Is “Acts of Service” a real love language?
Many of you may be familiar with the runaway best-seller by Gary Chapman The Five Love Languages, which argues that there are five different love languages, and we all have a preferred one:
- Acts of Service
- Gifts
- Words of Affirmation
- Physical Touch
- Quality Time
In Chapman’s paradigm, we all have a way that we feel loved the most, and we tend to want to show love in that same way. But we need to learn what our spouse’s love language is, because they may not feel love the same way we do.
Sounds okay, right?
And it is mostly benign–if that’s all it is. It is not, however, scientifically accurate, and a peer reviewed study came out last year going over how the “love language” idea is fundamentally flawed (I talked about the scientific issues with the five love languages here).
Basically, if a couple has never really communicated about how they want to connect, and they start talking about these five things, chances are it will help their marriage. But it isn’t actually based in science–and the book itself has some serious obligation sex messaging!
What I want to talk about today, though, is to ask: Is Gary Chapman seriously missing something when he talks about acts of service?
I have other issues with the way he’s framed the love languages, and we talk a lot about physical touch in chapter 8 of The Marriage You Want. But I want to focus today on the implications about acts of service.
Christian marriage authors have largely ignored mental load and imbalance in household labor.
When we wrote The Great Sex Rescue, we were amazed that Christian marriage authors talked so much about how women have to have more sex without ever mentioning the orgasm gap or the fact that evangelical women suffer from sexual pain disorders at twice the rate of the general population.
Like, that’s pretty fundamental stuff that they’re ignoring, right? And when you ignore the fact that for half of women sex isn’t that pleasurable, that means that all of your advice around sex just doesn’t work. This is too big an issue to ignore.
Well, that’s what we found with housework too.
In our survey of 7000 people for our new book The Marriage You Want (including 1300 matched pair couples), we found that it’s housework, not sex and money, which contributes the most stress in marriage. When housework goes from being shared to having one person doing virtually all of it, marital satisfaction drops 30 points. But when sex goes from several times a week to once a month, it only drops 10 points.
Yet when’s the last time you heard a sermon on how housework and mental load should be shared? In fact, Jimmy Evans and Willard Harley, in their books Marriage on the Rock and His Needs, Her Needs, actually say that having a wife do the housework is a God-given need of a man. When housework is preached about, then, it tends to be to tell women, “you’ve got to do all of it.”
We talked about this at length in last week’s podcast where we went over the unfairness threshold: How women can put up with something being very unfair for about a decade, but then marital satisfaction starts to really fall, and by year 20 she’s often cracking.
And three weeks we talked about what we called The Marriage Hierarchy of Needs, which we talk about in chapter 2 of The Marriage You Want. A marriage has basic needs, like meeting the bills, getting the kids fed and off to school, doing laundry, etc. And you really can’t care for the friendship aspect of your relationship, or put emotional energy into sex, if these basics aren’t being met.
And yet what often happens is that women are in the trenches just trying to survive and keep it all together, while men are worrying about more the “frills” of life.
What if Gary Chapman had a huge blindspot for unequal housework?
See, here’s the thing: gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, even physical touch–these are not things that are needed when the family is in survival mode. When you’re in survival mode, you just need to make sure there’s food on the table and that the clothes are washed. You need to make sure the chores are done.
So “acts of service” isn’t really a nice frill you add to make your relationship great. It’s something FOUNDATIONAL that is just part of surviving–at least if we’re interpreting “acts of service” to mean “doing things around the house to make the house work better.”
So we decided to test this, and asked our dataset:
Does the share of housework that you do impact your chance of choosing “acts of service” as your primary love language?
And I’ll let Joanna take it from here!
There are plenty of men and women who choose Acts of Service as their love language who just… really appreciate it when a person does a bonus task that makes them feel loved! Oftentimes it is that simple.
However, there are also folks (overwhelmingly women) who have to take on all of the household management, mental load, etc, etc, etc. And what are those folks going to pick as their love language? Very likely they’ll pick acts of service as it is the thing that would help their lives be livable!
And so I decided to look at how housework changes based on where women rate Acts of Service as a love language. (The trends on acts of service for men wasn’t statistically significant, which is why I’ve limited this discussion to women!)
Here’s my not-so-pretty graph that I came up with (the graphs in The Marriage You Want are ever-so-much-prettier, but we don’t have their fancy design team here at the blog!)
