If you hang out on this sub or really any relationship subreddit, you’ll find a common theme: women are chronically unhappy with their male partners.
And the causes are usually good. I could probably summarize the complaints into a few categories.
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Mental load/men just won’t manage the household/ women do all chores on top of working their full time jobs
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Men in general suck at gifts/special occasions. Seriously. Check out any relationship subreddit after Christmas, Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. Your heart will break at some of the stories of men who just don’t care
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Men are generally neglectful. They’d rather indulge in their hobbies or spend time with friends than their partner (ie the gamer who spends all free time on their PC)
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Manipulators, liars and cheaters
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Straight up abusive (hitting, screaming, yelling, etc)
I’m left wondering why this is the case. Why are these problems so pervasive amongst heterosexual couples?
Men will chock it up to communication issues. Come on, babe. How was I supposed to know you wanted a present on your birthday?
I know women are generally socialized to cater to men. When I was growing up, we all had to tiptoe around my mom’s partner. It was all about what he wanted to eat for dinner. If we went on an outing together, it was all about what he wanted to do, what movie he wanted to see, what restaurant he wanted to eat at. In the mornings, we had to tiptoe around the house and talk in whispers so he could sleep in as long as he wanted.
If my mom had extra time in her schedule, like a bonus day off, she would pack his lunch for work and do chores around the house so that they could spend their shared time off together doing something fun. Bonus time off for my mom meant a little more relaxation for both parties.
If he had extra time off work, he would indulge in his hobbies, leaving my mom her normal workload in terms of chores.
During my mom’s usual grocery shops (which she did alone because grocery shopping was her chore), she made sure to always buy his favorite snacks including things she would never eat like soda and snack cakes. She’d also check in with him on what to buy
If he ever stopped at the store, which was rare, he’d buy only the snacks and things that he wanted to eat. He wouldn’t call her to see if she needed anything at the store.
The common theme here is that she thought of him all the time. She was an afterthought to him.
Is this the root of the issue? Women are socialized to center their worlds around their partners while men aren’t? When women have extra time or money, it’s directed to their partners while when men have extra time or money, it’s directed to them and their hobbies.
What are your theories? Does anyone know if there are any studies on this?
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In the category of manipulators, liars and cheaters are the porn addicts, which is a form of abuse, and usually shrouded in lies. That might be a solid half of the stories or close to it. I read a statistic that it’s part of 60-65% of divorces, which is nearly all divorces initiated by women.
Marriage overwhelmingly benefits men more than women. I think women are really starting to realize that, especially as they outperform a lot of men in life (education, career, home ownership), they’re looking for men who are their equals and finding them scarce. They’re dating downward now.
It’s partially due to women refusing to leave lame ass men, or becoming pregnant by these bums.
Now, many of these women are in a financial situation where leaving would significantly impact them, and a lame partner is the preferable option. But there’s still just a subset of women who just refuse to be single or keep hoping the guy will change. I feel like oestrogen clouds our judgement. I don’t think it’s just socialisation
And if you look at male subs, they’re unhappy without relationships or after relationships end.
Studies show that happiness is distributed as follows:
So marriage is essentially a happiness transfer from women to men. No, thank you.
Then there was the study that found that on average a woman with a live-in male “partner” (controlling for children) does seven hours of domestic labor per week more than a woman without a live-in male “partner”. That’s roughly enough time to read a book. Again, no, thank you.
Do all women care about gifts and special occasions?
Asking for a friend.
Edit: Hold on there, I mean it. What about people in the spectrum for example, is this celebration of special occasions and exchange of gifts crucial as OP implies? Are there people who don’t care that much and make any occasion a special occasion? And no I’m not speaking about forgetting your birthday.
Here come the “not my husband” comments.
From what I’ve seen from my friends in relationships, the unhappiness is having to do the majority of the work. The men don’t help enough or at all. I have a friend who is always late when we meet for dinner. She says “sorry I had to make the kids some food quick” every time. Is there a reason your husband can’t get off the couch and prepare them something? It’s shit like that…
People who unhappy in relationships are usually unhappy within themselves and expect the other person to fill the void, which is unrealistic and impossible.
I’ve personally learned this the hard way.
I would just add that Reddit can be an echo chamber sometimes and most people are posting when they are unhappy. That doesn’t mean most people in general are unhappy most of the time in their relationship.
Idk the answer, but I know so many women who stay with men who are either straight up abusive or are sub par and they put these men and the relationship on a pedestal, why don’t they put themselves on the pedestal? I don’t get it.
