Why is that such a common thing? While there are certainly people in other generations who have bad marriages and go through bitter divorces, spouse hatred seems so much less common among other generations...
Say, this gal likes sody-pop like I do and is scared to have opinions. I should legally own her destiny for life.
i am sure sometimes its in jest, but the amount of times I head boomers talk about 'wearing someone down' or 'being worn down' (usually the man to the woman) is really unsettling...
Hating your spouse has been a stock joke for centuries, probably because marriage was something you entered into only semi-willingly and couldn't just leave. The Boomers were the first generation to have no-fault divorce. And even with easy divorce, marriage can be hard, and living with someone else for decades means grievances creep in, and you can fall into patterns of mutual resentment. So it's a old comedy trope that reflects reality to a certain extent, and there's nothing that unusual about Boomers using it.
My purely anecdotal impression is that divorce didn't become an viable option (culturally) until the Silent generation, and even then it was still fairly scandalous. In some backwaters, divorce was probably scandalous into the 80s, I'd guess? Certainly the 70s. So the Boomers were soaked in this attitude of "I hate my spouse" for much of their lives. In my opinion, the "hate my spouse" schtick peaked with the G.I. Generation, which was basically one big untreated ball of PTSD.
HOT TAKE:
Finding somebody you had the hots for, getting married to them, having kids and a household with them, was "following the rules."
When it turns out that checking those boxes doesn't equal happiness and the marriage dissolves, all of a lifetime's worth of stuff has to be divided up, having to "start over" when you thought you were done with that part of your life, can leave one with a sense of unfairness at a situation where "I followed the rules, so why did I lose? I did what I was supposed to do, so why am I in this situation?"
Tons of good answers in this thread. One thing I'll add: the fairly recent acknowledgement of alternative lifestyles means that there is probably a percentage of people in unhappy marriages who are queer / trans and closeted or don't even realize, and that's making them miserable. I would add people who are in other sexual / romantic minorities and those who simply did not want to be married or have children and did not consider other possibilities existed outside of the societal norms that existed at the time.
You joke but in Argentina divorce became legal in 1987.
Previously it had been approved in 1954 but the 1955 coup quickly baned it again
That generation got married and had kids because that's what you did. That type of group think and pigeon-holing carries a lot of baggage. For example: My parents undoubtedly wanted to have me for religious reasons, but weren't too keen on raising me. My dad walked out on my mom when I was 5; mom did her best but I was a latch key kid who ate a lot of TV dinners. Even if the 'rents stayed together, neither of them were really into parenting so I doubt I would have been much better off. My wife's parents straight up despise each other, are still together, and have both nearly died from self medication. Both ardent Trump supporters who love Wal-Mart and hate immigrants.
Whaddyagonnado?
I think my mom enjoyed having someone to share the struggle with, but she wasn't interested in being a motherly figure. I remember my mom was bored to tears during school functions and she had no love for other children in general. My father was just a self absorbed prick. My mom is completely elated to be a grandmother though, similar to your parents it sounds like.
The conclusion I've come to is, I doubt similar people would get married now let alone have kids in today's environment. From my perspective I do harbor some hard feelings toward my mom and dad for being kind of shitty (in different ways, respectively) - but I also realize a lot of it was born out of true generational ignorance.
My parents despise each other at times. They fight all the time and been together almost 40 years. Dedication and commitment and less of a focus in the type of live we usually think of. But also my parents are kind of religious and they value marriage for other reasons as well
I think a lot of them were pressured to marry to conform to societal norms. Like my dad, his first marriage fell apart but he got my mom pregnant so he had to do "the right thing" and marry her. The two of them should have never have been married. My mom and dad hate each other and I think they'd be happier off being alone.
lots of good answers in this thread, but ya gotta note that a lot of what you hear are legitimately jokes.
even boomers crack jokes you're not supposed to take serious.
a lot of what you hear are legitimately jokes.
Yeah, the comedian that popularized that style of joke had, by all indications, a very long and happy marriage, with his wife traveling with him while he was touring and helping him write his material, meaning a lot of the jokes would have been exaggerated in-jokes between them or self-deprecating humor on her part.
Rodney Dangerfield?
Edit: not Rodney Dangerfield. Benny Youngman who was married to his wife from 1928 -1987. His main joke was “take my wife please.”
Hard to ignore it coming from a generation with such shatteringly high divorce rates.
There's an excellent take on this joke in S2 of I Think You Should Leave
Husband treats wife life shit, like some combo of property, sex slave, maid, childcare, household manager, and spends his time working an easy 9-5, then relaxing while wife works her ass off.
Wife has been conditioned to accept this, but inside resentment builds up. Resentment comes out for this shit life they feel forced to live, husband resents wife for daring to resent him... vicious toxic cycle begins and then feeds itself for 50 years...
Deeply ingrained misogyny + hilariously pervasive cultural and religious norms = Take my wife, please, she always shops and crashes the car!
It takes a lot of understanding and compromise to be in a relationship, let alone a marriage. Boomers aren't exactly known for that
Because most of them married for status, and were much too young to realize what a commitment it is.
Hot take but the concepts of marriage and nuclear families have some inherent flaws. People change over time and may become incompatible, and emotions change and die down as well. Evo psych warning I guess, but I think people are built to form exclusive relationships for like, 5 years, and then their kids can go wander around a close-knit tribal community where everyone knows each other and is happy to teach them stuff. Marriage was an unfortunately necessary response to the breakdown of those communities with the advent of civilization, but the idea of the nuclear family is much more recent and didn't come around until the Industrial Revolution. Before that it was more common to live together with your extended family, which would typically have established roots in a community. But with the Industrial Revolution, people moved around a lot more, which meant more atomization, more separation from the support network of the extended family, and of course a less friendly and less safe environment for children to run around in than like a family farm. Even as things improved materially, the atomization remained.
That's the background going on when Hippies entered the scene and saw that shit was fucked and responded with the idea of "free love," as a rejection of the whole thing. But it was a pretty idealistic approach, that neglected the material conditions that drove the development of relationship norms to the point that they were at. The norms were very bad and they recognized that they were bad, but I don't think there was much analysis beyond that. This is kinda captured in the ending to The Graduate, where, after a big dramatic scene with a bride running away from her wedding with the main character, they hop on a bus, and the camera just stays on them as their expressions change as practical realities start to sink in, like that they don't actually want to be together and that she'd already exchanged vows before running off, but hey, they totally owned their parents.
So my guess is that you have this generation that is aware of the flaws of traditional relationships and vocal about them, but then ends up coming back to them because the same material conditions that created them still exist. And that's how you get "wife bad." FWIW previous generations had shitty marriages too, it's just that the problems were more buried and it's hard to make jokes about a problem when you're trying really hard to pretend it doesn't exist.
This is kinda captured in the ending to The Graduate, where, after a big dramatic scene with a bride running away from her wedding with the main character, they hop on a bus, and the camera just stays on them...
And it wasn't even a scripted scene, it was a total accident that the director decided to leave in (if I recall correctly.)
Just :chefs-kiss:
