Marriage and the Power of Divorce

House work was one thing my ex wife and I fought about all the time. I made over double what she did but we both had 40+ hr /week full time jobs. She insisted on us doing all the cooking and cleaning around the house. It drove me nuts. It was never that i didn't want to do "women's" work. I just hate doing house work and would rather pay someone to do it. I constantly pleaded to hire a house cleaner and eat more takeout to take some of the burden off us but she was too proud/cheap. It was one of the fights we always had. Fucking ridiculous because we both made decent money, had no debt other than mortgage, and lived well below our means.

As long as the argument is "let's hire a maid vs doing it ourselves" and not "you should do all the work because I make more" then that's legit.

If two people both work 40+ hours a week, just because one makes more than the other doesn't necessarily reflect that one person is working harder than the other. In my friends scenario, he made close to 6 figures in IT/sys admin for a private university, which basically meant he sat on his computer and browsed reddit about 6 hours a day, and needing to do actual work bout 2hrs, as his average day. His wife made $15 an hour working in a daycare facility, chasing snotty rugrats around all day. Obviously there was more to their divorce than just that, but I know that was always one of their main subjects for fighting.

Let me guess, she worked at a daycare because "she loved kids" and "she loved what she did". Who cares if she worked hard those 40 hours a week, she had no ambition and worked a shitty job. She doesn't have a career. She gets to not care if her place of employment closes down, she doesn't have to worry about her company downsizing or not getting her bonus because the economy hit the shitter. I know I sound crass (I can't help it, I'm a Long Island boy) but seriously she needed to grow the fuck up. She lived a comfortable life in which she didn't have to worry about what real, responsible adults need to worry about but she didn't realize that. No, instead it "wasn't fair" that she should have more responsibility at home because "I work just as hard as you do". Your friend put his time in and went into a career field. He worked to get that job and just because the fruits of his labor yielded a cushy job doesn't mean he doesn't bear all the responsibilities that I just outlined. Your friends ex was an entitled brat (based on the information you've presented).

Deep down she knew she was an entitled brat, it's why she didn't leave your friend until she had a guarantee from another man who could allow her to keep living like a teenager. Because that's the type of person who works at a daycare and complains about their duties at home as if the fact that she worked the same amount of hours as her husband meant she bore the same responsibility he did.

Yeah, I'm 100% with Khane on this one. I earn 5X as much as my paralegal girlfriend and the "move in" agreement was that I would handle all bills/mortgage/entertainment, and she would handle groceries, dry cleaning, and other errands. We both roughly work the same hours, however the stress/responsibilities in my job certainly trump hers. Her job "ends" at 5pm, mine is always on call. I accept the fact that on a daily basis I have to listen to an hour of "post work venting/frustration/drama" concerning her daily interactions, despite internally rolling my eyes most of the time as it's hard to sympathize when your responsibilities and difficulties at the office not only surmount hers, but intrinsically carry more risk if the shit hits the fan and you lose your job.

I feel that being able to provide my girlfriend a lifestyle she couldn't possibly live on her own earns me something in return. Perhaps "earn" is a bad word, but there needs to be equilibrium in a relationship. Nobody likes to feel like they're being taken advantage of, and I'm sorry if I pay for everything AND I have to split errands/chores I'll just feel like a chump that's being used. I'm open to other ways for her to contribute, but besides finances/errands there aren't many other variables that can be fielded to achieve this. Now what rustles my jimmies is when the GF inevitably starts slacking-- groceries get missed, dry cleaning doesn't get done, she forgot to pickup the dog's flea meds, etc, and she then uses work/stress as an excuse. I have work/stress all the time, but does that cause me to miss paying the mortgage or getting my driver's license renewed? No..

Now the fight concerning delegation of duties never goes well, you're right there Jaeboo. The girlfriend's opinion on the matter (when I get angry when she asks me to "help out more") is that I shouldn't be able to use the fact that I pay for everything to put more errand duties on her, "because I would be paying the mortgage, water bill, cable bill, electrical bill, property taxes, phone bill, and internet even if I wasn't with her". My response is then "and you'd still be doing the dry cleaning and groceries if you lived alone, except you'd also being cleaning your house because you wouldn't have a maid, and wouldn't have 90% of your income as disposable because YOU'D be paying mortgage, electrical, etc. That Louis-Vuitton purse you just bought, could you have afforded that if you lived alone on your 40K salary?". Sorry, I really feel that this is not only entitled behavior, but spoiled. If I lived with someone that paid for everything and my only duties were fucking groceries and random errands, I would operate that shit with military efficiency and rabid fervor.