I think it’s exactly that – women are socialized to make their entire world revolve around their partner while men are socialized to be independent and focus more on their public life or their personal interests. Meanwhile, women tend to be incentivized to give those things up in relationships and family life. So men are expecting the relationship of household to be a comfortable place to relax from the real world, whereas women expect it to be their main source of fulfillment. I think men are clearly getting the better end of the bargain, as evidenced by the fact that men are happier in relationships than single whereas the reverse seems to be true for women.
I don’t blame women for this dynamic at all, because I think it’s caused by patriarchy, but I do disagree with how a lot of women view these situations. I’ve noticed, especially on subs like this, there is a tendency for women to believe that everything they’re doing is good and necessary, and if only their male partner would fixate on the relationship like they do, everything would be okay. Whereas I feel like women need to be taking up more space in public and having more things in life that are just for us (hobbies, friendships, etc.) I understand why that sometimes isn’t possible, but I think most women need to get a lot more comfortable being selfish, when we can.
The simple answer is: boys are being raised poorly, and growing up to be incompetent, toxic men.
Your bullet points would make an excellent set of flairs to add to posts to assist in sorting. Mental load, neglectful partner, etc etc.
There’s a gradient for intimacy: friendly, friend, dating, married, parenting. Somewhere in there should be “roommate”.
The standard that someone needs to meet for me to be friendly with them is pretty low. They need to be a bit nice and a bit pleasant. For someone to be my friend, I have to actually like them, have things in common with them, trust them, and be able to depend on them, and they would need to have decent control of their temper. For someone to be a dating partner, they need all that, plus they need to be someone I’m sexually and romantically interested in. For someone to be a roommate, I have to really trust them, and they have to have reasonable household skills, and be reliable with money. For me to be married to someone, they would need to meet all those standards, and also be someone I felt I could trust with all my assets. Finally, to parent with someone, I would need all those things, plus we would need to agree on basic child rearing issues, and I would need to be able to trust them with the life of a child.
But that is hard-won knowledge built up over decades of over-trusting people, and letting people get close who really couldn’t meet these basic standards.
I think a lot of times, women end up dating a guy who is sexy or romantic, but who doesn’t really meet some of the standards. And then they move in together, often out of financial necessity, and it turns out he can’t meet the standard for a roommate, but it’s too late to turn back easily. Then they might have a child (planned or unexpected), and he’s being held to the co-parent standard when he couldn’t even meet the roommate standard. But, he *is* the parent of that child, and you’re kind of stuck with him, even if you break up.
It can be easy to love someone who you haven’t needed to hold to a high standard. And once you feel that, it can be hard to separate when you realize that they are deeply flawed. We tend to think that there’s something we could do or say that is going to fix the situation. If we just *communicate* harder, then they will understand the problem, and start to fix themselves.
The cold truth I’ve finally come to realize is that adults very rarely change, even when they desperately want to. If they don’t actively want to make the change, they sure as hell don’t change.
Similarly, we often extend grace to the men in our lives, thinking that they don’t *know* that they’ve done wrong. That they don’t *intend* to do harm.
And that led to my final lesson: impact is more important than intent.
It doesn’t matter if he means to hurt your feelings or destroy your belongings. If he’s causing harm regularly, his intentions are irrelevant. His impact is what you have to focus on.
Another issue that has come up in my life is that I tried to treat a male partner as an equal, but he didn’t return the favor. So, every time we had a conflict, I would work hard to find common ground, and he would just drag me in the direction of his preferences. It wasn’t in good faith. He argued to win. I argued to build connection. In the end, he’d gone too far in one direction, and I just left.
Boys and girls are raised very differently, and raised to behave differently. In the Before Times, when a woman was 100% financially dependent on her husband, and expected to follow his lead, this wasn’t an argument, because everyone agreed about how that was going to work. But ever since second wave feminism, women have asked men to treat us like equal partners. And men, on the whole, have not stepped up. They haven’t taken on an equal share of domestic and parenting labor. And many of them still expect us to mindlessly follow their wishes.
A big chunk of the problem is that men and women often come to marriage with wildly different expectations of how it is going to work, but it’s not discussed, so it doesn’t cause a problem until we’re already in very deep, and it would be hard or impossible to walk away.
So, we try therapy, and talking, and negotiating, and ask for advice.
Its the patriarchy
The system is working exactly right to give men their free ride, accolades fir moving air and pretend women don’t work or their work doesn’t matter.
Men benefit from heterosexual marriage while women suffer. Married men work less, earn more, love longer, in better health and have far more leisure time. This is only possible by sacrificing women’s life, time, health and energy.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zawn/p/were-getting-patriarchy-wrong-correcting
Obligatory disclaimer, the women in happy relationships are less likely to post about them online. So it’s difficult to say what proportion of heterosexual relationships are unhappy for women.
