(image from Amazon.com)
Commenter Slim mentioned reading All the Rage, by Darcy Lockman, and further mentioned having two copies to give away if we wanted to do something for Mother’s Day, which possibly we do. This is how Slim described the book:
Basically, straight married mothers’ brains are melting because our husbands think that doing a better job than their fathers is the same as doing a good job.
I don’t think I would mind dealing with all the stuff I have to do if I didn’t have to do it under the same roof as a grownass adult who makes my life harder.
Well, SOLD. I got a copy from my library, and I have finished it, and it is BRISTLING with slips of paper marking Good Parts. Some samples:
• “…couples with low levels of male partner participation in domestic chores are more likely to separate than couples in which men do more. As satisfaction with a male partners’ help increases, so, too, do positive marital interactions, closeness, affirmation, and positive affect. As it decreases, thoughts of divorce, negative affect, and depression go up—for mothers. Although perceived unfairness predicts both unhappiness and distress for women, it predicts neither for men, who often do not seem to fully register the problem.”
• “Writes [Stephanie] Coontz, ‘Self-reliance and independence worked for men because women took care of dependence and obligation.'”
• “Worrying to no purposeful end is unfortunate, but productive worry stimulates action: the scheduling of well-child visits, the installation of outlet plugs, the introduction of solid foods. The fathers in Walzer’s study both pathologized their wives for their vigilance and connected it to their babies’ well-being. It is not, however, connected to a mother’s well-being.”
• “Yana’s husband never explicitly turns down her requests [for help with housework and children]—but he routinely fails to fulfill them.”
• “Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade summed up what she has seen like this: ‘Men find ways of being so difficult that it’s not worth it. You do it yourself.'”
• “Men do not pause to consider the experience of the other, or at the very least, they appear unmoved by it.”
• “Imagine if your children’s father said these things to you, directly and out loud: Women are easy to take advantage of, your efforts are ultimately unnecessary, the needs of our family are not worth my attention, and I’ll choose the more selfish thing. Fathers are implying every last bit of this with their resistance all the time.”
• I wish I had copied a quote from this section before returning the book, but I didn’t mark it so I forgot, but what I keep thinking about is the part where they found couples who said they were equals, where even the woman of the couple said they were equals and she was satisfied with the equal division of labor; and when the scientists/sociologists studied those couples, they found they were NOT equals and the women were doing more. In every single case.
The book did make me feel angry. But more than that, it made me feel Seen and Validated: the inequality I’m experiencing has been observed and analyzed in numerous studies; I am not imagining how unfair it is and how maddening it is; I am not the only one who can’t figure out how to fix it. And the WAYS in which it manifests, also Seen and Validated: the husbands who “forget” to do something, or just sort of Don’t Do It; the husbands who claim they just have to be asked to help (but the wives do not need to be asked); the husbands who know that if they drop the ball their wives will take care of it; the husbands who make their own lives the priority over everyone else’s while their wives work for the common good of the family; the husbands who simply Opt Out of responsibility for handling things, so that the wives are forced to handle all those things.
I recommend the book to you if your library has it—and, now that I’ve read it, would probably go so far as to recommend buying it if you can’t borrow it and can find it at an affordable price. And perhaps we will see about getting Slim’s copies out there for Mother’s Day—let’s think more on that.
I’m putting this one on my to-read list. If you want to read about the fallout of this kind of behavior I recommend The American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/157981711
Looks really good! This quote spoke to me: ‘Self-reliance and independence worked for men because women took care of dependence and obligation.’ How many careers and achievements are launched off of the backs of wives, right?! I think of the writers, scientists, and business execs who work long hours and get to ignore their children because their wives are taking care of all of the family work.
THIS! EXACTLY! And if I won even a small enough sum in the lottery to make up for a second income (my paycheck is much smaller due to years of unpaid labor), I would immediately get a divorce.
Years of unpaid labor are often compensated in the divorce process by alimony and spousal support while you retrain for a higher paying job. See a lawyer; they will often advise you for an initial consultation for free. Happiness should not depend on winning the lottery.
(I would just like to note on top of all this that there are people out there actually telling single women that they are being *too picky* what with wanting someone who will, you know, carry at least some of the collective load, either financial or household or emotional, and *also* that it is selfish for them to remain happily, self-supportingly single. SERIOUSLY. Y’ALL.)
