The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #86641   Message #1614666
Posted By: *daylia*
27-Nov-05 - 10:02 AM
Thread Name: BS: What did your ex do TO you?
Subject: RE: BS: What did your ex do TO you?
Well, here's a hypothesis - do men, in general, find marriage a happier and more satisfying arrangement because, unlike women, traditionally they are not expected / required to do "double duty" for years on end (ie work outside the home to support the family PLUS being solely responsible for all the housework/child-care when they get home, exhausted, at night?)

Things are improving, albeit very slowly, in this regard. There are a lot more men "helping" out with child care and other absolutely necessary household chores (like cooking and cleaning) these days. But even so, the standard "Division of Labour" in the home still favours men, at the expense of women.

If in the future women achieve real economic equality with men, men will doing roughly half the unpaid work in the home that women now do. That is the main prerequisite of women's equality. If men are doing roughly half the unpaid work at home, that me ans that roughly half the primary parents--the parents who stay home when Junior is sick, reduce their job-related travel, or stay at home for years while the children are small--will be men. That is, the sexual division of labor in the home will have me lted away.

Men, on average, still earn more money for doing the same job as women. Therefore, women are more likely to stay in an unhappy marriage, for financial reasons.   Husbands are much more likely to be abusive, violent and adulterous than wives too (according to recent studies, 25% of women and 44% of men have extramarital affairs)... so I guess it's easy to understand why men are, generally speaking, more content in their marriages!