But the root cause for all those things you mentioned is the same – entitlement.
If you’re born and raised male and become a man, you’re told by society (both explicitly and implicitly) that you deserve what you want without having to do the work to earn it. And for many men this results in either an ignorance of the work required to live life or an outright refusal to do it.
Managing the household? Why should he, when there’s a woman socialised to do it all?
Birthday or Christmas gifts? Who cares? What’s in it for him?
Manipulating, cheating, lying, abuse? Well, it benefits them, doesn’t it? And that’s what matters, in their eyes.
The irony is that entitlement is poison to true happiness and fulfilment. But when you have a society catering to that entitlement and insisting women should do the work to prop that system up? Why the hell would they change?
Idk, you have to remember that people don’t post on the internet to say their relationship is fine. I was looking through your list and none of these my partner does. He’s a better gift giver than I am. He sucks at some stuff but so do I, and we’re working on it. It’s good, and boring (not boring to us). Drama and negativity get attention, they’re juicy.
Honestly, I think it’s really simple.
You will always have resentment in a relationship if it doesn’t make you happier than being single would. No matter how bad your relationship is, if it is better than the life you could provide yourself, you will find reasons to be happy. No matter how good your relationship is, if you could have a better life alone, you will find reasons to be resentful.
In the past, there was a very large area where people could be very incompatible but it would still improve over singlehood for both people. It didn’t matter if you and your spouse had nothing in common. One of you knows how to get money. The other one knows how to take care of a house and care for kids. You both need each other to have a normal social life and not live in squalor or starve on the street. Women couldn’t have jobs. So as long as the relationship isn’t so bad that living alone in poverty would beat it, people found things to feel positive about in their relationships.
That fundamental reality about mankind hasn’t shifted, but the math has changed. Most women have enough access to the workforce that they are not choosing between poverty and their relationships. They’re choosing between a less financially comfortable living and their relationships. And it’s not even just that men are lacking in home skills that would help them be equal partners. They don’t value those home skills that would make them equal partners. So that span of relationships where both people are benefitting from it requires so much more overlap in shared goals.
In many relationships, she wants to come home from her 40 hour job, and share the work necessary to put a meal on the table, get the house clean and well-decorated, and occasionally host for their friends. He wants to come home from his 40 hour job, feed himself something, and have fun with his hobbies. If she tries to do all the work necessary to keep the house running on her own, she realizes she’d be happier not in this relationship, she feels resentment. If she asks him to contribute half and then doesn’t pick up the slack, they live in squalor, and she realizes she’d be happier not in this relationship, she feels resentment. But he doesn’t care about the house being nice. If he were to come home from work and spend as much time as she does cleaning up the house, she would be happy, but those are things he doesn’t care about or value. He’d just be doing them for her. Every time he tries to keep up with what she wants him to do, he realizes he’d have more free time and autonomy over his life and paycheck if he weren’t in this relationship, he feels resentment. So if he just doesn’t help, shuts himself in his computer room and lets his wife feel how she feels about it, he doesn’t feel resentment. But she has no other option.
I think that if people want to be happier in their relationships, they really need to stop relying on love to make their lives work with people who are very very different from them. You need to talk with your partner about what you actually want out of the way you live, what you expect to contribute to that lifestyle, and if you both genuinely believe that’s better than your other options. Because we all have better options now than we did 30 years ago.
Why are women so chronically unhappy in STRAIGHT relationships?
– fixed the title
I think you are spot on about how girls and women are socialized (to prioritize others and especially men). Stemming from the same root of this problem, the entitlement men feel to this attention, affection, caregiving, adulation, etc; along with the entitlement men feel to their partner’s sexuality and reproduction.
I think that both men and women in heterosexual relationships struggle to see the dynamics at play within this system, even if either individual may otherwise consider themselves feminists or progressive. I think women are more likely to eventually feel that something is wrong with the institution of heterosexual relationships as they exist in our society because they don’t benefit from the norms as men do – and thanks to feminism we have started to have some of the conversation about why this is and how to fix it (unequal distribution of labor, etc). Once you see the proliferation of misogyny in our society you can’t unsee it, and it becomes unbearable to live with in every aspect of your life, but it hurts the most when it impacts the romantic or domestic sphere and propagated by someone you share such an intimate bond with.
Importantly and unacknowledged, I think that for many heterosexual relationships toxic behaviors and beliefs that contribute to mistreatment as well as abuse are normalized. This includes the aforementioned entitlement as well as the prevalence of men objectifying and dehumanizing women, among a myriad of other problematic factors.
I think you (and most women) may find Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women by Kate Manne to be very eye opening and validating. Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft is another book I highly recommend even if you don’t think you are in an abusive relationship.
