My Wife Doesn't Work ...

While I do understand a wife’s work certainly is not sitting around all day, it’s really not that difficult. I work from home and my wife takes care of the kids and does all the other said activities and I know exactly what she does all day, I easily would trade her for real work and dealing with adults all day. Housework is boring and mindless at times but many women would be in for a wake up call if they realized their jobs and the family’s welfare was nearly solely on their shoulders. If my wife doesn’t do her “job” we have a dirty house and it’s just more work for me. If I don’t do my job, there goes everything and there won’t be a house to clean, SUV, etc. I also give my wife credit because our kids are young, when they get older than 5 I know she’ll go back to work, but the wives that carry on the same routine, they are borderline worthless.

What a fu.cki.ng cu.nt you are, that's why I'm staying away from marriage, women usually turn into complete cun.ts. Why not talk to him about the issue and how much it bothers you instead of plotting a revenge ? jesus christ I wish I were gay sometimes. Yes I'm a guy but doing that to your husband just for saying those words is mean, it shows you don't really care about him, and the fact that he offered himself to do all the household chores means he cares about you. If you don't have a job then YOU DON'T WORK.

My wife stays at home with our 2 toddlers 5 days a week while I work, and then she works on Saturdays while I stay at home with the kids. If any of you other men had to deal with just ONE DAY per week as a stay-at-home spouse/parent, you would understand what this article is about. Working outside the home is SIMPLE compared to what my wife does. She WORKS. Kudos to her....

Of course you're working, you're raising a family. In that case, the stay-at-home spouse usually does work the same 8 - 10 hour day as the spouse who has a job outside the home. As long as you're both putting in roughly the same number of hours, it shouldn't be an issue. My wife works part time -- usually a day or two a week. What kills me is that she saves all the household chores for when I get home so we can do them together. "I'm not your maid" and "we should share equally in taking care of the home" are the comments with which I'm most familiar. Really? I work 50 hours a week, you work 10. What are you doing in those spare 40? "What would you do without me?" I ask. "Get a full time job to support myself" she says. Hmmmm... So you'd only work if you needed the money? And not because it represents a fair investment of effort in our future? "Well you make 10x the money I do! I doesn't make sense for me to work..." Does it occur to you that the reason I make more is that I've been working my ass off for 20 years? Apparently not. So if your work in the home doesn't amount to an equitable amount of time that your husband spends working outside the home -- quit complaining. I do love how you get angry about all the things you do for your husband (meals, laundry, etc.), but don't give him credit for working all day to pay for the food, clothes, home, etc.

I don't doubt that it's tough to run a household. But it's a team effort between husband and wife. Unfortunately this posters attitude is not uncommon as some women are insecure about being unemployed. Women have tough decisions when it comes to career/childrearing but that does not give them the right to break from reality. For a husband who has to work and support a family 9 times out of 10 in a non-perfect job to come back and then deal with a wife who gets to spend time with children yet takes it all for granted because she has to keep her place clean....well it's has to be tough. Unfortunately many women have a difficult time stepping in the others shoes and then the whole team effort thing becomes a civil war which is destructive. Too bad for this guy, I just hope she doesn't try and turn their kids against him too while he's out trying to support the family.

Wow, I feel sorry for your husband. You equate housechores and getting to spend time with your family as if it was a grueling job like many men and mothers have to support their families. Then you play ridiculous games rather than acting like an adult. This mentality scares me I hope my wife doesn't succumb to extreme selfishness like you have. It will only make life more difficult when it doesn't need to be. All because of one sentence. You know some men have pride in being able to support an unemployed wife but that obviously got caught up in your insecure brain.

