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"I always reasoned: “If you just tell me what you want me to do, I’ll gladly do it.”
This isn't really true. This is the voice of the superego that tries to maintain a positive self-image. The deeper recesses of the soul actually hate these chores, but few men have the self-reflection to admit it.
These tasks are mundane, boring, nothing h…
"I always reasoned: “If you just tell me what you want me to do, I’ll gladly do it.”
This isn't really true. This is the voice of the superego that tries to maintain a positive self-image. The deeper recesses of the soul actually hate these chores, but few men have the self-reflection to admit it.
These tasks are mundane, boring, nothing heroic about them, a 75 IQ person with the physical strength of a child could do them. I was very unhappy in my marriage after our child was born, I told my life I hate being at home in the evenings, it is all extremely boring, mundane and unheroic, I don't understand how can she cope with that.
How can a person do tasks that do not make themselves feel good about them, because they are so easy, anyone could do them?
Well I suppose they can try to not make them about themselves, but I am not so unselfish.
How can women accept a life of mundane, unheroic tasks? Are they really that unselfish?
Treating the home as a second workplace is bad enough in itself, but in the real workplace I solve computer puzzles only a few % of people could. Filling a dishwasher is something any child could do. Maybe one could train a monkey to. I absolutely hated this stuff.
I told her I want to be a rampaging viking, or something, romantic adventure, challenge, heroism, I cannot deal with this gray mundane domestic life.
The marriage did not last long after.
Well of course I did not turn into any kind of adventurer, but now I get to read about them. And paid help does the chores.
So my take is men do not deal well with domestication, we just try to maintain a good-hubby self-image so we lie to ourselves and tell us we do.
The results are these excuses "I did not know it needs to be done" and so on.
One thing is clear, I am never ever doing a live-in relationship again. I want relationships as vacation, leisure, going to the beach together and suchlike.
Post-40 it is doable, many older divorcee women want it like that - staying independent.
I understand perfectly what you mean. Actually, I could have said that myself when I had only one child. Paradoxically, that is one reason why I have six children: One or two is too easy. With more children it starts to get more similar to computer puzzles.
My guess is that the boredom of domestic life is one very important reason behind the fertility crisis. People need incentives to choose to have children - and definitely choose to have more than two children. Just saying that having children is extremely fun and stimulating doesn't work. Because as you say, many parts of it are not.
Interesting! Well a "herding cats" experience would have been challenging enough to be fun, I think.
When the neighbor kid, who is also a single child, visits my daughter, she is entirely transformed. Even just two work very different than one. She is transformed from the lazy phone addict couch potato to a whirlwind, they chase each other around the garden, with the dogs and all.
Cats resent being herded!