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There is a whole other potential article out there that could be written from the ex-wife's side - "My marriage died because I couldn't make this one simple sac

There is a whole other potential article out there that could be written from the ex-wife's side - "My marriage died because I couldn't make this one simple sacrifice". And I suspect both would just as incorrect, at least by omission. The glass thing is a useful article hook, but it's unlikely that it encompasses the sole reason their marriage fell apart. There is a deeper issue here, about neither side being willing to sacrifice for the other that likely really lies at fault. I like the idea that a really good relationship is a 60/40 compromise, where both sides are struggling to be the 60. It sounds like both sides of this marriage were struggling to be the 40.

thesuitonym 5y ago
That was the bulk of the article... The glass wasn't the problem, it was indicative of greater problems. The author even says ``A dish by the sink in no way feels painful or disrespectful to a spouse who wakes up every day and experiences a marriage partner who communicates in both word and action how important and cherished their spouse and relationship are.'' They had communication issues, but it wasn't anything huge, it was all small cuts like the glass by the sink, or the socks casually left at the foot of the bed, letting the trash bin overfill... All these little things that display a casual air of thoughtlessness.
Dobbs 5y ago
This isn't about the dishes. The dishes are just a symptom of the unequal divide of emotional labour in most relationships. Even in relationships where both parents work full time more often than not the majority of the mental and physical burden of running the house tends to fall onto the woman. Of course this isn't an absolute, but it does tend to hold true. You can see this at the outbreak of COVID where many women had to step back from jobs because they suddenly had a massively increased load of child care that by default fell onto their shoulders. The article is about someone coming to the realization of the ugly situation they are putting their spouse into, one that is extremely common. Don't try and devalue that by turning it into a "both sides" debacle.
- em500 5y ago
  The marriage lesson that I learned, not too late, is to hire domestic help pretty much as soon as we could afford it.
  - Dobbs 5y ago
    If resources are there then yes I definitely agree. It makes a major difference in quality of life, particularly for myself and my partner who both struggle with ADHD.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "Even in relationships where both parents work full time more often than not the majority of the mental and physical burden of running the house tends to fall onto the woman." I'd love to see the data on this.
  - Dobbs 5y ago
    If you look around for things about "emotional labor" or "unpaid labor". For example I found this from around 2014, it isn't strictly about dual income households, but there is data out there for that: > Around the world, women spend two to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men. Source: https://www.oecd.org/Dev/Development-Gender/Unpaid_Care_Work.Pdf https://www.oecd.org/Dev/Development-Gender/Unpaid_Care_Work...
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Any source for US or other developed countries? And of course the dual income is important too. Of course in developing nations or other scenarios with stay at home women will see them doing more unpaid work. I'd imagine it's similar for a brief time in developed countries when women leave the workforce to have children too. At least in my experience it seems division of overall labor is generally equal for the relationships I have seen.
      - sjostrom7 5y ago
nine_k 5y ago
I'd say that the whole "can't put dishes into sink for years" is but a tip of an iceberg, and the main part of it is "can't be bothered to pay attention for years". I suspect that such a breakdown in communication must be felt pervasively, but can't be described as easily, and likely most instances are too intimate to disclose publicly. If a bridge is under unsustainable strain, a single rivet failure can lead to a catastrophic collapse of the whole thing, even though everything just looked okay a moment ago.
Cerium 5y ago
Years ago I learned this lesson about marriage while on a trip in South Western China. I joined a tour group to see a mountain for a few days. My party was six and the van sat eight, so the driver got another couple to join us. They were fascinating. We learned over meals together that they were an arraigned marriage. At the time I had extremely negative views around the practice, thanks to growing up in the USA where we celebrate our freedom to choose the perfect partner. From them I learned a new facet of love and saw something beautiful in their relationship. They entered marriage knowing they would have differences to solve together. They solved those differences and developed a great relationship. After that encounter I changed my mental model of finding someone to marry from finding someone perfect for me to arainging my own marriage. By that I meant that I wanted to find someone generally compatable but also willing to work together. It turns out I found that person on that same trip, and we have now been married for 7 years, but that is a long off topic story. For sure, each side needs to always be trying to compromise more than the other.
- bombcar 5y ago
  This is a very important lesson - the chance of finding a "perfect" partner is vanishingly small if considered in the normal view - but the chance of finding someone who is willing to work together is higher. And most marriages are "arranged" in some way or another, we just like to pretend that random chance plays little part and somehow we've got it down to a science.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    I can't recommend this book enough on the topic. TLDR Women are more picky then Men in the courtship marketplace, and finding a partner with matching values is most important to growing and staying together. People expect a fairy tale, when they're signing up for a job (relationships require work and effort). A quote from the author 10 years post publishing: “I think the book is really, ironically, about having higher standards about the things that matter, like the character qualities, generosity, kindness, reliability, and not getting so hung up on things like, you know, whether you’re going to go on a second date with a guy because of how he dressed.” https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough/dp/045123216X https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough/dp/0... (Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23687614M/Marry_him https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23687614M/Marry_him The Atlantic piece that was the genesis for the book: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-him/306651/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-h... https://jezebel.com/lori-gottliebs-marry-him-was-always-a-caricature-of-the-1840878562 https://jezebel.com/lori-gottliebs-marry-him-was-always-a-ca... EDIT: @300bps (HN throttling, can't reply directly) Indeed. The book covers exactly this (census data for the dating marketplace and the dynamic between genders as age brackets tick upwards). The market is great for women 21-30, and it rapidly declines after 35. You can borrow the book from the Internet Archive with the library link I tossed in this comment for more context.
photochemsyn 5y ago
