I wish I was a woman so I

[FickleHuman]

Could have a bunch of kids, give up work & go out enjoying the sun.

AIBU to let this annoy me??

I know it's complete ignorance on his part but a huge part of me has lost all respect and no longer want to continue seeing him.

I know this is a running thing but Christ! Do your job and il do mine, no ones is harder or easier. Why do people feel the need to comment??

He's sexist and I wouldnt want to be with someone sexist especially with kids in the mix. Do you want him as a male role model for your kids?

Well to be fair it must get frustrating that men don't get the option to be SAHP without an obscene amount of judgement

I don't know about an obscene amount of judgment. Yes there will be some. I reduced my hours after kids and I know I am judged by others who put their career first. Life would be better if no-one judged of course it would but best thing to do is bring up your sons to be able to rise above it and do what's right for them regardless of other people's judgment.

Why waste your time educating a man in his 30s who's stupid enough to believe child rearing is like spending the summer in the park?

Bin him!!! My friends husband says this all the time to her 🙄🙄idiot ! ... although to be fair I have been out in the sunshine all day with ds 🤣🤣

I don’t understand all the hate and telling the op to dump him. Why not talk and discuss and ask what he meant and then educate if need be?

It's not hate to recognise that someone is going to cost you more than he brings to your life.

Women get an incredibly raw deal from heterosexual relationships even if the man involved is a nice, decent person who has respect for women.

It's not a woman's job to educate a grown man; it's a parent's job to educate a child but if half your time in a relationship is going to be spent educating the other partner in that relationship, that is incredibly dispiriting and exhausting. Ultimately people end up very unhappy if they take someone on who they need to educate to bring up to an even vaguely acceptable standard as a partner.

Even if you find someone you get on with, relationships are a process of negotiation and compromise. If they haven't even yet made the bar of being worth having a relationship with, it's taking on a really onerous task to have anything to do with a man like this. There's simply no good reason to do it. Seriously. Women have busy enough lives, why should they spend some of them educating men who couldn't be bothered to read the memo?

If being a SAHP was such a great option, don’t you think there would be a whole lot more SAHDs doing it?

He’s shown all his colours here OP. He thinks little of you.

I've not replied to him.

I simply haven't the time to constantly educate him on the matters he should understand.

Hmm, personally I think if you're going to dump men who don't have kids over comments like that (if that's the only thing he's done wrong) you may be a long time single.

Yes it is a bit sexist and lacking in empathy but (a) I'm assuming he's being at least somewhat lighthearted (b) if he doesn't have kids then parenting probably looks easier than it is, why would you expect him to know, I didn't know how hard it would be until I was one.

My dh sometimes says to me at breakfast time do you wanna swap when I tell him my plans, especially if it involves the park or meeting friends. It's understandable when he is stuck in an office.

But at the end of the day he wouldn't want to swap with me every day in the same way as I don't long to be back at work doing long hours with a long commute.

Hmm, personally I think if you're going to dump men who don't have kids over comments like that (if that's the only thing he's done wrong) you may be a long time single.

Yeah, cause god forbid women have standards eh

Hmm, personally I think if you're going to dump men who don't have kids over comments like that (if that's the only thing he's done wrong) you may be a long time single.

So what? Better alone than in bad company.

I think I know that guy. He said the same thing to me. One of these guys who targets single mums, probably so he can say shit like that to them. Run!

Good call, OP. It would put me off too. He doesnt have to really understand what it means but he should be savvy enough to keep his mouth shut and not let opinions lile this come out.

DH and I.work shifts so we can split childcare. There have been days where he has begged to be the one who gets to go to work rather than stay home with our two darling demons

OP well done for setting decent standards and sticking to them.

you know what they say, when someone shows you who they are, believe them
it would be a COMPLETELY different matter if you'd said 'taking the kids to the park today' and he replied 'oh, that sounds nice, wish I could join you instead of being stuck in the office
'
If you had no regard at all for you children's welfare and happiness, you could drop them off at his place 7.30 am Saturday, turn your phone off and return 12 hours later. Then he'd have just a tiny clue about being a SAHP. But I doubt you'd do that.