I say be MORE PICKY! I married an equal partner, very intentionally. Don’t waste one second on a baby man, women. Move along.
My husband appears to just about anyone except those that live in our house as an equal partner, and before kids I would have told you that he was going to be. We are both very successful and have moved to support both of our careers. But peer pressure at work and from some acquaintances, subtle pressure/expectations from his family, small personal disappointments and the sheer workload of juggling careers and kids create a situation where the world validates 1000 small choices by him that add up to making us unequal. Like he has chosen to take a week long vacation with his friends fishing and another taking a woodworking class. He gets positive feedback from everyone but me – the one stuck with the kids and work, not to mention having to pay for these trips out of the vacation budget. Then I’m the bad guy, except when I try to take a weekend his mom calls to see if she can come help him (of and stay an extra week so J have to deal with her before I leave. Joy). It started as a weekend when our first was born and just grew, as has my resentment.
Its funny when we are out with other parents and as “clueless but loving dad” he doesn’t know who the kids teachers are, but it’s not funny when he never remembers what they won’t eat for lunch and someone goes hungry because he inevitably gives PBJ to the kid who refuses to eat PBJ. Even less funny when that is the day that kid has to run in their first x country meet. Kids make lunch now because you can’t trust dad.
Yet he would tell you he is an equal partner because he does the dishes and cooks a few nights a week and puts kids to bed. I just do 100% of the thinking.
Doesn’t know who the kids teachers are?? Not cute. Not charming. These stories make me question how they function at work.
JD–this exactly describes what was my situation. Everyone living outside the house thought it was a model 50-50 partnership. I just did all the thinking that made it appear that way.
“My husband appears to just about anyone except those that live in our house as an equal partner, and before kids I would have told you that he was going to be.”
JD, YES, so much this. I never mention that my husband does most of the cooking, because I always get responses about how lucky I am, how much I must appreciate his “help,” etc. I hate it! I do more than half the housework, probably 80% of the child care, and 100 damn percent of the mental load, but I’m supposed to drop to my knees to worship him because he cooks dinner (after I did that for years when he worked evenings)?
Fuck that.
He cooks dinner for himself and his family. He’s not doing you a “favor.” I used to get this crap all the time until I started saying things like “he picks up his own kid from daycare, he cleans his own house, he’s buying groceries for the home in which he lives…..” until family members stopped saying I was “lucky.” I never let that pass without a comment. I refuse to normalize it.
I saw a Youtube discussion about some awful toxic masculinity video dating “advice”. And the comment that stuck the most with me is that men aren’t competing with other men. They are competing with a woman’s peace.
My husband once said ‘if you didn’t want three kids, you shouldn’t have gotten married and had two kids’.
Did you kick him?
That’s the only reasonable response.
I can’t decide if Seen and Validated wins out over Angry (i.e. if I should read this or if it would just piss me off), but I’m thinking about adding it to my list. I appreciate this review and that I am far from the only person who feels this way!
I occasionally daydream about splitting up household items like pots and pans if we were to get a divorce. (“Ok, we have 2 large frying pans so we could each get one, but this cast iton pan is newer so if i took that one, he would get this other pan….”) Please tell me I’m not the only one who does this!?
I doooo this! Mine is more like, “he can keep this, he can keep this, he can keep this…..”
I read this book after I saw it mentioned in the comments here, and while it resonated with me I also felt kind of left out of the narrative, as a stay at home non-working mother. Most of the research and anecdotes were about working women who ALSO were expected to pick up the slack at home, so to an extent I didn’t think she was including moms who are home by design. (Why, after 15 years, am I still struggling to explain that I don’t have a job but still work as a mom? Especially here, where I think you all know what I mean)
I did enjoy it and recommended it to a (work outside the home) mom friend. And I’m very glad you read it bc I’m looking forward to reading everyone else’s take on it!
Oh. This is me too.
I am also: will seen and validated outweigh the rage?
I am keeping ALL THE THINGS in the event of a split, just FYI.
Several years ago (possibly as much as 10 because my kids were still little-ish), during a discussion of some study about household chore splitting, I said to my spouse that I saw my job as taking care of my children because if I worked outside the home I would be paying someone else for that job. So I always saw child care as my job. It just happened to be for my own children. That I wasn’t getting paid for.
The look on my spouse’s face told me he had NEVER considered what I was doing as a job. Probably because I wasn’t getting paid.