There was an 11 point shift in the percentage of the housework women did if they ranked acts of service at number 1 (68%) versus number 5 (57%). That is a HUGE swing!
Similarly, when I looked at how much free time women had based on what she chose as her love language, women reported having fewer hours of free time if they chose acts of service versus if they chose quality time.
All of this is exacerbated by the attitudes that surround acts of service in the book and in popular understandings. Chapman portrays himself as being excellent at acts of service because he vacuums the house weekly. But distributing household work is part of the work of managing a life together, not a cause for getting brownie points!
My husband and I both love acts of service. My husband worked as a carpenter for years to put himself through school and he will do elaborate projects like making a hydroponics garden for me. Similarly, I spent hours last summer using my artistic skills to paint miniatures for a DND bachelor party Josiah was throwing for his brother. Those are great examples of acts of service because they involved going above and beyond.
Another legitimate acts of service example is when one spouse takes on household tasks to facilitate the other’s life. Yesterday, Josiah sent me to the gym while he took care of some snow maintenance issues in our back alley. I thanked him profusely for allowing me to get in my first run after being away on vacation!
But neither of us frames it as an “act of service” when we unload the dishwasher! That’s just doing life!
Other examples of things which are NOT true acts of service include the following action items from The Five Love Languages:
Examples of “Acts of Service” Gary Chapman Gives in the Five Love Languages
- Make a list of all the requests your spouse has made of you over the past few weeks. Select one of these each week and do it as an expression of love.
- What one act of service has your spouse nagged about consistently? Why not decide to see the nag as a tag? Your spouse is tagging this as really important to him or her. If you choose to do it as an expression of love, it is worth more than a thousand roses.
- Ask your spouse to tell you the daily acts of service that would really speak love to him or her. These might include such things as putting your dirty clothes in the hamper, getting the hairs out of the sink, hanging up your clothes at night, closing the door when you go outside, preparing a meal, and washing the dishes. Seek to work those things into your daily schedule. “Little things” really do mean a lot.
My other big question after reading all of this: if I told my husband that my love languages were Quality Time and Words of Affirmation, would he not need to help around the house? Could I leave the door open during a Canadian winter ad nauseam if my husband said he didn’t rank Acts of Service highly?
Can someone make it make sense?
Do you see the problem with how Chapman framed Acts of Service?
Let’s look at those tips for a moment. He’s saying: if you put your own dirty clothes in the hamper, that’s the equivalent of a love language, of someone spending quality time with you or giving you a gift.
Putting your own dirty clothes in the hamper is something you should be doing for yourself because they’re your clothes, you dirtied them, and you’re a grown up.
This isn’t a love language; this is basic human responsibility.
Or he says, “take everything your spouse asked you to do in the last few weeks, and do ONE of them as an expression of love.”
What if your spouse has been asking you to do YOUR FAIR SHARE of the housework? What if your spouse is drowning because she’s taking care of most things on her own? And Chapman says–it’s okay, just do ONE of those things, and it’s an expression of love!
Or he says, if you actually do one of the things that she has been “nagging” (or “tagging”) you about, that’s better than a thousand roses.
No, doing the bare minimum doesn’t even count. That’s just the bare minimum. It’s not an act of love; it’s a requirement of partnership.
So he’s essentially telling guys especially: Hey, if you do the bare minimum, then she has to go above and beyond!
Acts of service aren’t like the other four things he names, and Chapman is making the imbalance in housework WORSE with this advice–and we know that this imbalance is the biggest driver of women’s marital satisfaction falling.
Just like Christian authors ignored the orgasm gap, so Christian marriage authors are ignoring the housework gap.
The Marriage You Want actually looks at what matters.
We’re not gimmicky. We’re not just based on opinion. We look at what’s going on with couples on the ground.
And that’s what makes this an OPTIMISTIC, DIFFERENT, and SAFE marriage book!
The Marriage You Want is HERE March 11!
(And the Launch Team is OPEN!)
Our new marriage book is almost here!
Pre-order it now--and get pre-order bonuses and an invite to the launch team--so you can start reading right away!
Let’s stop ignoring the biggest issues women have in marriage.
Let’s actually put those things front and centre, while also taking into account what men want too.
That’s how we create marriages we want!
