Something pretty commonly said throughout the last 15-20 years is the idea of women being able to have it all. A career, kids, family, etc and being able to do it all without any negative repercussions. I’ve seen discourse where even slightly hinting that having a full time career would at some level take away the ability to be the best mother possible is akin to hate speech. However, most people understand that there are only so many hours in the day, so many endeavors you can pour your energy into, and while it wouldn’t make someone a bad mom by any means, it still does take time and energy away that could be used instead.

If we take the example of a dual income household with kids and we rank order the importance of everything involved, the relationship between the parents often gets put on the back burner (funny no one will argue this). In Warren Farrell’s book Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, he speaks to the data of overinflation in terms of quantity and time women self report spending on household items and men underreport there’s. If you have a marriage in which the relationship is already being put on hold, naturally this would add fuel to the fire in terms of unhappiness.

I mention this because it appears to be commonly accepted on this sub that most men are secret slobs itching to get married so that they have someone to clean up after them. I don’t see this much, but let’s speak to men who aren’t doing this. The marriages I’ve seen that are the happiest had two people who were well aware of this time crunch going into things and built in their relationship as a tenant of being good parents. They wanted their kids to see a mother and father who were a team, attracted to one another, and very much about each other.

My questions for this discussion are:

Do you think many still adhere to the “having it all mentality”?

Could a big component of failed marriages be tied to a misunderstanding of priorities once kids are involved?

Thoughts in general?