Housewives Are One Surprising Solution to “Millennial Burnout”
pamelajhobart.com
pamelajhobart.com
I went on a date with a guy who told me he is looking for a housewife with everything that you would expect and actually lean more into the 1950's version. Later in the date he let out that he also expected me to continue working my full time job and pay half of the expenses.
I hope he understands you're still laughing at him.
I would work 8-10hrs a day, then spend another 1.5ish walking dogs and .5-1ish doing house chores. After I was done, I would have to listen to them complain about how exhausted they were mopping the floors.
When I would mention to friends of the opposite gender that I felt taken advantage of and that they should contribute the majority of housework for their "free ride" (or get a job and contribute to expenses), the entire conversation would be warped into me being a sexist or abuser. It was a weird societal gaslight, for sure.
Some people will think that’s unfair (my income is mostly sourced from investments, sure, but I’m still bringing the income). Some will think it’s fair as it’s about doing the work.
Your situation, on the other hand, seems categorically unfair to you.
You say "doing the work"...well, the person with the job is doing 8hrs/day and 40hrs/wk to pay for everything. You should be willing to put in some sort of equity of work.
If the household chores somehow took anywhere near 40hours a week, sure the argument goes out the window; but the easy solution is go get a job, and then just split the chores down the middle. They don't have to pay for your lifestyle anymore, and there's no argument about being someone's servent. But I don't see what's weird about saying "I don't want to pay and work for someone who does nothing or nowhere near the equivalent".
You're retired, you're not doing "the work"...it makes sense that you also contribute.
I have found that the only real recipe for happiness in domestic life is if the parties come to the table honestly and earnestly, work out some kind of arrangement they’re jointly comfortable with, and understand that this may change over time. That’s OK, and the process should then begin again. (We love iteration around here, embrace it at home too!)
No one should be trapped into some sort of lopsided domestic hell hole with no option to be fulfilled and no equitable support from their other.
After you divorced did you hire a maid, etc? How is it going looking for a future spouse when you tell them you want to never do any house work at all?
They just decided they wanted to be a traditional housespouse. I certainly would have liked them to contribute something to the household, like walking the dog that they went and got of their own accord half of the time or to contribute something in their stead of contributing to household expenses. Mostly since I was spending the majority of my hard earned money on them sitting on their ass watching TV or going to museums and cafes with friends. And the majority of my time supporting their lifestyle.
I didn't ask them to be in that role, they were perfectly welcome to get a job and we could share an equal amount in all household chores. And in fact, that was the ultimatum that ended our relationship, leading into a different one of equal shares of contribution and a shared happiness (both employed, equal split of household chores).
> Mostly since I was spending the majority of my hard earned money on them sitting on their ass watching TV or going to museums and cafes with friends. And the majority of my time supporting their lifestyle.
And again it is adorable that you think it was your money. Legally married as you found out when you divorced, money earned during marriage is legally owned by both and split.
Really it sounds like you failed to have any sort of real conversation about life plans when you were younger. You then made all sorts of assumptions which not surprisingly blew up in your face.
I am willing to bet anything that if they got a job and you were both employed you would have still complained that they should be doing their half of the house work, which would have been all of the house work and you would have "walked the dog" as your half. And if you two had kids, of course you wouldn't have helped there either and she could see that hell coming.
Sounds like you wanted a bangmaid and not a life partner.
It's adorable you think we were married. They got nothing in the break up other than a lost ride and a one-way ticket to a deadend job. Oh, and a dog they tried abandoning on the streets a couple months later. Real upstanding person you're defending there because of your imagined solidarity in gender/perspective.
> Sounds like you wanted a bangmaid.
Nope, just a partner.
Funny how you're stuck on the one point of housework when I made it clear from the beginning that I would prefer they go earn their own money and we do a 50/50 split of chores. Obviously, because you know that that is a totally reasonable stance and you'd look ridiculous for saying they deserve to stay at home and do nothing while using someone else's money and effort to live off of; so you try to reframe it as some desire on my part. It's not working, move on.
You also probably think any man you date that wants to "go dutch" is a deadbeat too. You'll say no, because you know it'll look hypocritical; but we both know what you actually think, statistically.
Really shows how you most definitely treat your current partner. I truly hope they haven't legally entangled themselves to you.
