What I meant to do
I meant to write a post on Friday about the grocery store. I'll get to that shortly.
I meant to watch all of the football game on Saturday.
I meant to call back several people this weekend.
I meant to take some new pictures to add to my flickr account.
I meant to finish grading another set of papers.
I meant to finish that chapter in August.
None of it is done.
I'll start with the first on the list, even though the vehemence has now dissipated.
The grocery store.
I was buying groceries last Thursday night after yoga class: a woman with a half-full/empty cart in Kroger at 8:30 pm. Only one clerk was working. The line to check out was about 5 people deep, so I stood there (unwilling to pick up a magazine to pass the time) and watched those around me.
In front of me three women, with carts fuller than mine, thumbed through copies of Good Housekeeping and People. A man walked up behind me to join the line. He carried a hand-held basket containing 3 or 4 items. Another man was using his credit card to buy his single bag of items.
Finally, a clerk came and opened the "Express" line (for 12 items or less), and into that line skirted 3 more men, all of whom had hand-held baskets.
I thought of my previous post and the responses in which we are all careful to argue that gender and sex are not the same thing. But there we were, women with full baskets and men with a few items.
I had to ask myself, why was I doing the shopping? How much of the shopping did I normally do? I was startled at my own answer: most of it. And most of it is done alone but for two people.
Someone told me recently that I have "a chip on my shoulder about this gender thing." Yes, I think I do.
And today in one of my classes a white male told a black male that he was stereotyping because the black male said that white people always think he is white when they hear him on the phone because he doesn't "sound black." Yes, I think he was stereotyping. Or at least he was generalizing.
But the problem is, it is easy to stand in the position of power and condemn those of us without it for our complaints. Even if those complaints are over-generalized and stereotypical, they may hold some validity.
There were four men in the grocery store; all of them were buying less than 12 items. There were four women in the same grocery store; all of them were buying 20-50 items.
So, I know that I can't say that women do the shopping based on that one account. But doesn't that one account mean something (especially when it seems to match account after account from my own past and the accounts of some others)?
What I mean to say is, the person is political right? When is the personal enough?
I meant to watch all of the football game on Saturday.
I meant to call back several people this weekend.
I meant to take some new pictures to add to my flickr account.
I meant to finish grading another set of papers.
I meant to finish that chapter in August.
None of it is done.
I'll start with the first on the list, even though the vehemence has now dissipated.
The grocery store.
I was buying groceries last Thursday night after yoga class: a woman with a half-full/empty cart in Kroger at 8:30 pm. Only one clerk was working. The line to check out was about 5 people deep, so I stood there (unwilling to pick up a magazine to pass the time) and watched those around me.
In front of me three women, with carts fuller than mine, thumbed through copies of Good Housekeeping and People. A man walked up behind me to join the line. He carried a hand-held basket containing 3 or 4 items. Another man was using his credit card to buy his single bag of items.
Finally, a clerk came and opened the "Express" line (for 12 items or less), and into that line skirted 3 more men, all of whom had hand-held baskets.
I thought of my previous post and the responses in which we are all careful to argue that gender and sex are not the same thing. But there we were, women with full baskets and men with a few items.
I had to ask myself, why was I doing the shopping? How much of the shopping did I normally do? I was startled at my own answer: most of it. And most of it is done alone but for two people.
Someone told me recently that I have "a chip on my shoulder about this gender thing." Yes, I think I do.
And today in one of my classes a white male told a black male that he was stereotyping because the black male said that white people always think he is white when they hear him on the phone because he doesn't "sound black." Yes, I think he was stereotyping. Or at least he was generalizing.
But the problem is, it is easy to stand in the position of power and condemn those of us without it for our complaints. Even if those complaints are over-generalized and stereotypical, they may hold some validity.
There were four men in the grocery store; all of them were buying less than 12 items. There were four women in the same grocery store; all of them were buying 20-50 items.
So, I know that I can't say that women do the shopping based on that one account. But doesn't that one account mean something (especially when it seems to match account after account from my own past and the accounts of some others)?
What I mean to say is, the person is political right? When is the personal enough?
posted by perrykat at
1:09 PM
13 Comments:
Fire your yoga teacher. Golly.
Personal vs political.
I for one assume that the harmony, symmetry of nature is such that things at a higher order cannot help but be informed by the mechanics at the lower level.
