How many opportunities should I give my partner to change? Feminist Advice Friday
A reader wonders how much change is enough--and when to give up.
Feminist Advice Friday is now three years old! I’ve covered a lot of material over the last three years. My audience has also grown massively, so most of you have likely never seen the earliest columns. So in honor of this birthday, I’m revisiting some older columns and updating my advice. If you’ve written to me before and you have an update, I’d love to hear it.
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A reader asks…
How much progress is enough progress? If your spouse made substantive changes and seems to be trying, is that enough? How long do you give them to figure it out?
What about when there are mitigating factors-- depression, death, or major illness of a family member?
In my case, failure to launch is very real. My husband was never raised to be a partner and he seems to be trying to learn. But shit, progress is slow!
My answer
Before I get into the meat of this question, I think it’s important to consider the cultural context in which it is asked. Women suffer higher rates of mental illness than men.
They are more likely to experience chronic illness, and routinely suffer traumas such as rape, abuse at work, and sexual harassment.
Yet only men get graded on a curve. In the typical heterosexual marriage, there is no break for a woman who is depressed, who has just had a baby, or who has just lost a parent. She is expected to continue pushing on—indeed, to continue doing more than her fair share, while accepting little or no emotional support from her spouse. Virtually every pregnancy advice website specifically tells women not to be too demanding of their male partners in the exhausting postpartum period.
So I’m not terribly sympathetic when men ask for the kind of grace and understanding that, as a culture, we deny to women. This culture baptizes women by fire. They give birth, and then are up and learning parenting, whether they feel good or not, whether they like it or not. No one has to inform them that children need food. And when women slack off, no one tells their partners to give them grace.
That lack of sympathy does little for this letter writer, though, so let’s consider her question.
There’s a hidden assumption in this question, and in most questions about household labor: that women owe men relationships, and that they therefore must experience a certain amount of suffering over a certain period before they are fully entitled to leave. That’s misogynistic garbage. You can leave your relationship whenever you want, for any reason, or for no reason at all.
And certainly, if your partner has subjected you to years or decades of soul-shattering, body-breaking labor they’re unwilling to do themselves, it is reasonable to tell them you are not giving up one more second of your one precious and irreplaceable life.
Good intentions are not enough. And your partner’s intentions are not actually good if you are not seeing significant, measurable, impactful change.
Love being what it is, though, no one wants to walk out on someone they’ve invested years in. And people do occasionally change. We cannot expect our partners to be perfect; the challenge is in determining when we are experiencing the normal push and pull of a relationship, the normal imbalances where each partner does different proportions of the work at different times, and when we are experiencing the abusive inequality that is a choice. And once you’ve made that determination, you have to decide how likely it is to change, and how soon. Just more emotional labor for the sex that already does so much of this labor.
I can’t tell you whether your partner is trying hard enough or when you should leave. These are deeply personal decisions, and the cultural context in which you make them—especially how well you can support yourself and how much support you might get from loved ones—weighs heavily on these decisions. But I can offer you some general principles to consider as you weigh your options:
1. Mental illness, trauma, and stress do not compel people to mistreat others. While stress can make it harder to keep up with household duties, it is not an excuse for foisting all responsibility onto an overworked partner. Ask yourself: has my partner always been this way, or is this a temporary change due to temporary stress? If it’s the former, the odds are good that they are using their mental health as an excuse. If mental health persists as an excuse for years, then he is either permanently disabled (and you must assess whether you can live with this level of disability), or, more likely, he is not doing enough to manage his mental health.
2. Mental illness is not a person’s fault, but no one is entitled to mistreat others because of untreated mental illness. Your willingness to give your partner grace and forgiveness should be directly proportional to the amount of work they are putting into improving things. Are they working with you, talking to you, going to therapy, trying different treatments? If so, then it makes sense to give them time to make improvements. But if they’re lying around playing video games, refusing to seek help, or seeking excuses from their therapist, things are not going to change.
3. Men are not innately incompetent or incapable of doing household labor. Rest assured, your partner is fully capable of knowing when you are working and he is relaxing. He knows that children need food and rides to school. He knows that fairies do not wash the dishes; do not allow him to pretend otherwise. The decision not to participate in household labor is no accident; it is a choice. Change does not have to be a gradual process, and when it is, your partner is continuing to choose to buy their leisure time, their journey of personal improvement, with your labor.
4. When a partner spends years or decades not doing their fair share, they have absolutely no right to ask for additional consideration from the partner they’ve exhausted. When your husband does less and asks you for more, he is choosing to disregard your needs. The correct response to learning you have been mistreating your partner is an immediate and urgent desire to do better—not a request for the favor of more time. Sure, old habits die hard and your partner might have to learn some new skills, but the person who is owed something here is you, not them.
What is your spouse doing to make up for what they have taken from you? What have they done to show real remorse and true regret? If you don’t have an answer to these questions, I think change is unlikely.
What should be considered here as well is that abusive men are very good at giving you just the right amount of breadcrums that keep you stuck. They do one small step to change and then one more, so you have the hope that something is changing and you just need to wait a bit more. I have spent 3 years of my life like that, waiting, giving him time to change - he started therapy, he got psychological assessment, he got some medication, he promised to try to stop drinking, he stopped for two weeks, he made a call to a recovery center, he talked about different stuff he will do, he went once to AA meeting and talked about going to another... I could go on. Every time I was too frustrated he did some half step seemingly into the right direction. But in reality, nothing actually truly changed. And half of those things he never even meant, he even confessed that he said many things just so I wouldnt leave.
My now ex husband has told me so many times that his untreated mental illness, that of course I made worse by mentioning separation, is why he became verbally and emotionally abusive and cheated. Oh and he’s better now but I destroyed the family by proceeding with divorce. He talked to a priest once or twice, went to confession. The legit mental health professionals we saw, separate and together, were biased against him. Because of me, of course. And he still wants me to just “choose love and put the family back together” because he didn’t want any of this.