Ideally a partnership is a 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts' situation. It should be a win-win for both partners. If both partners have to 'make sacrifices' then you have a 'the whole is less than the sum of the parts' and in that case, the only reasonable thing to do is to chuck it all out the window and start over. The 'trial period' in a relationship should be a time frame in which both partners try to figure out if they're in a win-win situation or not. Incidentally, this is why economic collapse at the societal level leads to so many divorces. Yes, that sounds transactional, but that's the reality of marriage, it's as much an economic partnership as it is an emotional one. Not necessarily a great idea for everyone, too.
snarf21 5y ago
Divorced and looking back, the root cause of this (in my experience) is a lack of empathy. Love is easy to come by while empathy requires walking in someone else's shoes. I understand this Same Fight because I lived through that. It is never about that thing, it is about not being seen. As the author is processing his divorce, it is good he sees that there is value in doing something selflessly. However, I can't help but wonder if he isn't missing the forest for the trees. Maybe this man truly doesn't care about order/structure/cleanliness in any area of life, but I have to imagine there is at least one area that they are meticulous about. Whether that is his tools in the garage, his golf clubs, his home theater setup, etc. Would he have reacted in the same "... in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter?" nonchalance if his wife started leaving screwdriver in the bathroom and hammers in the living room or if his golf clubs were thrown on the floor under bags of trash? It feels like he stopped after he learned the first lesson examining his divorce and didn't finish. I think a lot of people would be well served to make a simple list of the life tasks that each partner currently performs. Then (where work schedules are possible), switch for 60 days. Anyone can grab groceries one day and it is no big deal. Force the other person to plan weeks of meals, keep the pantry stocked, etc. shines a bigger light on the unseen work and value each partner is providing. I learned this lesson the hard way and am better for it. Empathy is hard won and we need more of it. Apologies to my ex-wife for not being the person I didn't yet know I could be.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "Force the other person to plan weeks of meals, keep the pantry stocked, etc. shines a bigger light on the unseen work and value each partner is providing." If my wife were doing this, our grocery bill would double and it would all be frozen dinners and takeout. I'm not sure I trust her to do safety critical mechanic work either. So maybe switching isn't great for some tasks. Edit: It seems people disagree. Why? All I'm saying is that not everyone is suited to doing all tasks and that switching for some of them might not work or could even be dangerous.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    She would probably also outsource that mechanical work to a mechanic, just like you'd outsource the cooking work to the microwave/freezing company. Although, by outsourcing this work, you'd both have a little bit more free time. It might be a worthwhile experiment just to try for a month, if you can swing it.
jancsika 5y ago
> I like the idea that a really good relationship is a 60/40 compromise, where both sides are struggling to be the 60. It sounds like both sides of this marriage were struggling to be the 40. I'm picturing a therapist helping a refugee from Objectivism by suggesting to "compete on making the greater compromise, within a threshold" because that's easier to explain to them than cooperation.
- jrm4 5y ago
  I'd take this even further. Sometimes it's 50/50. Sometimes 60/40, Sometimes 100/0. You just have to comfortable with that's how it is.
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    Personally I’d rather lose 100% of the disagreement some of time (i.e. 50%) than part (40%, 50%, 60%) of the argument every time.
    - jrm4 5y ago
      I mean, you have to go to the classic point of rhetoric here. Do you want to win all the arguments, or do you want to have your way? Strategically losing arguments, or even just "lots of admitting when you're wrong (and also subconsciously reminding and modeling the fact that it's okay to be wrong)" is worth so much.
      - vxNsr 5y ago
        I was more saying that losing 50% of what you want means neither side is happy, you both gave up 50% of what you felt would make you happy. being willing to give in, entirely means even if you’re not happy right now, when your spouse/partner gives in to you you are
  - cjohnson318 5y ago
    The Gottman Institute did a lot of research on the effect of accepting bids (putting the glass in the sink), ignoring bids (leaving the glass out), and rejecting bids (throwing the glass against the wall and arguing), and they determined that accepting a bid added one feeling dollar (my term) to the bank account of your marriage (my metaphor), while rejecting a bid took five out, and ignoring a bid took like ten or fifteen out. TLDR: Ignoring someone, or causing them to feel ignored, is more painful than intentionally being mean to them, because even that is a form of acknowledgement or attention. Also, you need to keep putting feeling dollars in the bank because you never know when you're going to have a huge fight, have your partner check the balance, and decide there's no reason to keep going.
vmception 5y ago
Another thing many couples miss is positive reinforcement. Many people fall into the trap of ignoring the desired behavior and chastising the undesired behavior. Because the desired behavior is so normal and benign to one party. But its clearly not to the other party. If the glass was in the dish washer or washed and put away, I could imagine many couples experiencing no conditioning towards repeating that behavior.
- zrail 5y ago
  Yep. I regularly thank my partner for the work they do to keep the house running and they do the same back for me. It genuinely helps me feel more connected to them when we recognize and show appreciation for the things that could absolutely be considered automatic.
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charles_f 5y ago
That's not what I took out of the article. I took out that the glass by the sink is just the token symptom for one of the 10000 ways that the author ignored stuff that made his partner fumed, representing an underlying lack of respect, and ultimately left. He mentions it as the real reason: > It was about consideration. About the pervasive sense that she was married to someone who did not respect nor appreciate her.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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4ec0755f5522 5y ago
The wife's article would be called "I told him everything I needed but he still thinks it's about the dishes".
raydev 5y ago
> but it's unlikely that it encompasses the sole reason their marriage fell apart And he says as much in the article. It's frustrating to read all these comments that are clearly written without reading the entire thing!
david-gpu 5y ago
> a really good relationship is a 60/40 compromise, where both sides are struggling to be the 60 Perhaps I'm misreading your comment, but in my experience feeling that you are doing most of the compromising can easily lead to resentment. Looking at things as a zero-sum game in which you are either compromising or getting things your way at a certain ratio is intrinsically competitive. In my opinion, both in marriage and in other social settings, relationships grow stronger when both feel that they are working together towards a common goal that satisfies all parties. This takes more work than a simple "your way or my way" approach, but it leads to all parties feeling seen and heard (because they are!).