More; that our understanding of the world is fundamentally and fatally handicapped by our inability to reconcile the multi-scale nature of reality with the fixed scale of our brain and sense of self.
That this limited focal depth of our mental perception forces us to aggregate and disaggregate lower and higher levels into our field of vision, creating anthropomorphized vessels into which we pour familiar motivations.
Thus we seek to understand why the selfish gene is selfish, if the invisible hand is gentle or a fist, and how the giraffe knew to grow its neck longer.
The point is, asking which level is more true seems the wrong question. I suspect the truth, if such a thing exists, is in the harmony of patterns between the levels. A hard idea to put into words, maybe this is better: not the nucleus or the star, but the sphere.
===============
On another level. The self-described "chip on your shoulder" about gender intrigues me. Using one account as a basis for exploration (which is always fair if fairly intended), is it the *fact* of the disparity, or the *content* of the disparity, or the *regard* of the disparity, that defines its meaning to you?
To expand and clarify (and conflating gender and sex for simplicity lest I imply more precision than intended):
The proposed disparity (from inference): when men and women are in a couple, they are likely to divide labor such that the woman is more likely to do the labor of purchasing desired household goods from a grocery store.
The fact of the disparity. Typically/stereotypically men and women have different behaviors and in couples divide the labor between them so that women are more likely to do certain tasks and men others.
The content of the disparity.
Food shopping is one of the behaviors and household labor responsibilities that are typically different/handled differently between men and women. A major shopping stereotype that comes to mind: that men only enjoy window-shopping for big-ticket items (plasma TV, lawnmower) and otherwise treat shopping as begrudged spending on a short fixed list of necessities, while women view shopping more as an opportunity to acquire things for the household (or wardrobe) that will improve quality of life.
The regard of the disparity.
"Regard" in the sense of how it is regarded, the esteem in which it is held. Like many tasks typically performed by women in a patriarchal society, shopping is viewed (esp. by men) as something of low value. Thus, almost as a tautology, in an economy that values specialization and a society that reflects male status, economically specialized tasks of women are held in lower societal regard.
So to ask the original question again, is it the fact that men and women like/do different things, or the fact that shopping is one of them, or the fact that shopping is held in lower regard, that awakens the "chip"?
And, to take a crack at actually answering your original question, at least from a stereotypical position:
In a society where boys are raised to value achievement and play the role of breadwinners, and are subsequently granted status based on wealth and the status of women thus attracted, while girls are taught the importance of relationships and beauty (of both person and surroundings), and are granted status based on their beauties and the male status thus attracted... in that society a man seeks to maximize his wealth and views shopping as a reduction in his status/wellbeing, while a woman views shopping as an opportunity to increase her own beauty or that of her surroundings and thus her status/wellbeing.
Further, enjoying the act (or at least the possibilities) of shopping more, and having a greater vested interest in what is chosen to buy, a woman is more likely to ask that shopping be done and - seeing the man uninterested - to go do it herself. The man in turn is more likely to complain about the cost while, as with many things, secretly being pleased with what is purchased and recognizing his relative inexperience at making such good selections.
==================
And now another level. Yesterday I was in the grocery store. I had completely exhausted my fridge: nothing at all in the freezer, only a few sodas in the fridge (well that and a couple sticks of butter). I had eaten the last piece of fruit a day before.
I went around and got to the line. 10 or less. I counted. 11 items. I looked at them all and chose one thing to take back, rather than wait. I stood there for a good minute considering it, because truth be told, I didn't really need that 11th item. I just was interested in trying it. But it was a frozen item and I felt a little bad putting something frozen back in the freezer. I decided I wasn't in a hurry.
And later at home, while thinking about recycling and looking at my still-rather-bare fridge, I thought to myself, I wonder if I get any moral recycling credit for not buying much stuff in the first place.
Perspectives.
:) So much....
First, I love the perspective. I do, however, wonder why you don't fill the fridge. That is another interesting study.
Second, I do not like grocery shopping, I see it as a chore, like the housework, that must be done, and lately, I've been doing it. It has not been discussed in my house, the task has just sort of "fallen" to me. I do, however, do more cooking, yet another "stereotypical" gender divide, so that part of me doing the shopping makes some sense.
Third, the "chip" is not self-described. Someone actually told me that I "have a chip on my shoulder about gender." I've been trying to come to terms with that. I'm interested in if it is true.
