Having a supportive spouse is basically a superpower.
"Please don't ask as much of me in the future, I am at a breaking point"
"Please do more for me in the future, I am at a breaking point"
You see the difference in these two? In the first you ask for yourself to do less. In the second you ask for your partner to do more. The second often leads to your partner also burning out and then nobody has any capacity to spare creating a horrible situation.
The super power isn't the support part, but being able to live with less part. Demanding high living standards and thus high workload from your partner is the kryptonite.
When everyone around you shits on you and belittles everything you do, you're playing on expert mode.
My pet favourite example is the ”you’re shit and going to fail. You should do what I did”. This is advice inevitably comes from very toxic personalities who are in serious trouble in one way or another.
This blog post basically no different from the other "so I did X and now I'm a big success" anecdotal LinkedIn/Medium/Tweet thread posts.
Not everyone is allowed to break gender roles.
Edit: not going to promise this is the best reference/source, but it is at least one: https://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men-women/
When the husbands in these relationships lost their job did they try to get back out there? Did they help at home? Did they do anything about it? If my wife lost her job and showed no motivation to get another one then I'd probably divorce her too. Part of what I admire in my partner is her incredible work ethic.
Maybe instead of complaining about "gender roles" complain about people picking shitty spouses and not having hard conversations about these sort of situations before they actually happen.
Admittedly, you also mention "bad at relationships" and that element was present on both sides as well.
For what it's worth, that was his second attempt to marry someone after he broke up with my mother. The first was with a woman who hated me in absurd levels to the point that she would attempt to choke me and throw knives at me because (according to my father, I was too young to actually engage her in any form of discussion) I reminded her of his previous relationship. And all that happened after 4 years of him being in a casual relationship with her.
Anyways, I don't know if I would call it changing or rather that there are people who try to hide their true colors until I get what they want.
May I suggest that it is highly unlikely there were no warning signs. This level of violence does not come out of nowhere (neither in women nor in men). It tends to consequence of escalations. The hate toward the offspring itself should have been seen as warning sign.
Like, yes, dad is there victim of domestic violence too. But like with women who pick yet another abuser again, there is issue with partner selection, not knowing warning signs or interpreting them as passion or some variant of that.
In our society, we are used to seeing people getting at least vocal support when things get hard, harassment at work, inability to ask for higher pay, etc. We just forget that, when it’s men, the advice is “Ok maybe work gave you trust issues, but have you tried to man up? Why would you expect support from a spouse if you, yourself, aren’t self-supported?”
It defeats the idea of “he for she, she for he.”
Yes, why should you expect support from a spouse if you aren't doing anything for yourself? This goes for men and women. Of course both parties should be allowed moments of vulnerability, but I thought it was pretty cleat that my statements were in the context of a long-term struggle. If my wife gets fired and has a bad week, I'll be there to support her and would expect the same in return. If she has a bad month, we'll sit down and have a serious talk about what she needs to do going forward.
If the only support you're getting is "man up" then maybe you should find yourself a different social circle and/or partner.
"He for she, she for he" means just that. It explicitly does not mean "He for she even when she isn't there for she, she for he even when he isn't there for he".
If you expect people to "support" you whilst you make no personal effort then perhaps you should reevaluate your outlook on life as a whole. That isn't how things should work in a healthy relationship.
This is "have you tried not being poor" for mental health: it's not actually actionable advice.
Yes, but this is not the world we live in. Awareness campaigns all go towards telling people to get support and talk about their mental problems. Maybe we are weakening people, I don’t know, I’m just saying that we don’t tell people to swallow up their problems, and in France for example, we’ve raised taxes to be able to fund a one-billion-euros plan to provide various kinds of help for those soft issues for women.
In fact, those very people tell men that they don’t speak enough.
But when a man raises a grave issue that blocks his progress, the answer is launched automatically: “Everyone would be better off if they just tried a little bit harder to be more mentally resilient”. In other words: “k bye!”
It’s not that we should or shouldn’t be resilient, it’s that we tell people to provide help to their spouse and expect help from them, only to notice that said spouse can be relied upon like a house of cards during difficult times.
In this specific example, when women loose jobs, they are expected to take on most housework until they find a new job.
