To be sick of seeing 'I carry all the load' posts

[ijustdontunderstanditall]

Can't do a poll as on the app

It feels every other post atm is a woman being annoyed because they do everything, and their partner just goes to work, doesn't help with kids/house/life admin etc

Maybe I am just lucky that I don't have this issue, but I just don't understand why people don't just put their foot down and stop doing it all? Surely when the dinner isn't cooked/ hoover put round/ bill paid the other person will man up and help?

I agree - there seem to be posts like this every day and I also don't understand why they just can't discuss it like an adult with their partner. Some people seem to have very odd relationships. I can understand if someone is in an abusive relationship, but otherwise just talk!!

Maybe that thing would just never get done? For example, my ds19 bled all over the bathroom last week. There's blood under the sink still. Dh must have seen it, ds clearly is incapable of cleaning up his blood. How long will I wait I wonder? I'm prepaired to leave it and clearly no one else is bovered either. I guess the reality is that the dirty lazy people don't mind living in caous

So from his perspective, he was working longer hours than you (to put food on the table), and perhaps thought that you would reciprocate by cooking dinner.
What a bastard!

Don't marry or have children with a man who is more selfish and untidy than you are. You want to be the selfish slob in the relationship from the first moment so you know they are not in this for a domestic servant.

I'm only slightly joking. I know this isn't the case for everyone but motherhood made a lot of the women I know in the above dynamic less selfish and the blokes were already pulling their weight so they ended up with a more 50/50 partnership. Don't expect fatherhood to provide a 'Road to Damascus' moment where they suddenly pull their weight. There's no societal expectation for men to change and become more domestic so they don't.

Ok I understand what everyone else is saying, that this mostly happens after DC, the man was often broadly ok before children, and also there was (way) less to do then, so nowhere as big of a problem...
But then why have more than one child with the man, after he's shown you what he's like??
(apart from the cases of reproductive coercion, but hopefully that's not all.)

Many women get enjoyment from "doing everything" and wouldn't enjoy not bothering. If you don't enjoy it, don't do it?

I'm going to guess that it's lots of reasons, some connected to the sunk cost fallacy.

If you want more than one child and have always dreamt of a family with siblings then you continue with the partner you have rather than risk not meeting someone else.

Perhaps you can deal with the domestic pressure from one child and don't realise how much more another is going to add on.

Maybe the pressure from society to suck it up as a woman is too much to rock the boat and split a family up for domestic drudgery reasons alone.

It's perhaps too embarrassing to be one of the many couples that fall apart after a baby and a second gives the appearance that we are still good, having sex, all is okay here.

None of these make the woman in the relationship stupid, it's just really hard to fight the dream of a happy family when you have already made a mistake at the beginning with the wrong choice of partner.

There’s a truth to this though.

When I dated, my persona was scatty slobby hot mess who didn’t cook. Weeded out all of the people looking for a mum. When I met someone I wanted to marry, I did let up a bit- but I didn’t do any of the ‘wife’ duties until married. I actively never let myself become expert of cleaning and cooking, even though I actually am pretty deft at these things.

there is an ungodly amount of women who respond to the pressure to be a domestic goddess (who also works full time) as then they are a supreme woman. I understand this is societal, and not their ‘fault’- but we must reject this. And teach our daughters to reject this.

Too many women running to Homesense to buy vases and throws to ‘nest’ with a boyfriend who can’t clean his own shit from the toilet.

@TwigletAddict10

Thanks for this ....yes I understand. But most of these reasons sound like an active choice - albeit 'boundered'.
Yet again - women choosing (?) a worse life for themselves.

@Chanelbasketballandchain There's interesting research which I think sheds light on your house proud comments.

In an experiment where people are shown an identical photo of a messy/dirty-ish room, and half are told it's a man's house and half told it's a woman's house, those who are told it's a woman's house will rate it as being much messier than those who are told it's a man's.

This tells us that women are held to higher standards of cleanliness by our society. And, therefore, judged negatively if they do not meet them. Whereas men aren't.

Social judgement is something it's easy to say we should just take no heed of. But we are social animals, social status is critical for our success and survival just like other social apes!

So women are behaving logically within this skewed system, in order to protect themselves by not being judged a failure.

Ok, so what if people don't have many visitors etc? The issue with the patriarchy is that we all internalise it, so that doesn't stop it working on us.