What "bothers" me is (I think): the fact that even though I know the history of sexual discrimination, the implications of actions that (at least seem to) perpetuate the gender divides, and that men CAN do the shopping, cleaning, blah blah, I do these things in my household.
I keep shopping, cleaning, cooking, even moving city to city to support my husband's work. I realized the other day that without him, I could not (in the jobs and situation I am presently in) support myself.
These are questions powerfully real to me. Gender is not just a theoretical "problem" that my dissertation concerns. Yet my life is no different from many non-feminist women. I am a dependent, I am working two (or three jobs): housewife, college professor, graduate student. He works one job. I am not complaining about him; I want to know how it is that culture is so powerful that a woman like me would end up doing this (especially when she doesn't want to and tried not to).
How do I reconcile that?
Tyson,
You crack me up.
again i must just call
i'm gonna have to call Ang, I never hear from you :-)
Okay, let's give this a shot because it is very interesting to me too.
(Switching to voice software, and too lazy to spellcheck so bear with me)
Okay.
Instead of trying to build stealthily and carefully towards a theory, I'll just throw the theory out and then we'll see if there is anything to support it.
I think the operative mechanism here is a pair of values-based self-perpetuating cultures, one of femininity and one of masculinity. I think these cultures are complementary and have been refined over many centuries (even millennia). I think certain biological realities have historically helped to shape elements of these gender cultures and thus underpinned the linkage of sex and gender.
I think that cultures, especially those based on visibly different characteristics, are fundamentally stable structures characterized by many self reinforcing phenomena. Once separate cultures arise, the culture associated with one's own characteristics is likely to become part of one's identity. When there is inequality between members of two cultures, those cultures are likely to define themselves at least in part in contrast to each other. Like the arbitrary skin pigmentation distinctions between the Tutsis and the Hutus, power politics (even at the personal level) fuels simultaneous envy of others' positions and rejection of the (perhaps initially irrelevant) cultural markers that define the other group.
To put it bluntly, culture/group identity is stable because it most strongly rejects those competing cultures/groups that pose the strongest threat to it. In this example, for every "feminist" who proclaims that gender distinctions are arbitrary and irrelevant, there is likely to be one "feminist" who instinctively rejects the culture of masculinity and embraces a woman-centric view of the world. This is no criticism, it is a recognition that those with the most incentive to undermine a cultural gender role are precisely those most in vested in a gender-based identity.
To give another example, a culture of a race is not only sustained by whites in a position of power, but also by blacks with a strong sense of community and cultural identity. Of course the situation is far more complex than that, but the point is that once a cultural distinction is drawn and becomes part of a group's identity, even the groups that do not benefit from the distinction will naturally have emotional reasons to support it. And hence cultures perpetuate.
And so to the point. I really do believe that boys and girls are brought up in significantly different cultures, both by their parents and by society at large. Even if they don't like the distinctions (boys can't play with dolls and girls have to wear dresses), they come to value certain elements of the culture. There is something to be said for physical prowess, decisiveness, cold rationality, achievement, and material success. Both men and women are capable of all of these, but our society defines these as the gender of masculinity and grants it a privileged position. There is also something to be said for compassion, understanding, nurturing, relationships, and artistic sensibility. Both sexes can achieve all of these, but we define this as the culture of femininity and hold it in somewhat less regard. Recognizing these two cultures are complementary, that both are needed, and recognizing that most people and most parents are paired up as one male and one female, indoctrinating each sex in just one of the cultures provides an evolutionarily stable way to ensure that most people have both of these elements in their lives, including children. The children part is important because it is the children who perpetuate the culture.
Well that was very long-winded, but I'm just trying to walk through the mechanisms. What this suggests to me is that the paradox comes from the way the problem is stated; we are asking why when men are able to do the things that women are taught are important, than men do not do them and the women do them instead. Stated that way, the mechanism seems obvious. The more interesting question to me is: why would a woman troubled by a gender divide expect anyone (male or female) to carry out the female gender role?
Stated differently: the wife says to the husband "why do I always have to wear the dress, why don't you wear it sometimes?" Does her question makes sense? To me, only if her husband is asking her to wear a dress. If he says "you are welcome to wear jeans all the time if you like" and she says "well somebody has to wear a dress", then you see the irony.
That is my clumsy attempt at a segue into:
======================================
Grocery Shopping, Cooking, and Empty Fridges
I've been raised mostly on the culture of masculinity. I would count myself more in the "you are welcome to wear jeans all the time if you like" school (rather than the "why are you wearing a dress?").
