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I'm a middle aged married man who's been following gender issues for 15 years and I'd like to offer information to the younger men especially. AMA.

AMAMRA

February 11, 2016

6 upvotes

/r/MensRights

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Title	I'm a middle aged married man who's been following gender issues for 15 years and I'd like to offer information to the younger men especially. AMA.
Author	AMAMRA
Upvotes	6
Comments	27
Date	February 11, 2016 5:28 PM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/459x3r/im_a_middle_aged_married_man_whos_been_following/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/im-a-middle-aged-married-man-whos-been-following.956362 https://theredarchive.com/post/956362

Comments

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 1 point2 points3 points 10 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]AlwaysABride 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (7 children) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 2 points3 points4 points 10 years ago (6 children) | Copy Link

That's complicated. When my daughter was younger, my now wife was pretty abusive. I had planned on it, but in doing a lot of research and consulting with 5 lawyers it became abundantly clear that divorcing my wife would mean leaving my daughter with an abusive parent. Add to that that the court would likely be a willing and enthusiastic accomplice with absolute power over my life, and the decision to stay became a pretty clear one.

I eventually decided that no matter what, the one thing I would get out of it all would be a great and meaningful relationship with my daughter. I put myself right into that and in the end it has paid off. We're very close, but with her mother - not so much.

Now that I'm somewhat confidant that my daughter would want to live with me and that the court would take this into account, I've been considering divorce more now. But at this age (I'm 50) I have to consider the fact of not being able to ever retire.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]AlwaysABride 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

Yes over the years we've gone to several marriage counselors - 5 or 6 I think - just so people know, I've really fought hard to try and make it work.

Marriage counseling is a disaster, for a couple of reasons.

First, the double standards we deal with in the rest of society are not only present, but refined to a T. I remember the first time we went to one, I was sitting there on the couch with a black eye from getting sucker punched by her and the focus of the session was what I could do to not provoke her.

Another experience I had with a different counselor: During the course of one week my wife acted out violently twice. The first time we were having an argument that was escalating. I saw where it was going and told her the best thing was for me to leave for an hour and I'd come back to talk when things calmed down. She wasn't having it. Long story short, as I tried to leave she took our daughter, who was about 3 at the time, and set her down in the driveway directly behind the running car to prevent me from leaving. I immediately shut the car off and got out on foot.

Later that week I was riding in her car when we got into an argument talking about what had happened in the driveway. During the argument, I slapped the dashboard in frustration at which point she told me to get out of the car. So she pulled into a parking lot and I got out. As I was walking across the lot, she gunned the car and only slammed on the brakes at the very last second with the bumper literally inches from the back of my legs. I ran the rest of the way and hopped the fence to get away.

When these two incidents came to light in counseling, the therapist's response to her was (I shit you not) "You seem to have a lot of issues around the car lately." She then told me to be very careful not to retaliate. This kind of thing was fairly consistent across all the counselors we saw. Only one was decent, and even then you have to put up with several months of being seen as the problem until your wife flips out during a session and the counselor sees the light.

I haven't talked to any lawyers recently about retirement. It's really pretty cut and dried. She'd get half my 401K and I'd have to pay alimony for around 8 to 10 years.

[–]AlwaysABride 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]AlwaysABride 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]MRA-automatron-2kb 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

As I said, in today's climate the lower earner really has a lot of power.

I was a SAHD for a year after being laid off from a longtime job. I was lucky in that they were very generous and gave me full pay and medical coverage for a year as severance. After doing that I came to the conclusion that if one parent stays home, the family and the children can be much better off if it's the father who stays home.

I think that women are much better suited to the typical office environment and men are better suited to be stay at home parents (generally). Honestly, with one kid who's in school most of the day, it's very relaxing - almost like retirement. We had a little adventure almost every day, there was a homecooked dinner on the table 5 or 6 nights a week and I was able to get a ton of house renovations done.

I also used to socialize a little with some of the moms. Most of them don't do much until the kids come home from school, and that's the God's honest truth. I think the whole family works better if mom works in an office and dad stays home with the kids.

So really the pitfall is only the issue of getting back into the workforce if you have to.

[–]MRA-automatron-2kb 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 1 point2 points3 points 10 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]MRA-automatron-2kb 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]dankcaked 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (9 children) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (8 children) | Copy Link

[–]GizDrak 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (7 children) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 1 point2 points3 points 10 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

There are a lot of myths about menopause and many of them are holdovers from when hormone replacement therapy was the norm. There was a cancer scare associated with it and most women today don't take any HRT.

Most of the available info on menopause is euphemism and misdirection. I saw something a while back on the Mayo Clinic website that said there's no reason to expect a drop in libido during menopause which is absolutely absurd. It's like saying that just because your body doesn't produce insulin, there's no reason to believe that you'll have any problem regulating blood sugar.

When your sex hormones drop to nearly nothing, you can expect your sex drive to also fall to nearly nothing and that's what happens to menopausal women. Add to that that once your hormonal sex drive drops, many sex acts that seemed run of the mill previously will now seem distasteful or downright disgusting. The idea that women get somehow hornier during menopause is completely untrue and is a holdover from the HRT days, when if you brought a woman's hormonal levels back to what they were when she was 30, she'd definitely be more horny.

Another thing people refer to with menopause is vaginal dryness. This is a euphemism. What really happens is that in the absence of estrogen and progesterone, vaginal tissue begins to atrophy. The vagina shrinks, loses elasticity and in many ways returns to a prepubescent state in the absence of sex hormones. The result is that penetrative sex becomes downright painful for most women and her days of having orgasms are basically over. So even if she wanted to have sex, she couldn't.

I came across a study, that I can't seem to find at the moment from a reputed peer reviewed journal that among something like 2500 women surveyed between the ages of 50-59, that only half of them had had any kind of penetrative sex once in the past year. I'll look some more when I have the chance and post it if I can. It was summarized on another site and the original data is behind a pay wall.

[–]GizDrak 1 point2 points3 points 10 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]MRA-automatron-2kb 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]AMAMRA[S] 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]GizDrak 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]MRA-automatron-2kb 0 points1 point2 points 10 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link