I have never understood this joke. Growing up I never heard my Pops say anything like that even jokingly (though he would often say she wouldn't let him buy dumb stuff but that was the extent of it). However it's super common in older media and culture and is still notice able in contemporary times. I even hear from guys around my age who in their late 20s to mid 30s in break room chats. I haven't noticed a national or race trend either, it seems to be from dudes of every background.
Is marriage that soul crushing that you resent your partner?
Is it a "pressure release valve" sorta thing about monogamy? Is it actually something people feel? Do guys feel trapped somehow or are just realizing they live unfulfilling lives and project that on to their partners? If that's the case it's kinda weird, like your wife is supposedly the love your life and I would assume you'd really like them.
I remember hearing at lot at my Men's group at my church when I was an early teen. "Upstanding, moral, virtuous Christian men™️©️®️" just kinda openly saying stuff like and pretty much everyone saying "lmao same" (or the time appropriate equivalent).
I see it a lot in movies too. Tons of films are about guys secretly pining for someone else or just resolved to live their lot with some they feel hinders them.
I remember reading the book " Bowling Alone " which lacked any real material analysis of social conditions but it mentioned that men's groups were guys would go to escape their marriage for a bit. While I understand it's important to have your own friends and social groups, the idea it's describe "escape" seems like it's an unpleasant space to be in. Has patriarchy created marriage into prison were men are both the jailed and jailor like it has for many other things in men's lives?
Do dudes really loathe their partners this much?
I get that for sure, but it seems so unqiuely one-sided. Dudes complain about their wives and in-general men tend to have more if not most control of if they get married or not. It seems so strange to me that men (particuarly younger guys) seem to resent the partners of their own choosing. It seems so salty to pick someone and be the one who passively hates their partner. It just seems so odd. On a serious note, it seems to me that they project the guilt and unhappiness of their marriage on to the other person and take a passive role in your own active choices.
I know realtionships are nuanced and complex but i have always found this troupe so odd as it flips the power dynamic while still maintianing it. It's doublely bad when traditional types do this, as I would assume this path of their choosing. This is what being "trad" is supposed to be right? Like the trad dude is getting what he supposedly wants right? If he doesn't want it why not just leave rather than blaming the partner?
To make a bad meme reference "My brother in christ, you picked your wife."
This is what being “trad” is supposed to be right? Like the trad dude is getting what he supposedly wants right?
He can never get what he wants because his wants are always at odds with each other. this is irreconcilable: firstly, the trad dude is obliged to hate femininity. he has to disavow all things girly to maintain manhood. but secondly, the trad dude is also obliged to be performatively heterosexual. so he has to hate girls with utmost conviction, but also desire them more than anything else. fulfilling his sexual obligation to society means he has to expose himself to manhood-threatening levels of femininity. he is forced to sleep with the enemy, and to make matters worse this gives the woman power over him. this automatically leads to frustration, an inability to connect with his wife and a constant need to vent about this.
straight dudes who do not suffer from toxic masculinity much do not experience this. they can fully love their wifes and be happy with them, and they do not need to constantly disparage their partner in public. if they complain, there's a reason for that and it isn't a constant thing, because then they'd work on that problem with their partner or just get out of that relationship if that isn't possible. reactionaries ofc need to deny that other men have found a healthier and more fulfilling way to perform masculinity, so they will often try to police other men's relationships as well by insisting that less toxic dudes are weak and being controlled by their wives.
the trad dude is getting what he supposedly wants right? If he doesn’t want it why not just leave rather than blaming the partner
Doublethink, for want of a better term, is not an obstacle for this type of individual. Most of them tend to be conservative, so they're very familiar with complaining about any perceived slight while being in complete control.
because a lot of these people just married without first making sure they were compatible with their partner in the long term. They made the wrong decision basically. Maybe the church forced them to marry young, they got their GF pregnant and had to marry to save face, or just married the hottest person and didn't care about anything else. ToxMasc means you aren't supposed to give a shit about things like "how you feel about being with this person forever". You don't have to be compatible to get married, you don't even have to love eachother, that's not even what it is about. Marriage is traditionally just a way to show your faith to God by following his reproductive rules (which incidentally most religious Americans are absolute moral failures too)
Then they probably had kids somewhere along the line to "save" the marriage (worst decision) and now they can't leave without looking like a deadbeat, which honestly would be best for everyone at that point but capitalism shackles everyone is that situation. (The man the least tho). So they just live miserable, loveless lives and grow bitter. It's fucking depressing, the US divorce rate is like 50% and that's just the people who had the resources and will to separate.
My wife and I have a pretty great relationship for all intents and purposes; but I'll say this: In America, your significant other is often your one and only friends. Like if you think about how many people get into a relationship and then disappear from their previous social groups, now imagine that in steroids. Dinners with the wife, waking up every day and spending time with the wife, then you have kids. And depending on whether you have a support network, you might not even have those bonding moments alone — not to mention most men are incredibly shitty at helping around the house. Even myself: who does laundry, bathes the kids, changes them, puts them to bed, reads them books, cleans after myself, and does the dishes, still manage to grate her nerves because I leave cups in the wrong place or sometimes I take my socks off and don't pick them up — and not everything I do is to her standard.
Most men do not do this. They do not help with the children. They do not handle their finances well. They don't do chores. So imagine how terrible a fucking marriage is when one person does all of the important household chores AND goes to work (because who the fuck can afford a single-income living) and the other partner merely goes to work and is a fucking pig and a manchild that needs to be looked after with the same intensity as a teenager. And that teenager also wants to fuck you after a long day, and try whatever new sexual fetish or perversion they picked up from efukt.com or :reddit-logo:.