And stay tuned tomorrow–because Joanna and I will be talking about these findings on the Bare Marriage podcast, PLUS what we learned about physical touch!
What do you think? Did Chapman miss something major with Acts of Service? Let’s talk in the comments!
I notice you tend to not like the idea of people making lists but as someone with ADHD it is actually recommended you make lists so you don’t forget certain tasks and steps of tasks. BUT… the idea is you make your own list not your wife. I thought I would point that out since a lot of therapists do recommend lists to help people with ADHD stay on track and it isn’t all bad.
Yes, making lists is absolutely fine–if you’re making it yourself as part of taking on the mental load for the task. But requiring your spouse to make a list is something else entirely.
And perhaps coming up with an ongoing list together is fine too (we talk about this in The Marriage You Want). But then the person is now responsible for keeping the list and doing what’s on that list!
Right! I figured that is what you meant! I think the biggest way to tell whether or not it is ADHD or male privilege is ask this: does your husband do this at work too and did he do this well before you married/lived together? Especially if this was an issue since childhood. In that case you might need help from a therapist and psychiatrist
The thing that bugs me most about that book is the way so many couples use it as an excuse for not putting the work in on their marriages.
We watched a video marriage course that featured it heavily, and with one of the couples, the guy was saying that he was spending hours crafting beautiful poems for his wife and she was begging him “I don’t want the poems, I just want you to spend time with me” and he got upset because she didn’t appreciate the poems he was giving her. Then they read the love languages book and suddenly he realised that his wife’s love language was quality time and that’s why she wasn’t appreciating the poems, so he stopped writing them and started spending time with her instead.
It was portrayed as this wonderful, marriage-strengthening thing. But my thought was: “Why didn’t he listen when his WIFE was telling him she needed quality time with him. Why did he need a MAN who didn’t know either him or his wife to tell him that his wife needed quality time before he would listen?”
Ground-breaking suggestion, men: if your wife is saying “I would rather you mowed the lawn than bought me a bunch of flowers” or “I would prefer you spent time with me instead of writing love letters”, then just listen to HER instead of waiting until you’ve read a book written by another man that says her request is valid.
Great point!
Ugh, THIS. I read a book from the late eighties called “Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope” in which a sexologist said that when a couple comes to see him with sex problems, he asks the woman what she needs to make the sex feel good. The woman tells him the exact same thing that she’s been telling her husband for years, then the sexologist repeats that very same thing to the husband, and that’s when the husband finally listens for the first time (hearing it from another man), and that’s how the couple’s sex problems get solved.
That’s a familiar pattern….
It made my marriage miserable. I have a friend who is checked out of her marriage because her husband does this to her with everything.
“But my thought was: “Why didn’t he listen when his WIFE was telling him she needed quality time with him. Why did he need a MAN who didn’t know either him or his wife to tell him that his wife needed quality time before he would listen?””
Because women don’t count?
For the same reason that women don’t “really” mean it when they tell a man “no” — because women “just don’t say what they mean.”
Where in H—LL did that one get started, anyway? It makes me so angry.
Closing the door when you go outside is an act of service!?🤣🤣🤣 Where does this author live that you can just leave an exterior door open!? Even in a warm region like mine, you wouldn’t do that. You’d make the AC work harder during the summer, and heaven help you if a squirrel or other animal gets inside to ransack things (I live in a wooded area). At the very least you’d need a screen door closed in front of the main door. He must not have pets or children that you’d have to worry about wandering outside either.
It really was a bizarre example.
I have a lot of issues with the love languages book. My biggest one is that so many people read it and, rather than learning to love their spouse better, use it to beat their spouse over the head with how their spouse is loving them wrong.
Having said that, insofar as it goes, my father’s love language was absolutely acts of service. He would basically take over from my mom when he walked in the door, and get us through baths and bedtime. He was always doing projects she had asked to have done around the house. He worked incredibly hard, and a lot of it went unappreciated and unnoticed. So I would caution that, while it’s absolutely necessary to be aware of the issues you are raising, it’s also important to recognize that this book frequently encourages people to only focus on what their spouse is doing wrong. We need to also assess how well we are loving our spouse, not just how well they are loving us. Acknowledging what someone does well is the first step in improvement, because no one is motivated by criticism.