Some years ago, I burned out, and was asked by my doctor to stay home, and this was followed by crushing depression. I was broken for months until I pieced myself back together, with help (therapy, meds, spending time with my kids...). My spouse says she was afraid I was lost, not going bacl to work, afraid I'd be broken forever. Thank heavens she just didn't ditch my ass, she helped me back and I'm watching myself more than ever, because I don't want that to happen twice.
Seeing the person you love falling apart in such a way (depression, burnout) can tempt you to reevaluate the person as a whole. But if you can't stay and help when I'm broken, what kind of partner are you? Sure there's a limit, and everyone must draw a line somewhere (and I'm pretty sure I decided mine before we married), but losing one's job isn't there for me.
There is no indication of 'why' she might show no motivation. The assumption here seems to be that she's a freerider, a burden, and not a partner with motivation issues. And I cited good reasons for lacking motivation. From personal experience.
Yes, there are people that become lazy, or show their laziness after some time hiding it behind an easy 0-producing job. And yes sometimes you discover that you don't like that in your partner and maybe you're now too different, etc.
But this hustle mentality, don't stop and think, just find a job, any job, gogogogogogogogogo, isn't how I want to be treated when laid off or broken in some way. There's a lot of talk on HN about mental health, burnout, depression, but also lots of people that seem to be OK to ditch a partner at the first sign of him or her not being 100% 'on' all the time.
There's many discussions to be had when you realize your partner doesn't want to work anymore. The first one is probably 'downsizing' as fast as possible. Can we live on one salary? How much time? What do we let go to weather this? Do you think it's temporary, do you want to switch careers? Are you ready to lose those comforts? Are you thinking about the near future? Do you have plans? Do I sit in them? do you want to try therapy? Maybe not all the questions on the same day. Decisions, together. And red lines if you must. Money, kids, health. Yours and your partners.
I was just saying, maybe someone you trusted and observed having fine work ethics (if that's what floats your boat) changing suddenly, is maybe sign of a problem you were supposed to be helping with, as the other person in this relationship.
There's a reason "you're not a real women" isn't an insult, but "you're not a real man" is. There's a reason men live 3-10% shorter than women and commit suicide several times more often (in my country 8 times more often). And there's a reason divorce law is absurdly sexist.
This is not to say "women are evil", there's no secret conspiracy to reinforce the gender roles, no "matriarchy" nor "patriarchy" keeping the status quo. It's simply people repeating what they were taught about life to their children because "that's the way it should be".
So the fix isn't to "find better spouses", the fix is to make people better human beings and live the way they want.
That is the "patriarchy". It was never claimed to be a Dr Evil thing.
Also calling it "patriarchy" when it hurts both genders equally and is reinforced by both genders equally - is counterproductive.
Another related concept in feminism is "toxic masculinity" and that name is even worse. If you're trying to solve a problem don't start by naming it "it's all their faultism".
Curiously I've never heard anybody call the same phenomenon happening to women "toxic femininity".
One thing I might note is that a lot of these kind of harmful social constructs were applied to women 100 years ago. Things as trivial as wearing trousers and as important as voting or working would have been considered "not womanlike" back then. What has changed that is ~100 years of the feminist movement, which made all of these and more acceptable for women.
But there hasn't been and still isn't such a movement for men. And I would suggest that that's what we need.
No need for the whataboutism: gender roles exists and are deeply entrenched in some societies.
A simple measure is how often divorces end with the ex-husband having to pay spousal support to the ex-wife and not the other way around.
This is a clear indication of how the legal system expects men to be "providers" and, therefore, woman careers and financial independence to be less important.
If you don't do traditional she stays at home with kids thing, you won't have to pay it. Because either it was you being at home or she had job too.
Basically what women do at all time is weave a healthy psychological support net of people. We, the men, should learn to do the same.
That's not really how it works, though. The support net is given to women because, subconsciously, society understands the value of women. A civilisation where the women are unhappy and take their own lives is not going to work beyond one generation for obvious reasons. This isn't something that women work to achieve while men don't bother. Telling men they should just "get support" like a woman is similar to telling a poor person they should just buy a house because it's a good investment. It's not as simple as that.
Some guys started doing this. "MGTOW monks" and Men's Rights Activists, for example. They were quickly ostracized as hateful misogynists, despite their focus largely being on providing help, support, and motivation to rectify particularly-unique male problems. They have some demographic overlap with the maladjusted incel demographic so of course all communities get painted with that same brush.