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!
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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.)
They totally are telling on themselves! It’s actually so telling that they don’t realize this.
Sounds like the SEP field mentioned below. These men hit the start button on the SEP field, and they’re good for the next hundred years! (And for no more than the cost of a single torch battery!)
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. 🙄
“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.”
I laughed. That’s great.
I’ve been reading through the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, so when I got to the part about “men just can’t see the mess,” guess where my mind went:
“An SEP,” he said, “is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s
what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is.”…”The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective [than an invisibility field], and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.”
–Life, the Universe, and Everything, chapter 3
Nailed it, Mr. Adams!
Oh, that’s so good! I wish I had known about that to put it in The Marriage You Want!
You haven’t read the right silly books, Sheila!
Hi Sheila, I have been enjoying your books and podcast for a long time now. Thanks for all you do! I am a GenXer with two young adult children. I have also read Eve Rodsky’s book. I think gender roles are flexible and arise largely from culture, but perhaps also from biological differences related to physical strength and childbearing. In any family, there is a certain amount of work that has to be done, including paid work (to pay the bills), housework, parenting, etc. Throughout the years, my husband has usually (but not always) done the larger portion of the paid work, and I’ve usually done a larger part of the housework and parenting. This has felt fair to both of us. However, there are two big things that threaten my ability to enjoy my work:
1) The complementarian idea that my husband is the leader of everything. No, I am the leader of our home! I am the one who decides when to buy new clothes for the kids and what we are bringing to the potluck. My husband is the helper. If he is doing the dishes and he decides to reorganize the cupboards, I will be angry, because this is my area and I am in charge.
2) The cultural idea that certain types of work, such as bearing the mental load of family life and cooking, are mere drudgery rather than real, skilled work. Since these tasks are currently done more often by women, it seems misogynistic to denigrate them. I want respect for doing these things! I am proud of myself for managing my home, like I am proud of myself for managing all of the tasks of my paid job. Both require skill; both are tiring and satisfying.
Hi L! I totally agree that you can be very skilled at managing a household, and that you can take pride in that and satisfaction from that. The problem is that research consistently shows that this is exhausting–far more exhausting than work outside the home. Research also shows that the people with the highest stress levels are stay at home mothers.
In addition, work from home doesn’t have a start and stop time, so you are literally always on.
So, yes, you can take great joy and satisfaction from it. But there is also a big imbalance if one person takes on the lion’s share of that task without much help. And that exhaustion, while it can be endured for a time, wears on you so that after two decades women have largely had it.
That is what the research shows, and it’s a HUGE driver of dissatisfaction in marriage, and it does need to be addressed. If you’re fine taking on the lion’s share, then that’s certainly your decision. The one thing I would warn about is what you’re showing your kids. If you raise your kids to expect that the woman will do everything, it could be that your daughters aren’t as willing to take on the lion’s share of something that is fundamentally more exhausting, and it’s very likely your sons will marry women who won’t be willing to do that. So teaching your kids the importance of sharing load is key to their future marital happiness too.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, Sheila! I would like to look more at the research on the exhaustion and stress of stay at home mothers versus those with other jobs. It doesn’t seem like the work of managing a home is inherently more stressful, so I wonder what other factors are in play.
I am okay doing more than half of the housework because my husband does more than half of the outside-the-home work, and because I feel like my work is valued by my husband and others. My kids are grown, but when they were growing up, I usually worked part-time outside the home, and my husband always worked full-time and did a chunk of housework and parenting. For the first couple of years, I had no outside job and he went off to work every day. When he came home, I considered my SAHM day to be done, and we divided up (or worked together on) whatever else had to be done for the day. We have always tried to do roughly the same amount of overall work.
I think we modeled partnership and consideration to our kids. I wanted them to know that various types of work are needed and valued, that both men and women can do various types of work, and that the most important thing is that everyone feels valued and that they are making roughly equal contributions. My young adult son is living at home right now and he is making dinner tonight. He has always been more interested in cooking than my daughter, so he makes more of a contribution in that area.
I can only speak for myself and somewhat for those who were in my circle at that time, but the stay at home moms I knew did not get to have their SAHM day end when dad came home. Our husbands did not know how to play with our kids without explicit instructions which we gave while we accomplished other tasks. They “needed to relax” after their “tiring” days at work. We knew that every time a kiddo was up in the middle of the night, we were responsible for covering it as dads had to get rest since they worked outside the home.
I was in charge of the majority of the outside and the inside chores because I was “home all day.” He covered finances because he made the money. My husband sulked when I had to get him to mow because I could not safely mow while keeping an eye on a busy toddler who napped inconsistently. On vacations, he would plan where we stayed, etc., but I had to explain why this or that place was bad for travelling with a kid. While on vacation, my husband got to relax while I took care of feeding kids and him (since I was already making sure to feed kids, it made sense to feed him, too). Going to the sea? He was clueless if a wave was going to knock our kid underwater who couldn’t for medical reasons be submerged.
On my rare night out or weekend away, I was called constantly to ask where this or that was (drinkware, diaper bags, etc.) It didn’t “make sense” for him to know where those things were because it was my job as a SAHM- after all, I wouldn’t go into his office and be expected to know where all the supplies were, could I? And since he did a full time job outside the home, when he was home that was his time to relax. He watched ballgames on weekends while I did dishes, laundry, weeded, vacuumed (during commercials only so as to not disturb his relaxtion, of course!), checked in on the kids so they didn’t hurt themselves and were quiet enough for him to hear what the score was, etc.
So for many, that is what is encompassed by the term stay at home mom. It never ended. I recently explained it to my husband like this: You work, live, eat, and sleep in your office. The phone/notifications must stay on and be answered immediately at all hours, day and night, weekends, holidays, sick days, etc. Your coworkers are only responsible for their portion, not yours. If they try to help you out, they do so while expecting you to explicitly explain the steps needed while you must continue doing the other task(s) you were already working on. Do this for months, years, decades. That stress level is not sustainable but is unfortunately what most of the SAHMoms in my circle lived out. Those are likely a lot of the extra factors at play.
I also was the “leader” in the house: I did all the things that kept it running and kept the children fed and clothed. The problem for me arose with the fact that my incessant hard work was denigrated to the point that I ended up knowing that I had no worth in the eyes of my husband, and eventually, of anyone else in my family. I actually enjoyed being queen of the household, but by the time I had been mentally and emotionally beaten down for three decades by my husband’s refusal to acknowledge the worth of what I was doing, I hated even the cooking part, which had previously been my favorite.
I feel that a great deal of the exhaustion we experience is due to the lack of recognition that we experience. And the fact that we are ALWAYS on call never helps. But we knew that.
Hi Lisa, what a tragic story. I’m so sorry about your experience. The work that you were doing should have been valued and respected, by your husband, family, and all of society.