Very interesting, I never thought of acts of service as being about helping with necessary housework that both people should be contributing to already. I thought of it as doing additional things such as washing the car which is not part of daily/weekly tasks or just taking over the usual chores of the spouse.
As I read more about the problems of The Five Love Languages, I can now see how acts of service can be used to weaponize like the one on physical touch. It comes off like keeping score in your marriage. For example, one person’s main love language is physical touch so they will interpret it as “If you give me more sex, then I will meet your love language which is acts of service. But in order for me to meet your love language such as doing the bare minimum of house work, you must give me sex x number of times a week.”
I am so over these formulaic Christian marriage books. This book could be seen as a tool in the toolbox of marriage, but not the only, correct formula for how to love someone. I guess the verses about love are just too vague and people want something super-specific such as how to love through The Five Love Languages, Marriage on the Rock(s), His Needs, Her Needs, etc. But these books are pretty much based on the opinions of these authors without actual research. Why not just talk to your spouse and ask them what they want? There’s no one-size-fits-all advice on how to have that perfect or ideal marriage.
I’ll tell you all something interesting. You can get two or more love languages knocked out of the park at once. Yesterday, my husband performed acts of service and quality time in one afternoon. Since he is an excellent driver and I cannot stand to drive long distances alone, he drove me to an out-of-town appointment (acts of service) and during that time, we got to spend some time together talking (quality time). Now, I don’t adhere to a specific love language and neither does he. It’s just like asking someone, “what do you need more, love or respect? And you cannot say both.”
“Now, I don’t adhere to a specific love language and neither does he. ” I’m puzzled that anyone does, to be honest. Do people’s ‘love languages’ not change based on circumstances?
If I’ve had a really exhausting day at work, then I’ll most appreciate my husband loving my by the act of service – cooking dinner, even though it’s my turn.
If I’m really upset, I might just want a hug.
If I’m facing a big challenge, then words of affirmation are probably most helpful.
If we’ve both had busy weeks and haven’t seen much of each other, then spending some quality time together is going to be most beneficial.
I’ve always found it a bit weird that I’m supposed to have one or two of these things that are more important for me than others!
I’m also a bit uncomfortable about the way most people talk about it – nearly always, it’s “my love language is … so I need…” I hardly ever hear “my partner’s love language is…”
The peer reviewed study we looked at in this post last year really said that there is no scientific basis for people having only one love language. Instead, we basically need a balanced diet of all of the things!
I can’t remember: did the survey ask if people thought household labor and childcare were a woman’s job?
Believing that as part of the foundation in marriage might affect how much both men and women rate inequalities of household labor and being an involved parent. If a guy’s baseline is “That’s HER job,” then he’s going to feel mighty proud of himself for playing catch with little Johnny for FIFTEEN WHOLE MINUTES on a random weekend. If SHE’S the only one who is “supposed” to do dishes, then she’ll fall all over herself “praising” him for doing a half-assed job of cleaning up the kitchen after supper once a month (note that “doing the dishes” almost always means a whole lot more than just washing what’s in the sink).
And, Gary, your examples of “putting your dirty clothes in the hamper, getting the hairs out of the sink, hanging up your clothes at night” aren’t acts of service AT ALL. Those are behaviors we expect out of kindergartners and preteens. If men are too immature to have mastered these basic skills and do them on a daily basis, they have zero business getting married and negative a zillion business writing books purporting to give “marital” advice.
If these are behaviours we would expect from any good roommate, then they are not “love language” messages. They are simply “decent human being” behaviours. What on earth is wrong with these authors? (I know, I know. They have such low expectations of men that they consider the bare minimum of human decency to be going above and beyond.)
Yep.
Or they’re too busy being SPIRITUAL(TM) to bother with bare-minimum human decency.
“It’s All Gonna Burn”, you know.
That’s exactly it, Jo. If those are his baselines (and they’re really just what a human being should be doing), and he thinks that’s a love language, then he has no business writing marriage books.
Remember Job’s Counselors?
It’s always those who have never been there who are full of glib advice for those who are.
Oh this book is going to be a depth charge I can already tell.
I sure hope so!
I never would have thought that “acts of service” encompassed basic household tasks.
To me, an act of service could be:
Your wife’s car is low on gas; it’s 10 pm and freezing cold; you take her car to the gas station and fill it up for her so she doesn’t have to do it in the morning.
