This comment by Jeff on the post Couples Sharing Goals, Dreams and Spreadsheets
With the hopes of not sounding bitter, this is the issue that ended my marriage. I’m a high school graduate who built a successful consulting practice. When we married, my wife was a professor at a major university in Boston making a fine salary. My wife has two bachelors degrees, a masters, and a Ph.D. After a few years, she quit her job saying she just didn’t like having to put up with meetings and other normal responsibilities of employment. We married later in life and needed a duel income to maximize our retirement. After years of traveling close to 400K miles a year working with clients, I really started feeling my life force begin to drain out of me. I needed to scale back for my health. My wife refuse to work shaming me often saying other men provide for their wives. The lack of understanding and partnership broke my heart and left a resentment that I couldn’t get past. It’s dangerous to generalize either gender, but as much as women proclaim their independence, they still want men to take of them and their needs. When it comes to the battle of the marketplace, few wives are equipped to tell their man, “You relax, take some time to regroup, I’ll go out and handle things for a few years.” It’s left bitter taste in my mouth about marriage and all that bullshit “sacred love/partnership” which seems to translate into men losing their libido and masculine identity.
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Let’s start a conversation:
Are men and women equal in the responsibility to provide for themselves, each other and their family, regardless or traditional gender roles, and pursue their dreams at the same time?
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