How long should I give my husband to change? Feminist Advice Friday

How much change is enough? When is a marriage no longer worth it?

I occasionally republish and update older Feminist Advice Friday posts. If you read this one back in the early days of the newsletter, I hope you enjoy revisiting it. I’ve significantly updated my advice!

A reader asks…

My husband is a basically nice, but clueless, guy. I knew I was unhappy, but had a lot of difficulty explaining why. Finding you was a revelation. I began immediately demanding better. He has been mostly receptive, and has made some changes. But he always backslides, and I have to be the change police.

It feels silly to divorce someone I love over household labor inequality. But at this point I’m wondering: how long and how hard should I try to make my marriage work?

My Answer

You say that it feels silly to divorce someone you love over household labor inequality.

What if we phrased it differently, though?

You’re considering divorce because he is knowingly and continuously stealing your time, your dreams, and your life.

The notion that domestic labor inequality is a silly, trivial issue is itself a product of patriarchal socialization. We only think domestic labor inequity is unimportant because we don’t value women’s time. And we don’t value women’s time because we don’t value women. We think stealing their hopes for the future, their potential, their ability to think clearly, their joy is a small thing. We view women as expendable.

You are not expendable, and even if your marriage were otherwise perfect, domestic labor inequity is a compelling reason to divorce. Because it is abuse.

However, labor inequity almost always coincides with other forms of exploitation. People who allow their partners to work themselves into exhaustion while they sit idly by are people who are fine with ignoring their partners’ other basic needs, too.

There’s one simple test to assess how bad inequity is in your relationship:

Match his work.

It all boils down to that.

You should not be working harder than him—at home, with the kids, on the relationship. You should not be sacrificing more than him. How hard is he working to save your marriage? How much is he giving up? If you haven’t even gotten close to household equality yet, the answer is not much. Meanwhile you’re sacrificing your one and only life for a man who cannot even aspire to equality.

If your life would fall apart if you matched his work, if he would start calling you abusive and demanding more, then there’s no hope here.

You call him a nice guy. For a lot of men, nice functions as little more than an identity, a signifier of meeting the very minimal bar society sets for men, not as meaningful data about the man’s behavior. But what is this man doing that is actually nice? He’s foisting the majority of the labor onto you—the implication of which is that your time, your life, your suffering are all unimportant. Inequality in your relationship was never an accident; it’s by design. It exists because it benefits him, and because an entire society has devoted itself to telling women that this inequality doesn’t matter because they don’t matter. He’s not clueless. He’s never clueless.

He’s trying to get away with doing the minimum possible so that he can keep you while still extracting as much extra labor from you as possible.

That’s what it means when a man keeps backsliding.

Theoretically, I think it’s fine to give him some time to change, to allow some grace, to work on it together as much as possible—as long as meaningful change is happening and equality is getting closer and closer.

That’s not what’s happening here, though. He’s continuing to exploit you, and has convinced you it’s because he’s incompetent and nice—rather than calculating and shitty. He’s not nice if he's stealing your life. Nice has to be a word that has an actual meaning.

If you as a human being really mattered to him, he would be orchestrating his own change. Not turning you into the change police. “Is this good enough? Can you settle for this? Am I doing enough bare minimum?” he seems to be asking.

Do you really want to be with someone who only wants to do the bare minimum?

Or, the too-long; didn’t read version of this all: Are you happy with things they way they are? Is this what you feel you deserve? What he deserves?

Too often, women focus on the man—whether he’s trying, why he’s being a shithead, whether she’s given him enough chances. But a relationship is supposed to be for you, too. Turn your attention toward yourself. Is this what you want?

Of course, leaving is hard and often dangerous, and courts can be biased. So I understand that you may need to find a way to live with this. One way that many women find to cope with being trapped with a shitty man is to tell themselves that he’s nice, that he’s trying, that he’s trying to get better.

But doing this requires you to ignore your own lived experience, to devalue your needs and time, and to refuse to see reality for what it is. I believe that seeing things for what they are can be painful, but empowering, and can help you position yourself to eventually escape—whatever that means in your situation.

Quiet quitting. Leave before you leave. I cover how to do that here.