Your husband is working long hours and decompresses by going to the gym. He doesn’t want to leave you in the lurch, though. You go find a decent treadmill and weight rack on Facebook Marketplace, clean out a corner of the basement, and set it up for him so he can work out when the kids are asleep.
If you want to say that “not being a gross slob who leaves hair in the sink” is an act of service, can we say that showering and using deodorant count as physical intimacy?
Jane Eyre this made me laugh so hard. Brilliant. I needed that today.
Excellent question!
“I spent hours last summer using my artistic skills to paint miniatures for a DND bachelor party Josiah was throwing for his brother.”
YOU PAINT MINIS?
(Gamer here, from Old School D&D to Old School SF & Fantasy miniatures.)
Cool stuff dude. Mini painting is so good as a hobby.
Keith paints minis too!
This reminds me of the marriage counselor who was surprised that I associated lack of cleaning with lack of love. “If he doesn’t clean because he’s a slob, that has nothing to do with love!!”
This reminds me of multiple times when husband (now ex) would clean something and get upset that I didn’t initiate sex because “I spoke your love language, but you didn’t speak mine”. Once, I even apologized because I didn’t want to be an unloving person, but I felt gross when I realized he was basically buying sex. Then, I also realized that the majority of times I gave him sex, he didn’t clean something in return.
This reminds me of the time I thanked him for doing something, and he said, “words of affirmation aren’t my love language”, so I was frustrated that I had no way to encourage specific behaviors. That time, he wasn’t using it to get sex, but it was still clear that I couldn’t encourage him to repeat the good behavior.
That’s definitely weaponizing the whole idea!
This is kind of complicated to untangle, because there are people who really do feel good about serving their partner, or feel proud of their ability to make a good home for their partner/family, feel like that’s important to their identity- and those feelings are valid- but also it’s very much influenced by how women are socialized to believe that this is what we *should* want to do, and what we *should* base our sense of value on. So, maybe some people want to do more housework than their partner because they like to express love through acts of service. Which is fine on an individual level, but it says something about society’s expectations for women.
But even if you’re that kind of person, it doesn’t mean you want to do ALL the housework yourself! Typically it’s more like, you take pride in some specific aspect of caring for your home/family- like you want to spend a lot of time on cooking and do a really good job. I don’t think anyone takes pride in cleaning other people’s hair out of the sink?
If a woman is just slotted into the role of doing all the housework, and she wishes her husband would do his share but he never does, and so it’s framed as “she shows love by doing acts of service, and she wants to receive love from her husband by him doing acts of service” that’s NOT COOL.
Exactly. It’s like, everyone should have to do basic stuff because everyone contributes to mess. And Acts of Service doesn’t mean you’re someone’s maid!
Very good points. Esp. Expecting the bare minimum to be extraordinary. Or acting like an adult is not an act of service. Eg. Mine IS acts of service, whether it the garbage or bathroom Remo. His, acts of service. Using that model, I get off easy. 😉😁
It is merely a model and not the be all or end all that will make or break a marriage. Bigger and important issues,”Bare Marriage” covers.
“ putting your dirty clothes in the hamper, getting the hairs out of the sink, hanging up your clothes at night, closing the door when you go outside, preparing a meal, and washing the dishes. Seek to work those things into your daily schedule. “Little things” really do mean a lot.”
The bar is on the floor.
My 12 year old kid can do all of these, plus fold his own laundry and take out the trash. (Does he do it without being reminded? No, but that’s another story). These are all just basic life things everybody needs to learn to do. An adult who feels like they are graciously serving someone else by putting their OWN laundry in the hamper wasn’t raised right, imo.
I love that your 12 year old can do those!! Even if he needs a reminder, at least he’s not 30!!
My daughter with autism knows how to separate clothes, move clothing from the washer to the drier, turn the drier to the correct settings, fold the clothes, take them to the correct owners, and take out the trash. She also helps with other simple household chores. You don’t have to be autistic to be able to do these things.
It could also keep people in boxes instead of encouraging growth. “That’s not how I express love” is an easy “out” to not having to learn how to be verbally loving with another, or figure out how to buy someone a gift they like, or indeed to be a decent human by doing normal chores.
Sounds like you met my ex 🤭.
