Wife Tells Her Husband He's 'Too Broke To Be So Sexist' When He Agrees With His Mom That She's 'Too Modern'
If your income isn't high enough to support your family, should you really be complaining?
talevr / Canva Pro A mom on Reddit is in hot water with her husband and his family after pointing out that he can't remotely afford for her to quit her job and be a stay-at-home mom like he wants.
Her story takes two of the most galling dynamics of many marriages — men who refuse to stand up to overbearing in-laws and virulent sexism — and combines them into one neat little package that highlights exactly how out of touch with reality so many are nowadays when it comes to the realities of the "tradwife."
She told her husband he's too broke to be sexist after criticizing her for having a job.
It's downright bizarre how some 75 years of advancements in marital equality, women's issues, and parenting seem to be unraveling in fast-forward. It was only about 15 minutes ago that saying a woman should quit her job and stay at home where she belongs would make you a pariah. Now it's absolutely everywhere as a mainstream view.
The problem is that, unlike the 1950s, these views are completely divorced from economic realities. Most households can't remotely afford to be single-income. This mom's experience perfectly illustrates that (and every other way this point of view is idiotic, for that matter).
She wrote in her post that her husband comes from a very "traditional" family — her mother-in-law was a stay-at-home mom and her father-in-law was the "sole provider." She, on the other hand, comes from the opposite kind of background, and her mother "drilled into" her that women should always be financially independent.
Her husband has "worked hard to unlearn the values he saw replicated at home," she wrote — or at least she thought so. But when his parents visited recently, she saw the galling and ridiculous amount of "weight he puts on the opinions of his family."
Her mother-in-law spent the entire visit criticizing her for being 'one of those modern women.'
Her and her husband's routine is typically that she makes breakfast, and her husband makes dinner. Since their housecleaner was on vacation, they were also divvying up the work of keeping things tidy. Suffice it to say that her mother-in-law had none of it during their visit.
"[They] hate that I'm 'one of those modern women,'" she wrote. "They hate that I work, they hate that I don't find my purpose in being a wife and mother, and they hate that my husband pulls his weight at home."
Those dynamics came to a head one night at dinnertime when she came home from work to find her husband had done nothing to prepare the meal as usual. "I asked my husband about it, but he wouldn't look at me," she said, "and his mother answered that he hadn't cooked anything."
Of course, it got worse from there. "She told me I needed to do my duty as a wife and cook for my family. My coward of a husband still wasn't looking at me," she wrote.
Her husband admitted that he agreed with his mother — despite making nowhere near enough to support their family of five.
When her mother-in-law wouldn't let it go and kept criticizing her "as a failure," the mom finally snapped and asked her weakling of a husband for his two cents.
"He said his mother had a point, and it wouldn't hurt if I acted 'more like a proper woman' and 'took better care of my home and children,'" she said. He went on to say something even stupider. "He said tradition was tradition for a reason, and it was kind of insulting that I thought I was too good for how he was raised."
Now, you'd assume a man with this kind of view must be pulling down more than enough of the big bucks needed to support his wife and three children, right? LOL, as if.
"I told him tradition won't allow a man on £35k [approximately $45,000] to support a family of 5, and he was too broke to be so sexist." MIC DROP. In perhaps the most telling bit of the story, her husband immediately "looked hurt, and I saw tears welling in his eyes. He excused himself from the table." Of course, he did.
The wife felt bad for insulting her husband in front of their kids, but Redditors insisted she had nothing to apologize for.
"Sucks the kids were there for it, but he deserved worse," one commenter wrote, summing up the general consensus, especially given that her children also had to hear her benighted, bigoted in-laws insult her for two weeks while her lily-livered husband just sat there and let them.
"This is honestly the bigger concern here," another commenter wrote, which is true. Professionals like therapists and social workers say witnessing conflict between their parents and hearing their parents be bad-mouthed can make kids feel caught in the middle of adult conflicts and is correlated with mental health issues down the road.
Experts also say that spouses not standing up for their partners when their in-laws get out of line can be a death knell for marriage because of the ways it violates trust. That, of course, is on a whole other level here. After years of thinking her husband was more enlightened, it turns out he was faking it the whole time.
He should really tread lightly because, aside from everything else, the mom wrote that she is, in fact, the breadwinner after he made some "stupid" mistakes that cost him both his job and his savings.
"I'm working hard to cover the shortfall while he works on getting back on his feet, and he has the nerve to say that to me," she wrote.
Licking your masculinity wounds doesn't pay the bills, after all. Beggars can't be choosers.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.