We found it to be an excellent book.
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I don’t know personally many lazy husbands either, as described in this thread. Our kids are more likely to see me fussing around the kitchen, making dinner and cleaning up, on a nightly basis than my wife. But that is because I am restless and like menial tasks at the end of the day to wind down from work, whereas my wife likes to wind down from work by watching tv or reading.
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You sound awesome!!! Lol…can you train other hubbies!! Jk!
Ok…you probably would NOT know of such men unless you happened to have them in your family. Working men tend to know their co-workers, old friends, and family. They wouldn’t really have the opportunity to know of men who sit on their tushes all day long unless it’s in their close circle.
What I’ve found interesting is that in quite a few of the cases with friends and family we didn’t see the divorce coming. One family was particularly shocking as the family did everything together and seemed very close. You never saw discord though both parents were very controlling of their kids. Another couple always very physical with each other in public. While we have other friends who constantly bicker yet stay married.
I saw one of my closest friends who separated about 10 years ago and finally divorced about 7 years ago yesterday. Even years later her ex still haunts her. She was blindsided and still bares scars. Her ex was extremely generous for the first few years of separation but in the end he hid assets and claimed he was making far less money. She gets alimony but she lives a drastically less affluent lifestyle. She had been a stay at home home and her earning potential is low at this stage. Plus she is stuck in the position if she makes any money her ex will take her back to court to reduce the alimony. While her ex and his new partner live in a multi million dollar home my friend rents a studio guest house in a less expensive city. The one blessing is that he has paid for his kids education. The wires thing was they were such a loving family and he loved his kids and was a great dad. He has allowed his present relationship to strain his relationship with his kids.
Honestly, I haven’t seen the lazy man thing. I have known many SAHMs who’ve been pretty crappy mothers, though, either spending a lot of time not taking care of family and houses but shopping, working out, playing tennis, lunching and everything else to do with “me time” and I’ve seen plenty of depressed and medicated SAHMs who aren’t functioning too well, frankly. In both scenarios, it is the dads who are doing double duty.
I’ve also known more mothers who abandoned their families and left their husbands with the task of raising the kids than the other way around.
That is very sad, @mom60. I have a friend whose DH was having an affair and the now wife (then “other woman”) would answer his cellphone when they were together (and he was still married to my friend) when the daughters called him. Awful. Just awful. Thats how they confirmed he was having the affair. The other woman reportedly has a history of manipulating men and taking their money (I am hearing this second hand). The husband was sadly developing an early onset dementia (early onset dementia is commonly a dramatic decline, as opposed to a late onset dementia, which tends to be slower and more insidious) and got manipulated by the girlfriend/now wife. The ex-h did reportedly agree to finish paying for the last daughter’s college but the monies were at that time controlled by the new wife.
I question whether he was even competent to sign a wedding license (he had already been diagnosed and was declining) and wonder if the new wife will really take care of him as the dementia worsens.
@jym626 how sad. Especially for the kids in that situation.
The gap between the upper class folks and the working class folks shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone who has seen the impact on economic dislocation on things like communities and families. In 1960 working class men and their families faced a pretty bright future (at least if you were part of the privileged groups, that wasn’t true for more than a few people), they could get jobs with a high school diploma (or even less) that could pay for families, where they could be a significant breadwinner, and it isn’t surprising that marriage rates were high. Compare that to today, where the economic prospects of the working class has gone south, and you see much of what we saw in what some called the economic underclass, where marriage rates were low, out of wedlock births, etc. I think it is simplistic to call this laziness, a lot of this is hopelessness I suspect, where the “American Dream” has gone south and as a result they have given up hope beeing the prime breadwinner and so forth, or having a ‘traditional family’. The other thing to think of is when you are economic marginilized, getting divorced isn’t going to likely change things much, as sad as that sounds, not much loss in divorce financially if you already were struggling.
That probably has something to do with it, musicprnt, but let’s also remember that no-fault divorces didn’t exist in the 60s so people stayed in marriages because they didn’t really have a choice.
The divorce rate was pretty high following the passage of no-fault divorce laws (starting in 1970) as people who had long wanted to get out of their marriages now had a way out.
So sure, the economic stability of the 50s, 60s probably helped… but it’s not like people had much of a choice anyway.
@romanigypsyeyes :
of course you are correct, I am sure Murray would tell you that is because people were more ‘moral’ back then, rather then as you point out being hindered by restrictive divorce laws. However, there is another indicator that you can’t blame on divorce, and that is people getting married in the first place, and that has plummeted as well, among the working class we are talking about you see the same story that was played out before, lower rates of marriage in the first place, births out of wedlock and so forth, and I think that is telling as well. Kind of like saying that the death rate from automobiles was very low in the 19th century and therefore those cars must have been very safe:)
To clarify: I do think that many marriages break up because of economic instability and other stresses that come along with being a low income family.
I just caution (not to you but in general) against romanticizing the past.
^agree totally, most people who romanticize the past tend to either a)romanticize the world of when they were kids, before the reality of life had hit them, and to them it was a kinder, simpler time and/or b)believe those who remember the world when they were kids IME.
Dos–"…Honestly, I haven’t seen the lazy man thing."
Well, when you see it you’ll know it. It’s not pretty. Hopefully you don’t run into the situation.
