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A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

theatlantic.com

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Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a CEO of a $100M+ company came in and gave a speech. His first slide had a PowerPoint, on which he put something like, "3...2...1." Then he said, "3 wives, 2 divorces, and 1 heart attack. That's the real cost of entrepreneurship." Plenty of people who were never entrepreneurs suffer the same or worse.. and do so while earning a tiny pittance of what CEOs make. Lack of money causes all sorts of additional stress on fa…

Presumably said CEO wasn't in much danger of poverty though. The entrepreneurship caused his troubles. That other things also could is beside the point.

"The entrepreneurship caused his troubles."

Did it, though? That sort of misfortune can and does happen even without entrepreneurship, and might well have happened to him anyway.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's providing for the household by taking care of everything in their lives outside of his specific business functions. He should be making every reasonable effort to support her.

> taking care of everything in their lives outside of his specific business functions. You're just making stuff up. You don't know this is the case.

I don't know that he's providing for the household, for all we know he's blowing every penny on meme stocks.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marrying someone with ambitions doesn't mean the ambitious spouse gets full control over where the other partner lives and the relationships the other partner can have. A partnership is not a contract to have the needs of one partner subsumed by whoever happens to be more ambitious. You don't know what they communicated before deciding to get married. Strange to not be able to imagine being on the other side of it

> Marrying someone with ambitions doesn't mean the ambitious spouse gets full control over where the other partner lives and the relationships the other partner can have. Not the OP nor GP, but I think the person who sought after an ambitious spouse is equally responsible for understanding the trade-offs. The term “married to their career/job” was an old term when I was a child growing up in the 1970 and 1980s. That…

> how many spouses are willing to live far beneath their means, to accommodate for a better work life-balance?

Approximately zero spouses who complain about glass-dishwasher-alignment will sacrifice by lifting the breadwinner's burden. Sorry, folks. Everyone is entitled to self-realization and higher meaning, however, if you're being supported by someone who works 40, 50, whatever hours per week, suck it up and move the glass. Any other position simply is a symptom of major problems further up in the paragraph and has nothing to do with glasses, dishwashers or anything else.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#634
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marrying a successful and ambitious 20-something in no way commits one to be fine with the same ambitious person uprooting family’s life a decade or two later and moving to the other side of the world. Family is about shared sacrifice for its well being, and sometimes (in fact, usually) one needs to sacrifice their career for the family. That’s life.

I can share the converse example. My uncle had a once in a lifetime opportunity to get training in the US and get a promotion at his company. His wife did not want him to leave for 6 months. He did not get the training or the promotion. He fell way behind his colleagues that did. Fast forward 20 years, and he was unable to give his children a good education, whereas his colleagues who got promoted, did. He gets reall…

I agree, of course, but I never meant to imply that the answer here is “always do what your wife tells you to”. My point is simply that one should be prepared to sacrifice career for family. Sometimes, as in your uncle’s example, it might turn out that a better decision for the family would have been to make a different sacrifice instead. But that’s just another life’s lesson: hindsight is always 20/20.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#636
post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a woman should defer completely to every single career decision a man makes You're making a straw man argument here... none of the comments above say "defer completely" or "every single decision".

Haha the parent post literally said that it was ironic that a woman would marry an ambitious man and then complain about said ambition. The ambition, implicitly, being wanting to move to Asia for a job. It seems to me if a woman isn't allowed to complain about moving continents for a job, she's not allowed to complain about anything, and this is, therefore, not a strawman.

So with that logic... if he gets a huge opportunity to run the Asian division which he feels compelled to take despite her objections, then she is not allowed to ask for smaller concessions such as "hey, can you turn off the work phone on Saturdays"? You linking those together doesn't make sense.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#637
It's hard to judge without any additional background, but it seems a case of general neglect. The wine glass being a mere symbol of it.

Most marriages end because of neglect. A decreasing investment in each other. Surely a true investment, say planning a weekend trip together, would make his wife feel so appreciative and happy that the wine glass is forgettable. I should add though that investments go both ways.

Investing (time, love, money) in a relationship is a must-do, but as much as this is common sense, it's still no guarantee for success. For the simple reason that often the underlying love is not there, or long gone. It's now replaced with the currency of obsessive continuous validation.

To me, acceptance is a core condition of true and unconditional love. I love my wife dearly as she is. Flaws and annoyances included. I don't judge her or try to change her in any way, I'm a live and let live kind of guy. She can be her total self with me. If today she'd slip, stop doing her part of tasks, turn into an alcoholic, whichever...I will love her regardless. She'll do none of these things as she's not that type.

