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> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to thi

> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other. Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.

UncleMeat 1y ago
Many men advocate for an equitable household. But the stats are clear. Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.
- epicureanideal 1y ago
  The stats are rigged and biased by not counting the types of work men do, and if they did count it they wouldn’t reach the “right” conclusions so wouldn’t be published. This is written about quite a bit.
  - fknorangesite 1y ago
    > This is written about quite a bit. Go on.
    - epicureanideal 1y ago
      It’s sometimes difficult to find the links through Google on short notice but I found one random site that discusses this. Of course the site is pro fathers but they do link to primary sources to verify the claims in the article. There are plenty of other places this is discussed, and I’m not associated with and haven’t ever before read the following website. It just happened to easily show up in my search. https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-these-chores-dont-count-on-mens-hidden-second-shift/ https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-th...
      - Tadpole9181 1y ago
        Then post the sources directly. What you linked to is obviously useless for good faith discussion?
        drooby 1y ago
        What they linked cited sources well. Quote from the original source study. "Housework was defined as “core chores,” or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting … Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured … . Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework." Obviously completely BS biased sexist study. It doesn't get more blatant than that.
        itake 1y ago
        When I was a kid in Florida, my sisters stayed inside learning how to knit while watching tv in the AC while I was outside in 95º Florida Humidity heat, helping my grandfather repair and maintain his home. Outdoor labor is not enjoyable.
  - zmgsabst 1y ago
    Similar to how we talk about the Wage Gap but not the Death Gap, ie, that men do an order of magnitude more dying in the workplace.
    - hdgvhicv 1y ago
      And after. Women live on average 3 years longer than men, at least in the U.K. In theory male retirement age should thus be 3 years lower, but until very recently in the U.K. female retirement age was 5 years lower, meaning women had 8 more years of claiming a pension. When this was equalised there were massive protests.
      - imtringued 1y ago
        A properly thought out retirement system should reward those who have children, take care of step children or pay child support with retirement benefits based on the number of years of child care. This would give women a few extra years of retirement in line with their longer lifespan without artificially subsidizing them (child care is a form of labor that should be directly depositable in exchange for a pension). That would align the incentives for fathers to stay with children or pay child support and for unlucky men to at least have an economic legacy that will work in exchange for their pension money, which would otherwise be worthless.
  - intended 1y ago
    This is bunk - as in not even wrong territory. Measures of productivity didn’t count domestic labor at all for the longest time. That correction occurred in this life time.
- deathanatos 1y ago
  [citation needed]? A very cursory Google of this nets me a Pew study; the stat we're looking for is: > fathers’ overall work time (including unpaid work at home) is actually two hours more than that of mothers. > Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population. This is a different claim. (A household could be equitable — both partners performing roughly the same amount of work —, even if the amount of at home labor is performed more by one person. I.e., the traditional arrangement. The question of whether the traditional arrangement is equitable is fair, and that's why I link the Pew study, seems about as close as I'm going to get.) [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-6-time-in-work-and-leisure-patterns-by-gender-and-family-structure/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter...
  - itake 1y ago
    IMHO, many of the traditional unpaid labor tasks go towards maintaining the home (repairs, landscaping, car repairs, etc)z In 2025, some of that labor is recaptured by the man, as that improves the value of the family home or cars. Also, if your family chooses to rent (which seems to be a trend now for millennials), the man doesn’t have a lawn to cut or a car to fix.
    - nothercastle 1y ago
      Almost all the traditional male tasks got automated or delegated away for your 30 yo male. Live in an apartment, no maintenance take the car to a mechanic if it even breaks anymore, all that’s left is work and earn money.
      - itake 1y ago
        yeah, so instead of stepping up around the house with this extra 'free time', they either worker longer hours at their job or relax watching tv/sports/games.
      - hdgvhicv 1y ago
        Important to remember many traditionally female tasks were also automated and simplified - washing machines, fridges, air fryers, dishwashers etc all reduce the time spent on those “inside the home” tasks.
itake 1y ago