These are stupid excuses all based around what other people might think of you. Growing up in unbalanced, resentful households does children absolutely no favours, and it’s selfish in the extreme to continue having kids in that dynamic just because YOU want them. I have every sympathy with people in genuinely abusive situations but if you have the means to leave and your reasons for not doing so basically boil down to “what if people think I’m not womaning right” I have no time for that at all. It’s really not that hard to take no notice of societal tropes.

@TravelInHope

I am severely disabled following an accident and use a wheelchair.
I suffer from chronic pain.

I work full-time.

Yet he thought I was unreasonable for trying to get him to do some cleaning after our cleaner left because he told her she wasn't a good cleaner.

I left him because he hit our daughter.
Who is also disabled.

Yes, he is a bastard. I hope he rots in hell.

Same here, except it wasn't so much a persona as the real thing. And when I met DP, becoming slightly less of a slattern was my compromise - his was to let some of his standards drop. I'm pretty happy that a tiny amount of his cooking skills have rubbed off on me, though he still does almost all of it.

It wasn't a deliberate tactic but who knew that being a fun-times party girl who stayed out clubbing every weekend would weed out so many shit men.

It’s a phenomenon noted by several scientific studies that men do less housework/mental load than women- even when both partners work. I’m sure there are other factors at play other than women being too meek to ask for help.

When women earn less, they do bigger share of housework. the most equal relationships are where both partners earn exactly the same, but when women start earning more, something weird happens- men start to do less house work and the woman does more.

Same. I remember years ago dating an older guy who it turned out was a massive misogynist and subscriber to the notion of traditional gender roles. Didn’t stop me lying in bed til gone lunchtime every weekend and never doing any cleaning or cooking. Well, I would occasionally but not near as often as he wanted and my cooking is terrible. He actually did start doing all that stuff himself but he did berate me about my slovenliness and complain he didn’t have any clean work shirts, I told him to just take care of his own laundry and I’d do mine because his work shirts weren’t any of my concern. So he ended up doing most of the domestic stuff and being the higher earner. I’m now the higher earner with my current partner and he does all the cooking and I’d say we’re 50/50 on cleaning because we’re both slobs and happy to do it once a week or less, so it’s easy to share. He will do more laundry than me during the week. It’s just never occurred to me to want to be a homemaker or give out the persona of a domestic goddess. I don’t care what men or wider society think of me and I’d rather not conform to a traditional idea of femininity. How did I (and @gannett) miss out on that part of socialisation that apparently all women get that makes them do it?

Same. I remember years ago dating an older guy who it turned out was a massive misogynist and subscriber to the notion of traditional gender roles. Didn’t stop me lying in bed til gone lunchtime every weekend and never doing any cleaning or cooking. Well, I would occasionally but not near as often as he wanted and my cooking is terrible. He actually did start doing all that stuff himself but he did berate me about my slovenliness and complain he didn’t have any clean work shirts, I told him to just take care of his own laundry and I’d do mine because his work shirts weren’t any of my concern. So he ended up doing most of the domestic stuff and being the higher earner. I’m now the higher earner with my current partner and he does all the cooking and I’d say we’re 50/50 on cleaning because we’re both slobs and happy to do it once a week or less, so it’s easy to share. He will do more laundry than me during the week. It’s just never occurred to me to want to be a homemaker or give out the persona of a domestic goddess. I don’t care what men or wider society think of me and I’d rather not conform to a traditional idea of femininity. How did I (and @gannett) miss out on that part of socialisation that apparently all women get that makes them do it?

So from his perspective, he was working longer hours than you (to put food on the table), and perhaps thought that you would reciprocate by cooking dinner.

Except...

he wasn't working longer hours.

I hate to burst any bubbles but keeping house and caring for family members IS work. Which is why we pay cooks, teachers, nurses, cleaners and carers to do everything that wives, mothers and daughters are expected to do for free.

I suppose all the posters blaming women for their own oppression think women should just walk away and leave their kids and elderly parents to make do without them.

I have other suggestions but I don't want to get banned.

Yes, I blame women who use excuses when nothing really stopped them.

I am not talking about countries abusing women, I am talking about my country, where we have exactly the same rights and opportunities. I have never witnessed or heard of a Maths teacher prioritising male students over female, I have never heard of a university discouraging female students.

I have always ended up working in a so-called "male environment", nothing stopped women to join in, they just.. were not there. Men were recruited because we had male applicants. I have never felt inferior let alone worst paid than a male.

If young women struggle to juggle work and family, it's a personal issue. Sort it out before having kids, don't blame "society" for it.

eg. not picking up his socks

Also this. Why would I pick up his socks for him?! If he leaves them on the floor, so what? They're his socks!