Some perspectives from this school:
Why I don't fill the fridge: when the fridge is full of food, I can't see everything inside. So I forget what I have bought. And food goes off. And I have to throw it away. Which is wasteful, both of food and of money. It also encourages me to overeat. Also, because I am lucky enough to be able to walk to the grocery store, having a small amount of food means I get to walk regularly and have very fresh food.
As much as anything though, I don't have much in my fridge because I don't cook.
Why I don't cook (for myself): cooking takes time and effort. It requires multiple ingredients. Unless you are cooking a lot, some of the ingredients may go off (milk, butter, eggs, fruit, vegetables, etc.). Also, cooking tends to work best when you are making a large amount (if you only need half of an onion, it'll probably end up throwing out the other half). Large amounts of food tends to get eaten because they're there, so cooking tends to lead to overeating.
In contrast, with a fridge containing only a few days worth of fresh fruit and vegetables and a freezer with at most one weeks' worth of microwavables, portions are well-controlled, you always know what is in your fridge, and nothing gets thrown away. Healthy, efficient, convenient.
The most obvious criticism would be that I would miss out on the pleasure of preparing and enjoying a nicely cooked meal.
This perspective interests me the most, as I don't know how gender related it is. Sometimes I feel bad if Annette is doing a lot of work to prepare a nice meal for us. I think that she is having to go through a lot of work when she could be doing something else, and I could just as easily have something simple that takes no time to prepare. Sometimes I'll mention to her that she doesn't have to do all that work. And she generally says that she enjoys it. This also leads me to the gender stereotype that women often want to "Mother" some (usually younger) man who doesn't know how (or care) to take care of himself.
This is all just a personal example of the broader political/cultural theme: that though I may think the sexual assignment of gender roles is (especially in the modern technical world) almost completely arbitrary, I am nevertheless someone raised in a culture of masculinity and to some extent my genuine values reflect that. At the same time, though I don't like things messy and a tidy apartment is pleasing to me, I don't feel that my interior decoration says nearly as much about me as whether I throw out food or pay my bills on time. Do I really think it matters more? Objectively, no. But my gut has been trained by my culture, and I think many women who dislike the gender roles assigned to them at birth nevertheless internalize and identify with important markers of that culture.
I could go on, but that would just give away how much I miss talking to you guys. Which would be a show of emotion, which would be a sign of weakness, which wouldn't be very masculine.
You how it is.
Yes. To much or all of this.
I enjoy cooking. It is the shopping and cleaning I don't like. So, I don't tend to complain about that gendered role. That is an another interesting thing about those roles. Like with religion, we pick what we want (we wear jeans if we like them) and toss out the rest.
Someone, though, has to buy food and clean. No one HAS to wear jeans.
Part of me is just trying to situate myself -- what roles will I perform when that child get here? How much will I train her in "traditional femininity?"
Too tired to go on...more tomorrow.
Devil's advocate...
"someone has to buy food and clean"
Maybe. Eventually. But try a thought experiment:
You get one last big shopping trip. Stock up on household cleaning items like dishwashing detergent, dryer sheets, toilet roll.
And then stop shopping. No grocery store trips. Eat what's in the fridge. Then what's in the freezer. Then the cabinets and pantry. Until it is all gone. Then stop by Subway on the way home and get a nice fresh sandwich.
Limit cleaning to the body, spilled foods (remembering no cooking once the food is gone), cleaning up broken dishes, and washing/drying clothes. Buy no-iron clothes where possible, and try to take out clothes to hangars right when dryer stops (to avoid/minimize ironing).
No straightening up, no dusting, no cleaning bathroom mirrors. No making the bed. No vacuuming. Heck, throw used clothes in a pile in the corner. Don't touch it until it is time to wash. (The toilet, well okay a quick swirl is okay. But try blocks or something that autocleans.)
Point of the thought experiment: though technically true that one has to eat and complete lack of cleaning is dangerous and socially debilitating, maybe 80-90% of effort spent on food, cleaning and shopping is elective.
Anecdotal evidence: I'd love a cleaner apartment and cooked food. But I don't like shopping and cleaning, so I chose to do the least I have to. And while I'd love to have someone shop, cook and clean for me, their work wouldn't necessarily save me significant effort (as I'd chose to forego the benefit rather than expend the effort).
