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March 17, 2006

Seems like it's not enough to bring home the bacon, and fry it up in the pan... apparently women have to clean up the mess too. Ellen Goodman looks at a new study that says the new norm for marriages is a "husband who expresses more feelings and a wife who cleans more."

But what intrigues me most is the choice morsel the researchers themselves pluck from the data. As Wilcox describes it: ''Wives who work full time and have more progressive attitudes are more likely to be unhappy with the division of housework. And that spells trouble for them and their marriages." The best marriages, he says, are not just those in which men do more emotional work than they might choose, but those in which women ''make an effort to expect less" in household sharing.

There are no surprises in this semi-traditional model of marriage. The new norm is a husband who expresses more feelings than his father and a wife who cleans more toilets than her husband. But do women really want to lower their expectations? Aren't they pretty low already?

Posted by dkdanielson at March 17, 2006 10:23 AM | TrackBack

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