Good luck with that. It is clear how you value that work.
It never seemed to click that I was LGBT and describing a relationship with a man.
The hypocrisy runs deep in some.
What the original article misunderstands is that there is no incentive for the stay-at-home partner to contribute. They don't have to do housework, because at the level of your own disgust threshold, you'll do it for them. They don't have to raise the children, there's Youtube for that. And you can't leave, because you'll lose half of your assets and be on the hook for spousal and child support.
"Housewife" is a fun idea, but the incentive structures are so perverse that it's invariably a bad deal for the earning partner. Most of us end up working from sunup to sundown while the housespouse scrolls on social media all day.
That said, sounds like you hit the jackpot with someone who mopped the floors. That's better than most.
(Families at the fancy private schools just pay extra for that stuff. They also seem to typically have one stay at home parent, but also nannies, maids, etc.)
It's a whole seperate beast from public schooling when I was growing up nowadays.
I couldn't do what I do without my wife, she is just as critical to running the household as I am. Honestly how did we convince half of society that it was liberating and freedom to be able to slave away for a corporate wage day in and day out?
I think because until recently, housewives had a very poor standard of living (e.g. women couldn't reliably get credit cards til the 70s, very traditional views of a role of a woman in a family). It's not a surprise that the subsequent generations (Gen X and Millennials) were raised with distaste for the housewife lifestyle.
In the US during WWII women took over a lot of traditionally male jobs and got to run their own lives as men were often away. After the war there was a full court press to force women back into the home and traditional roles. And by 1960 women were in open revolt.
My mother mentioned being a housewife with small kids as. You spend all day at home with children and no adults to talk to. Then your husband comes home and now you have an adult to talk to. But he's been talking adult stuff all day and just wants some downtime.
The modern homeschooling movement is solving this problem. I've seen it firsthand. The caretaker parents put their kids in various daytime group programs and many days are spent with other parents and other kids.
The kids get time with other kids. The parents get time with other adults. It's the grassroots version of "it takes a village"
Perhaps the more equitable route is a household where both work fewer hours so both can be breadwinner and homemaker.
Actually, being able to depend on someone you trust is the real liberation.
And as terrible as bad employers might be, they usually cannot inflict the levels of physical and emotional abuse that bad spouses can. Business, not personal.
I've seen some rather un-liberated comments above, such as "oh no! we could never make it as a family on a single income! both spouses need to work... or else!" "who can afford children in this economy? we're DINKs for life; we barely get by!" so it's rather apparent to me who is enslaved.
It's a good point. Let's put it in the same box as slavery and arranged marriage.
Although if food keeps going this way we may need to cut back on some things.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...
Couple this with the fact that nowadays couples have less children in average and you start to get the picture. If now two people work (vs 1) to have one child (vs 5) that will get the same (vs better) quality of life than their parents then you have on average become poorer.
I can't help but feel we have been duped.
Anecdotally I know a family of five that survived on one income that is half of a common tech salary, while in a fairly high cost of living area.
You know how they did it? Frugality, and sacrifice, of anything unnecessary. The mother keeps up the home and homeschools the kids. The dad learned to maintain cars by watching YouTube every time their old car broke down.
Mom could've gotten a job, but they made a choice to sacrifice a more luxurious lifestyle for the ability to keep the kids out of public schools. It is a choice. It's just a choice most people don't want to make. They want the lifestyle that comes with two incomes, and the benefits of being a stay at home spouse, and it's just not realistic.
Buddy, in California, you need $208K of income to just QUALIFY for a mortgage for a median house. [1] No matter how much frugality people live in, most people won’t even come close to that number on a single income. Average car payments are $700+ a month and $500+ on used one. [2] Average cost of a 4 year attendance in a public college is $100k and for a private college it is $200k [3]. Average monthly premium for non subsidized health insurance for a family of 4 is around $1700, which drops to $500-$800/month with employer or state sponsored subsidies. [4] It’s very convenient to blame things on lifestyle, but the reality is that even the basics are way out of reach of a median household on single income. It ain’t the 50s anymore for a reason.
[1] https://www.ocregister.com/2023/08/11/only-16-of-californian...
[2] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/average-....
[3] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college
[4] https://www.anthem.com/individual-and-family/insurance-basic....
