I bowed out of tech after spending 15 years working up to nearly 200k a year. It was terrible for my mental health to be expected to be mostly available most of the time. I didn't like it much but stayed because the money allowed my wife to take jobs that interested her.
We are now in Michigan and my wife is the primary earner and it's interesting to relinquish that perceived power differential. It's time consuming and challenging to run a household. I do cook, clean and wash the dishes 90% of the time. Also I'm doing handyman jobs to get that secondary income stream up.
The pull to get another high paying tech job is occasionally quite strong. A lot of that pull is really wanting that big primary earner stick back. It's almost been like kicking an addiction.
I'm a couple cookies deep I hope that makes sense.
The power differential is really important and under-discussed. I’m so glad you’ve been able to make changes for your mental health. I also quit tech, well I got laid off, haha. But I’m definitely still recovering from burnout from that and a draining relationship. I kind of wish I had a breadwinner spouse. But to be real, I don’t want the power differential. I don’t trust myself or anyone else with that kind of power. It’s a tough thing to navigate and I wish people talked more about it
I'm pretty convinced a very large chunk of the abusive behaviors we see perpetuated in society are trauma related.
I also would say that trauma I experienced led to a lack of personal embodiment and a very warped understanding of how and when to enforce personal boundaries. I know it also made drugs and alcohol quite attractive especially the delight in excessive indulgence and the camaraderie found in kindred spirits. Those who shared the appetite and fortitude to "keep it together" while aggressively self medicating. Took me a long time to realize that I was using these substances to escape self jusgement, anxiety and depression.
It's hard to know what anxiety is when you have only been anxious. My default was anxious hyper vigilance with a huge dollop of low self esteem.
I have a firm belief that addressing existing trauma and minimizing or eliminating emergent trauma in the existing population will do more to move our civilization forward in a significant and noticeable way. Sadly this needs to be done for decades long stretches which makes me think it's unlikely.
I'm pretty convinced a very large chunk of the abusive behaviors we see perpetuated in society are trauma related.
I also would say that trauma I experienced led to a lack of personal embodiment and a very warped understanding of how and when to enforce personal boundaries. I know it also made drugs and alcohol quite attractive especially the delight in excessive indulgence and the camaraderie found in kindred spirits. Those who shared the appetite and fortitude to "keep it together" while aggressively self medicating. Took me a long time to realize that I was using these substances to escape self jusgement, anxiety and depression.
It's hard to know what anxiety is when you have only been anxious. My default was anxious hyper vigilance with a huge dollop of low self esteem.
I have a firm belief that addressing existing trauma and minimizing or eliminating emergent trauma in the existing population will do more to move our civilization forward in a significant and noticeable way. Sadly this needs to be done for decades long stretches which makes me think it's unlikely.
I'm pretty convinced a very large chunk of the abusive behaviors we see perpetuated in society are trauma related.
I also would say that trauma I experienced led to a lack of personal embodiment and a very warped understanding of how and when to enforce personal boundaries. I know it also made drugs and alcohol quite attractive especially the delight in excessive indulgence and the camaraderie found in kindred spirits. Those who shared the appetite and fortitude to "keep it together" while aggressively self medicating. Took me a long time to realize that I was using these substances to escape self jusgement, anxiety and depression.
It's hard to know what anxiety is when you have only been anxious. My default was anxious hyper vigilance with a huge dollop of low self esteem.
I have a firm belief that addressing existing trauma and minimizing or eliminating emergent trauma in the existing population will do more to move our civilization forward in a significant and noticeable way. Sadly this needs to be done for decades long stretches which makes me think it's unlikely.
I wanted to be a househusband and in fact, one of the reasons I dated my wife was because she said she wanted a Mr. Mom type. When we started out, she was in grad school and very ambitious.
When we had a child I suggested that I should stay home and raise our daughter but she did not agree. She said since I was the White guy in tech, I should focus on my career and since she was the woman of color (and immigrant) working in the non-profit sector, I should be the one focusing on making money. We did end up making a lot of money, but I missed out on the chance to be the do-gooder.
It’s only fair to add that she has a long standing complaint that I don’t do enough housework, which is true. My job has long hours and is exhausting, even though I enjoy it. I could go into more detail, but you aren’t my therapist.
That brings up an interesting twist on the conversation. Namely, the gender wage gap. If men still make, on average, more money than women for the same work, it might make sense for couples where both have degrees for the man to do most of the paid work while the woman takes on most of the domestic responsibilities. But my advice is mostly for men who don't have a high earning potential, since they're the ones who are overwhelmingly unmarried and unpartnered.