YES: when my children were small and I was taking care of them, that is how it was: if I were not doing that work, and were instead doing other work, we would have had to pay someone else to do the work I was doing. Like, there was no option where neither of us would do the work I was doing; and we both would do other, paid work; and we wouldn’t have to pay someone to do the work I was doing: the work I was doing needed to be done either by me or by Paul or by a paid person. I was doing the work of a paid person; I was doing it “for free”—but what was actually happening was that my work meant we didn’t have to pay the person who would have charged us to do it, which means I was providing that monetary benefit to the household. And if I weren’t doing the childcare, it’s not as if we would have been dividing that work between us: someone else would have been doing it, removing it from the equation. So when we came back together at the end of our days of both working full-time (Paul as a software engineer, Swistle as a childcare provider), we still needed to evenly divide the household/childcare work that remained.
This resonates with me. I have been home with my kids for almost 2 decades, a lot of that was spent homeschooling, and now I’m trying to get into the labor market. It’s hard, because most of the work, even for entry level stuff is full time. I know that being home is a full-time job and I don’t want to add another full time job to the one that I already do. I wonder how you do the mental gymnastics to get yourself to the place of being ready to work full time or do you just do it knowing it will absolutely suck and you will be exhausted always.
I am also reluctant to read it due to the anger it will for sure incite in me. I felt that way after reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez.
Yes! This discussion was putting me in mind of that book too!
This seems like a perfect opportunity to kvetch about something that happened this past weekend as it epitomizes why I would both like to read that book and am afraid it would infuriate me, and I need a private space to gripe in: I woke my family up at 10:00 on Saturday because we had to be at a potluck brunch a 40 minute drive away in an hour. When I got to my husband, his response to “We have to be in the car in 20 minutes” was “We have to be in the car earlier so I can stop and pick up an iced coffee.” This conversation ensued:
Shawna: We have a good coffee maker here, can’t you just make yourself a coffee? Pour it over ice if you want? You can do that while I’m taking a quick shower.
Husband: Or you can do like the rest of us and skip showering.
S: I haven’t showered in a couple of days.
H: Neither have we. Oh wait, I showered at the gym last night.
S: So I’ll take 10 minutes to shower and get dressed. You can easily just make a coffee while I do.
I go into the bathroom seething and turn on the shower, then march out again.
S: I need to tell you that I am angry.
H: Okay. (And goes to walk away!)
S: No, I need to tell you why too – I got up a 7:00 to feed and medicate the dogs. Then I prepped our brunch contribution, cooked it, packaged it up, and cleaned up all the dishes from the prep. I also chopped up the cauliflower in preparation for cooking it later today, and all the extra broccoli. And a pineapple. And I hid all the treats for the Easter hunt and made the family Easter basket. And exercised the puppy for awhile. Now I want to take a 10 minute shower and you act like I’m selfish for not sacrificing it so you can pick up an iced coffee. Just MAKE one!
Gentle readers, he literally hardly spoke to me for the rest of the day. I’d like to think he was feeling guilty, but I honestly don’t know if he was, or if he was sulking. And yes, he didn’t know all that I’d done, but I’m still kind of ticked about the whole thing, because the reaction I wanted was “I had no idea you’d been so busy! I can make a coffee here, no problem!” and I didn’t get it.
All the Rage indeed. What I really want to do is get this in hard copy and leave it where it will be spotted by my husband, despite the fact that my eyes aren’t what they used to be so I mostly do audiobooks now.
Seriously, I would sign this out from the library JUST so he could see I was reading it, and I’d also get the audiobook version to actually listen to.
Spouse did not react well to Feminist Fight Club back when that came out. Just seeing me laugh at the book irritated him. It was really interesting. He never bothered to read it.
Oooohhhh. I feel this in my soul!
How did he think all that stuff got done? HONESTLY.
My ex husband would manage to do things like brunch prep himself, he liked cooking. What he could never do is paperwork and school stuff relating to children: field trip permissions, camp sign ups, medical forms, sports sign ups and equipment buying, costumes for plays and events, shopping for school supplies, helping with homework, making sure homework was done, going to PTA meetings, meetings with the teachers at school. Now we are divorced, and when the kids were still doing these things, they missed the sign ups for camps and were taken to the wrong fields for sports games. They survived these calamities. My ex never got it, and still doesn’t understand why I was so angry when we were married. I’m still angry with him–over failure to pay for expenses and support–but I don’t live in the house with a grownup who makes my life harder. It’s a better way of waking up in the morning.