And that story of the chick who cheated on her husband despite the fact that he gave her a life she could not afford and used the justification that "he didn't appreciate her" fucking pisses me off. A classic case of an adult child making banal excuses to justify her irresponsible and hurtful behavior. The bullshit rationales women come up with to justify cheating boggles my mind. She obviously secured her 2nd nest before flying from the first..

Frenzied Wombat_sl said:

If I lived with someone that paid for everything and my only duties were fucking groceries and random errands, I would operate that shit with military efficiency and rabid fervor.

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But that isn't how most people would see it. Most people would see it as "How come he gets to come home from work and kick his feet up and drink a beer while I'm still busting my ass to get stuff done around the house"

It just doesn't fly. Now if she's working 20 hours a week and you're working 60, that's one thing, but if you are both out of the home & working roughly the same amount of time, the stuff at home should be a pretty even split too. I'm not saying it's inherently right or wrong, I'm just saying that from my experience that's a road that leads to bigger problems. It makes your woman feel like a maid, that she has to do more work because you provide more money.

I'm just trying to give advice for having a happy relationship with as little fighting as possible. If you enjoy unnecessary arguing and conflict, then by all means continue to base equality in your relationship on earnings.

I agree with joeboo in that I don't think if both people work 40+ hours, whoever makes less should be obliged to cook and clean by themselves all night. Don't know how you could make a relationship work like that.

If I make way more than my significant other I just want some fucking slack from time to time. Let's hire a maid, go out for Chinese, and don't be afraid to give my balls a tongue bath from time to time, that's all I want.

Yeah, and that's totally reasonable because those things help both of you out equally. You aren't hiring a maid just to do your portion of the chores, or you aren't bringing home takeout only when it's your turn to cook(if you take turns)

Wait people take turns to cook?? I gotta get my wife to take some turns.

I don't really disagree with you joeboo in the fact that it's a tough sell because that argument essentially comes down to a condescending "you need me, I'm better than you" tone. It's not meant to be that way but if I have to pay for everything as Wombat said, including vacations, furniture, nights out and everything else as well as shelter and comfort I believe it's perfectly reasonable for the lesser income (if it's that disparate and life changing) to take care of the household chores. The problem is women like your friend's ex (and most people in fact) don't see things in those terms. She was incapable of seeing the big picture. She was thinking in terms of hours a week worked and that's it, and so are you in this case.

"Oh you want to go to Europe for 2 weeks? Yeah that would be amazing, we'll split the cost. Oh you can't afford it? Guess I'll go alone". That would never fucking fly with her. Relationships are supposed to be give and take, and all she wanted to do was take. That woman, regardless of her belief about her own self worth, will only ever amount to the man she is with. That's her own fault for not taking charge of her own life and I have no respect for women like that. I do respect housewives who take their job seriously and get shit done, I don't respect women who think just because they work 40 hours a week at a "job" they are equal to people who actually have careers and shouldn't have to pull their weight in a relationship.

It comes down to us guys thinking logically with the women thinking emotionally. Like I said, I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but that's the general feeling that the vast majority of women are going to have. Shit won't fly for long.

Oh I completely agree with you. It's the main reason my last two relationships ended. In both cases both parties were unyielding in their beliefs on the matter and I am not the type of guy who is going to take care of a woman so she can go through life like a juvenile without a care in the world. I want to be your husband not your father.

Deathwing_sl said:

You agree to marry someone(or live with them, whatever), there's an intrinsic understanding that you accept each other's ambitions and goals in life. You don't get to marry someone and then continue holding over their head that she work at a daycare(like my wife) and you make 3x what she does(like I do).

You're the asshole in this situation, not her. I can't say for joeboo's very specific example, there's obviously quite a few details missing. You marry someone, his/her want to do something with his/her life becomes your want to do something with your lives. Maybe working with kids is really what she wants to do in life. There's a career path for that. It's a bit insular, but you can "move up". And trust me, those people are very much underpaid, especially the infant teachers. Or maybe she wanted to be a teacher but availability of "standard" teaching jobs in the area are so slim that it means you either work at a daycare or you're substitute and get paid even less.