I appreciate that! I doubt it, tbh, unfortunately. But I think that culture tends to bleed over from one group to the next. So I don't think it's useless to get my readership to rethink their assumptions about gender. Especially since some of them talk to and influence people outside my readership.
I am unclear on why it is necessarily the job of men to change in this instance. Instead of telling men to do more housework, why not just tell women to do less? If seeing a mess irritates them more than it irritates their husband, they can just ignore it for a bit and let it get worse. Eventually the mess will get bad enough that it irritates him as well, and then he will clean it up.
If you look at the homes of single men, they often leave messes for longer there as well. If they were motivated purely by a sexist belief that women should do the cleaning we would expect them to step up if no women were present. But they usually don't. It isn't that they think women should clean up messes, it's that they don't think messes should be cleaned up at all (at least not until they're a lot worse).
It seems to me that everyone would be better off if women just did less housework. Men and women would both have more free time, and the only price to pay would be a messier house. That seems like a small price to pay to me, but if some people are really, really bothered by mess they should try to talk to their spouse about it. But they need to understand that their preference for less mess is just that, an aesthetic preference. Nothing bad will happen if the housework gets done more slowly or less frequently.
Asking your spouse to help more with the housework is like asking them to help decorate the house. They should help if its important to you. But they have a right to ask you to tone it down if decorating gets too time-consuming. Your preferences shouldn't just override theirs.
I feel like you might have not fully understood my point about how sexism works. And I’m a much bigger fan of the idea that who cleans shouldn’t be gendered than the idea that both people should live like single men
Cathy, how do you actually know, for a fact, that sexism deserves the blame for the discrepancy between male and female housekeeping aesthetics?
In your conversation with Sam Hammond (published Sept. 5, 2022), you ask rhetorically, "What actually is biological and what is cultural?" Good question! Ghatanathoah doesn't know for sure, neither do I, and neither do you—which means that you can't say for sure that it's an example of "how sexism works".
And this, in turn, means that you can't necessarily moralize your distaste for "the idea that both people should live like single men". It may be just another merely aesthetic issue that must be negotiated in a heterosexual relationship.
(Have you ever read, or seen a production of, Lysistrata? I'm probably a traitor to my sex for reminding you of it, but there are ways to negotiate in strength even when you can't necessarily make accusations of sexism. Just saying.)
Well I do believe, from personal experience and from reading some research, that most people don’t expect men to keep house as well as women. So that is definitionally cultural. Now what would happen if that expectation disappeared I do not know. All I know is that sexism is operational here.
Does the expectation cause the behavior pattern, or is it merely an accurate observation of the behavior pattern? Is the cultural component at cause, at effect, or some of both? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Does anybody know for sure?
Right. That’s an open question. We can be fairly confident there’s a cultural component. We don’t have good evidence, afaik, about whether there’s a biological component at work as well.
Without knowing whether, and to what extent, the cultural component is at cause instead of at effect, we can't say whether, and to what extent, sexism is to be blamed for the problem.
Women are into hypergomy, the idea that they want their man to be somehow "better" then they are. But look at this from men's perspective. If women want and do marry a "better" man, then men must content with marrying with a "worse" person. And for over eons before women started to get paid equal to or more than men.
So, you are right. We need a new script - for women. Fall in love with guys seemingly "worse off" than you. Then these guys have no choice but to do more housework and such to keep you women.
That all makes some amount of sense theoretically.
The truth, as usual, is much weirder.
Men who earn less and work fewer hours than their wives actually do less housework, childcare, and other forms of domestic labor than high-status husbands on average. They're also more likely to cheat on and beat their wives than high-status husbands.
So no, it doesn't work for women to just marry men with less status than they have. And no, low-status men don't respond to the clear incentive to keep their high-status wives by being better husbands. They actually respond by being worse husbands in order to protect their egos from feeling emasculated. Does PsycHacks have any videos on that?
Thanks for your kind reply. You've said in your linked article that "top-half" marriages are a completely different institution from the "bottom-half" marriages. So, when you say, e.g., "men who earn less and work fewer hours than their wives", are you talking about the "top-half" marriages or the "bottom-half" marriages? Also, you've delimited the notion of "high/low-value" to "status" but is it "status" or "value" that distinguish between "top-half" marriages from "bottom-half" marriages? For women's hypergamy might be directed at a number of things, and it is conceivable that it is directed at all these things "combined". Questions, questions! :D
I bowed out of tech after spending 15 years working up to nearly 200k a year. It was terrible for my mental health to be expected to be mostly available most of the time. I didn't like it much but stayed because the money allowed my wife to take jobs that interested her.