You'd go insane, probably be loud and moody, and refuse to put up with their shit after a while. Maybe they are lucky enough to escape the marriage; maybe they finally go to therapy and work things out; maybe she slowly poisons her husband and makes off as a rich widow. But no, oftentimes, they just live with each other, torment each other in silent fury, until all they know is disgust when they see each other. So yeah these :grillman: end up thinking it's all the woman's fault. That they are moody, and bitchy, and a ball and chain. And they escape to other men who won't be like, "jeez man have you tried doing the dishes, and cleaning after yourself you fucking pig?"
Source: My dad is this exact type of asshole.
Managing a household is super important. I learned a lot about that from my mom who did everything. Emotional stuff I had learn through my own experiences and relationships as my parents didn’t have a good relationship.
It was such a common sitcom trope in the 90s too. I remember being a kid and thinking "If these comedians hate their wives so much, why did they marry them? This seems childish."
Like damn boomers, when a kid thinks you're childish, maybe it's time to grow up a little. And I say this as an adult that makes fart jokes.
hehe toot
Conservatives get married and have children way too young and way too fast in order to live up to the reactionary social pressures placed upon them by their elders and community. The function of this is to maintain the feudal property relations inherent to the family unit, because it is the atomic structure of their grip on the present social order. In the process of fulfilling this reactionary social duty, they come to realize that they and the people they married have very little in common. They come to resent and loath their spouses, feel trapped, and eventually divorce. In the process of divorce they often lose money, time, and personal possessions, which increases their resentment. Because men are the property owners of the family unit, ex-wives "getting away with" half of the property of the male is seen as violating the entire family structure. They grow so bitter and hateful of this arrangement that they spend the rest of their lives complaining about their ex wives and pining after this ideal family unit that never existed. They view themselves as the "bread winners" of this ideal family unit even though most families are dual income these days and women do tons of unpaid domestic labor that men don't. They don't see the structural inequality. All they see is that they "bought all the stuff" and "the ex wife took half of it." and on top of that, they think the ex wife deprived them of what the traditional fairy tales promised them, rather than seeing through the fairy tale itself.
I agree that a lot of what hear about is performative. I think I’m lucky my wife and I didn’t need each other (financially or anything like that) when we met in our mid-20s, our entire relationship has been by deliberate choice.
The only “my wife” jokes I’ve made are just saying “MAH WIFE” like borat
The structure of marriage that most cishet people use makes both partners miserable. The old structure was only partly torn down, and now balancing parts of the structure that used to exist no longer do, and the new balance makes both partners miserable most of the time instead of just one and sometimes both.
The woman is expected to be dependent on the man, and the man is supposed to provide for the woman, but also control her. At the same time, women are no longer expected to have the old duties to the husband of acting basically as a servant to keep the man comfortable. But men still aren't supposed to be vulnerable and talk directly about anything either. Some of the duties of both parties are still socially expected, but not all and different couples draw the line at different places.
This more often than not leads to a communication style of the wife complaining to the husband to get him to do things to make her happy, the husband not really directly addressing anything but choosing what address based on what he feels like doing and thinks will make her shut up. And the husband never communicating what they want, just declaring what they are gonna do and then doing it, and if the wife hates it he will ignore her complaints. The man won't try to negotiate something, just decide "do I think she will complain for a week or a month?" And base decisions she may dislike based on that.
The leads to both partners having a relationship based on manipulating each other rather than communicating and coming to a common ground. They just can't communicate directly, when they try one or both partners will act like children having meltdowns. Many decisions end up being made with the thinking of "how much do I have to give up to avoid losing my partner", and not with the thinking of how to gain things for both.
This sounds like hyperbole, but it's not. It's literally how most cishet relationships work. It's so insanely miserable. My cishet friends often come to me for advice on this subject because they see my relationships seem to work a lot better than theirs (which shows how badly their shit is going because almost all my relationships have gone horribly), and I see it all the time.
They will straight up tell you the only reason they deal with any of it is because they get lonely and want sex and someone to sleep with at night. Which goes to show how important those things are to most people.
I will say, if I was straight I wouldn't bother. Straight relationships are usually so toxic.
This comment is two months old, but like; the way I read it 90% of the problem here is that people expect to still be able to live as if they are individuals after they get married & that doesn't actually work.
I was watching a YouTube comedy channel with my partner this weekend, and there were still a surprising number of comedians who were going with the basic "My fuckin' wife, eh?" routine. Do so many of us hate our spouses? Is the target audience 50 and older small bourgeois living in gated communities?
I know it's comedy, but comedy relies on unspoken assumptions, which in this case amount to "wives are nagging shrews who don't want us to have any fun."
It blows my mind. I used to watch a lot of stand-up, and this sort of thing felt tired back in the 90's.
I know it’s comedy, but comedy relies on unspoken assumptions, which in this case amount to “wives are nagging shrews who don’t want us to have any fun.”
Exactly what I think when guys make that joke. I constantly think you probably didn't have to marry that person. Unless it was some organized ordeal you can either work on things, or just leave. The underlying assumption of wives being shrews by design is just sad to think grown-ass dudes geniunely believe that idea.
From living with some incredibly annoying roommates I think the sentiment is more about coming to really dislike someone you live closely with
Also at one point until I found out otherwise I was worried I would have to marry someone out of obligation and I have to say I felt like an animal chained to a post I can see how someone who got married like that could come to hate their spouse
It's and old, old trope. Originally I would guess it is the catharsis of complaining over any part of an institution like marriage which permeates all of society. Living together with someone forever will naturally lead to some friction, while the cultural expectation is (or was) for it to always function perfectly. So at some point there was ample room to subvert expectations and quite possibly score a few laughs by just airing some pet peeves. It makes sense to me that far, but I can't explain why it is still around in its current unhealthy form when it isn't subverting any expectations.
