How long should I try to make my marriage work? Feminist Advice Friday
If my husband is a nice guy who's trying, but who just doesn't get it, how do I know when it's time to give up?
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
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.
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.
If you as a human being really mattered to him, he would be orchestrating his own change. Not turning you into the change police.
Of course, leaving his 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.
Quit quitting. Leave before you leave. I cover how to do that here.
Sometimes it is necessary to leave to effect change. When I was completely fed up, I left emotionally. I was done. I stopped talking, arguing. I quiet quit. Moved to my own room. Started planning when and how I would leave physically, and getting things in order for that. I didn't hide it and he could see that I literally was going to walk away and never have anything to do with him again.
It scared the bejesus out of him and he finally started to put in the consistent effort I had been asking for for years. Since I wasn't able to leave physically for at least a year (to avoid disrupting one of our children's last year at school), I watched with detachment.
We have since reconciled to some extent.
Another thing that I think helped change his view was to get therapy. I had told him that he should so that once I was gone he wouldn't try to lean on our teenage/early 20 children. He did go, and still does, and I think the therapist consolidated everything I had been saying for years. (Of course it's extremely annoying that it took a therapist to say the same things before he listened.)
He also started to read Zawn's blog faithfully. He subscribes to her on his own and he regularly discusses her posts with me. It is clear that he really is getting it rather than saying he does or briefly making some performative moves.
I had spent years trying to get through to him with talking, emailing, writing him letters, sending him books and articles, arguing etc. It was all pointless. The only thing that got through was my quiet quitting the marriage.
Hey Zawn, can you help me out? I'm trying to find a consistent way to link to your content, so I can send articles to people via comments on Facebook in some groups I'm in, but they keep saying they're seeing a paywall on content that I know isn't subscriber-only. I also went back to your blog and found some links, but they are older and not named, so they look suspicious (for example: https://www.zawn.net/blog/nygr2wodse4zr3lt96taj4vjx0bfo0) What's the best way to share your free content?