A woman we know made the mistake of marrying a computer nerd. She complains of his performance as a husband mostly because he is a “workaholic.” I said “Well, the computer industry has been booming like crazy for most of the last 20 years so doesn’t it make sense for him to work hard and try to make money for your family before he hits 50 and nobody wants to deal with him anymore?”
It turned out that he was still inadequate, in her view. It wasn’t sufficient for him to contribute more than 90 percent of the family income and enable the family to live comfortably in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets. She had a list of additional tasks and standards and he was falling short.
The question of whether or not she had a legitimate grievance was discussed among a group of friends and acquaintances here in the Boston area. One school of thought was that she was unreasonable. After years of marriage and kids you shouldn’t expect too much more than some barebones items such as “sober,” “goes to work,” “nice to the kids.” He should get credit for supporting the family financially. Against this idea were a few folks who pointed out that, by being married and taking care of the kids, under Massachusetts family law, she is already entitled to nearly all of this guy’s income going forward. Since she could get rid of the husband/father at any time and keep his money, the contribution of money to the household therefore doesn’t count and she can demand additional stuff if he wants to keep his position as husband.
Readers: What do you think?
Related:
The guy should set up a company, give all his assets to this company and have his salary paid to the company, making himself at the same time legally a pauper. This way the wife would have to decide whether his failings as a human being are worth his money. A clearer situation would give clearer feelings.
Joking aside we cannot provide an answer unless the failings are disclosed.
That dude needs to read up on being a man. Roissy in DC is a good start. Run some dread game on that ungrateful twat.
He seems like a bit of a dolt to boot. The article doesn’t state her earning but assuming she is the low earner (given her work ethic probably so) she will have a piece of all of his future earning with those earnings extrapolated from what he is earning most recently. So her best strategy is for him to earn a ton of money and his best strategy is to earn the least. Sounds like the both of them have it bass ackwards.
Women are never happy. They are like cats, as my grandpa would say. They look at some other woman, and ask themselves, why can’t *I* have that? So if she’s reading somewhere that some woman has the perfect husband who works until 4:30pm and takes care of the kids the rest of the day until bed time, then why can’t she have that too? Or she thinks her husband is purposely working beyond X hours because he is avoiding his home responsibilities (never mind he might be under pressure to deliver for a project or is working hard to get promoted and raise the family income). Or maybe she thinks he has no chance to get promoted anyway and figures it’s better if he works for her instead of trying hard for the promotion. But as Bill Burr so eloquently put it: “women are constantly patting themselves on the back about how difficult their lives are, but no one corrects them because they want to f**k them”. Maybe before anyone gets married, they should be made to live a month in the third world as wife and husband so both could learn count to their blessings. But it doesn’t matter, eventually they’ll get spoiled.
Also, regarding the related topic of where are all the good single men – interesting to listen to is this conversation about a woman who is 28, studied history, then went to law school, quit, then became a teacher, quit that too, and is in some other dead-end job and now wants to get hitched to a computer nerd guy:
Mind you, it’s Stefan Molyneux, and I don’t agree with everything he says – he’s a bit too much for me at times. I don’t regularly listen to the guy, but sometimes he has interesting topics.
It’s not his day job. He’s not attracted enough to her obese, disabled body enough to meet his other obligation. He’d rather be exercising than sitting around watching TV.
Whoa, what’s with all the misogyny?
The three things that couples commonly fight about are money, sex, and kids. It sounds like money’s definitely not a problem. But if the husband’s not around enough to help with the kids, I can see how that could be a justified complaint, especially if the kids are young.
I remember an older co-worker telling me that when you get married, life doesn’t actually change that much. What makes a huge difference is having your first child: infants demand a ton of time and attention. (Biologists like Jared Diamond suggest that this is why humans pair-bond: it’s because human infants are so helpless that you really need two parents to look after them. See Why Is Sex Fun?)
On the other hand, even if the husband wants to spend less time at work, he may not be able to. It’s not easy to cut back your hours when you’re part of a team. Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society:
If the husband is doing well as a provider, the wife can have childcare to help with the kids. A lot of nerd men don’t think about this, even when they make more than enough for it. Many wives of men with 80 hour work weeks are happier and less inclined to take legal action when they can have another woman around to help with the kids and just hang out. Or to watch the kids so they can go hang out with some chick friends. Whichever.
Russil – ” But if the husband’s not around enough to help with the kids, I can see how that could be a justified complaint, especially if the kids are young.”
What do you think would be a fair share of childcare for the husband? If he is earning 90% of the income, should he also give 50% of the childcare? 10%?
My ex-wife was all about equality and sharing. She wanted me to provide 100% of our income as well as at least 50% of household chores and 50% of childcare. Then she wanted me to pay for a nanny so she could hang out with her friends from college more.