Oof, Shawna, holy shit. Kickable offense.
I also once read an article in the globe and mail (in Canada) that my husband did read. It was called something like “What I really need is to be a husband” written by a female of course. He mentions it from time to time but all it’s brought me is more thank you’s for making dinner, no making the dinners himself. Later this month I’m going away for two days and I plan to not do a single thing in advance. I will not make sure the fridge is full, I won’t prep some meals, I will not even remind him he needs to make the kids’ school lunches. Maybe it’ll give him an idea of how much work there is that he never contributes to!
I do this every two years and cannot recommend it highly enough. Before my last girls’ weekend, an older friend asked if I planned to stock the fridge for my husband when I left. I laughed and said absolutely not.
My husband is a very good partner and person. He listens when I tell him he’s wrong. He initiates more cleaning than I do. He does not make me responsible for his shit. But bless him, if I don’t disappear every couple years so he can see what I do by its absence, he starts to think I could be doing more. And I can’t. I keep 3 small kids alive and the house standing, on a tightly balanced budget. I’m an excellent project manager operating at top capacity, and my work is irreplaceable, darling. Try it for a weekend and see.
Girls trips and the book Fair Play by Eve Rodsky have done absolute wonders for our marriage and my wellbeing.
THIS QUOTE RIGHT HERE.
“Imagine if your children’s father said these things to you, directly and out loud: Women are easy to take advantage of, your efforts are ultimately unnecessary, the needs of our family are not worth my attention, and I’ll choose the more selfish thing. Fathers are implying every last bit of this with their resistance all the time.”
I’m divorced and while my ex never SAID these things, his actions became more and more clear that this is what he thought and believed. Nevertheless, I ‘assumed the best’ of him FOR YEARS. The trigger was finding out that he was cheating on me, which really made me reevaluate my marriage and the kind of my person I thought I was married to.
Adding this to my library list. My husband has entered his Bodybuilding Era, and while I support healthy goals, it has added significantly to my workload. He requires expensive high protein meals and shakes and literally spends HOURS after work at the gym, so he has no time to help at home or even interact with the children. I asked what would happen if I started a hobby that took ME away for 3 hours nightly, right at the dinner/bedtime busy hour, and he was baffled and confused. Didn’t I want him to be healthy? He is not a bad person, just entirely focused on his own needs, to the point he can’t see around them even when it’s explicitly pointed out to him.
Yes! My husband has entered a Self-Care era and I feel this! He’s gone vegetarian (no more contributing to the cooking by BBQing, no more cleaning the pots and pans of meat dishes I’ve made for the kids and I, I’m having to cook more things so we all have something to eat but then he’s just as likely to snub what I make and feed himself – alone and not participating in family meals – even if I make vegetarian things). He goes to the gym frequently (he has fewer waking hours to do anything around here, not that he did a ton before but at least he was there when I wanted to ask him to do something) and has to spend more of his more-limited time at home “resting” (he didn’t have 20 minutes to take down the Christmas lights for months, but had time to watch the entire Game of Thrones series). He’s added a lot of small things to his self-care routine (beard oil, conditioner, washing his face every morning), but not one of them helps the household in general. Why can’t self-care extend to his environment? Like, vacuuming every now and then?
No children, but when I was with my ex-husband, the inequality in the life/house management was still crystal clear: I was the “boss” (said jokingly, of course *eye roll*) so all decisions and plans were my responsibility, he would have to be asked repeatedly to do things that only HE could do (it took months for him to submit items to his insurance company for benefit reimbursement, I didn’t have the access to do it, it was a 20 min task, tops, worth hundreds in dollars back), meal planning, grocery shopping, prep, pet care, bill payments, laundry, vacuuming, etc, ALL OF IT fell to me. We both worked long hours outside the home full time. I also worked out regularly, spent time with my friends and participated in volunteer work that was important to me. His reaction? “I just don’t understand how you do it all”. ME NEITHER BUT I DO IT. His attempts at helping were more work for me, having to provide direction and make decisions (all the invisible labor stuff), and he would be baffled by why I would get frustrated! Don’t tell me you’re going to take care of dinner and then ask me what to have, how to make it, is this ok, do we have ingredient X… he knew how to cook and follow a recipe.