Some men are stepping up. but others aren't. Many women don't want to have kids because they can't find a qualified partner they feel will be a good dad and good husband.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  They'll also reject this sort of man at the start of a relationship for being "too nice".
  - jdlshore 1y ago
    Let’s not perpetuate these sorts of unbacked, destructive aphorisms here.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - itake 1y ago
    I don’t think “too nice” is correct, but I’ve definitely seen women pass on great guys that weren’t 6ft or good looking.
    - more_corn 1y ago
      I fucking love the 6’ restriction. I can think of no better way to eliminate unsuitable mates than to identify that they have a height restriction.
  - Mawr 1y ago
    "Too nice" or "too indecisive", "not confident", "not projecting the ability to take care of and protect her and her children"?
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      And the men that eventually wrap their minds around what it takes to not be judged that way become not all that interested in marrying most women.
lazyasciiart 1y ago
So does my teenager, that doesn't make them an equal partner.
Analemma_ 1y ago
Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets have seen pretty steady marriage rates, and as someone also in this bubble, they tend also to have men with more egalitarian views on marriage. But the flipside is that high-earners tend to delay childbirth-- they have to, because you need a lengthy period of education and work experience to get to that high bracket. It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it. So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups. If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions." [0]: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-because-its-bad https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-beca...
- itake 1y ago
  thanks for sharing! I have definitely heard the "waiting for a stable career" from a few partners, despite me having a great situation. I will take a look at your linke tho
- acdha 1y ago
  One other important detail is that money smooths a ton of things over. Cooking dinner is less onerous when you have a decent kitchen, good ingredients, and it’s not taking time you need to clean the house, fix the car, etc. because you outsource that. That doesn’t mean that affluent marriages are always happy, of course, but the odds are better with less stress.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  You pose an interesting theory. That said the article you linked to is horrendously biased. I'm not sure if I'm maybe pointing out the obvious to you but to me it reads analogously to other well written highly partisan propaganda. It certainly poses some interesting questions to think about but then so do the higher quality far right essays. I mean the author is unironically positing that single women as a class are better across the board than single men. Why would it be that (apparently) all the best men married all the worst women? How does that make any sense outside of some radically far left filter bubble? I think a far more convincing theory is that ideological extremism has thoroughly permeated our society, is highly toxic to both critical thinking and functional relationships, and can be seen more prominently among single adults. I'll cite the very article you linked as evidence in favor of my claim.
actionfromafar 1y ago
They are married though. A bunch a guys stand no chance of being or staying married because they just don’t offer what it takes
- epicureanideal 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - more_corn 1y ago
    Come on, you only ever stand to lose half your resources. Also you’re interacting with the wrong kinda lady my friend.
    - giantg2 1y ago
      Not every state is a 50% community property split. That's not to mention the child support, which is just wild when you see how it's calculated in most places.
    - aianus 1y ago
      (Half your assets at the time of divorce plus child support and alimony) can easily be more than (all of your assets at the time of your wedding)
    - hatefulmoron 1y ago
      > Also you’re interacting with the wrong kinda lady my friend. When you sign a contract you have to be careful to consider how fucked you can be by the other side. It's not really the fault of that particular lady, you don't know how things will turn out.
    - epicureanideal 1y ago
      > you only ever stand to lose half your resources Not true. You can lose half your current assets easily, but possibly more. Then you likely need to pay alimony for many years, which if you add it up might be.. pretty much the other half, depending on the situation, and maybe much more. And that’s before talking about child support, which can be gamed, because they can argue for higher custody percentage in order to extract higher payments from you. It’s so common it’s basically routine.
gt0 1y ago
100%, if my gf made half as much money as I do, I'd be happy to do all the housework, literally all of it.
0dayz 1y ago
Data shows very clearly that men are way behind on helping around the house.
moralestapia 1y ago
I agree and add myself to the list and also every father I know about, including older peers. Both share responsabilities at home. This myth needs to die, it's not true and it discriminates against men.

