What if there’s a Bigger problem in marriage than sex or money?
We always hear that the two biggest issues in marriage are sex and money, right?
Wrong.
One of our findings in our matched pair survey for our new book The Marriage You Want (out March 11!) that blew us away was how HUGE the effect of unfairness in housework has on couples.
It’s HUGE. It’s monumental. It blows everything else out of the water.
It’s largely the reason that sex is bad.
And yet NO ONE is talking about it.
And so today–we do!
Or, as always, you can watch on YouTube:
This may step on some toes–but we have to take the unfairness threshold seriously.
We’re going to share in today’s podcast the finding that surprised us the most.
Basically, people can put up with something being unfair for about 10-15 years. But then one day they break, and they can’t take it anymore. And that’s why we see so many divorces at years 20-25. It’s not because people just “drifted apart.” It’s not because she “spent too much energy on the kids.”
It’s because things were unfair for far too long, and the body can only put up with that for so long.
Now, unfairness, when it’s the guy who faces it, is also highly destructive. But the simple fact is that when it comes to:
- Sex
- Housework
- Making medical/dental appointments
- Being the one to initiate repair in the relationship
- Taking care of kinkeeping
the unfairness tends to go in one direction: women bear it. It doesn’t mean men don’t; it’s just that women are far more likely to.
What we found is that in roughly 50% of marriages, things are equitable. But in the other 50%, she tends to do the lion’s share. So either marriages are 50/50, or they’re heavily weighted in her direction. They’re very rarely heavily weighted in his (but it does happen).
And when housework especially is unfair, we see a HUGE drop in marital satisfaction, EVEN IF she’s a stay at home mom. You can only handle the unfairness for so long.
This is a GREAT episode to listen to with your spouse, if you’re trying to get them to understand what you’re experiencing!
And it’s all in chapter 5 of The Marriage You Want!
The Marriage You Want is HERE March 11!
(And the Launch Team is OPEN!)
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Pre-order it now--and get pre-order bonuses and an invite to the launch team--so you can start reading right away!
Things Mentioned in the Podcast
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What do you think? Does the unfairness threshold resonate with you? Why do you think things break at the 15-20 year mark? Let’s talk in the comments!
Transcript
Coming soon!
“either marriages are 50/50, or they’re heavily weighted in her direction. They’re very rarely heavily weighted in his.”
Wow. Just wow. I mean I knew this, there are plenty of stats that show women do way more housework than their male partners, even if the woman earns more income. But putting it this way it sounds so stark. It makes me want to say to all those silly guys who complain about feminism, “Look, what’s the worst you have to worry about? Statistically, your worst case scenario is you might have to pull your own weight in a relationship. Whereas a woman’s is, she might end up doing her own share while carrying you on her back too.”
Jimmy Evans says men want domestic support. Who doesn’t? I don’t think I linked this on that blog post, but it’s a good one:
http://www.columbia.edu/~sss31/rainbow/wife.html
—
Men have the ILLUSION of a “nothing box” because women have the REALITY of being responsible for everything.
I started doing the nothing box myself about two years ago, and it was GREAT. More recently, I’ve been paring back obligatory stuff to the bare minimum and removing the vast majority of the optional stuff. So, no more putting the flag out on the porch and taking it down every day. It just never gets put out anymore. I “stopped noticing” when someone else was out of their soap, as we have a LONG-established tradition of a running grocery list in a very public place, and if someone else can’t be bothered to put “my soap” on the list, why the 🤬 should I spend brain cells noticing they’re out of their soap?
—
“Fair Play” may work for men who realize there are inequalities. But let’s face it, those inequalities favor men, so most men are going to pretend to be ignorant of certain basic life realities: that kids need food and a clean environment (which in turn require meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning up, and regular house cleaning); that bills must be paid to prevent the electricity and water from being shut off, the car being repossessed, and being kicked out of one’s house or apartment for not paying the mortgage or rent; that everybody’s clothes need laundering.
Men know these things. But dealing with getting yelled at is way easier than actually getting off their a$$e$ and doing even the minimum of effort toward any of those tasks.
Or the “just make me a list!” excuse. Dude, you researched how to strip down the carburetor in your 65 Mustang. You can find lists of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semiannual, and yearly tasks that are generally required to keep a household functioning.
Be enough of a “leader” to admit you’re just lazy and don’t want to do any of these things.
Zawn makes the case that this is all deliberate (langauge warning for the faint of heart):
https://zawn.substack.com/p/why-household-labor-inequity-is-abuse
She also has several articles on “Fair Play” itself.
