This hits very close to home right now. As someone who is about to be married, the wedding planning itself has brought about a number of these issues. Even the things that are for his benefit that are associated with the Big Day have fallen to me because it is assumed that I, the woman, will get it done because he isn't ever going to get around to it and I am the one who cares more about the wedding. I am afraid that this is how it is going to be with a lot of other traditional "women's work" tasks once we are married and cohabitating. He may LIKE a clean house or whatever, but he doesn't care enough to do all the things that need to be done himself, so they end up ultimately getting taken care of by myself. And I guess part of me feels guilty about making him do things for the wedding because a wedding is usually more of a "girl thing" so I don't push him to get things done like I should. I fear this will continue about traditional "girl things" that come in married life. But I am partially to blame as I could just demand these things get done. But then I get the dreaded "nag" label.
Also, my comment is full of poor grammar. My apologies.
It took me one relationship to realize that all women are high maintenance and that's part of why it's nice to have relationships with them.
One thing you have to be careful about with "egalitarian" relationships is alluded to by slynnro above. When I was living myself, it was fine for the bathtub to get cleaned once a month. My wife likes it cleaned once a week. There had to be compromise there. The woman's standard of cleanliness is not inherently the correct one, and provided this is all clear to both parties and a suitable compromise is reached out in the open, it needn't cause problems.
And while I won't deny the emotional work women put in, or the short shrift many get in their relationships, men pay emotional costs for relationships too. I haven't watched all 4 quarters of a Redskins game in 2 years. (If that sounds trivial, then you aren't 'getting it', as the feminists say.) I haven't played a face-to-face boardgame in 6 months. Still, I worry that my wife also doesn't get any time to do what she likes to do. That post was worth reading.
My first thought is that this is a maturity issue -- if he pouts when he doesn't get his way, he's probably not ready for a mature relationship where both people have to compromise. But considering the comments (including yours) that lots of relationships are like this, maybe I'm wrong. And very lucky.
The stereotypes of the nag and the demanding girlfriend are powerful, and it doesn't take much more than a brief invocation of them to shut some women down before they can express their own needs. Everyone is disappointed when they don't get their way, but I don't know if women have as good a trump card to play to silence the objections of their men before compromise can happen.
I thought Lauren made a good point in the comments to that post where she talked about her ex who did the dishes and the laundry but didn't get that chores aren't the only work to share. Being an emotional helpmeet is, as asg points out, something men and women should do.
I think I can sympathize; while I don't doubt that it tends to be the woman who has to do most of the emotional heavy lifting in the relationship, it can work the other way, too. I did pretty much all the emotional work in my last relationship. I will certainly try to avoid being the kind of guy that puts it all off onto the other person in the future, since I know how exhausting it can be.
In my experience with my past realtionships and the realtionships of my friends, men often approach women with a variety of assumptions- one of which is that women are demanding and tend to be nags. Every girl I know attempts to fight this stereotype, occasionally to her detriment. No one wants to display behavior that would give a man grounds to stereotype her as the demanding/co-dependant/needy/emotional/and/or naggy girlfriend.
realtionships=relationships. I promise I know it is Jane Austen and not Austin.
duh. obviously marriage is a better deal for men. why do you think that, when marriages break up, the man spends (at least) the next three months getting bombed out of his gourd at the local tavern (without ever getting laid).
men see what they want to see; men hear what they want to hear; men believe what they want to believe.
and having seen,, heard, and believed only what they want to, they wake up every morning, look at the world, consider it beautiful, and say, "look at this beautiful world that i created, all on my own."
fact remains, a man can clean a bathroom to what he considers immaculate, and the wife will still consider it filthy, and tell him so.
a man can do everything he thinks necessary to make a holiday nice, and it will not suffice.
women want more than men do. that won't and can't change. women have to accept that.
but, they obviously should not accept a man who wants his feet rubbed while she is eating. jesus fucking christ.
I think you've partially missed the point. It's not that all women want more emotional support than men do: it's that some of them aren't getting much, period.
What your hypothetical man sees, hears, and believes about his world is in some sense constructed by the woman in his life through her support of him and her maintenance of their relationship. When this is based on the woman being bullied into self-censorship and constant yielding to the man, the illusion is bound to shatter. We can have an argument about how clean a bathroom should be, but I think it's obvious that having one person constantly deferring to the emotional demands of the other is not reasonable. (Especially if one party is so out of touch that he doesn't even acknowledge that the other person's preferences are always losing out!)
I would prefer that the woman not hold back, which often doesn't happen, because of the social conditioning. I do think that there is a kernel of truth in the stereotype of women being more emotionally demanding in the aggregate, but recognizing that is one of the reasons for my preference. I would rather know if I'm missing something. But I also agree with Geoffrey that the man can end up doing the heavy lifting sometimes. Ideally, there should be sufficient compatibility -- or ability to compromise -- regarding a number of the examples in the linked post that one party isn't running roughshod over the other. But without good communication, it doesn't happen.
The number of truly equal partnerships I see among my married friends is sadly small. It's one of the things that's really held me back from serious consideration of marriage--my sense that most men, regardless of what rhetoric they use, expect in the end that marriage is the acquisition of a caretaker rather than a partner in mutual effort. I can't be that person, and I wonder exactly how much of women's strength is frittered away daily on maintaining relationship in which the investment of effort is unequal or very poorly negotiated.
i just meant to say, don't confuse innate male cluelessness with poor behavior. there is a difference, believe it or not!
Reading the original post and the author's comments, the problem really seems to be one of the dynamics in that particular relationship where (a) they were incompatible; (b) he didn't like her that much; and (c) she didn't want to acknowledge either fact, and thus avoided engaging in the communication that would have made (a) and/or (b) explicit.
It's a bit of a stretch to blame that on gender dynamics, other than to note that women are more likely to be socialized to be passive about speaking out. But I've been in relationships in both the role of the person who always gets his way, and the person who always quietly yields to the other's wishes to avoid confrontation; in the role of having my needs and wants utterly ignored, and in the role of being less than willing to respect the other's preferences. It had nothing to do with gender. In each case, it was reflective of the underlying politics of the relationship, where one person wanted the relationship much more than the other one, and the party with the power in the relationship was able (consciously or obliviously) to dictate the terms of engagement because the other yielded rather than upset the (unhealthy) equilibrium.
I had one relationship where I was quite blunt about the fact that I liked aspects A, B, and C, didn't like aspects X, Y, and Z, and was willing to have the relationship on the former terms, but not the latter, and that I wasn't going to lie to her to keep her in the relationship if she wasn't happy with that structure. Because my partner wasn't honest with me (or perhaps with herself) about really wanting X, Y, and Z, we stayed together unhappily a couple of months longer than we should have, until she insisted on X, I refused, and we broke up: we weren't compatible after all. Of course, if I liked her more, X wouldn't have been an issue at all. This model fits within the "wifework" scenario of the female always yielding, but I don't think it was an issue of gender, rather than the fact that I found the relationship more pleasant than not having a relationship, but not pleasant enough that I wanted to work for it.
Because I've definitely been in the reverse scenario where I compromised on every aspect: those relationships ended when I asserted my needs/wants or when the partner decided that even getting her way on everything wasn't sufficient. Sometimes there were great fights that I yielded rather than face the realization that there was incompatibility; sometimes I had been emotionally trained to not challenge her preference for fear that I'd lose the relationship that seemed tenuous.
Where there's compatibility, communication, and mutual love (which is, perhaps, just another form of compatibility), there's no reason for these issues to exist. Kyso's relationship seems to have lacked the first two, and probably the third. If her boyfriend cared about her, he would've found it less important to get his way on every is
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