UncleMeat 1y ago

Many men advocate for an equitable household. But the stats are clear. Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.

epicureanideal 1y ago
The stats are rigged and biased by not counting the types of work men do, and if they did count it they wouldn’t reach the “right” conclusions so wouldn’t be published. This is written about quite a bit.
- fknorangesite 1y ago
  > This is written about quite a bit. Go on.
  - epicureanideal 1y ago
    It’s sometimes difficult to find the links through Google on short notice but I found one random site that discusses this. Of course the site is pro fathers but they do link to primary sources to verify the claims in the article. There are plenty of other places this is discussed, and I’m not associated with and haven’t ever before read the following website. It just happened to easily show up in my search. https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-these-chores-dont-count-on-mens-hidden-second-shift/ https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-th...
    - Tadpole9181 1y ago
      Then post the sources directly. What you linked to is obviously useless for good faith discussion?
      - drooby 1y ago
        What they linked cited sources well. Quote from the original source study. "Housework was defined as “core chores,” or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting … Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured … . Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework." Obviously completely BS biased sexist study. It doesn't get more blatant than that.
        itake 1y ago
        When I was a kid in Florida, my sisters stayed inside learning how to knit while watching tv in the AC while I was outside in 95º Florida Humidity heat, helping my grandfather repair and maintain his home. Outdoor labor is not enjoyable.
- zmgsabst 1y ago
  Similar to how we talk about the Wage Gap but not the Death Gap, ie, that men do an order of magnitude more dying in the workplace.
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
    And after. Women live on average 3 years longer than men, at least in the U.K. In theory male retirement age should thus be 3 years lower, but until very recently in the U.K. female retirement age was 5 years lower, meaning women had 8 more years of claiming a pension. When this was equalised there were massive protests.
    - imtringued 1y ago
      A properly thought out retirement system should reward those who have children, take care of step children or pay child support with retirement benefits based on the number of years of child care. This would give women a few extra years of retirement in line with their longer lifespan without artificially subsidizing them (child care is a form of labor that should be directly depositable in exchange for a pension). That would align the incentives for fathers to stay with children or pay child support and for unlucky men to at least have an economic legacy that will work in exchange for their pension money, which would otherwise be worthless.
- intended 1y ago
  This is bunk - as in not even wrong territory. Measures of productivity didn’t count domestic labor at all for the longest time. That correction occurred in this life time.
deathanatos 1y ago
[citation needed]? A very cursory Google of this nets me a Pew study; the stat we're looking for is: > fathers’ overall work time (including unpaid work at home) is actually two hours more than that of mothers. > Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population. This is a different claim. (A household could be equitable — both partners performing roughly the same amount of work —, even if the amount of at home labor is performed more by one person. I.e., the traditional arrangement. The question of whether the traditional arrangement is equitable is fair, and that's why I link the Pew study, seems about as close as I'm going to get.) [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-6-time-in-work-and-leisure-patterns-by-gender-and-family-structure/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter...
- itake 1y ago
  IMHO, many of the traditional unpaid labor tasks go towards maintaining the home (repairs, landscaping, car repairs, etc)z In 2025, some of that labor is recaptured by the man, as that improves the value of the family home or cars. Also, if your family chooses to rent (which seems to be a trend now for millennials), the man doesn’t have a lawn to cut or a car to fix.
  - nothercastle 1y ago
    Almost all the traditional male tasks got automated or delegated away for your 30 yo male. Live in an apartment, no maintenance take the car to a mechanic if it even breaks anymore, all that’s left is work and earn money.
    - itake 1y ago
      yeah, so instead of stepping up around the house with this extra 'free time', they either worker longer hours at their job or relax watching tv/sports/games.
    - hdgvhicv 1y ago
      Important to remember many traditionally female tasks were also automated and simplified - washing machines, fridges, air fryers, dishwashers etc all reduce the time spent on those “inside the home” tasks.