thesuitonym 5y ago

That was the bulk of the article... The glass wasn't the problem, it was indicative of greater problems. The author even says ``A dish by the sink in no way feels painful or disrespectful to a spouse who wakes up every day and experiences a marriage partner who communicates in both word and action how important and cherished their spouse and relationship are.'' They had communication issues, but it wasn't anything huge, it was all small cuts like the glass by the sink, or the socks casually left at the foot of the bed, letting the trash bin overfill... All these little things that display a casual air of thoughtlessness.

Dobbs 5y ago

This isn't about the dishes. The dishes are just a symptom of the unequal divide of emotional labour in most relationships. Even in relationships where both parents work full time more often than not the majority of the mental and physical burden of running the house tends to fall onto the woman. Of course this isn't an absolute, but it does tend to hold true. You can see this at the outbreak of COVID where many women had to step back from jobs because they suddenly had a massively increased load of child care that by default fell onto their shoulders. The article is about someone coming to the realization of the ugly situation they are putting their spouse into, one that is extremely common. Don't try and devalue that by turning it into a "both sides" debacle.

em500 5y ago
The marriage lesson that I learned, not too late, is to hire domestic help pretty much as soon as we could afford it.
- Dobbs 5y ago
  If resources are there then yes I definitely agree. It makes a major difference in quality of life, particularly for myself and my partner who both struggle with ADHD.
giantg2 5y ago
"Even in relationships where both parents work full time more often than not the majority of the mental and physical burden of running the house tends to fall onto the woman." I'd love to see the data on this.
- Dobbs 5y ago
  If you look around for things about "emotional labor" or "unpaid labor". For example I found this from around 2014, it isn't strictly about dual income households, but there is data out there for that: > Around the world, women spend two to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men. Source: https://www.oecd.org/Dev/Development-Gender/Unpaid_Care_Work.Pdf https://www.oecd.org/Dev/Development-Gender/Unpaid_Care_Work...
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Any source for US or other developed countries? And of course the dual income is important too. Of course in developing nations or other scenarios with stay at home women will see them doing more unpaid work. I'd imagine it's similar for a brief time in developed countries when women leave the workforce to have children too. At least in my experience it seems division of overall labor is generally equal for the relationships I have seen.
    - sjostrom7 5y ago

nine_k 5y ago

I'd say that the whole "can't put dishes into sink for years" is but a tip of an iceberg, and the main part of it is "can't be bothered to pay attention for years". I suspect that such a breakdown in communication must be felt pervasively, but can't be described as easily, and likely most instances are too intimate to disclose publicly. If a bridge is under unsustainable strain, a single rivet failure can lead to a catastrophic collapse of the whole thing, even though everything just looked okay a moment ago.