If you don't have a paying job, you don't work. Vacuuming, laundry, making the bed, doing the dishes are chores, but they are not work. vacuming the entire house: 30 minutes. make a bed: 3 minutes. laundry: 15 minutes of hands on labor, 5 minutes to load washer, 5 minutes to move from washer to dryer, 5 minutes to unload dryer and put clothes away. dishes: 10 minutes, 5 minutes to load dishwasher, 5 minutes to unload. I can do the household chores in less than 2 hours a day, and yes I am a man who can sort his own laundry. If it were 200 years ago and you spent your time making clothes, building a fire in the oven to bake bread, grinding the wheat to make flour, churning the milk into butter after milking the cow, collecting the eggs from the laying hens, boiling a tub of water on an open fire to do laundry, going to the hand pump well and getting water, making chicken dinner involved plucking the feathers off the bird, getting reading lights meant making the candles, getting clean meant making the soap and getting to town required hitching up the horse; those would all be work. The effort it takes to run a household when your food is available at Safeway, your wardrobe is available at TJ Maxx and your transportation is made by Toyota is a joke. And yet in this supposedly modern world we keep an antiquated view on these traditional rolls for men and women. Men go to the field and plow or to the woods and cut the lumber and women keep the household together raising the children and making the meals. Lets admit that we consume our survival, we don't make it from raw materials. If you owned and fed the cow that produced the milk that fed your kids, made the broom that swept the floor so your kids had a clean floor, or crafted the blankets or shoes that kept your children warm please have my heartiest congratulations. However, you didn't do any of that. You bought the milk in the dairy department, you bought the vacuum cleaner at Sears and your designer bed linens were bought on credit with the Macys charge card. Your house has a thermostat so you don't have to get up 3 times a night to throw another log on the fire to stay warm. Your garden is watered on an automatic timer not from buckets drawn from the creek 400 yards away. Your hardest decision about sanitation is whether to get the hand soap with or without fragerance not how to keep your kids from dying from cholera, measles, mumps, rubella, scarlet fever or the infections from an accidental axe wound. About a hundred years ago in the US, women got the right to vote, it became legal for them to wear pants, to drive an automobile and attend the same educational institutions as men. This was about the same time that arduous labor to keep a household intact began declining. Also about the same time that the agricultural life of most people began transitioning into urban and industrial. So the role of "homemaker" as an idealized Donna Reed spinning through the ultra formica kitchen of the 1950's like a balerina keeping the house clean, the kids fed and ready with a pipe and slippers for dad after a long day of work was the pornography that you were sold. Porn is something that doesn't really exist the way its portrayed. The truth is since the home-maker doesnt actually make anything, the position should be called a home-consumer. Consumers need money and money doesn't magically arrive in the bank account every payday. So the man still goes out the door every morning, but instead of chopping firewood or plowing the field to keep the family warm and fed he goes to his job to earn the money to buy the heat from the gas company and the organic arugula from Whole Foods. Meanwhile its somehow perfectly acceptable for the woman to not be a part of that money producer equation since she is busy nesting and consuming, drawing money off the stack but not putting any back. Any woman who stays at home after her children reach school age is living some fantasy where they are denying the fact that they are consumers and are living off the charity of their husband's paycheck. Homemakers are delusional about the economic reality of how they live today, and the real word for home-maker shouldn't just be changed to home-consumer, the word should be "unemployed-and-not-looking". So all you homemakers out there, if you can't support yourselves to the standard you expect to live on when your husband comes home one day to find your vapid stories about what was on Oprah or how the line at the store was so tragically long or how the minivan is making a funny sound and they wake up that you are a consumer of both their time and money and your contributions to the family are not beneficial; you had better have a plan B. While you produce value to the family by educating children or managing household needs more than a maid service sure you can keep the title of homemaker, but lets not try to fool anyone into believing that its work. And the title homemaker doesn't come with tenure, unless you greet me at the door after my long day of work with a martini in a chilled glass and you are wearing nothing but the back aisle from Victoria's Secret. If you can live in your porn fantasy world then I should get to live in mine too.

Let me summarize this... Your nice, hardworking husband takes you to a party. You decide to say thanks by spying on him. You hear him make one comment to another man that you then take completely out of context, then sulk indefinitely without ever telling him the problem. When he notices that you're upset and asks why, you lie and say that nothing is wrong. When he goes off to work the next day to support you and your children, you spend the entire week "plotting your revenge" instead of playing with your kids, making nutritious meals for the family, managing the family finances, or doing anything else that could be considered remotely useful to the household in which you "work." Finally, the weekend rolls around and you lie again, faking an illness to avoid spending quality time with your family--I mean, really, why would you ever want to take the kids to the zoo, go see a movie, or go play in the park when you could instead lie in bed and whine all weekend? Your husband, being the insensitive jerk that you're convinced he is, offers to take care of you, the house, and the kids for the entire weekend after an entire week of full-time work. He does more chores in two days than you typically do in two weeks. He happily asks if anything else needs to be done. He easily accomplishes every arduous task you assign him, without complaining once and without taking one moment to realize how difficult menial household chores must be. Sounds like he learned his lesson!

Well, you certainly are clever, and your husband took the "bait," but what a disappointing reaction to a harmless comment! One healthy option that you can consider if your husband says something that hurts your feelings (ie., triggers a deep-held negative belief about yourself that you might not even be aware of), is to be direct and say how it made you feel. Not attacking him, but just: "Honey (or whatever you call him), it hurt my feelings when you said to Tom that I don't work." Then he can clarify what he meant, and if there are underlying issues you can talk it through, but honestly most of the time with men they just weren't thinking the (incredibly analytical) way that women think. Game-playing to teach your husband a listen is not only mean-spirited, but probably useless. If he already appreciated everything you did and you misunderstood him, what did that accomplish except you feeling distant from him for that week? Real intimacy is about being vulnerable, not hiding your feelings and playing on opposite teams. If this is a real challenge for you then I would suggest couples counseling or even individual therapy. Best of luck.

To Anonymous, Feminism hasn't ruined women. It has made them better. More productive, more assertive, more independent, . Your wife does not sound like a feminist. You are confused. She sounds like she takes you for granted. You have been spoiling her and shes used to it. You need to sit down and make a list of chores that each ofshould do. That way she is clear about what she should contribute. Feminism improved women not ruinedthem.