(The laundry is my job so if they are next to the laundry basket I'll pick them up but if he leaves them on the other side of the bed that's his problem. Though tbh my socks are the ones that are strewn all over the floor. He doesn't have to pick them up. It's a non-issue. If that's your mental load just get rid of it!)

OK - that's what I did, he just bought more, eventually every table and chair had his socks underneath them, collecting dust, stopping the robohoover going round (bought because I was the only one who ever hoovered or swept), some cases just looking bad and embarrassing if I had a guest, in some cases actually smelling. I either had the work of picking them up, or the mental drag of seeing them everywhere I looked.

My half-way house was chucking them all in a box, with everything else he left lying around that was in my or the children's way - but that's no solution either, that was just another illustrates the issues with the relationship.

I agree with you.

I am not talking about countries abusing women, I am talking about my country, where we have exactly the same rights and opportunities. I have never witnessed or heard of a Maths teacher prioritising male students over female, I have never heard of a university discouraging female students.

ROFL - I was hounded out of Physics A-level nearly 30 years ago - and let me tell you, as one of only 2 women on my particular Uni course, and one of 4 or 5 max in the lectures shared with other courses, it takes a bit of bottle walking into a room filled with 100 blokes at 18 and standing your ground in discussions.

This. It's very easy to function as adults with no children in the picture if you're not house proud. DH and I managed it for years doing practically nothing:

• We both ate lunch and breakfast at work - no cooking or cleaning up. We also ate out once or twice a week in the evening, ate 'posh' microwave meals a few times a week, snacked most of the rest of the time and cooked properly maybe a couple of times of week.
• We did our own laundry.
• We wiped up any kitchen mess we made and put our dirty plates in the dishwasher.
• I ran the hoover round the alternate week from the cleaner.

We'd each of us spend less than 10 minutes a day on chores really. The only real points of contention were taking turns over emptying the dishwasher and taking out the bins/recycling.

Compare that to now:

• Children need 3 healthy meals a day. Packed lunch for the older one if it's a school day. Youngest is 1, so a lot of food ends up on them/the floor. So the floor needs hoovered and the highchair wiped down 3 times a day.
• School mornings are a nightmare - getting everyone washed, breakfasted, dressed, baby fed, bags packed and out of the house by 7.45am.
• The older one has guided reading to do every night and homework once a week, so this needs to be supervised. There's often some school project/dress-up day/school trip that needs to be planned for, some line that needs to be learned for a play or assembly or something to take in. PE kit for PE days etc. and making sure we have everything.
• School run takes up to 2 hours every day.
• Evenings are an endless round of homework, dinner, bath, bed.
• Baby still wakes 2-3 times a night.
• The workload is the same on weekends/holidays - children still need to be fed/washed/exercised/played with/generally loved and cared for.
• There is endless mess to be cleared up - food mess, dirt from outside, craft mess, toys etc. It is amazing how much mess children can make in a short period of time.

But there is no part of this that I would ignore or just stop doing if my DH didn't pull his weight, because I wouldn't want my children missing out, not being properly cared for or living in an unpleasant home environment.

The 'im alright Jack's attitude is honestly vile and does nothing but make people who say it look ridiculous. I've never seen a murder so murder doesn't happen.

If you can't see why and how society perpetuates women's struggles then I can't help you.

You only have to see the gender pay gap reporting to see that women are worse off than men. I think you'll be surprised at the mediocre men earning more than fantastic women.

oh please.

I work with in a "male environment"because I fell into it more than anything, I am not especially bothered one way or another.

It makes 0 difference to be at uni or walk into a conference room with 200 blokes or 200 women, they are people. That coy attitude from SOME women really annoys me, you are a big girl, behave like an adult. Do you walk out of a supermarket if there's a majority of male shoppers there too? Ridiculous.

That's what brings us down, not the men who happened to be there.

I've never seen a murder so murder doesn't happen.
what a stupid thing to say.

I am talking about opportunities, real life examples and real life workplace.

A lot of the complaints against the "gender gap" compare different things (a lot ,not all...SOME women complaining that they don't get the same or higher when they refuse to work the same hours and show the same commitments

I think you'll be surprised at the mediocre men earning more than fantastic women. Women calling themselves "fantastic" when they are just as mediocre you mean 😂or when they don't negotiate their contract, or when they don't fight for higher pay rises.

It's this stupid attitude that makes it harder for the rest of us!