I wish I had exact wording but in Five love Languages: Men’s Edition, he speaks about how vacuuming is an act of service because when he was younger his mother made him do it before he got to go play, so he came to despise the chore and wrote, “I’m gonna get a wife one day so she can vacuum”! But now he does it every so often and because it doesn’t come naturally to him, is an act of service for his wife.
I really didn’t like having to be pigeonholed to one or two love languages when hubby & I read this. All five things are really nice & appreciated! If you always did x, and never or hardly ever a,b,c, or d…. I’d wonder if you really loved me! lol.
But the again, it has to speak to the person your with. Like, gifts are nice but if you bought me something I wouldn’t use or eat…. I mean, I suppose the thought was there, but almost like an “oh I should so here ya go with no thought about the person receiving it”
Putting your clothes in the hamper? Getting the hair out of the sink? That’s basic adulting. Why should a grown man get brownie points for basic adulting?
And picking ONE thing to do from the list your wife gives you?! That’s just to shut her up. Now if she asks you to do another thing that’ll help her now drown, why, she’s just UNGRATEFUL. She’ll NEVER BE SATISFIED. You CAN’T MAKE HER HAPPY. It’s just another way to take away her voice in her destiny.
The egg’s on your face, Gary.
Yep!
I think some people really do give over and above with acts of service. The book was really helpful to me when I was totally single and living with my gram, whose love language was definitely acts of service (can’t count the number of times she came to our house to clean when I was growing up, including one pretty gnarly task involving us starting a flock of chickens in our enclosed porch and keeping them there until they were fully feathered…that was nasty, but she cleaned it!) I pretty quickly figured out that my love language was quality time, and I wanted to spend time with my gram just being with her – like, knitting in the TV room with her while she watched TV – and learned that if I was spending time with her because I loved her, but my bedroom and bathroom upstairs were trashed, she was definitely not feeling the love.
That being said, I wonder how many responsible, well-behaved firstborn daughters like me would say quality time is our language, and the reason we don’t even realize is because we didn’t get much of it growing up? (To get credit, my mom did try to establish a weekly date with me, because she did realize I was getting back-burnered, but that didn’t last very long before it got squeezed out by other pressures.)
In any case, as a single 20-something, the notion that my husband should pick one thing from a list of NEEDS I’ve been begging for for weeks or months, do it to appease me, and then expect me to feel well-loved and like he’s gone over and above for me, went right over my head. Or maybe I was just so pickled in the patriarchal kool-aid that it sounded right and good. Which is sad.
I think a lot of this went over our heads when we read it! It’s wild when you think about it.
I think most people need all of the 5 areas of “love.” However, many of us may feel a greater desire for one or two which made the book feel more credible. E.g. For me, words are needed because they were used to punish me/keep me in my “place,” so words of affirmation are enormous! I wonder if those of us who were denied some of the 5 found ourselves buying into the theory even more because we had already been so damaged and unloved , particularly in one of those areas?
Many men may actually desire physical touch because they lacked feeling loved growing up. They didn’t learn the emotional skills needed, so they mask with oxytocin release. However I’d argue, based on the coddling/fawning E.E. and others require, that they desire words of affirmation much more than they realize or will admit to. If they say they prefer words, perhaps they are afraid women will only give words instead of also giving them sex? Which is a problem with the idea of putting most of your eggs into one love language “basket.”
I think anyone who predominantly wants only one area could benefit from exploring if there might be a reason behind that desire, much like women with little household help desire acts most.
That whole, “closing the door” thing is ridiculous though! I guess it’s one more male/female difference: Chapman thinks a closed door is love, and Anna from the movie Frozen thinks love is an open door. Just can’t win.
HAHA about Frozen!
I definitely think the love language approach likely shows what we’re lacking for sure.
Thinking about this more:
One of the reasons that many women prefer to not marry young is that they want men who have lived on their own. They don’t want men whose mommies cleaned up after them until 18, then had the dining hall feed them and the janitors clean up in college, turn to them at age 22 and expect their new bride to do all those chores, too.
They want a man who has had to run his own household, even if that household is himself and his goldfish. The guy knows that the dishwasher doesn’t empty itself and that clothes don’t get clean.
If you are turning basic adulting (or even basic “you aren’t three years old”) into an act of service… are you encouraging or discouraging young marriage?
Wouldn’t it be better to push men to be more self-sufficient as young adults so that they will appeal to young women?
Excellent point!