Chicken as a meat has been depicted in Babylonian carvings from around 600 BC. Chicken was one of the most common meats available in the Middle Ages. For thousands of years, a number of different kinds of chicken have been eaten across most of the Eastern hemisphere, including capons, pullets, and hens. It was one of the basic ingredients in blancmange, a stew usually consisting of chicken and fried onions cooked in milk and seasoned with spices and sugar.
In the United States in the 1800s, chicken was more expensive than other meats and it was sought by the rich, but by no means does this make meat-birds a novelty of CAFOs.
Yes. The opportunity cost of housewifing is breadwinning. The opportunity cost of breadwinning is housewifing. Guess which one pays the rent/mortgage (keywords not found in the text.)
Relationships are about trust and vulnerability. If you're making fucking contingency plans, you're cheating at being in a relationship and don't belong in one.
My own advice would be that if you catch your spouse making contingency plans, see to it that their plan is executed as quickly and efficiently as possible. People that know they have a way out of trouble tend to do very nasty things before justifying their execution (same reason not to trust anyone of a citizenship you don't share). Get out of that relationship immediately while terms are good. The contingency will be executed by them under the worst of terms otherwise (expect to be provoked into violence or accused of spousal rape or worse, seemingly out of nowhere).
* Childcare costs decrease with age, and decrease substantially when your child reaches school age. Full-time childcare costs are typically only for the first 3-4 years of a child's life.
* Even if you break even in terms of take-home pay, a stay-at-home parent that was previously working might be missing out on things like 401K/retirement contributions.
* The opportunity costs to your career of taking 3-4 years off is enormous, and it's frequently difficult at best to return to work with similar pay/seniority as when you left after taking several years off (and might be effectively impossible if you've taken 10+ years off).
For working professionals, it's incredibly short-sighted to look at short term childcare costs vs take-home pay solely in terms of dollars, and it's silly to to say there is 'no incentive except avoiding your kids.' The incentive in terms of dollars and job prospects over the course of your career can be huge.
- many more meals must be ordered in or eaten out instead of prepared from scratch
- transportation cost increases, more vehicles needed which means more gas more insurance more repairs or more transit fare and now both people sacrifice possibly hours of their day to commuting
- childcare services must be paid for and transportation arranged for them
- the choice of housing now has the additional constraint of being within commute distance for the second job (along with other resources that must be obtained outside the home now e.g. childcare) often meaning less choice and higher cost
- with both partners sharing household duties evenly, neither can take on additional work as needed whether that's taking work home, staying late or working a second job. Dividing the labor so one person manages the household and the other devotes their energies to earning money allows both to be more effective at what they do. Division of labor is the cornerstone of an advanced industrial society that makes everything possible.
But the real issue is what the article points out, that this often leaves the stay at home parent “trapped” and dependent on the working spouse. What do you do when you’ve been out of the workforce 20+ years, kids out of the house (no child support), and you need to support yourself now?
If the earner leaves: alimony
It's not like we haven't solved these problems before. Yes, we could improve legislation around this but the basic idea is that if you have a contract with a partner where one of you earns the income and the other does the work at home then part of that contract is to recompense the person who is not working if the one who is fails to live up to their side of the bargain for whatever reason.
I was thinking about the logistics of this the other day since one of our cars is down, I'm WFH with a SAHM and I hate the expense of having to maintain two cars. Maybe this is the time to downgrade to one (which will be followed by mandatory RTO, knowing my luck).
Being a housewife is Work. It's a full-time unpaid job that frequently involves bringing things to the home from outside of it. She's not my dog; if I took our only car to work, my wife doesn't just sit around awaiting my return or stop needing to go places. The kids still need to be brought to/from school (in California, this is at irregular times on irregular days for maximum exclusion). Sometimes they need to go to the doctor. Sometimes she needs to go to the doctor. Groceries need procurement.
She could take the bus, maybe. Then it's a discussion of which partner's role is critical enough to necessitate exclusive use of the car. Both sides are valid. Being a trailblazer doesn't mean shit if nobody's maintaining your path.
In past instances, I've left the car to her and just taken Uber to ad-hoc onsite work, but this is very unreliable (and expensive for short hops).
If you live in an American suburb, you need multiple vehicles regardless of employment status.
