The couple at the center of this Reddit story illustrates just how deep this divide goes for some couples. “Over the last seven years, I have been the primary caretaker for my husband and my three children (7, 5, 2),” she wrote in her post.
That has continued to be the case now that she’s back to work, including sometimes working overnight. “I am still the one who does the most childcare and household tasks.”
Recently, her husband’s work schedule changed so that he has one weekday off per week, and when he ended up under the weather on his day off, it caused quite a stir in the house.
Her husband was furious when she told him to call a babysitter when he was sick, even though he had never even taken notice when she was ill.
“Whenever I was staying at home with the kids and was sick, my husband would just go about his routine as normal,” she writes. “He would leave without checking if I would need help for that day. There would be times when I was so ill I needed to call reinforcements, but I would arrange that.”
So when the tables turned on his recent day off, she figured the same rules applied. “I told him that it’s his responsibility to arrange for care since he is the parent at home, as I had done many times when I was home with our children,” she wrote.
You can probably guess how well that went over. “He has texted me WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU several times,” she said. “I asked him several times if he had ever asked me if I needed help while sick. He keeps asking what is wrong with me.”
She stood her ground, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it worked out fine. When she came home later, “I watched in disbelief and AMAZEMENT as I saw my husband rounding the corner with our two youngest on the way to the park,” she wrote.
“So there you have it, he was not dying, he was capable, he may have [defecated] his brains out this morning, but somehow he was able to persevere.” Funny how that works.
Stories like this are becoming more common, even as more women become breadwinners.
Men are still overwhelmingly the breadwinners in most households, but the share of female breadwinners has tripled over the last 50 years. The number of households where both partners make roughly the same amount of money has significantly increased as well.
But according to a Pew Research study, that income parity has not even come close to replicating itself when it comes to child-rearing and household labor.
In egalitarian marriages, women, on average, do about a third more childcare and more than double the housework than men. Men work more at their jobs, however, but they also have more leisure time each week than women.
