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Comment by rudrigu | Hacker News Reader

"... or the wife works while the man take care of kids"

Then wifey starts seeing hubby as a sexless entity --- sort of like the son she never gave birth to --- and loses attraction for him.

"... it isn't a gender thing. It is a money thing"

Humans spent millennia as hunter-gatherers. Men hunted, women gathered. Men protected and provided, women nurtured the children. If women provide and protection is provided by the state, then men are useless. Birth rates fall. Religious people who live according to traditional gender roles then outbreed the atheists.

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Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. It makes discussion less interesting because there are fewer interesting things you can say about them. Then people compensate for that by flame-throwing, and down we all go.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13796757 and marked it off-topic.

In my marriage, I bring home the bacon with a small SaaS and the wife is in graduate school. We split the raising of our child 50-50.

I like it just fine.

She doesn't.

She's admittedly jealous of how much time I spend with my son, she resents having to continue on her career path and not being able to be a stay-t-home mom. She doesn't understand why I would rather raise my son than work a real programming job.

We are getting divorced.

Sorry to hear you're about to get a divorce.

Here's some unsolicited, opinionated advice from my position of ignorance, take it with a grain of salt:

If she wants to stay at home, let her. But make it clear you're happy with your job as is, and wants to be part of your child's life. Find some not-childcare-related housework that she can take off your hands to keep things fair. Preferably something you don't like anyway.

Obviously there's more to it than just the home/work life. But that's a big part.

I would be AOK with "letting" her stay home, although there's no letting this woman do anything, she does everything for herself just fine, thanks. She decided that she needed to continue her career to achieve her life goals of owning a home, paying for our child's college, those sorts of things.

TBH she's probably right, I'm a bit more "anarchy and freedom is what i want" and value my time and agency over money.

She's admittedly jealous of how much time I spend with my son

This is more common than people think. I've had male friends who either become stay at home dads or rearrange their work life to take on a majority of the childcare responsibilities.

It's interesting how often this causes conflict in a marriage.

Sorry to hear about your divorce. And I know it's painful and you may not want to talk about it, but something stuck out at me, and if you'd like to elaborate I'd be very interested in hearing more:

> she resents having to continue on her career path and not being able to be a stay-t-home mom

If you're already covering the majority of the household income with the SaaS while your wife is in grad school... why does she have to continue grad school and her career path?

I don't make that much money, but I only work 3 days a week.

We are comfortable but we don't own a car and we rent. She wants to buy a house, I want to build an earthship.

I get a lot out of being my own boss and learning new things and adding features to my SaaS, and the value inherent in entrepreneurship and building a business. My wife shares none of that, but does share the anxiety, instability and risk of self-employment.

We also spent millennia believing the earth is flat. I see your point that "Religious people who live according to traditional gender roles then outbreed the atheists" which is definitely a worry of mine too. I've recently begun wondering about the value of my parents' old fashioned values, that if you're a productive member of society and you don't have kids, you're a drain on society. The problem there with that argument is the same problem with the "if you don't vote don't complain" argument but there is an element of truth to it.

I also think that if women provide, nothing prevents them from having children, whether with men or otherwise. Men will still have to protect and provide in relationships, but it will be as partners in relationships do, not as men being men. A far cry from useless.

Gathered/trapped (female contributed) foods provided approximately 50% of average caloric intake in most forager societies outside of the Arctic. And there are a lot of interesting social rules about the sharing of hunted meat (highly desirable but less reliable). Men do have to be willing to put skin in the game and contribute in some significant (sometimes risky) way to be considered an acceptable mate, though.

Hey, if your wife sees you as a sexless entity, that sounds like something personal. Like maybe you need to find a way to be sexy for her.

Turning that into a generalization about men being emasculated because women have careers now, man that's just not accurate. It's blaming women for something that's their fault or responsibility.

I would argue it's rather dangerous to use evolution as support for theories about human behavior. This kind of argument is what brought us eugenics.

Yea. I like evolutionary psychology. It's interesting. But we need to be aware that it's extremely speculative and not take any of it at face value.

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