But to have a friend married to it (and not be able to figure out WHY their life is in turmoil is even worse. (But " I LOVE HIM" is not a good response).
-I must say at the end of the day that I want my kids to get married and have kids and have good lives and support one another for the next 60 (or 70 or how many years that takes) to live happy.
It’s nice to know the road blocks in front of you so you can prepare. It helped me.
But I really hope anyone stuck in a bad situation can find the strength to get out. Whether it’s in a few weeks or years from now. I can’t imagine living life in a vacuum.
I’ve just been listening to the story of the idiot governor of Alabama who had an affair with an aide and is now being impeached. And his wife, in her 70’s divorced him. What is wrong with these men? Clinton, Spitzer, Weiner, and I’m sure I’m forgetting countless others in public life who do this at the risk of losing their careers and reputations.
Yeah, keep on telling yourself that should be why study after study have shown that women were happier in the 1970’s than they were in the modern era.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14969
http://quillette.com/2015/11/02/the-paradox-of-female-happiness-2/
Well, divorce rates were much higher during most of the 70s. Maybe that’s why women were happier then. We’re currently at a 35-40 year low for divorce rates.
For those who, like me, find this a fascinating topic: we’ve discussed later-in-life divorces before, once when Al and Tipper Gore divorced after 40 years of marriage ( http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/937493-gores-splitting-up-p1.html ) And another time, more recently: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1826469-after-full-lives-together-more-older-couples-are-divorcing-p1.html (And probably many other times, too.)
I completely agree with @morrismm, way back in post #24, when she said
I don’t think marriage was designed to last for 50 years or more, since people weren’t designed to live much past 70.
If a couple splits up after a long marriage, I don’t think it necessarily means that they never had a good marriage, or that they were only hanging in there for the kids, or that someone was cheating sexually/emotionally/financially. I think a later-life divorce can also mean that the marriage played itself out and was a good relationship at one time but then … isn’t. We can speculate on why, but the only marriages we really know are our own.
@frazzled1: Sometimes even our own marriages are resistant to understanding. I spend a lot of time (probably too much) wondering what I did or what about me made my ex-H want to leave me.
@zinhead:
That is known as subjective sampling, one that uses a single methodology to try and come up with an answer (and neither article was claiming the 1970’s were better, mind you), and it leaves out some basic facts. In the 1970’s, while women’s participation in the work force was increasing, it was a time when women didn’t have the pressure they do today to be superwomen, thanks to economics of most families, today very few couples have a wife who is a SAHM or who has the kind of job where she works around kids, yet women still have the burden of being the prime caregives of kids, it is mom driving kids to soccer practice or ballet lessons or whatnot. In the 1970’s a lot of moms were still stay at home, least in the middle class burb I grew up in, and there wasn’t just the pressure on women back then to be superwomen, to be working the high pressure job and raising kids and so forth.
The other thing to think about is that since the 1970’s, women more and more have been allowed into jobs that used to be men only, they are better educated today than in the 1970’s, and they are working a lot more in high stress jobs, pure and simple. That doesn’t mean there weren’t high achieving women in the 1970’s, there were, but the penetration was nowhere near what it is today, and worse, there is a lot of pressure on women that if they don’t ‘achieve’, if they step back from a career or become SAHM to raise the kids when they are young, they can be seen as ‘lesser’ by other women. I think the ‘hapiness’ gap has closed, not because women’s lives were a panacea back then, but rather that they have come closer to men in where they work, how they work, but unlike men many of them still have the ‘other half’ to deal with, so not a big surprise they are stressed.
I would also like to see what men’s happiness levels were in the 1970’s compared to today, given the politics of the last election and what drove the eventual outcome, means there are a lot of unhappy men out there today who likely were a lot more happy back then, I wonder if you measured men’s happiness levels in the 1970’s and compared it to today, what you would see (hint, I suspect it won’t be to be the same or more happy), given that men are feeling the stress, working long hours, the decline in jobs, the growing gap in education with women, the fact that few jobs these days are anywhere near permanent, and I would be suprised.
There is another factor, too, women have been shown time and again a lot more likely to say what they feel,a lot of men would be very reluctant to say they are unhappy with their lot,seeing that as showing weakness and not ‘acting like a man’.
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haven’t seen the lazy man thing. I have known many SAHMs who’ve been pretty crappy mothers, though, either spending a lot of time not taking care of family and houses but shopping, working out, playing tennis, lunching and everything else to do with “me time” and I’ve seen plenty of depressed and medicated SAHMs who aren’t functioning too well, frankly. In both scenarios, it is the dads who are doing double duty.
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Sure, we’ve all seen some lazy spouses/parents, but I would imagine that even those “crappy moms” you’re describing are doing some things…even if it’s ordering take-out, buying their kids’ clothes, taking them for haircuts, dentist appts, doctor appts, grocery shopping, attending some kid functions, some family functions, etc. I’m talking about a whole ’ other level. Someone who literally isn’t doing anything for the family/kids. And some of the worst ones will be up all night with hobbies/TV/video games, and then sleep much of the day…infrequent bathing, etc.
What you’re describing sounds more like the country club set…high salaried hubbies, housekeepers and maybe nannies that help out at home, and wives who spend a good bit of their time being socialites.