With Father’s Day almost upon us, be on the lookout this week for stories, op-eds, and essays that include these five myths on contemporary fatherhood and family life.

akrabu · 2009-06-20T21:39:58+00:00

As a stay-at-home-dad I've always wondered what percentage of families had them. I should probably look for a better source but 1% seems legit.

The division of labor thing IMO is silly. How could someone do 8 hours of work a day and then do another 8 hours of work at home. Also I don't know why division of household labor is a big deal for alot of couples. My other cohabitating friends fight about that stuff all of the time. In our household we do what we are good at doing and maybe alot of the chores my wife completes take more time than the chores I do but she is absolutely incapable of doing the things around the house that I do. An example, I can scrub the ring out of the tub with minimal time and effort, she for some reason can't. I can't handle doing alot of dishes because I'm very tall and it hurts the hell out of my back.

What's worse is that I don't think it's right or natural to measure someone's value by the amount of stuff they do for us, so like I said we just do what we're good at or feel like doing and never sweat it, just do what has to be done.

But speaking of women wanting everything 50/50 my overly cultured friend's live-in girlfriend makes them split everything 50/50. He has been out of work for a week or so and she's keeping tabs on all of the money he owes her. I mean he doesn't complain about it but I think he gets a raw deal because when he's rolling in dough he pays for everything. But when the money dries up he owes her money. Not to mention he provides immeasurable services to their household (things she can't provide but relies on.) On top of that he is required to do all of the chores while he's not working because he isn't paying the bils but he will still owe her 50/50 for every bill. For me the weirdest thing about it is that they split expenses 50/50 but they've been together for 8 years.

xanados · 2009-06-21T05:43:38+00:00

Married fathers are also much more likely than their cohabiting peers to stick around. One recent study by Wendy Manning at Bowling Green State and Pamela Smock at the University of Michigan found that 50 percent of children born to cohabiting parents saw their parents break up by age five; by comparison, only 15 percent of children born to married parents saw their parents divorce by age five. Dad is much more likely to stick around if he has a wedding ring on his finger.

This study (or at least the explanation here) has causality issues written all over it. Naturally a man who is willing to marry rather than cohabit is more likely to be the kind willing to tough it out. The reasons people are cohabiting are mostly because of the broken system of marriage in America, that still follows moral standards developed before women were allowed to vote. It's a fucking joke.

Though Loh manages to find for her Atlantic piece a bunch of well-educated friends who are also entertaining thoughts of divorce, she is (fortunately) in increasingly rare company. The work of sociologist Steven Martin indicates that since 1980, college-educated Americans have grown less tolerant of divorce, and the divorce rate among this cohort has fallen off sharply.

It's funny that this section is so far detached in the article from the section above. Obviously the divorce rate is falling, the rates of cohabitation are increasing! These situations are substitutes for each other! College educated men are recognizing ever more the rationality of cohabitation given America's broken legal environment vis a vis divorce, and so divorce rates are falling.

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