Cleary I still have resentment and anger about this because no matter how I tried to redistribute responsibility, ask for help, express my overwhelm, it never made a difference. I knew he was capable, and I’d accepted that we didn’t have the same standards/expectations, but the complete lack of willingness or ability to be more actively engaged and actually hear what I was saying really hurt. So I too am not sure if I should read this book, or if it will only fuel the rage more… but I’m putting on my library list anyway.
I’m not a mother or technically a wife, but I have a younger brother and I now realize this shit starts EARLY. I’ve always been a good little helper and I’ve been helping him literally my entire life. It has never been reciprocated or acknowledged in any real, tangible way. Mental load, invisible labor, all the different ways to say “A WOMAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE.” If I was an older brother instead of an older sister the expectations would be vastly different, the bar would’ve been on the floor instead of up around my neck. He would’ve had to earn my time and attention and helpfulness instead of it being handed to him on a silver platter as MY DUTY. And, my god, the guilt trips, the learned helplessness, the weaponized incompetence. Almost 50 years of this shit.
I’m so tired.
My ex husband is very similar to your brother. Two older sisters, and a SAHM mother (born in late 1930s in Europe) who had no other example other than to pamper her husband and son. I thought after we were divorced – 9 years ago – he’d figure things out. Now I find out our 14yo daughter is often responsible for getting meals for her 11yo brother and father when they’re on his days. WTF.
My blood pressure is at a solid simmer reading this post and the comments. I don’t think there’s a woman alive who doesn’t relate on some level.
As a SAHM with school-aged kids, I’m often not sure whether the mental and physical load I bear is because I want to be an awesome mom/wife because this work is meaningful to me or whether I’m burdened with a heavier mental/physical load than my husband because that’s the example my own mom gave me and our patriarchal society seems to expect of me. My personality is very much centered around being a people-pleaser and a worrier, so by default I’m overthinking when I wake up and go to bed each day. I don’t know how to really stop it if I tried. I want to help break this cycle for my kids but it’s hard to make progress even at home when I’ve internalized so much sexism. I also don’t want the ball to drop … so I just carry on.
All of this. Well said.
My husband took my son to the doctor 3 weeks ago for a terrible virus. Today he had to take him for a well check-up , which i usually do. He actually asked me, “so is it the same doctor as a few weeks ago?”
I really had to bite my tongue because we have literally brought our son to the same doctor for 10 straight years. I just don’t know why he would think I would switch doctors in the last three weeks just for fun. If I make a sarcastic comment about this type of question, he looks positively mystified about why I am annoyed.
Same question has also happened with our dentist of 10 years. Gahhhhh!
I missed this because I was on vacation – a vacation on which I ended up feeling like a failure because we stayed in hotels for four nights, and it turns out the last hotel we stayed at had a pay-for-two-nights-get-one-free deal, which if I had only known about for that first night I’d now be $100 richer or looking forward to a fun free night in a hotel coming up, but I did not know about because I am not generally organized enough to research deals. And as I was mentioning this, my husband pointed out that he is very good at researching deals but he didn’t because I never want his help. And…I hope he is still thinking about my reaction to that. Or that I can figure out a way to communicate that not wanting to answer a ton of questions at any time of his choosing is not the same as not wanting help.
I feel this: “Or that I can figure out a way to communicate that not wanting to answer a ton of questions at any time of his choosing is not the same as not wanting help.”
“Live in a house with another adult who makes my life harder” is absolutely perfect. And we don’t even have kids.
What has lead to succsuccessful changes in your household? This could be a whole discussion! More and more I am asking my spouse to do things (its not perfect obviously that I still need to ask for help). I struggle big time to let certain things go and let my spouse face consequences when he doesn’t do them as I would like. For instance, a big time suck in our lives is taking the kids to / from activities! My spouse can be forgetful about picking up the kids and I HATE the idea of my kid being the last one picked up, much less the activity director having to stay late because my spouse didn’t show up on time. So then I remind (and REMIND) about pick ups, but that enables the forgetfulness! However, a step for me was to add my spouse to the carpool text groups with other parents (for which I was taking sole responsibility for organizing for our house. why?!) so that he’s in the loop about who needs to go where and when. Its helped get him to take more responsibility for carpooling. We made a shared calendar of family events and we discuss what’s coming up / dividing up responsibilities. We still have a long way to go, especially when it comes down to cooking/meal planning.