—
So when wives give husbands lower quality sex than the men want, the men are going to shut their bloody traps about it, right? She’ll be able to say, “It may not be exactly the way you want it, but you’re getting something good enough,” right???? Yeah, that’ll fly. 🙄
I definitely see this played out in lots of marriages. No wonder I’ll hear women refer to their husbands as the other child. Yet, these same women talk about how husbands are supposed to be the leaders in the marriage. Yet, they just have the title but aren’t doing anything to be leaders except for make the final decision or be the tie-breaker.
Thankfully, none of this is played out in my marriage, but I just got remarried last year at 47. His kids are grown, so we are not dealing with the typical parenting stuff like science fair projects and piano lessons. I feel like we are equal partners which is what I have always wanted and prayed for after having had a lousy marriage during my 20s.
I’m so glad, Laura! It’s just so fun to watch how well you’re doing!
Appreciated your 2 most recent pods. So helpful, especially as we try to break the spell of horrible teaching my husband and I received in our formative years in the church. We’re trying to give our 5 kids healthier visions of marriage. We quote your material often! So glad the Sons of Patriarchy pod had you on. You were excellent!
I saw a “comic” online this week of a man proposing to a woman. His proposal was, “Would you do me the honor of taking on even more responsibilities while my life remains largely unchanged?” That’s what we were taught was God’s design for marriage in the church…and boy, does it destroy marriages.
Oh, that really gets to the heart of it, doesn’t it? Ouch!
I wonder how much longer women will be willing to go along with this…
I hear so much about the crisis of masculinity. I wonder if the REAL crisis is that there is a huge swath of men who simply need to figure out the following: in a world in which women no longer NEED men to survive financially bc women can finally get properly educated, buy homes, have credit cards, enjoy the fullness of human existence without a man (which was a pipe dream until very recent history), what if she actually WANTED a man around because the relationship led to the mutual flourishing of not just the man but both the man AND the woman.
The crisis is no crisis at all. It’s just men having to personally negotiate what it would be like to ADD something profoundly good to another person’s life. If young men could figure that out, perhaps the “crisis” would be over?
Strange that the church, with the ultimate Man as the example, put forth the idea that masculinity is fundamentally, at its core, profoundly selfish. And behold! God made an entire sex to be endlessly sacrificial to feed the selfishness. What a deal!
Where are they finding this message? Not in Scripture, that’s for sure. These men writing books with zero credentials are only laying bare how disturbingly selfish they are. They were never writing about God’s design. They were only making the iron-clad public case for why each of them desperately needs therapy…and how we should all be deeply, deeply concerned for these authors’ wives and children. (I’ve heard you make this case about these authors. My favorite is when I’ve heard you say that these men can only claim expertise in one marriage, namely, their own, since they aren’t credentialed in anything. They’re just mediocre men who were fooled by a Christian sub-culture that’s aggressively allergic to expertise into thinking they have what it takes to write books on sex and marriage. So when they posit that “women don’t enjoy sex,” they’re only telling on themselves. No, brother. You just said publicly that your wife really despises sex with YOU. This is a you problem, not a female problem. Makes me laugh every time I think about it.)
Jimmy Evans says men want domestic support. Who doesn’t? I don’t think I linked this on that blog post, but it’s a good one:
http://www.columbia.edu/~sss31/rainbow/wife.html
—
Men have the ILLUSION of a “nothing box” because women have the REALITY of being responsible for everything.
I started doing the nothing box myself about two years ago, and it was GREAT. More recently, I’ve been paring back obligatory stuff to the bare minimum and removing the vast majority of the optional stuff. So, no more putting the flag out on the porch and taking it down every day. It just never gets put out anymore. I “stopped noticing” when someone else was out of their soap, as we have a LONG-established tradition of a running grocery list in a very public place, and if someone else can’t be bothered to put “my soap” on the list, why the 🤬 should I spend brain cells noticing they’re out of their soap?
—
“Fair Play” may work for men who realize there are inequalities. But let’s face it, those inequalities favor men, so most men are going to pretend to be ignorant of certain basic life realities: that kids need food and a clean environment (which in turn require meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning up, and regular house cleaning); that bills must be paid to prevent the electricity and water from being shut off, the car being repossessed, and being kicked out of one’s house or apartment for not paying the mortgage or rent; that everybody’s clothes need laundering.
Men know these things. But dealing with getting yelled at is way easier than actually getting off their a$$e$ and doing even the minimum of effort toward any of those tasks.
Or the “just make me a list!” excuse. Dude, you researched how to strip down the carburetor in your 65 Mustang. You can find lists of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semiannual, and yearly tasks that are generally required to keep a household functioning.
Be enough of a “leader” to admit you’re just lazy and don’t want to do any of these things.
—
So when wives give husbands lower quality sex than the men want, the men are going to shut their bloody traps about it, right? She’ll be able to say, “It may not be exactly the way you want it, but you’re getting something good enough,” right???? Yeah, that’ll fly. 🙄