There is this "modern" expectation of a lifestyle, but most of those things aren't _necessary_. There are lots of families which need two incomes to maintain the necessary stuff, but it's not the majority and few of them are reading HN.
I really can't get behind the money-saving arguments about food etc. (mostly in other comments even though my post is here.)
I mean, I buy meals during the day because I'm rich and lazy. Nothing's stopping me from storing leftover dinner in the fridge and taking it into work the next day.
But if I wanted unrealistic comparisons between food costs and employment, why not child care too: I save so much money and time by having my kid fed at daycare instead of having to feed him myself.
I agree.
It would be absolutely crazy to split the workforce down the middle (housewife vs. everything else). It would be like if half the workforce was bakers or dentists.
Since it's clear from the top-level comments that most people aren't reading this far: This article is using "housewife" to mean one member of a two-adult household focusing mostly on home-related work rather than typical money-earning work, and the article (eventually) takes pains to point out that this could be a man (though usually isn't).
Personally, I think she's right that having at least one person in a household not work full time for pay would be a much better setup if it actually worked the way I would want it to, especially (but not exclusively) in households with children. However, I don't see any path to it working the way I would want it to, and for most people I know, the way it would actually work is less desirable than the status quo.
Here's how I wish this could work:
- Both people work part time and share the "homemaking" responsibilities. This is covered in the article along with the reasons this doesn't work for most people in our current society. But this is what I'd like to do if we were financially independent.
- People take turns working at home or for pay. I would love to switch back and forth. I get tired of both kinds of work and it would be rejuvenating to do one for awhile and then the other. But again, this doesn't work for most people, because it's not what employers want (it is just a different version of part-time work after all).
- No gender-based stereotyping of who "should" be doing which kind of work. This one is possible to overcome on an individual basis by communicating really well about the expectations for both people involved and by conscientiously not caring what other people think. But still, enculturation is hard to overcome, and I know both sides of the "non-traditional" way of doing this often face different kinds of struggles with it.
But if those things aren't plausibly achievable in a widespread way, then I think the status quo where most people try to do both work for pay and work at home (and do kind of a bad job of both) is preferable to the "traditional" setup of having strictly a woman do all the work at home indefinitely. Very few of the women I know would thrive with that lifestyle, and few of the men I know would actually prefer their partner live that lifestyle.
One of the things I find annoying in American life is how so many bureaucratic things are only open 9-5ish. DMV, Doctor, Banks, Dry Cleaners, any government office etc. Having to shove these things into a lunch break or take time off really adds to stress levels. We did a great job 15-20 years of getting things moved online and out of "business hours" then we seemed to stall into whatever we're at now.
I think it was the non-PC part that got this flagged.
Personally, I prefer the term "homemaker", because that's a good description of the _job_.
Taking care of a home and a family is work. Sometimes, both adults have to be employed to pay for the bare necessities. Often, they don't -- they choose to, so they can have a more luxurious lifestyle. It's a _choice_. And not all of the consequences are good:
> Now, the home is a complicated site of production and consumption. Consumption - largely of food, but also of things like entertainment - has to be arranged, as most of the consumables are not produced on the premises.
The mention of entertainment struck me, because I've seen how rare it is for families to play games together -- child siblings might play video games together, but the adults rarely join in. The "family time" is passively watching something on a screen, and even that has been reduced now that each person has their own personal screen.
More than anything, I think folks should take away from the article that there's no shame in choosing to take care of the home and family. Even if you and your family don't want to do it, don't treat it as weird or creepy when another family does.
Personally, I would think the solution to this type of millennial burnout is having the economic stability and workplace protections to _not_ have to always be worrying about school and work.
Also, it’s baffling to me that this is treated like a choice everyone is making? Like, what if you need multiple incomes to afford rent, or what if you’re single???
Kind of amusing that the solutions to modern problems are quickly becoming what were once thought of primitive lifestyles and culture.
Multi-generational and extended family houses work for some folks, but more broadly we have the problem that adult children move away from their families and start a new family somewhere else, without a replacement for that support structure.
There's nothing else to do? Well I might as well:
- do my taxes
- mow the lawn
- do a batch of laundry ... etc.
Abundant entertainment leaves little room for otherwise boring but useful and necessary activities.