She accepts me as I am. Which is pretty important because I'm ungovernable, it's genetic. I'll do everything and anything, just don't package it as an order. I do things out of free will, as does she. When you care deeply about somebody, you see what needs to be done. Surely I might get it only 80% right, but that's good enough. We're not running a business here. And in the rare case where either of our flaws pose a real issue, I guess we can just talk about it. That's what reasonable people that love each other do, instead of turning it into a passive aggressive power play where you keep score cards.

We're a perfectly happy relaxed couple that can't remember our last fight. We even need to do joke fights as we struggle hard to think of something worthwhile to argue about.

The point being, don't ever come home to a second boss. Don't keep scores. Don't obsess over changing the other. It's unhealthy and a massive signal for a lack of underlying deep love.

Sexist as it may sounds, in my group of friended couples, the pattern of the ultra dominant wife seems too consistent to ignore. I know these guys. They're not perfect, but pretty great. They work full time, do a reasonable job at chores, they minimize things outside the family (like drinking with buddies), are very involved with their kids, and then...well, the day is over. And it still isn't enough. It never is. Don't get stuck that way.

Or as my dad summarized my relation: fuck son, you got lucky.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#638
post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate you sharing this. Reminds me of a class I took at the University of Illinois, it was a seminar in entrepreneurship for engineers, if I remember correctly. I believe a CEO of a $100M+ company came in and gave a speech. His first slide had a PowerPoint, on which he put something like, "3...2...1." Then he said, "3 wives, 2 divorces, and 1 heart attack. That's the real cost of entrepreneurship." I've rememb…

Mark Cuban had a different perspective when he was younger. “I went through girlfriends (who threatened) — ‘It is your business or me,'” the Shark Tank investor recalled. “And I was like — ‘What is your name again?’ It was just non-stop.” https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/shark-tank-star-mar... I'm not endorsing that comment. I just thought it was interesting to see how a notable entrepreneur approached relati…

I appreciate this comment. Something I've currently struggled with is the tension between a private life (romance, family, etc) and a public life (running a business, podcast, politics). I find that sometimes a private life wants me to care about those few people more than all the other people and a public life wants me to care about all people equally. Maybe that story of the CEO stuck with me and has added to the fear I feel about becoming too public (will lose my romance and family), and may be why I've hidden more and more from public life.

Anyway, I'm grateful for you showing another side to this, thank you.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#639

About 10 years ago, I had a internship at Newell Rubbermaid. As part of the experience, the entire group of interns across all the brands got to have lunch with the CEO and basically ask him anything we wanted. At some point, someone asked about his biggest regret. We all expected some business blunder, but he said that he was offered an executive position by Kraft to lead their Asian segment, and that his wife reall…

It's ironic to me when women choose successful ambitious men to marry and then complain these same keep striving to climb up the corporate ranks.

No one said there were any gold digging personalities involved. Might want to check why this assumption came up.

Re: A dirty dish by the sink can be a big marriage problem

#640
Ouch. The article resonated with me and seems to indicate the author has gotten some good personal growth out of this, but the final sentence kind of killed me: "I could have carefully avoided leaving evidence that I would always choose my feelings and my preferences over hers."

Perhaps it was not the intent, but that really sounds like he thinks the solution here would have been to cover up the evidence. Not to, say, figure out how to reconcile their feelings and preferences.

I'm not sure if it makes me more or less an expert—I screw up stuff like this all the time, but I do recognize that I am screwing this up.

My take: it's not about the dirty glass. It's not about faking that you care. It's not even about communicating, because if they were to read each other's minds in this situation, she'd discover that she was right all along.

My best guess: there was a problem, and no will or desire to solve it. It's the visible manifestation of the same lack of will to solve other problems, the same lack of interest in figuring out what the other person wants/needs and doing what is necessary to make it happen. From her point of view, the dirty glass issue is proof that he's not going to work to make anything go better. From his point of view, it's proof that she's willing to throw out the whole marriage rather than address what's underneath that surface-level problem. Maybe she's afraid of looking petty, which ironically ended up making her look even more petty if you just look at the surface.

If this couple were to open up enough to each other to attack the real underlying issues, would the dirty glass continue to be placed by the sink? Who knows. Who cares? I doubt either of them would, or ever did.

Every marriage needs a functional conflict resolution process, and they never found or made one. (It's tricky, because in the first M years you can just have sex with each other and then it's all good. The next N years you can have a big blowout fight and then it's better. M and N overlap. So the need only becomes critical after some number of years.)

I would suggest my process, except I haven't worked it out either. I can say that it depends on the specific two people involved. Stuff like love languages may be sufficient for some couples, but it barely starts to address what's needed for my relationship.

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