Men's view of being divorced for not sharing the load

[TheAmusedQuail]

It isn't really like me to be interested in the bloke's POV, because I'm firmly feminist.

But I do like to have a view of both perspectives on things in life (e.g. although left-wing, I do take a gander at, for example, Reform perspectives despite vehemently disagreeing with them).

I wonder about the perspective of men who women leave for not adequately contributing to the family load (housework, childcare, mental load). From my POV, my ex, while useless with me, wised up a little with his 2nd wife. Not totally, leopards don't change their spots, but he's not the asshole he was while I was married to him.

I wonder how other men who are divorced for being lazy etc rationalise it and feel about it. Do they regret coasting into marital breakdown because they didn't share the housework? For not doing more of the parenting? For not cooking a couple of times a week?

I have suspicions about how this gets framed by them, but there must be other men like my ex (who is no paragon of virtue) who wise up a bit and hold themselves culpable.

Bullshit are women the emotional ones. We don't punch walls or have meltdowns when there is no sex.

And if you think living in functional home is obsession, you are clearly NOT the one maintaining it. Meaning you're either a bloke or you're one of the very lucky few women who have a man who does his share/is able to afford staff so you don't do it all.

Living as a adult in a comfortable environment is normal. And it takes work to keep a home/family that way.

I think with my XH, he was copying the pattern of his childhood. His mum was all very 'men go out to work (she never worked) so when they come home all they need to do is sit down and rest'. That was what my ex saw, every day.

Interestingly, before me he'd been with another girl who had put her foot down about him never doing housework and it had ultimately split them up. So he was great with me to start with and it was only when our second child was born and I gave up work to be a SAHM (this is more than thirty five years ago and there was no childcare) that he decided he was the Man Of The House and I had to do EVERYTHING. He went to work. So, as conditioned by his mum, he came home and took it easy. I was at home all day (with very small children), so the house, home, children, organising life, was my job. He didn't take it into account that this meant HIS job was 9-5 and mine was 24/7. He couldn't see that at all.

I reckon this is probably the wrong forum to ask this on, as the men on here are probably more "enlightened" than most.

I got lucky, I found Mumsnet about a week after DD was born, looking for some specific information. The top 3 results on google were all this place, so I stayed, and hoovered up info.

DP and DD didn't actually move in with me until 3 months after DD was born ( we did everything in slightly the wrong order), by which point I'd probably already seen about 8 bajillion threads about relationships with no sex, or where divorce wasn't on the cards, where the man wasn't pulling his weight.

I'd like to think that I wouldn't have been that bad even without Mumsnet. But I never saw my Dad lift a finger at home, and at 24 my standards of cleanliness weren't exactly high. This place made me realise that I didn't need to be 50 / 50 to my standard of cleanliness, I needed to be 50 / 50 to DPs.

I'm not going to suggest I'm perfect either. Me and DP and now 18 years into living together and last week I saw her giving the inside of the washing machine a wipe down, a job that I'd never in my entire life considered might need doing. I mean, "wash" is in the name of the thing, surely it self cleans!

But I do think my relationship is in a better place because of Mumsnet than it would have been without. And it's not just mental load stuff either, for example peri-menopause is currently hitting DP fairly hard, and I don't think I'd have understood properly just how debilitating stuff like brain fog can be without having seen threads on here over the years.

As I said, we tend to get emotional . . . 🙄

Pointing out sexism is hardly emotional. It's a statement of fact. Would adding a statistic help you distinguish between the two?