Exactly. My father made his desires pretty clear before he and my mother tied the knot. While she didn't exactly promise to be on board with all of them, she wasn't exactly opposed either.
Things just kind of evolved of their own accord from there. He made her a deal after I was born that he would take care of bringing in the money if she stayed home at least until we were old enough for school, and in the meantime she simply happened to discover homeschooling, and the idea appealed to her enough that she decided to go ahead and do that full time instead of working.
The dynamic's only really gotten screwed up since the economy bottomed out in '08 (and my father's heart condition reared its ugly head), leading my father to have to take a pay cut at a new company, and my mother to have to go back to work in a new career.
While she would honestly be happy enough not working at all, she does resent the way it has basically doubled her workload now that she is. I can also understand why my father isn't the most eager to leap up and make up the difference - he's a fifty something year old man with a heart condition who already works like sixty hours a week.
It's just kind of an awkward situation all the way around. :shrug:
It is also one that could likely have been mitigated somewhat if they'd taken more time to build equity and take better care of themselves along the way, and started off on a somewhat more solid financial foundation to begin with. I'm more than happy to wait a little while to get everything figured out before I settle down for that exact reason.
My parents married mostly for love, admittedly. They were flat broke for the first decade or so of their marriage as such.
While I suppose there is something to be said for that - in that they made it through, and were able to be more or less happy in doing so - I ultimately agree. Love alone isn't enough.
You can't have a marriage without it, of course. However, there has to be some form of deeper commitment behind that to hold a couple together even during the times when they might not be feeling that love so strongly as they were initially.
Love, after all, is fleeting, and fickle. It often comes and goes over the course of long marriages.
That is another aspect of it; it is ideal, if you are going to go the traditional route, for you to build up an over-abundance of resources. Sooner or later, age will catch up with one or the other, and when you only have one partner doing (or able to do) each thing, one partner going out of commission turns into a big fiasco.
Truth is, it's hard for me to think of what your parents might do to get out of this non-ideal situation. I can see either of them feeling resentful no matter what they do. They seem to have gotten through worse and that bodes well for them, but it's definitely not ideal.
I mean, there's a third option here (between your parents' going the traditional route while under-prepared, and delaying having a relationship into one's 30's). This, I think, is the crux of what the difference is between a traditional relationship, and a sexist one. Because although I don't think you believe me when I say it, they are not the same thing.
What's wrong with starting off sharing all the loads, until you get to such a place where you can partition them off?
Nothing. But some men don't want to do that because they have a rigid expectation, and they expect the woman to be the one who gives things up.
This is why I refer to my friend's boyfriend's thinking as sexist, and not traditional. He is expecting something for nothing. I don't think maliciously. He just grew up seeing men have that expectation, and seeing women meet it. When you've spent your whole life not having to compromise, it's a hard habit to get into. I understand that from a different perspective; the adjustment I'm making after several years of living alone. But it's sexist all the same.
You can be an egalitarian traditionalist. Ideally, you'd like to do X, but if X is presently not feasible, you will do Y instead until such a time as it is.
Or hell, vise versa. I've been in that situation myself, actually (where money is plentiful, but time to execute necessary tasks is not).
What's important is flexibility and working together. A lot of American men, especially from smaller towns, don't have that. And that is why American women don't really want to marry them.
It isn't necessarily because many of them are traditional. It's because they're sexist, and they don't want to give what they get.
