Readers vote: who is to blame for this problematic marriage? The wife or the husband?
Please read the excerpt from the article BEFORE you vote in the poll at the bottom of the post! Thanks.
Letitia the Damsel posted this article from the UK Daily Mail on my Facebook page. The article is written by a woman who rejects the traditional roles and responsibilities of women in marriage.
My husband is the kindest, most considerate man in the world. During the seven years we've been married, Ben has done most of the cooking, cleaning and ironing without ever being asked.
He brings me an organic buffalo milk cappuccino every morning in bed and once spent hours making fresh syrup from rhubarb to add to my favourite champagne after I'd given birth. And yes, he works full-time.
But for all he does for me, anxious to make everything in my life better, he gets a raw deal in return.
I am shamefully neglectful of my wifely duties. In fact, I am the anti-wife.
The trouble is that I just can't do the subservient partner thing. Ben is more likely to arrive at our home in Twickenham, South-West London, after a hard day's work and find me having a manicure or checking Facebook than slaving over a hot stove.
This may make me sound selfish, but I'm just being honest. At 39, I've never ironed a single item of my husband's clothing. I rarely cook for him either. Why would I bother when he's so much better at it than I am?
And if you think I reward his sterling domestic efforts with treats in the bedroom, I'm afraid I fail in that department, too. Intimacy is reserved only for his birthdays – and then just the ones with a zero.
I felt occasional pangs of guilt about our unusual dynamic during the first year of our marriage, but now I find it liberating. He even refers to me as the 'household manager' because I'm an expert in the art of delegation.
Recently, Ben's job for an organic fruit and vegetable box delivery scheme meant he was away on business for three weeks.
Before he left, I found him packing the freezer with organic ready meals and ringing round for short-term nannies to take care of our children, Ronnie, six, and Stanley, two.
The truth is that I'm just too busy and involved in my career as a writer to be a traditional, caring wife.
I work from home and, like most self-employed people in a recession, I push myself to the limit. I set my alarm for 6am so I can squeeze in an hour of work before the school run and I often write until midnight.
My job often means being away from home during the evenings and weekends, which means the lion's share of the childcare falls to Ben. Even when I am home, I keep one eye glued to my iPhone for fear of missing a work call.
Ben bemoans my inability to achieve a work/life balance. He sees the word 'driven' as a negative, while I think I'm aspirational and ambitious. Now, I know what you're thinking – that I must earn more than Ben. But no, I don't.
He's the breadwinner and a domestic god. But my work is so all-consuming there's little of me left to go round by the time I switch off my laptop. Don't get me wrong – I love Ben very much and regard our marriage as happy. And he could never claim breach of contract because he always knew I was a workaholic.
[…]When we began dating in 2003, I was helping to launch a woman's magazine, which required me to be at work from 8am until 11pm.
It was Ben's touching gesture of sending boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the office that made me realise what an excellent husband he'd make.
But when, in the early throes of our relationship, he mooted the idea I might one day be a 'stay-at-home mum', I bristled. 'But my mum stayed at home for the first five years of my life,' he said.
'That's never going to happen,' I replied sharply. The matter was never raised again.
[…]It's my fault that he returns home to find no dinner and our children running amok.
But I work hard, too, and that changes everything. While I love my children deeply, wiping noses, bottoms and encrusted beans off the floor doesn't inspire me in the way my work does.
I'm too busy to share the chores. After a day of writing, I feel happy and complete; after a day with the children, I am frazzled.
After the birth of our first son, I went back to my £60,000-a-year job as deputy editor of a national magazine and put Ronnie full-time into an eye-wateringly expensive nursery.
I felt guilty about it, and working 8am to 6pm every day and barely seeing my son just compounded that guilt. But I didn't want to give up work.
You might think me self-obsessed, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for my happiness.
Just before the birth of our second son, I decided to leave my job and pursue a career as a writer after being offered a generous redundancy package.
But instead of relaxing into my new job, I allowed work to seep into all areas of my life.
That is why I ignored cripplingly painful contractions ten minutes apart and carried on writing to meet a deadline.
I was back at work just two weeks after giving birth to Stanley, breast-feeding while conducting tricky phone interviews.
I'll vote and comment later tonight to say how I voted.
By the way, if you like the articles that Letitia finds, you can hear her on her Visible Conservative podcasts on Fridays. Here's the most recent one and the opening monologue transcript is here on Letitia's blog. If you're like me, and you like hearing conservative women talk passionately about issues that matter, you'll love this podcast. I never miss it.
UPDATE: I voted and my vote was to blame the man entirely. He chose this woman to marry and to mother his children. He knew she was unqualified to be a wife and mother and married her anyway. It's ALL HIS FAULT. She is completely innocent because she was bad BEFORE the marriage and he knew it.
You cannot blame a bad woman for continuing to act badly after you marry her. If she is bad before, she'll be bad after. If she has no moral standard for marriage before, then she'll have no moral standard after. She doesn't BELIEVE that she is doing anything wrong – either before or after marriage. You can't blame her for acting according to her own feminist worldview. It's the MAN who is to blame for choosing her.
The man shouldn't even be opening his mouth to complain about her after he chose her. He chose her, and he has no right now to blame her or complain about it. You can't expect traditional wife and mother behavior when you marry someone who explicitly repudiates those roles. Blame the man 100%. And what's more he is EVIL to have inflicted this on his children.
You can't go to the pet store and pass by all the cats, dogs and birds and buy an alligator then complain when you get the thing home and it bites your arms off. It's a freaking alligator, and you knew that when you bought it. It's your fault.