itake 1y ago

Some men are stepping up. but others aren't. Many women don't want to have kids because they can't find a qualified partner they feel will be a good dad and good husband.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
They'll also reject this sort of man at the start of a relationship for being "too nice".
- jdlshore 1y ago
  Let’s not perpetuate these sorts of unbacked, destructive aphorisms here.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- itake 1y ago
  I don’t think “too nice” is correct, but I’ve definitely seen women pass on great guys that weren’t 6ft or good looking.
  - more_corn 1y ago
    I fucking love the 6’ restriction. I can think of no better way to eliminate unsuitable mates than to identify that they have a height restriction.
- Mawr 1y ago
  "Too nice" or "too indecisive", "not confident", "not projecting the ability to take care of and protect her and her children"?
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    And the men that eventually wrap their minds around what it takes to not be judged that way become not all that interested in marrying most women.

lazyasciiart 1y ago

So does my teenager, that doesn't make them an equal partner.

Analemma_ 1y ago

Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets have seen pretty steady marriage rates, and as someone also in this bubble, they tend also to have men with more egalitarian views on marriage. But the flipside is that high-earners tend to delay childbirth-- they have to, because you need a lengthy period of education and work experience to get to that high bracket. It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it. So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups. If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions." [0]: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-because-its-bad https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-beca...

itake 1y ago
thanks for sharing! I have definitely heard the "waiting for a stable career" from a few partners, despite me having a great situation. I will take a look at your linke tho
acdha 1y ago
One other important detail is that money smooths a ton of things over. Cooking dinner is less onerous when you have a decent kitchen, good ingredients, and it’s not taking time you need to clean the house, fix the car, etc. because you outsource that. That doesn’t mean that affluent marriages are always happy, of course, but the odds are better with less stress.
fc417fc802 1y ago
You pose an interesting theory. That said the article you linked to is horrendously biased. I'm not sure if I'm maybe pointing out the obvious to you but to me it reads analogously to other well written highly partisan propaganda. It certainly poses some interesting questions to think about but then so do the higher quality far right essays. I mean the author is unironically positing that single women as a class are better across the board than single men. Why would it be that (apparently) all the best men married all the worst women? How does that make any sense outside of some radically far left filter bubble? I think a far more convincing theory is that ideological extremism has thoroughly permeated our society, is highly toxic to both critical thinking and functional relationships, and can be seen more prominently among single adults. I'll cite the very article you linked as evidence in favor of my claim.

actionfromafar 1y ago

They are married though. A bunch a guys stand no chance of being or staying married because they just don’t offer what it takes

epicureanideal 1y ago
[flagged]
- more_corn 1y ago
  Come on, you only ever stand to lose half your resources. Also you’re interacting with the wrong kinda lady my friend.
  - giantg2 1y ago
    Not every state is a 50% community property split. That's not to mention the child support, which is just wild when you see how it's calculated in most places.
  - aianus 1y ago
    (Half your assets at the time of divorce plus child support and alimony) can easily be more than (all of your assets at the time of your wedding)
  - hatefulmoron 1y ago
    > Also you’re interacting with the wrong kinda lady my friend. When you sign a contract you have to be careful to consider how fucked you can be by the other side. It's not really the fault of that particular lady, you don't know how things will turn out.
  - epicureanideal 1y ago
    > you only ever stand to lose half your resources Not true. You can lose half your current assets easily, but possibly more. Then you likely need to pay alimony for many years, which if you add it up might be.. pretty much the other half, depending on the situation, and maybe much more. And that’s before talking about child support, which can be gamed, because they can argue for higher custody percentage in order to extract higher payments from you. It’s so common it’s basically routine.

gt0 1y ago

100%, if my gf made half as much money as I do, I'd be happy to do all the housework, literally all of it.

0dayz 1y ago

Data shows very clearly that men are way behind on helping around the house.

moralestapia 1y ago

I agree and add myself to the list and also every father I know about, including older peers. Both share responsabilities at home. This myth needs to die, it's not true and it discriminates against men.