what the attraction was. Her answer: It’s like riding a horse; I get to control / influence something much bigger than I am. Brains over brawn. They think they’re “taking care of me”, but they’re just feeding their own ego while I’m getting the thrill of driving them. We’re like Master Blaster.
Who’d she eventually marry? An ordinary-sized smart IT-geek guy. She knew the difference between sporting and real life. Not every woman (nor man) is self-aware enough to know that difference.
Would a woman who’s had alot of responsibility dumped on her from a young age be ok with having a man who would take the lead and take alot of that off her? I mean as long as #1 he was darn good at it and 2. he wasnt being a jerk and 3. kept her in the loop?
My wife has no problem with me doing all the paperwork and handling our finances.
At one point my dad freaked out a little when he found out my spouse was handling all the money and finances for awhile - but although the spouse was doing all that he also made sure I knew where all the account numbers, passwords, etc. were and every two-four weeks we sat down for about 20 minutes to go over stuff so while he was doing all the work I was very much aware of what was going on and could speak my mind at any time.
When my spouse became incapacitated taking over all that stuff was actually one of the easier problems to deal with simply because I was so thoroughly in the loop and knew where everything was.
That is VERY different than a situation where the man has all the money and the woman is kept in the dark about what’s going on.
Or the reverse situation that, although less common, can also occur.
I grew up a dowdy, fat, pimply, boysih broad who realized pretty early on I wasn’t ever going to get a man to dote on me. I did kinda try, but after a couple terrible relationships I just struck out on my own at the age of 25, bought my house and never looked back.
Buying a house/car/furniture/etc on your own is kinda great. There’s zero other people to compromise with. Having my own schedule is fantastic, zero people to consult with. I go where I want when I want, eat what I want when I want, the house is as messy or as clean as I want. It’s gravy.
So I kinda lead the opposite life of “taken care of by a man.” However, it doesn’t mean I’d not be interested in an equal partnership, or at least, yaknow, help. But it feels like the deeper I get into this independence groove, the harder it is to want to give up any of that for whatever “help” is. And my married female friends don’t make it sound like being partnered up is any easier than what I’ve got going on here. In many ways it seems more burdensome (for what it’s worth, they’ve all got kids so that adds an extra dynamic to the possibilities of needing “help”).
I do have a boyfriend but we’re pretty arms length. We drift in and out of each others’ lives as our independence allows. It works for us, I guess. I love the guy, he loves me. We just live quite separate lives.
Anyway…no. I couldn’t imagine being taken care of by a man. I’ve only dated one guy who makes more money than me (and I don’t make much money) and that guy was a huge asshole. Not that money makes one a huge asshole (the broke ones were assholes too!) but I don’t have a good track record with guys who could even begin to “take care of” me. I’m more nimble on my own.
Zipper, not everyone is supposed to be partnered. I figured that out about myself a long time ago.