Cerium 5y ago

Years ago I learned this lesson about marriage while on a trip in South Western China. I joined a tour group to see a mountain for a few days. My party was six and the van sat eight, so the driver got another couple to join us. They were fascinating. We learned over meals together that they were an arraigned marriage. At the time I had extremely negative views around the practice, thanks to growing up in the USA where we celebrate our freedom to choose the perfect partner. From them I learned a new facet of love and saw something beautiful in their relationship. They entered marriage knowing they would have differences to solve together. They solved those differences and developed a great relationship. After that encounter I changed my mental model of finding someone to marry from finding someone perfect for me to arainging my own marriage. By that I meant that I wanted to find someone generally compatable but also willing to work together. It turns out I found that person on that same trip, and we have now been married for 7 years, but that is a long off topic story. For sure, each side needs to always be trying to compromise more than the other.

bombcar 5y ago
This is a very important lesson - the chance of finding a "perfect" partner is vanishingly small if considered in the normal view - but the chance of finding someone who is willing to work together is higher. And most marriages are "arranged" in some way or another, we just like to pretend that random chance plays little part and somehow we've got it down to a science.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  I can't recommend this book enough on the topic. TLDR Women are more picky then Men in the courtship marketplace, and finding a partner with matching values is most important to growing and staying together. People expect a fairy tale, when they're signing up for a job (relationships require work and effort). A quote from the author 10 years post publishing: “I think the book is really, ironically, about having higher standards about the things that matter, like the character qualities, generosity, kindness, reliability, and not getting so hung up on things like, you know, whether you’re going to go on a second date with a guy because of how he dressed.” https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough/dp/045123216X https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough/dp/0... (Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23687614M/Marry_him https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23687614M/Marry_him The Atlantic piece that was the genesis for the book: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-him/306651/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-h... https://jezebel.com/lori-gottliebs-marry-him-was-always-a-caricature-of-the-1840878562 https://jezebel.com/lori-gottliebs-marry-him-was-always-a-ca... EDIT: @300bps (HN throttling, can't reply directly) Indeed. The book covers exactly this (census data for the dating marketplace and the dynamic between genders as age brackets tick upwards). The market is great for women 21-30, and it rapidly declines after 35. You can borrow the book from the Internet Archive with the library link I tossed in this comment for more context.

photochemsyn 5y ago

Ideally a partnership is a 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts' situation. It should be a win-win for both partners. If both partners have to 'make sacrifices' then you have a 'the whole is less than the sum of the parts' and in that case, the only reasonable thing to do is to chuck it all out the window and start over. The 'trial period' in a relationship should be a time frame in which both partners try to figure out if they're in a win-win situation or not. Incidentally, this is why economic collapse at the societal level leads to so many divorces. Yes, that sounds transactional, but that's the reality of marriage, it's as much an economic partnership as it is an emotional one. Not necessarily a great idea for everyone, too.

snarf21 5y ago

Divorced and looking back, the root cause of this (in my experience) is a lack of empathy. Love is easy to come by while empathy requires walking in someone else's shoes. I understand this Same Fight because I lived through that. It is never about that thing, it is about not being seen. As the author is processing his divorce, it is good he sees that there is value in doing something selflessly. However, I can't help but wonder if he isn't missing the forest for the trees. Maybe this man truly doesn't care about order/structure/cleanliness in any area of life, but I have to imagine there is at least one area that they are meticulous about. Whether that is his tools in the garage, his golf clubs, his home theater setup, etc. Would he have reacted in the same "... in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter?" nonchalance if his wife started leaving screwdriver in the bathroom and hammers in the living room or if his golf clubs were thrown on the floor under bags of trash? It feels like he stopped after he learned the first lesson examining his divorce and didn't finish. I think a lot of people would be well served to make a simple list of the life tasks that each partner currently performs. Then (where work schedules are possible), switch for 60 days. Anyone can grab groceries one day and it is no big deal. Force the other person to plan weeks of meals, keep the pantry stocked, etc. shines a bigger light on the unseen work and value each partner is providing. I learned this lesson the hard way and am better for it. Empathy is hard won and we need more of it. Apologies to my ex-wife for not being the person I didn't yet know I could be.

