How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“Yes. You are. And it may get results, intermittently. That’s the seduction of the dark path.” He fastens his unblinking gaze on me. “But the idea that you can haul off and be abusive to your partner and somehow get a pass, that you can’t control it, or whatever you tell yourself to rationalize it, is nuts. Also, your whole ‘angry victim’ role is g

Sociologist Michael Kimmel, director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities (yes, this exists) at Stony Brook University, says that men tend to pitch in more with childcare than with housework—but as with housework, they’re selective about the kind of childcare that they will do. “What happens in a lot of middle-class families is that

but I have to say that I am really, really tired of having to ask you to do things.”

“We’re all figuring it out as we go along, so I think this idea that women have this built-in superpower where they just know how to take care of children is a lie. We need to do away with it.”

Real frowns. “But she’s the after-school mom and the cook and the cleaner-upper,” he says. “That would be fine if she didn’t work, but not if you’re both working. What I see happening with guys is ‘Don’t mess with me—I need sleep and R&R so I can fight the dragons for my family.’ But she’s fighting the dragons now, too.” In the old days, he goe

women do countless invisible tasks. This is the time-gobbling labor that will likely never show up on any sort of time use study. One is “kin work,” which Smock defines to me as “giving emotional support to relatives, buying presents and sending cards, handling holiday celebrations, things like that.”

output roughly equals that of my former job as a music writer at Rolling Stone magazine—I may have spent nine hours daily in the office, but a full third of it was dedicated to web-surfing, gossiping with coworkers, and debating what to have for lunch (if we weren’t on deadline, twenty minutes could be devoted to the topic of will Mexican food make

There’s a world of difference between assertively standing up for yourself and aggressively putting him down. As crazy at it might seem, arguing or complaining can actually feel safer to most of us than simply and directly making a request. So,

But equality, as Lean In’s Sheryl Sandberg has stated, is not a zero-sum game. Beyond the most immediate and obvious benefit—that I will cease being, as Real memorably put it, a “raving lunatic”—there are so many others. A Cornell study found that couples with young kids who split housework more evenly reported better and more frequent sex than whe