Doh. That should be the word ‘successful’
Definitely a big discussion here, but one thing my spouse and I do is mutually add tasks to one of three categories; category 1 are things that we easily agree MUST be done e.g. taxes, dentist/doctors appointments, snow shoveling etc.. category 2 are things that agree have to be done but we disagree on to what “level” they must be completed, e.g. vacuuming (how often) preparing for house guests, holiday preparations, washing the dog (again, how often) category 3 is things that we fundamentally disagree if they need to happen at all, e.g. new clothes for professional portraits, a cake baked from scratch, Halloween treat bags for neighbor children etc… We divide tasks in category 1 completely equally, if we agree it’s a category 3, then the individual who cares if it happens must handle alone without complaints. That leaves us with category 2 to bicker about, and truthfully, we still do, lol. But having these shorthand “categories” really helped cut down on the list of things we go back and forth on. Also, it was interesting (for me anyway) to understand what my spouse might consider a category 2 vs. category 3, and it was eye-opening to make the list of category 1 items and try to balance it.
I have gotten my husband to take on some tasks, but he is still a net burden.
I have given up on him and am focused on making sure my kids do better with their partners, assuming they have them. But I am not spending the rest of my time on this earth attempting to open the eyes of someone who does not want to open his eyes and consistently got all sulky-wounded when I tried. I don’t need another project, even if I’m married to him.
That was one of the most discouraging things about the book. I assumed that later generations had gotten it together better than mine had. I’m in my 50s. Women in their 30s appear to be undergoing the same nonsense.
My ex-husband and I had a list of recurring chores on the fridge with points assigned to each chore. We had made this list together and decided on which chore was worth how many points together, and also how often each thing needed doing (daily, weekly, etc.). Every time one of us did a chore, we marked it on the list. At the end of each month we would add up the points, and if one of us had a surplus (more points than the other), we would write that down. We had agreed what to do when one of us would reach a certain amount of surplus points, for example 200 surplus points meant the other partner had to organize a surprise outing for both of us.
We started this system because we had both read enough books about the unequal division of labor inside the home, and we both wanted to see if we could do things more equally (mostly my ex-husband, because he liked to call himself a feminist).
Within a few months, it was clear that the only one getting surplus points was me, and the difference was huge. It was eye-opening to both of us how many 1-point tasks I was doing in between everything else, and how quickly that added up, while it looked like we had things more or less equally divided between us (him: shopping and cooking, me laundry and washing up, for example). After a few years we stopped using the system because it was just me consistently getting more points than him, rather than a way to be able to equally get tasks done.
When we split up a little while later, he made a comment about the system, how one of the things that bothered him in our marriage was seeing the unequal division of points between us and “feeling unable to do anything about it.” I had to bite my tongue not to scream the obvious: that him doing more chores would have immediately resulted in a more equal number of points. But no, he chose to just sit there and instead feel bad about that paper so blatantly exposing him.
It was RIGHT THERE IN WRITING as to how you could problem-solve this issue. No mind reading, no guessing. He could READ THE PAPER and know how to solve, yet chose not to. My brain is turning into liquid right now.
This whole “husbands in their self-care era” thing has come up a lot in my friendship group. It’s mind-boggling to me that the general self-centeredness of men can apparently get EVEN MORE SELF-CENTERED. It’s like once the kids are a little older they turn that time they used not helping with the kids to EVEN MORE not-helping around the house. My dad had a dad who did a lot around the house. My dad was a dad who did a lot around the house. I’d like to think that led me to choose a husband who is a pretty equal partner in childcare and general life upkeep, but I had really low self-esteem, so I think I just got really, really lucky. It’s a miracle so many husbands are still walking around alive and oblivious.
It’s true. It’s like before they were just oblivious, but now they’re choosing to “only do things that make me happy”. I get that doing more chores wouldn’t make my husband more happy while he was doing them, but surely having a cleaner house and a less resentful wife would go a long way in that direction overall?
I read the book and it did make me feel seen and also feel angry. I am divorced and my ex finally does a lot more with the kids, because he has no choice. I still do all the mental load and all the doctor scheduling and forms and stuff like that. I’ll tell you what, my life is so much easier without having to take care of him and clean up after him. Divorce is the absolute best and I highly recommend it. I am not sorry one bit.