He is who he is. You picked him. No, that’s not his fault, that’s your fault. |
Nothing on that list rings true for our household at all (and one of us is SAH). |
That doesn't make sense. Even if you assume men spend the extra 14 minutes that women apparently spend sleeping to do work or leisure, it doesn't explain the discrepancy. Do men simply have more time than women? Or is there work that is not being accounted for. Because why would women spend less time on leisure AND on work of all kinds. What is it that women are doing in the missing time? |
Men create more housework. And because they are less accustomed to DOING housework, they don't know how to live in a way that minimizes it. My husband will clomp through the house with muddy boots on, wander down hallways and through rooms while eating crackers, toss mail onto tables such that it falls behind the table, bang a spoon on the side of a pot so flecks of sauce get on the wall and cabinets, and so forth. But he never vacuums or mops, never fishes the mail out from against the wall, never wipes down the cabinets or the backsplash. If I ask him to take more care with these behaviors so less mess is made, he accuses me of being controlling. If I say "okay, then I need you to vacuum and mop and wipe things down," he complains my cleaning standards are too high. If I want to live in a house where I can walk through a room barefoot without getting bits of dirt and food on my feet, or where we don't have food on the walls of our kitchen, I have to do it myself. This was really brought home during Covid. Men are so hard on homes. Having my DH home all the time created cleaning issues that had never existed before. The floor under his workspace in the living room became worn and dirty very quickly and I started having to mop it and treat the wood, even though I work in the same room and have never had to do this before. More dishes, more spills, more random items left all over the house. The bathroom gets gross faster (and I don't mean it just gets dirtier -- I mean it get's gross). I have been cleaning up after myself, with normal hygiene standards (as opposed to "single guy in his 20s" hygiene standards) my whole life, so I know how to live more lightly and make less work for myself. Men don't get this. Men are generally as messy if not more so than children and pets, and one reason married women spend more time cleaning is that they are cleaning up after their husbands, even before kids enter the picture. |
DP but I hate this argument because it assumes that women know what kinds of husbands and fathers men are going to be. We don't. It's all guesswork. I believe some women have better "pickers" and are better at selecting partners who will show up. But I also don't think it's possible for a woman to fix her picker. I also think a lot of me do an okay job of convincing themselves and the women they marry that the really, actually want an egalitarian marriage, and then later (after kids come along) they are happy to lean into their male privilege to escape doing work. I see it in my husband, my brothers, some of my friends and some of my friends' husbands. It is easy to be like "of course I'll do my share!" when you are 28 and dating a woman you like and being a progressive feminist man makes you seem more attractive. It's very different when you are 48 and you are pretty sure that even if you shirk a lot of stuff, your wife won't leave you because you have two kids together and your finances are all bound up together and she's middle aged too. Men will woo with "we're equals, baby." They don't always stick with it. |
That missing time gap could easily be explained by morning make-up and hair styling, and evening grooming, nails, brows, hair coloring. |
Not my experience at all. I am definitely less organized and messier than my husband. Careful with your gendered assumptions. A lot of issues people are bringing up in this thread sound like personality issues rather than "dad privilege". |
That seems like a reasonable guess, and is presumably in the data. My biggest takeaway from looking at the actual time use data, rather than articles about the time use data, is that men and women do similar amounts of work, but distributed differently, and that on average both have pretty decent amounts of leisure time. It does make these fights seem like tempests in a teapot, at least at a societal level. Individual cases may be different, obviously. |
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… why’d you have more than one kid with the guy? Twins? |
It’s 2024. Go get yourself a roomba or two. Or is the “mental load” of programming it one time and taking 30 seconds a day to empty the filter too much for you? |
A roomba costs a minimum of $350, and oh yeah, they break constantly and don't really work that well. How about if there are two adults in a home and one of them is fine vacuuming when necessary and the other is allergic to the vacuum, the person with the vacuum allergy buys the stupid roomba (or two ). |
It's 2024. A man should know how to use a vacuum cleaner by now. |
Men do vacuum. You've got a lazy spouse problem, not a man problem. |
But in this scenario the man doesn’t care about being able to walk through the house barefoot or eat off the floors. The woman does. So vacuum every day and constantly p!$$ and moan about it, or maybe get a roomba and have your dirt free floors with practically zero effort on your part. How’s the saying go? Work smarter, not harder? |
Is $350 more or less expensive than a divorce? |