Maybe women wouldn’t want to get married if they knew how time-consuming it was

A 40ish friend he told me about life with his twentysomething girlfriend:



  • “I plan the dinner, shop for all the ingredients, choose and buy the wine, cook and clean up.”
  • “We were staying at a friend’s house.  When it came time to leave she was relaxing while I cleaned up and put the sheets and towels in the washing machine.”
  • “We earn about the same amount of money and yet I pay for everything.”
  • “She seems to think equality means doing less than half the work so she won’t ever have to feel mid-twentieth century housewifelike.”

At the same time we know a huge number of women who seem to be good at everything except holding onto a guy long enough to get married, something that they claim to want.  Could it be the case that in the old days mothers sat their daughters down and explained to them how selfish and spoiled most men are and what they needed to do to keep the guy happy?  Whereas now young women are exposed to wisdom from Jada Pinkett Smith, a popular actress:



“Women, you can have it all—a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career,” she said. “They say you gotta choose. Nah, nah, nah. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want. All you have to do is want it.” (speaking at Harvard, a talk that got her into hot water for being too “heteronormative”)


The implication of Pinkett Smith’s remarks was that a Harvard girl, in virtue of being bright, well-educated, and ambitious, was entitled to these things without doing too much work except maybe on the career part.  She never added “if you’re willing to do the laundry, plan and pay for half the evenings out, straighten up the house in between visits from the cleaners.”


Some of our women friends do seem to have figured out what compromises and efforts are entailed but they suffer through many inexplicable (to them) dumpings and are into their late 30s by the time insight is acquired.  This wouldn’t be a problem except that by this age they are past their best reproductive years and are often rather embittered toward men.


A potential solution:  Find couples where the man is satisfied and not thinking about walking out.  Do time-and-motion studies of the female partner in these couples and figure out how much effort they are putting forth.  Report the results so that single women can decide if it is worth the bother.  Perhaps when they see the data they will come to agree with Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, who, when all around her were trying to marry her off, thought



“she held that a woman ought to be able to make up her life in singleness, and that it was perfectly possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex.”


[Update:  Some (married) friends pointed out that there are quite a few books targeted at women who want to get married, offering advice.  However this advice is anecdotal and not based on hard numbers gleaned from surveys.  A friend in her 40s pointed out that perhaps by coddling our kids we’ve produced an entire generation too selfish to make a marriage succeed.  This afflicts both young men and women equally with the difference that men have the biological luxury to wait until they are 40 or 50 to figure it out.]

18 thoughts on “Maybe women wouldn’t want to get married if they knew how time-consuming it was

  1. What’s so difficult about sharing the labor?

    Kids these days… 😉

    My prediction is this: any relationship where either party worries obsessively about equal contributions to the relationship is doomed to failure.

  2. Your friend chooses to remain in this “recreational” relationship despite complaining about his chores – so his experiences with the 20-something princess must be worth it. The rest of your post hits me as an generalization on a disastrously large scale. It’s useless to speak about “women” / “men” etc. in general… Oh, and let’s say that the overall cultural background of (young) women (and men) in Cambridge, MA is different from the background of women/men in New Orleans or Rio or Berlin or Melbourne. Also, an actress’ opinion about how the world ought to be is not nearly enough to change it (the world), even if she voices a fantasy which many may find tempting.

  3. Phil you’re really taking on some controversial topics here. Keep it up!

  4. Umm… what Andre said. Your first anecdote doesn’t match with the overall point of your article, unless you’re implying that your 40something friend is going to dump his girlfriend in the short term.

  5. So you know one person who does more housework than his girlfriend. Good for you?

    Women still do 1.5x more housework than their husbands, according to various studies[*]. When a man and woman both work full time, in most cases the man still expects the woman to do most or all of the housework (and typically she obliges). As long as we’re trading anecdotes, this is the pattern most typical of couples I know.

    Of course, many of the guys who do occasionally lift a finger to help, act like they deserve a medal for being so wonderful and overworked.

    Oh, and then they make blog posts complaining about how women these days never learned how to treat a man right.

    [*] one of many: http://www.epolitix.com/EN/News/200502/6932a6ff-7126-45be-beee-1c5bf8dbd916.htm

  6. I’m curious as to your thoughts on the whole heteronormative complaint…

  7. Well, I agree with Andre and Paul – there is a mismatch between the story of your friend and the conclusions you draw from it. I doubt the amount of housework a woman or a man are willing to do is terribly relevant to their longevity as a couple. Your friend’s 20-something princess knows how to keep a man excited enough to clean after her, but to keep the man excited and to keep him around long-term are not necessarily the same thing. I wonder what your friend would do if this girl started hinting to him that it’s time to get engaged?

    There is quite a bit of evidence that women do much more housework in marriage than men. There is also exists common wisdom that a woman needs to be a bit hard-to-get in the pre-marital part of the relationship to keep her guy interested. Converserly, to keep a marriage happy it is often optimal to transform from a hard-to-get into an easy-to-be-with gal, and this presumably includes a reasonable share of house- and otherwise-work. The women who can get and keep a man may simply be the ones that know this dynamic and can act effectively act it out.

  8. My 40ish other half’s coworkers joke that he got a good deal importing a twentysomething girlfriend after rigorous pre-screening.

    I do more than half of the housework, but I chose to be a stay at home parent and feel it’s a reasonable tradeoff since my partner is willing to be the sole wage-earner until my daughter starts school.

    Our respective first marriages were time-consuming because our spouses were unwilling to compromise and we stayed married for our children’s sake and hoped the situation would improve. One of the more important things we learned from them is that we value sitting down together at least once a month to discuss how we’re meeting each other’s emotional needs and negotiating fairly when we don’t enthusiastically agree on something. (These are some of the basic concepts of Marriage Builders.)