I was a SAHD, it's not difficult, it's just work but usually more enjoyable.
OP's 'guy' should be an EX though.

Dairy I got an obscene amount of judgement for deciding to be a SAHM when my D.C. were little.

I then got an obscene amount of judgement (some of it from the same people) when I decided to go back to work full time once my kids started school.

Because a mother's place is in the wrong.

@outabout - maybe being a SAHP was not difficult for you - but that doesn't mean it isn't for other people. Your post looks awfully like a man coming to explain to a load of women why their opinion is wrong and their experiences don't count or matter. That may not have been your intention, but that is what I see.

SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius I didn’t read it like that. I’m assuming because he is a man that you may have taken it in such a way? We all give opinions based on our circumstances. My partner (when I was at college full time) was a stay at home dad and it’s tough but he found it more enjoyable than working in a factory for 12 hours. It all depends really, I much preferred going to college than I did staying at home all day while he was working. Different strokes and all that. It was very easy when it was just our first but our second makes it difficult (through no fault of her own) due to her disabilities.

If being a SAHP was such a great option, don’t you think there would be a whole lot more SAHDs doing it?

The friends I have that are SAHM did not give that choice to their dps, when I asked one of them if they were going back to work they laughed at me. It is rare that the man just doesn't want to stay at home, but often that they are not given the choice by their partner in my experience.

StickThatInYourPipe yes I've seen people on here saying they won't "share" their maternity leave and in all honesty I wouldn't have wanted to either although it wasn't a choice then.

I've often thought I wish I'd met a man who could work while I stay at home it's often something people just say.

It isn't having contempt for people who do, we often think the grass is greener.

My best friend is a modern matron in a busy general hospital and I'm a Psych working with high risk offenders. He often jokes that I just 'talk all day' and I joke that he just goes to meetings and monitors machines that do all the life-saving work.

People always think someone else has it easier. Often they're right.

Sharing maternity leave is a weird thing though - it needs to be longer to be shareable, because of breast feeding and recovering from physically giving birth. When I had DC1 it was only 6 months - for the first 6 weeks of that I was physically recovering from an emergency section which hadn't gone smoothly. I would have been signed off sick for that amount of time with a comparable abdominal surgery without a baby involved. After that I was breast feeding exclusively for the remaining 4 months, then I was back at work. Sharing that would have been far less straight forward than sharing leave would be if it were not for the pregnancy and birth and breast feeding biology. The mother still ends up doing all the night feeds if exclusively breast feeding, for example. It isn't equal.

Maternity leave needs to be a shorter medical element related to the massive biological way in which maternity is utterly different to paternity.

Say 4 months ring fenced maternity leave, not shareable because it is medical leave. Then after that 12 months leave to be shared. It could in fact be mandatory for cohabiting parents to share it, fair enough.

It isn't straight forward equal treatment to go halves on maternity leave though, because the father doesn't have the physical recovery to go through, nor can he breast feed. The mother would always have to take the first half, which is the hardest half.

For what it is worth my DW could earn more than double what I could and she enjoyed her job so it was logical I stayed at home.
The range of experiences is huge but most of the people I knew at the time enjoyed it.
Maybe some men can find 'house bound activities' a bit easier because they just get on and do, rather than agonising about what might go wrong? That would be the topic of a complete new thread however.

Fuckingitupforfree I think that’s exactly it. The grass does always seem greener. For instance, my child has one type of heart condition and her cousin another. I have often at really hard times (not so much anymore) sat and wished my child just had what her cousin does. It seemed more survivable and my child had no real cure or treatment and no plan of action. Now she is doing better I don’t think like that anymore. But it does go to show, we all see things in a different light when it is someone else, I truly thought life would be easier if her heart condition was a different one. Now we are out of the worst I don’t really think that anymore.

DTMFA!

Quack - precisely. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a pang of jealousy when I'm in a prison in the midst of a dirty protest and later see my SAHM friends had a picnic in the park or went to the beach.

But they probably feel the same way when I get home and drink wine and have a takeaway while they're grappling with bedtime and children that wake up every 2 hours in the night.

Swings and roundabouts.