The latest thing to emerge on social media is the idea that it is wrong for wives to do things for their husbands. Why? Apparently, this represents a wife "mothering" a "man-child". The argument extends even to stay at home wives whose children are at school. They, too, are never to do anything for a husband, and he should take over the domestic work on his return from his paid job.
Here is an example of the mindset:
Now, obviously there is a terrible logic to this claim. If women cannot do wifely things for a husband, because it is "mothering" them, then there is no longer any meaning to the word "wife" - it has been emptied of any real content. It will no longer signify anything of value. And, of course, there is no longer the same level of reciprocity in a marriage. Men will go out to work, will then come home to more work, but cannot expect anything from their "wife" because that would make them a man-child.
How did we get to this point? Well, one reason is that the modernist mindset is to believe that life is about the pursuit of self-interest. When it comes to relationships this means that I should attempt to get my relational needs met to the maximum, whilst only being required to meet the needs of the other to the minimum.
So, specifically this means that a woman will want maximum effort, energy and attention from a man, whilst having few requirements to provide comfort, support or sex; whilst a man will want comfort, support and sex, with the minimum level of effort, energy and attention. Men with this mindset might angle for "situationships" or "friends with benefits", women might want a marriage in which they are not required to do homemaking, or "emotional labour", or to have sex.
You might ask, if women want marriage to be run according to their own self-interest, why would a man sign on the dotted line? The answer is that women who think the world revolves around self-interest, assume that men think the same way and that marriage has been set up to benefit men. They claim that men get all the benefit from traditional marriage, so they are only righting the scales now to make marriage all about female self-interest.
To justify this approach, they commonly cite debunked research by Paul Dolan that marriage improves happiness levels for men but sinks them for women. He misinterpreted some data, and has since corrected his original claims (see here). It turns out that married women with children are happier on average than all other categories of women:
To give an example of what these online debates look like, here is an exchange with a woman calling herself Alakazam. She began with the usual claims that wives "mother" their husbands and that men are happier in marriage than women.
I pointed out to her that the research she was relying on had been debunked and then replied with the following:
Her response? Exactly as might be predicted:
I tried to persuade her to retreat from this position by asking her if we should put our own self-interest ahead of our children. But she was happy to answer yes:
There is a positive side to all this. This can be changed. We are choosing to live in a world created by men like Thomas Hobbes. We don't have to. We could return to a different approach, one in which spouses will the good of the other. In a marriage in which both spouses have been formed along these lines, this would mean less focus on what we maximally get from the other, and more on what we have to give as husbands and wives. This is a healthier mindset, because we reach the better aspects of our own nature through acts of familial love. It would allow men to think positively of what they can gift a wife as a man; but similarly it would raise the status of what women might gift a husband as a woman.