Russil #7 – good communications and coordination is essential for project success and that’s why there are agile software development methodologies that try to manage software products development process. But way too often notion of teamwork is used by incompetents to fudge software products and re-distribute personal contribution of individual contributors to one or two politically connected. At the end of the day, most important is thoughtful analysis and individual work. It is impossible to substitute this with any meta-process. Employment is a contract and not a contract on 100% of employee free time. I think that if the programmer philg is writing about works 80 hours/weeks consistently while his children are young then he looses precious never to be repeated time with his children while they are young and this will reflect negatively on his future and his children upbringing. Unless he is making millions it does not make sense from professional view either: inflation will eat up his savings, he may not have time to invest in real estate or individual securities and he is a likely candidate for burn-out that will cap his ability to make money in the future, not even mentioning that his children could become strangers.
I think we’re asking the wrong question here, which is whether the woman has a legitimate complaint. The superficial thought is, well, she wants to live in an expensive neighborhood so the cost is a workaholic hubby. But if you drill down, complaints arise from unmet needs. Lots of people make decisions to do things before seeing how that translates to reality, so maybe she didn’t quite know she would feel this lonely, for example, when aspiring to this lifestyle. Maybe she hasn’t connected the dots yet so will continue to see herself as a victim, and even if 100% of people agreed she shouldn’t feel that way, feelings never follow “shoulds” so no external logic or reasoning or awareness will change how she feels (unless she is ready to change internally).
A healthy marriage requires both partners to take each other’s feelings seriously and communicate honestly (without blaming).
Ideally, they would also have similar desires for connection – there are schools of thought that think it boils down to this. Even if he didn’t work those long hours, there might be other things about the way they connect that fall short. Gottman research found that in happy marriages, couples responded to each other’s “bids” for connection a high percentage of the time and in unions with low satisfaction, they didn’t. Maybe work is a convenient social construct that allows low connection levels to exist? I would wonder, how do they connect on vacation together? When work isn’t a barrier, are they very close? Were they close early on?
I don’t like that she thinks he’s inadequate. She does need to own her feelings in a way that isn’t blamey. “I feel lonely…” is a good place to start (“I” statements). Then start thinking about what might need to change. Adjust expectations? Compromise? They can both only do this when criticism and blame are replaced with compassion and willingness to improve. But unless she can shake her foundational belief that he is in the “wrong,” they’re not heading in a positive direction.
Sam: “What do you think would be a fair share of childcare for the husband?”
Hmm. Looking at it from the point of view of the wife: assuming that the kids are small, you’re home looking after the kids all day. Depending on the kids, it’s not much different from having a fairly intense full-time job. Once your husband comes home, you’d really like him to be able to help out with the kids. If your husband is working 80 hours/week and only comes home after the kids are in bed, or gets home and is too exhausted to do anything except watch TV, I can see that being dissatisfying.
When you say that your ex expected you to do 50% of the childcare, do you mean an equal share of looking after the kids during the time you were home? That doesn’t seem so unreasonable; I work and my wife’s home with the kids, and that’s more or less how we do things. (I was fortunate enough to be able to take 12 weeks of parental leave after the birth of each of our two children, so we were sharing parenting responsibilities pretty equally for the first three months.)
One thing I learned from reading the business book Seeing Systems, by Barry Oshry: People in partnerships often end up specializing – one person does all the cooking, for example, or one person does all the finances. Over time, they start to resent each other for it, and the partnership breaks down. My wife and I try to avoid this by taking over each other’s tasks occasionally. My wife does all the cooking and the bulk of the child care, but I try to cook once in a while, and when the kids were small, we would give each other a regular evening off once a week. One year she went to a friend’s wedding out of town for a few days, and I took a few days off work, so I got to prepare lunches, drive the kids to school and extra-curricular activities, etc. I found it eye-opening.
That said, we’re speculating in a complete vacuum here, because we have no idea what the specific issues are in this particular case.
If she wants him to work less hours, then she has to go out and make some of the money, If she wants his money to spend, she shouldn’t complain about how hard he has to work to make the money.
Could he work less – who knows? Not enough information here.
She should stop complaining – plenty of third world women are more or less deserted by their husbands who have to go to foreign countries and far away cities for long periods of time, leaving the wife to both provide the groceries and work bent over in the rice paddies and the vegetable garden, tend to the chickens and the goats, and raise the children.
Any ‘-holic’ will make a bad husband/wife e.g alcoholic, shopaholic, workaholic. Any form of addiction is bad.
Somehow, more people more tolerant to workaholism because in this capitalistic world, money is seen as the most important thing. Hence it is ‘understandable’ that one works too hard to amass cash. But money is not everything in a relationship.
Giving your partner roof over her/his head, and bread on the table is not enough. A good partner also provides company (time), intimacy (sex), understanding (emotional support), and other things that cannot be quantified by money.
There should be a balance. A man/woman who works hard for his family and bring the bacon home is commendable, but a man/woman who prioritise work/money and neglecting other needs of their partner is not.