The irony would be if said person thought "you don't appreciate how much work goes into this" while I thought "as much as I'm glad she does this, I don't know why because it sure wouldn't be worthwhile to me to do it."
The really key thing to me is, at the times when Annette and I are living in the same space, if I think something needs cleaning and ever catch myself thinking "why didn't she clean it" (something that thankfully hasn't happened yet), that is when the alarm bell would go off.
Everyone has their own sensibilities, and is free to live on their own and do their own work for their own benefit. Living together, people can share the benefits from others' work. The line, for me, is wanting a benefit for oneself and asking someone else to do the necessary work.
Of course, where the benefits are clearly desired equally and shared equally, fairness dictates that the work be shared equally (or implicitly or explicitly traded for other work).
======================
Of course, you are right that the introduction of a child complicates things and makes the more urgent. Perhaps two adults living carefully can avoid the need for much cleaning... but it is not reasonable to expect that with a child in the house. So the question becomes, who cleans up after the child? And the related question, who is responsible for teaching the child to clean up after herself? And a thousand things after.
The gender role question is interesting. It seems to me to be a facet of the central ethical question of life (gosh, that sounds a bit dramatic). To try to state it:
In a world that does not reward or even necessarily respect our ideals, to what extent are we ethically bound to sacrifice our well-being (and that of the ones we love) in order to transform that world, and to what extent are we obligated (especially to the ones we love) to make the best of the world do we are in?
Gender roles, clothing choice, allowances,...
I was really impressed by a former boss that I had who wondered aloud to me how to avoid raising spoiled children that took wealth for granted while not socially depriving them relative to their peer group.
Great question, been thinking about it for two or three years, still not sure. But it seems like a facet of that same big question. How much of the imperfections of this imperfect world should we teach to our children to allow them to better live in it?
Anyway, I should get some sleep too. This is really interesting, please keep writing.
Sometimes I feel bad that I don't update my blog more often, but then I realized that it is because the stuff over here is so much more interesting to talk about. If I were going to do a blog right now, it would be called "dial-up", because there is this ridiculous mismatch between us thought that goes to your head in about two or three seconds, and the good two hours it takes to attempt, however feebly, to express it in words.
The result being that 30 seconds (or, let's be very generous and say two minutes) of thinking becomes a almost an entire evening of trying to share it. Like dial-up Internet when you first found it, the content is really really interesting but you feel like pulling your hair out at the speed.
So anyway, I go back and reread and find another thing that is interesting: the question about how someone ends up in the situation they're in. In some ways I can relate to that. Without fully understanding what this means, I'm reasonably sure it has something to do with the sacrifices we are willing to make.
For example, and I'm just pulling this out of my donkey (too tired to program profanity), there come times in life when we decide whether material security or enjoyment of work is more important. Of course, both are important. But I expect that when push comes to shove, the combination of social expectations, ingrained values, and recognition of opportunities (by men that there will likely be no one else to support them, and by women... well I'm not sure what women recognize not being one...)... that all of these together make it more likely and probably safer for men and women to choose as they do.
Speaking for myself, from the time I was a child I felt my status and worth measured primarily in terms of academic achievement, which translates to economic opportunity. That my father had done his job once I was able to support myself. And perhaps more relevantly, that any path I might take had as a necessary prerequisite that I be able to support myself. I obviously can't speak for all men, but this is one generalization that I think might hold. It's not that you want to be able to support yourself. You have to be able to support yourself. Everything, everything else comes after that. It is far better to hate your job and be miserable, and be able to support yourself, than the opposite.
So from the perspective of the culture of masculinity, the paths open to modern women seem almost ironically to be much greater in number than those open to men. Culturally, women have the option of self-sufficiency, career, or family/philanthropic/nonmonetary pursuits. Granted, being able to "have anything" is not the same as being able to have it all, and choice brings stress and inevitable criticism regardless of the choice that is made. But women who choose to work are I think subject to less derision than men who choose to stay home and take care of children (of course, I'm living in Texas...).
The challenge I think is that when men continue to play this single solitary provider role, the remaining needs of a family/partnership tends to be heavily weighted towards things other than money. So if a woman wants to partake in multiple roles and feels culturally free to do so, is her ability to balance those roles constrained by her partner's role balance? That is, if he is already fully busy earning all the money they could need, can she strike whatever balance she likes?