I think women are speaking up more and more about this and finding that even men who are willing to share professional and public space with [some] women as something like peers (or even superiors) are much less willing to do the self analysis and work necessary to dismantle the belief system that continues to oppress women when it affects them in their intimate/personal/sexual lives. The benefits to men in heterosexual relationships under a male supremacist society are too great and hit too close to home for them to want to acknowledge, nevermind give up, for the good of the women they claim to value and love.
My issue is also the idea that we won’t pay attention to anyone who isn’t rich, tall, and hung.
Pay attention to this sub or others for any amount of time and you’ll see we’re dealing with men who don’t wipe, communicate, or near anything else.
Are all these dirty holed men rich and tall and hung?
No.
They we’re good at faking a decent personality long enough to hook us in, then completely flipped once we were.
The takeaway? Treat us decently and we’ll do the same. We’re sick of keeping up the charade after you drop yours.
i think women are conditioned to fear “being alone” more than being in a sub-par or even bad relationship. it takes a lot of guts, internal work, and self worth to face that prospect head on. most of the time the being-single-forever warning is not even true but men want you to think it is so that you don’t feel like you have a right to seek better treatment.
I’m not saying none of this is true, but people are more likely to complain on the internet than talk about how amazing their relationship is. Like people are more likely to leave bad reviews on products than if they’re perfectly content with what they ordered.
People who are unhappy talk about it because they need support. People who are happy tend to keep quiet because bragging is obnoxious.
I’m in a good relationship with a kind man and we have a great sex life. But where’s the drama or intrigue in a post about that?
Unhappy people search out places to vent. Happy women in stable relationships have very little motivation to come to a women’s subreddit and say “hey everyone I’m happy and my partner treats me well”(and also people get mad when they do. I’ve seen posts like that and then angry replies about rewarding men for the bare minimum)
There is no point in being in a relationship with a man unless he makes your life EASIER. Remember that ladies
Disclaimer, my husband is great and I believe much of what you see is selection bias. That said, regarding women spending time/money on family or partners while men spend it on themselves, that’s why 74% of microlending clients are women.
>Women, as it turns out, are an excellent risk. Worldwide, microfinance loans serve almost 20 million people living in poverty. 74% of these clients are women. At the Grameen Bank, the world’s largest microfinance institution, more than 90% of loan clients are women. It is true that women tend to make their payments more reliably than men. But more importantly, a loan in the hands of a woman has a better chance to change not just her life, but to improve her children’s opportunities and her society’s prosperity. Why is the combination of microfinance and women so potent?
>For one thing, women are ambitious, for themselves and for their families. As they lift themselves out of poverty, they carry their families to a better life. Once they get a leg up, women are more likely to spend their earnings on medical care and education for their children.
Banks don’t lend out of altruism, they lend to a good risk, so that’s a pretty good measure.
Another example, people love to characterize the anti-drinking movement as a bunch of prudes ruining everyone’s good time, but the reason so many women agitated for Prohibition was because men would drink up their entire paychecks on Friday night, leaving their families to starve.
I dunno, but I hope they leave
Because men aren’t gonna care as long as they still have a relationship
This app sometimes I have to be careful getting advice too. Bc many people tell me bc I’m 22 I shouldn’t get into relationships or avoid them
Everything around my house has mostly been centered around my dad and how my mom and him are still together astounds me. Supper? We gotta read his mind. “Oh whatever you want.” “oh no I don’t want that.” then it becomes a huge fight. (yes. even during my birthday and mom’s birthday)
“Need anything from the store?”
“No.”
Then later.
“You mean you didn’t get this?!”
Mom comes home late and dad is angry. Keeps thinking she is abandoning him when she is the money maker currently.
Me going anywhere? Constant comments and judgement, as if he doesn’t want me to go.
There should be goddamn studies of this.
Lack of empathy, self-centredness, being brought up in homes / society where this behaviour is normalised and conditioned.
Too many women would rather be unhappy than “alone”
People come to Reddit with problems. Once, I posted a thing about how my husband spent a day off cleaning the whole house and how it was so nice to come home to that and women on this very sub criticized me for it.
My husband plans all the vacations. He goes grocery shopping with me because we like to spend time together. He does the dishes nearly all the time and the laundry half the time. He would never forget my birthday or our anniversaries (we celebrate the day we met more than our wedding). A week ago, he stood outside of my work waiting for me because it was raining and I always forget an umbrella.
I bet that when I get home, he’ll have coffee waiting for me because I have class tonight.
Many of us are not willing to admit that romantically involving, coliving and reproducing with our apex predators is very likely to not be the most fulfilling set up. We learn a bit late.