We are now in Michigan and my wife is the primary earner and it's interesting to relinquish that perceived power differential. It's time consuming and challenging to run a household. I do cook, clean and wash the dishes 90% of the time. Also I'm doing handyman jobs to get that secondary income stream up.
The pull to get another high paying tech job is occasionally quite strong. A lot of that pull is really wanting that big primary earner stick back. It's almost been like kicking an addiction.
I'm a couple cookies deep I hope that makes sense.
The power differential is really important and under-discussed. I’m so glad you’ve been able to make changes for your mental health. I also quit tech, well I got laid off, haha. But I’m definitely still recovering from burnout from that and a draining relationship. I kind of wish I had a breadwinner spouse. But to be real, I don’t want the power differential. I don’t trust myself or anyone else with that kind of power. It’s a tough thing to navigate and I wish people talked more about it
I'm pretty convinced a very large chunk of the abusive behaviors we see perpetuated in society are trauma related.
I also would say that trauma I experienced led to a lack of personal embodiment and a very warped understanding of how and when to enforce personal boundaries. I know it also made drugs and alcohol quite attractive especially the delight in excessive indulgence and the camaraderie found in kindred spirits. Those who shared the appetite and fortitude to "keep it together" while aggressively self medicating. Took me a long time to realize that I was using these substances to escape self jusgement, anxiety and depression.
It's hard to know what anxiety is when you have only been anxious. My default was anxious hyper vigilance with a huge dollop of low self esteem.
I have a firm belief that addressing existing trauma and minimizing or eliminating emergent trauma in the existing population will do more to move our civilization forward in a significant and noticeable way. Sadly this needs to be done for decades long stretches which makes me think it's unlikely.
I'm pretty convinced a very large chunk of the abusive behaviors we see perpetuated in society are trauma related.
I also would say that trauma I experienced led to a lack of personal embodiment and a very warped understanding of how and when to enforce personal boundaries. I know it also made drugs and alcohol quite attractive especially the delight in excessive indulgence and the camaraderie found in kindred spirits. Those who shared the appetite and fortitude to "keep it together" while aggressively self medicating. Took me a long time to realize that I was using these substances to escape self jusgement, anxiety and depression.
It's hard to know what anxiety is when you have only been anxious. My default was anxious hyper vigilance with a huge dollop of low self esteem.
I have a firm belief that addressing existing trauma and minimizing or eliminating emergent trauma in the existing population will do more to move our civilization forward in a significant and noticeable way. Sadly this needs to be done for decades long stretches which makes me think it's unlikely.
I'm pretty convinced a very large chunk of the abusive behaviors we see perpetuated in society are trauma related.
I also would say that trauma I experienced led to a lack of personal embodiment and a very warped understanding of how and when to enforce personal boundaries. I know it also made drugs and alcohol quite attractive especially the delight in excessive indulgence and the camaraderie found in kindred spirits. Those who shared the appetite and fortitude to "keep it together" while aggressively self medicating. Took me a long time to realize that I was using these substances to escape self jusgement, anxiety and depression.
It's hard to know what anxiety is when you have only been anxious. My default was anxious hyper vigilance with a huge dollop of low self esteem.
I have a firm belief that addressing existing trauma and minimizing or eliminating emergent trauma in the existing population will do more to move our civilization forward in a significant and noticeable way. Sadly this needs to be done for decades long stretches which makes me think it's unlikely.
I wanted to be a househusband and in fact, one of the reasons I dated my wife was because she said she wanted a Mr. Mom type. When we started out, she was in grad school and very ambitious.
When we had a child I suggested that I should stay home and raise our daughter but she did not agree. She said since I was the White guy in tech, I should focus on my career and since she was the woman of color (and immigrant) working in the non-profit sector, I should be the one focusing on making money. We did end up making a lot of money, but I missed out on the chance to be the do-gooder.
It’s only fair to add that she has a long standing complaint that I don’t do enough housework, which is true. My job has long hours and is exhausting, even though I enjoy it. I could go into more detail, but you aren’t my therapist.
That brings up an interesting twist on the conversation. Namely, the gender wage gap. If men still make, on average, more money than women for the same work, it might make sense for couples where both have degrees for the man to do most of the paid work while the woman takes on most of the domestic responsibilities. But my advice is mostly for men who don't have a high earning potential, since they're the ones who are overwhelmingly unmarried and unpartnered.
The patriarchy screws over all of us and pushes towards our assigned gender roles. Even if we resist it, there’s a price to pay.
I appreciate your advice and I think that it is solid, but do you really have a lot of working class unmarried men reading you? If so, huzzah!