Honestly, my first reaction is yes she can. What she cannot necessarily do (ethically speaking, leaving love the out of the equation) is expect her partner to subsidize her own role choice. At this point anyone reading should say, should shout "but men do this all the time, men expect women to raise their children for them!" Exactly so, and ethically speaking I believe men have no right to expect this. If a man wants to have a child, he should either marry a woman who wants (of her own accord) to raise a child, or he should be willing to raise a child, or some reasonable combination in between. Similarly, if a woman wants to go on luxury cruises she should either marry a man who wants to be a sugar daddy or do the necessary work to get a high paying job. Etc.
This is all very idealistic. In practice we don't choose between 10 million different people to be with, with full knowledge of their desires (or even our own). Then there is the pesky matter of falling in love. So we end up in situations where we don't want exactly the same thing as the person that we're with.
Again I can only speak for myself (it's 1 a.m.! This is ridiculous, I just wanted to write a quick five-minute thing! Arggggggg!). I start by asking myself if I would still have to do whatever it is I don't want to do if I were on my own. If so, it is not the other person's fault that I have to do this. If it is not something I would otherwise have to do, and it is recurring, then I try to make sure to think about it when it's not after 1 a.m., because I don't think well after 1 a.m.
What a coincidence.
The part about moving between cities is, perhaps not surprisingly, also really interesting to me. But must sleep.
Well, at the risk of keeping this post going on forever, I am going to respond.
Or, try to.
I agree, cleaning doesn't have to be done. However, what if what I want is to live in a clean house and what my partner wants is not to clean. Then, there is trouble brewing. This is the solution we have reached for now: I will completely stop cleaning (and the cleaning service)and try to do my best to not let the dirt bother me. He will begin to clean. This way, we are both experiencing each other's pain. Once we see it, we hope that we'll find a compromise. We will see how it works out.
The question of how I ended up where I am is intriquing to me too. Until the past year or so, I have remained self-sufficient, even if I made much less money. This meant that in many ways I lived a different standard of living than my partner could, but I didn't mind that. We bought a house (before) that I could afford half of. But in the past 16 months we made changes that where huge sacrifices (in my mind). I gave up my job and moved to be with him (this was for the child). We bought a house that even if I were working full time I could only afford to pay less that 25% of the mortgage. But, I am only working part time. So I don't contribute anything to the mortgage. I pay my car payment, my tuition, my clothing, and a few smaller bills. That's it.
This is the core of the problem. I, like the men you describe, was taught to take care of myself. I don't want to depend on anyone. I don't like it. And I don't want to do unpaid labor.
What I realized recently is that many women live their entire lives with this compromise. Many women don't have options. But while I'm supposed to feel lucky, I don't. I want to downsize. I want to go back to work.
I'm on my way. And it may be that I end up living apart from my partner. It may be that children are a bad idea for us. I don't know.
Somewhere, though, in the shadows of all this rationality, lurks that same old question though. And I don't know what to do with it.
I was raised as a female. I am female in this world as it is. How much of my discomfort is because I am not comfortable with those expectations/rules/definitions?
I can relate to your feelings about dependency on a partner. They sound like my feelings about dependency on my job/employer. I like my job, but I don't want to be dependent on it. And one of my fears about buying a house or having a child is that it makes me dependent on that employer.
There is something different though in the perspective on money, and of the concept of self-sufficiency while in a partnership. I'll go off and think about those until I have something useful to add.
Thanks for you posts, it is always wonderful to hear your mind.
Well I could write another 50 paragraphs about money and self-sufficiency. To be brief though, I think there is a difference between self-sufficiency in the sense of not creating a net financial burden for another person, and being an equal financial contributor to a partnership. The former is how I conceive of taking care of myself, and I do think it is important. The latter is an idea that I'm aware of, but it seems strange to me and I wonder where it comes from.
In any partnership both people are generally able to enjoy material things that alone they would not be able to. This is true whether the costs are borne 50-50 or not. Where the bills are not split evenly, it could be said that one person is getting a better financial deal than the other. But generally they should still both be getting a good deal (better than being on their own), and as there is so much more to life and relationships than money, equal financial contribution to a partnership at any point in time would seem to have little significance in the scheme of things.
Having said that, I know firsthand that it does have great significance to some people. I also know that I don't fully understand why.
Yes, agreed on your last comment Jebbo. The problem is that I am a burden. I cost much more than I contribute. I don't like that feeling AT ALL.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home