giantg2 5y ago
"Force the other person to plan weeks of meals, keep the pantry stocked, etc. shines a bigger light on the unseen work and value each partner is providing." If my wife were doing this, our grocery bill would double and it would all be frozen dinners and takeout. I'm not sure I trust her to do safety critical mechanic work either. So maybe switching isn't great for some tasks. Edit: It seems people disagree. Why? All I'm saying is that not everyone is suited to doing all tasks and that switching for some of them might not work or could even be dangerous.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  She would probably also outsource that mechanical work to a mechanic, just like you'd outsource the cooking work to the microwave/freezing company. Although, by outsourcing this work, you'd both have a little bit more free time. It might be a worthwhile experiment just to try for a month, if you can swing it.

jancsika 5y ago

> I like the idea that a really good relationship is a 60/40 compromise, where both sides are struggling to be the 60. It sounds like both sides of this marriage were struggling to be the 40. I'm picturing a therapist helping a refugee from Objectivism by suggesting to "compete on making the greater compromise, within a threshold" because that's easier to explain to them than cooperation.

jrm4 5y ago
I'd take this even further. Sometimes it's 50/50. Sometimes 60/40, Sometimes 100/0. You just have to comfortable with that's how it is.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Personally I’d rather lose 100% of the disagreement some of time (i.e. 50%) than part (40%, 50%, 60%) of the argument every time.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    I mean, you have to go to the classic point of rhetoric here. Do you want to win all the arguments, or do you want to have your way? Strategically losing arguments, or even just "lots of admitting when you're wrong (and also subconsciously reminding and modeling the fact that it's okay to be wrong)" is worth so much.
    - vxNsr 5y ago
      I was more saying that losing 50% of what you want means neither side is happy, you both gave up 50% of what you felt would make you happy. being willing to give in, entirely means even if you’re not happy right now, when your spouse/partner gives in to you you are
- cjohnson318 5y ago
  The Gottman Institute did a lot of research on the effect of accepting bids (putting the glass in the sink), ignoring bids (leaving the glass out), and rejecting bids (throwing the glass against the wall and arguing), and they determined that accepting a bid added one feeling dollar (my term) to the bank account of your marriage (my metaphor), while rejecting a bid took five out, and ignoring a bid took like ten or fifteen out. TLDR: Ignoring someone, or causing them to feel ignored, is more painful than intentionally being mean to them, because even that is a form of acknowledgement or attention. Also, you need to keep putting feeling dollars in the bank because you never know when you're going to have a huge fight, have your partner check the balance, and decide there's no reason to keep going.

vmception 5y ago

Another thing many couples miss is positive reinforcement. Many people fall into the trap of ignoring the desired behavior and chastising the undesired behavior. Because the desired behavior is so normal and benign to one party. But its clearly not to the other party. If the glass was in the dish washer or washed and put away, I could imagine many couples experiencing no conditioning towards repeating that behavior.

zrail 5y ago
Yep. I regularly thank my partner for the work they do to keep the house running and they do the same back for me. It genuinely helps me feel more connected to them when we recognize and show appreciation for the things that could absolutely be considered automatic.

deleted 5y ago

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charles_f 5y ago

That's not what I took out of the article. I took out that the glass by the sink is just the token symptom for one of the 10000 ways that the author ignored stuff that made his partner fumed, representing an underlying lack of respect, and ultimately left. He mentions it as the real reason: > It was about consideration. About the pervasive sense that she was married to someone who did not respect nor appreciate her.

deleted 5y ago

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deleted 5y ago

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4ec0755f5522 5y ago

The wife's article would be called "I told him everything I needed but he still thinks it's about the dishes".

raydev 5y ago

> but it's unlikely that it encompasses the sole reason their marriage fell apart And he says as much in the article. It's frustrating to read all these comments that are clearly written without reading the entire thing!

david-gpu 5y ago

> a really good relationship is a 60/40 compromise, where both sides are struggling to be the 60 Perhaps I'm misreading your comment, but in my experience feeling that you are doing most of the compromising can easily lead to resentment. Looking at things as a zero-sum game in which you are either compromising or getting things your way at a certain ratio is intrinsically competitive. In my opinion, both in marriage and in other social settings, relationships grow stronger when both feel that they are working together towards a common goal that satisfies all parties. This takes more work than a simple "your way or my way" approach, but it leads to all parties feeling seen and heard (because they are!).