She’s Your Wife, Not Your Mom
It’s not cute when men act like boys
Have you ever heard a man say of his wife, “Oh, she’s really just another one of my kids.”?
Of course, you haven’t, but that’s a common sentiment expressed by women. “My husband is really just my third kid.” It’s often said good-naturedly as if it were an inevitable fact that is not ideal, but about which nothing can be done. I’ve even heard men say this about themselves as if it were a cute characteristic and a kind of self-deprecating thing to say. It’s not self-deprecating and it’s not cute. It’s admitting that you don’t want to grow up and that you think it’s fine for the woman you sleep with to take care of you the way your mom did.
I am married to a man, not a child. I have a son and several pets and I do not want to be anyone else’s mommy, particularly not if I’m going to share a bed with him. My husband has never really asked me to relate to him in that way — thank goodness. I probably wouldn’t have married him in the first place if he had.
But what of the guys who think nothing of asking questions like these?
“Hey, hon — what’s that restaurant I like?”
“Where are my socks?”
“When are we going on vacation?”
Besides the emotional labor that many women are expected to expend to be the unpaid family manager and central source of information in this way, married mothers also do more housework than their single or divorced counterparts.
Drawing on a sample of 23,088 mothers living with children under the age of 13, they found that married and cohabitating mothers racked up approximately 3 hours of housework per day, compared to 2.5 and 2 hours respectively undertaken by divorced and never-married mothers.
Married women also get the least sleep and the fewest hours of leisure-time. Interestingly women who live with a male partner but haven’t married him have more leisure time — an extra 35 minutes per day — compared with married women.
This suggests that it’s not just having a man around that’s the problem. Rather, the issue seems to lie with the expectations that come with being his “wife”.
Married women, even those without children, do the bulk of the housework even when they work outside the home. In fact, the more a woman earns, the higher the percentage of chores she will typically perform. “The more economically dependent men are on their wives, the less housework they do. Even women with unemployed husbands spend considerably more time on household chores than their spouses.” It’s a not-so-subtle way of asserting, “But, I’m still the man!”
The culturally enshrined idea of the male breadwinner and the female homemaker is still strong, even as more and more couples no longer live that way. Married women are still reluctant to refer to themselves as breadwinners, even when it’s technically true. Many couples operate as partners until it comes time to deal with things related to the home and their schedule, and then they seemingly revert back to traditional patterns.
One frustrated woman described her otherwise good marriage as that between a lackadaisical intern and an executive:
“Other than this, our relationship is pretty egalitarian — we have careers, we co-parent, we share responsibilities as much as possible — but when it comes to household management and scheduling, my husband, a considerate special-ed teacher, seems forgetful and even lazy, as if he’s the lackadaisical intern to my executive.
This leads to what I will call “The Cycle”: He asks me where stuff goes, I get frustrated at being assumed boss of domestic territory — and frustration builds. Like many mothers, I get tired of carrying the “mental load.” I resent the notion that it’s my job to not only know where the spatula goes but also to decide it goes in the drawer to the left of the stove.”
For some couples, this is a dynamic built around her need for control and perfectionism compounded by his passivity and abdication of responsibility. Maybe he has no problems planning his poker night or guys weekend away but is perfectly willing to let her handle everything related to their children, holidays, or anything that might be characterized as home-making.
He may believe that it’s wife work, even if only subconsciously, or perhaps he’s afraid of criticism if he doesn’t do it to her specifications. Some women are OK with being a martyr who has everything in her home just the way that she would do it. But if she won’t step back in order to let him step up, she will probably find herself living with a man-child rather than a husband.
But on the other hand, if he refuses to show up and do his part, pretending that he doesn’t see the mess, isn’t any good at laundry or that certain things are really women’s work — if he thinks that being “her other child” is cute, because it allows him to abdicate any responsibility for things that he doesn’t really want to do, then that’s on him.
A study on male “dirt blindness” indicated that it’s really just a myth. Men and women perceive clean and dirty spaces in the same way. The disparity in willingness to keep things tidy seems to arise because people hold women to higher standards of cleanliness than men, and also hold them more responsible for it. And of course, some men are clean freaks and some women are fine with living in a pigsty.
True partnership means being willing to share in the maintenance of the home, and noticing what needs to be done without having to be asked. Your wife shouldn’t have to hand out a chores list or plan your life as if she is your mom. Being her other child is not cute, even if she laughs about it, even if she prefers things a certain way.
There’s nothing wrong with divvying up the jobs so you don’t have to do one that you loathe, but she undoubtedly does things that she doesn’t enjoy. Laundry and dishes are an unrelenting stream in most households. Saying that you mow the lawn once a week is not a balanced counterpoint to that.
It’s been estimated that if homekeeping (laundry, chef, driver, nanny, yard maintenance) were professionally done, it would cost about $143,102 per year. This still doesn’t account for the emotional labor of things like making sure there is toilet paper in the bathroom and that there are teacher gifts for the end of the school year. In an office setting, the person who is the planner and the manager is not typically the one who also executes all of the plans.
MEL Magazine coined the term, mandholding to describe this phenomenon, the expectation that women are just naturally good at and therefore should be responsible for making life run smoothly. “Free, invisible work women do to keep track of the little things in life that, taken together, amount to the big things in life: the glue that holds households, and by extension, proper society, together.”
This kind of work is exhausting, not just from a physical perspective, but also from what it demands mentally and emotionally. Grow up! Figure out how to be real partners! The side effect will probably be that she has more time and energy for intimacy with you. Not much is sexier than co-creating a life with someone, rather than being their mommy.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.