By saying she has to do more work around the house because she makes less money essentially means you think she's worth less than you. She's picked the wrong career and goals in life and thus has screwed up. That can really dig at someone over time and goes against the whole foundation of what marriage is supposed to mean.

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I can agree with that actually. All these things need to be discussed prior to getting married. But who's to say she didn't agree to do the household stuff and then started refusing because she felt it was unfair after they were married? I had those conversations in both my previous relationships when they had progressed to the point where we were considering marriage. Both times the conversations ended with them admitting that they want to be taken care of. Literally, my last girlfriend finally said "I guess I just want to be taken care of". And that was pretty much it for me.

If you've reached the point of marriage without getting something as simple as delegation of duties squared and settled first, then you have either moved waaayy too fast, or you haven't lived together first. Me making more than her and asking that she be mainly responsible for errands that she would need to perform anyways if she lived alone isn't a matter of me implying "that I'm better than her", it's simply a desire to achieve some sort of equilibrium in the relationship where I don't feel like some sugar daddy that also has to pick up groceries while she hits the gym followed by a Mystic tan. In commiseration with Khane's "Europe trip" example, I just went to Thailand with my GF (an 8K vacation), paid for everything, but the expectation was that she was going to handle the tasks/errands associated with it (kenneling dog, calling CC companies, packing, etc), yet she was so "stressed out" by work that week I still had to handle the majority of it. Which brings me to another issue-- women and stress. How many here have wives/girlfriends whose ability to function reliably is constantly impeded by emotional situations brought on by work or other external factors?

Dabamf_sl said:

Not all women are like that!

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If you help a friend kick the addiction of smoking, and you did do so via graphic, ugly stories/illustrations of the end result of their addiction, you?re a saint. However, if you advise him against marrying a woman you know will destroy his life in the long term, you?re a meddling misogynist with nothing better to do than stick your nose where it doesn?t belong. ?You just hate women and cast them all in the worst case scenario through sweeping generalizations!?

Eyashusa_sl said:

Lately this thread has been more about a bunch of guys taking their shitty situations and experiences with women and marriage and extrapolating it across all of society and trying to tell everyone else that we're wrong when we say our lives and relationships aren't like theirs.

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On the topic of generalizations and to further touch on Dabamf's trope about all women being "different"..

generalization

n 1: the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances [syn: abstraction, generalisation] 2:reasoning from detailed facts to general principles[syn: generalisation, induction, inductive reasoning] 3: an idea having general application; ?he spoke in broad generalities? [syn: generalisation, generality] 4: (psychology) transfer of a response learned to one stimulus to a similar stimulus [syn: generalisation, stimulus generalization, stimulus generalisation]

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Generalization gets a bad rap. The term really should be used in the way it was actually intended - drawing hypothesis and conclusions from a greater,generalwhole of observed behavior. Weshouldbe interested in the general rule, since it, and not the exceptions to it, help to better predict an outcome.

Generalizations are useful and we use them all the time to see the forest for the trees. They're not unrelated aberrations in a system that we use to describe the circumstances of that system, it?s the whole. We studymajoritiesto assess overall behavior, not aberrations. That?s the scientific definition of generalities, but when they refer to things that are close to us, we tend to put ourselves into the generalization and use the "not-in-my-experience!" mindset. You?d like to think that your experiences are unique and special (and they are, to you), but in the generality, we?re simply statistics. So, "generalize" automatically gets a negative connotation and the person using it is vilified, because it ends up being a vexation to our "unique" experiences.

The concept of generalization is the antithesis to women's innate, solipsistic perspective. I'm not saying that women can't be analytical or scientific in various areas, but I am saying that in regards to personal and larger social contexts, thinking in generalities is not their innate cognitive process. So, when their general behavior gets challenged, it's always met with, "Nuh-uh! I'm different! I'm not like all those other girls!". Or the feminized-male response of, "Dude, maybe you're just with a bad woman!". Obviously all women fall on various points of the curve, but in "general" theyallexhibit certain behaviors.