  9. The 50-50 division of labor is a complete and total feminist canard. The ‘studies’ undertaken with this level of sophistication about what constitutes work remind me of the European violinist union demanding a higher pay because after all they play nearly twice as many notes. I’m glad to see your is friend is man enough to provide the complete meal service and not complain about it. An excellent example of masculinism at work. He’s not complaining, right?

  10. re:” A friend in her 40s pointed out that perhaps by coddling our kids we’ve produced an entire generation too selfish to make a marriage succeed.”

    Apparently this is a big problem in China, with a generation of only children now grown up and a skyrocketing divorce rate.

  11. While you are hearing your 40 year old friend whine about the disproportionate amount of domestic work he has to do in this relationship you are not hearing his, “Holy Jesus, I’m banging a hot 20 something year old.” Clearly he’s more interested in a hard body than an emotional peer and team member.

    Just like some people are only happy when their miserable, some people *choose* to be in relationships where they are the martyr (like your friend) or where they are the slacker (like your friend’s g/f). Either way, it’s a mess of disfunction and to try to reason about it rationally is foolhearty at best.

  12. I don’t see anything much wrong about men doing more than half housework than women, even the entire. Just think about the suffering women would have when they bear children….It’s just fair for men to do something for women when they can. And, I don’t understand nowadays what’s so hard about solving the trivial mundane tasks like housework. Is hiring a part-time professional housework engineer (maid that is) that expensive? As the employor one not only gets more time for more creative/productive activities but also creats job for other people…

    And, I agree with andre. The scale of generalisation of men/women in this post is way too large. And, people are moody, more or less. Even for the same person, different behaves on same matter would appear at different times, depending on her/his physical status, mood, etc, etc….Okay, here’s the opinion from a born-in-’80s.

  13. I’m married and I have two children, who are one and three. Anybody who has kids knows how much work that is, and both my husband and I put in a lot of work to make our household viable, both inside and outside the house.

    That said, I don’t think the “household economics” split is really the biggest problem today. I think younger people have an overly idealized conception of marriage. This brings them to the unrealistic expectation that their marriage will provide for all their needs, both economic and emotional. My grandparents would have scoffed at the idea of married people needing to be “soul mates.” Yet I don’t believe anybody would say that their marriage was not successful, objectively and on their own terms.

    In an article I read recently on childcare, the author said something smart: “We try to do individually what we’ve given up doing as a society.”

    It seems to me that many married couples are pretty isolated — they no longer live in the context of an extended family or community where they know everyone, they don’t have reliable daily contact with friends other than their spouse. Add to that that in many couples both people work, often long hours. The problem isn’t entirely within couples — it’s the context that couples play out their lives in, an increasingly harsh and lonely context that puts even more pressure on that relationship to provide everything and to provide it into an ever smaller and more squeezed time that makes things very difficult.

    And all these changes have happened in only fifty years — far too fast for us to create new cultural norms that make us feel okay about what we’re doing.

  14. Your 40-year-old male friend makes about as much money as his 2x-year-old girlfriend? Considering the significance of experience and being male on wages, this hints at a huge imbalance. Either your friend is highly subservient, working years without much of a raise, or his girlfriend is a born leader who really knows how to get what she wants. It’s no wonder this power structure shows up in their relationship.

  15. The guy is whipped and puts up with it because his girlfriend is young. He whines but he stays and pays. You make good points about the selfish spoiled nature of many of today’s women, but what about the men who put up with this?

  16. Crimson is correct in the context of my frame of mind that day at lunch with Philip. All the rest of you conjecturing are just projecting. Lisa Williams, Ellen Zhao, Melissa: Thank you. I plan to spend a long time with this woman. I love her. Some days we all just need a friend to listen to our B.S. about our relationships.

  17. What’s so difficult about sharing the labor? There’s too much that needs to be done! My husband’s 70 hour work week, my 25 hour work week, and the 70 hours + required in childcare (not to mention cooking, cleaning, etc.) No matter how you divide it, it’s overwhelming.

    Are kids are coddled? No, kids are overworked. There’s the longer school day (My daughter attends a kindergarten several hours longer than the one I went to.), with increased academic expectations. They are not only expected to learn the same material at an earlier age, but more subjects: more foreign language, music, etc. These increased expectations continue. I used to do interviews for college, and I’ve had to ask top high school students if they actually have time to sleep.

    For the record, I’m 41, married and have two children.

  18. Women really need to “get over themselves”. First, they say being a housewife is the most rewarding job there could be……and then a higher percentage of them stop being housewives and go to work. So, are they saying they would rather have a less rewarding job? or were they just lying about it being rewarding??

    Stop the whining about housework. I’ve never, and I mean never, heard a house-husband complain about the housework. His wife is working and earning the money and he is doing what he should be doing….taking care of the house and the kids (if they have any).

    I am sick and tired of hearing about how women think they are unappreciated or should get paid for taking care of their house. If your husband is busting his butt to provide a house and everything it takes to run that house…..then stop whining about having to take care of it. When it comes to taking care of a house such as cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc., you can always hire someone to do that anyway – so to me, the housewife can be replaced. (If prostitution were legal, you wouldn’t need a wife for that either, but that is a whole other topic.)

    So, ladies…….for those of you who have had time to read this…..I hope you are paying attention. If you have a GOOD MAN who is the only bread winner in the family and you are not also bringing in a paycheck….stop whining. Do your job! You want hubby to appreciate you…..guess what…..the fact that he is busting his butt every day to give you the house to make a home is his way of saying “thank you…..I love you” and by doing nothing but complaining, you are taking that love and telling him he isn’t worth the effort. (By the way….if there are househusbands who do this also….same applies to you.)

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