I appreciate that! I doubt it, tbh, unfortunately. But I think that culture tends to bleed over from one group to the next. So I don't think it's useless to get my readership to rethink their assumptions about gender. Especially since some of them talk to and influence people outside my readership.
I am unclear on why it is necessarily the job of men to change in this instance. Instead of telling men to do more housework, why not just tell women to do less? If seeing a mess irritates them more than it irritates their husband, they can just ignore it for a bit and let it get worse. Eventually the mess will get bad enough that it irritates him as well, and then he will clean it up.
If you look at the homes of single men, they often leave messes for longer there as well. If they were motivated purely by a sexist belief that women should do the cleaning we would expect them to step up if no women were present. But they usually don't. It isn't that they think women should clean up messes, it's that they don't think messes should be cleaned up at all (at least not until they're a lot worse).
It seems to me that everyone would be better off if women just did less housework. Men and women would both have more free time, and the only price to pay would be a messier house. That seems like a small price to pay to me, but if some people are really, really bothered by mess they should try to talk to their spouse about it. But they need to understand that their preference for less mess is just that, an aesthetic preference. Nothing bad will happen if the housework gets done more slowly or less frequently.
Asking your spouse to help more with the housework is like asking them to help decorate the house. They should help if its important to you. But they have a right to ask you to tone it down if decorating gets too time-consuming. Your preferences shouldn't just override theirs.
I feel like you might have not fully understood my point about how sexism works. And I’m a much bigger fan of the idea that who cleans shouldn’t be gendered than the idea that both people should live like single men
Cathy, how do you actually know, for a fact, that sexism deserves the blame for the discrepancy between male and female housekeeping aesthetics?
In your conversation with Sam Hammond (published Sept. 5, 2022), you ask rhetorically, "What actually is biological and what is cultural?" Good question! Ghatanathoah doesn't know for sure, neither do I, and neither do you—which means that you can't say for sure that it's an example of "how sexism works".
And this, in turn, means that you can't necessarily moralize your distaste for "the idea that both people should live like single men". It may be just another merely aesthetic issue that must be negotiated in a heterosexual relationship.
(Have you ever read, or seen a production of, Lysistrata? I'm probably a traitor to my sex for reminding you of it, but there are ways to negotiate in strength even when you can't necessarily make accusations of sexism. Just saying.)
Well I do believe, from personal experience and from reading some research, that most people don’t expect men to keep house as well as women. So that is definitionally cultural. Now what would happen if that expectation disappeared I do not know. All I know is that sexism is operational here.
Does the expectation cause the behavior pattern, or is it merely an accurate observation of the behavior pattern? Is the cultural component at cause, at effect, or some of both? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Does anybody know for sure?
Right. That’s an open question. We can be fairly confident there’s a cultural component. We don’t have good evidence, afaik, about whether there’s a biological component at work as well.
Without knowing whether, and to what extent, the cultural component is at cause instead of at effect, we can't say whether, and to what extent, sexism is to be blamed for the problem.
Women are into hypergomy, the idea that they want their man to be somehow "better" then they are. But look at this from men's perspective. If women want and do marry a "better" man, then men must content with marrying with a "worse" person. And for over eons before women started to get paid equal to or more than men.
So, you are right. We need a new script - for women. Fall in love with guys seemingly "worse off" than you. Then these guys have no choice but to do more housework and such to keep you women.
For more detail on this, watch this excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAlDZ3Fcnbo
That all makes some amount of sense theoretically.
The truth, as usual, is much weirder.
Men who earn less and work fewer hours than their wives actually do less housework, childcare, and other forms of domestic labor than high-status husbands on average. They're also more likely to cheat on and beat their wives than high-status husbands.
https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/bottom-half-marriage-is-a-completely
So no, it doesn't work for women to just marry men with less status than they have. And no, low-status men don't respond to the clear incentive to keep their high-status wives by being better husbands. They actually respond by being worse husbands in order to protect their egos from feeling emasculated. Does PsycHacks have any videos on that?
Thanks for your kind reply. You've said in your linked article that "top-half" marriages are a completely different institution from the "bottom-half" marriages. So, when you say, e.g., "men who earn less and work fewer hours than their wives", are you talking about the "top-half" marriages or the "bottom-half" marriages? Also, you've delimited the notion of "high/low-value" to "status" but is it "status" or "value" that distinguish between "top-half" marriages from "bottom-half" marriages? For women's hypergamy might be directed at a number of things, and it is conceivable that it is directed at all these things "combined". Questions, questions! :D
Those men were failed by their parents. If I didn't keep my areas clean my parents would definitely make it known that it was not acceptable.
Also, they probably never lived in a communal house, apartments, or military style accommodations.