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.
She writes:
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?
Last Christmas, he produced a lavish three-course lunch and booked a 15th-century cottage for our whole family to eat it in. All I did was hold out my champagne glass for him to refill while saying: ‘Well done, darling.’
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.
Now that you read the excerpt, please vote in the poll:
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.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I don’t quite understand why some options are missing. For example, if an unmarried man thinks the woman is to blame, which option does he choose. And if anyone, married or not, thinks there is blame to be shared on both sides, where’s the option for that?
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Let me fix
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What about “I’m a married man, and it’s the MAN’S fault for facilitating this arrangement instead of taking the initiative and forming a plan to balance out his household.” In my marriage, my wife is the breadwinner, so I take on many of the responsibilities the man in this article does. But as soon as our station changes, and I get stable work, It’s my job to say “ok, i’m not home all the time anymore. so let’s re-evaluate what needs to be done, and who’s going to do what.” The husband should support his wife, but not enable her work addiction. so i blame him.
and well, her too. she IS being pretty selfish.
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I have fixed the poll. Please select an option that fits what you think.
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I’m a married woman, and think the lady is laying it on with a trowel….
However, if the guy’s happy, fine. The marriage works for them, and hopefully works for the kids…assuming they don’t get killed by the organic junk, they’re no more harmed by being raised by dad and daycare than they would be if raised by her.
I think she’s a selfish bleep, but not sure that’s a matter of blame, just an is thing– obviously her husband is alright with it, assuming (against my better judgement) that the quote is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because he proposed and married her after it was established beyond a shadow that she wasn’t going to be a home-maker of any sort.
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“You might think me self-obsessed, but that’s a price I’m willing to have others pay for my happiness.”
I fixed that quote for her.
The husband was to blame for marrying such a horrid person. She is to blame now for knowing that she is horrid and continuing to use her husband and children as props in her little personal play.
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They both sound like fools
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I blame her. She seems totally selfish and self-centered. It would be easy to blame the husband for “putting up with it”, but it seems like he is trying to step in and do what needs doing for himself and the rest of the family. She blames all this on work, but I know that type of women and she will likely be the same after retirement or without a job at all.
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Normally it is the both the man and the woman’s fault, but this case is definitely the exception.
What is very clear about this is that her husband loves her A LOT and she is very blessed for that. The reason I am saying this is not because he irons her clothes or does whatever for her, but because he is doing what plenty of other men do when they are “in love” with their wives–put them on a pedestal and give into their every request. Of course there is plenty of things wrong with this.
Now, normally this happens when the wife is taking charge, but it seems as if he is in charge. He leads the family, but does her job too! I cannot blame him for this though, honestly, she may describe his actions as “the kind husband”, but it sounds like he is doing this because it needs to get done and she won’t do it. She is too busy playing on her phone instead.
Yes, she is very selfish, any woman who has a family and is more concerned with her happiness than her family’s is selfish. Period.
And I know why she can’t watch her own kids too, because it commands her to think of someone else besides herself.
I think of the Proverbs 31 woman and then this woman. Her slothfulness and inattentiveness to her family is disgusting and humiliating to her husband.
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Correction: Pro-Life Fridays Radio can be heard on the TRUradio network on the BlogTalkRadio.com platform from 5-7pm CENTRAL time. You can find show information on the facebook page (www.facebook.com/prolifefridays) and on Twitter (@plfradio).
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I’m placing the blame firmly on the wife. The husband seems to be doing what many marital advice gurus suggest; that whole “be the change you wish to see” idea. Usually, the advice is aimed at wives. We’re told that if we just love on our husbands enough, do all the right “wifey” things, they will eventually come around and treat us the way we deserve.
This situation illustrates the hole in that logic. If one of the couple is utterly and completely self-serving, they don’t care. They have no motivation, nor incentive, to respond by treating their spouse as well as he or she is treating them. If anything, it’s more likely to feed their narcissism and sense of entitlement. It’s unlikely the husband could have known just how severe her selfishness would turn out to be.
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“And he could never claim breach of contract because he always knew I was a workaholic.”
If marriage was simply a contract where you could spell out what you were going to do and only had to live up to that, then the fault would lie entirely with the husband for choosing a wife who wasn’t suited for the kind of marriage he wanted. But marriage isn’t merely a contract. It is an institution created by God and, since God created it, He decides what the marital duties are. When a person enters into a marriage, they implicitly agree to these God-given duties, regardless of what they say with their mouths.
Since this woman did marry and is not living up to the God-ordained duties of marriage, she is also to blame. Not only that, but she is robbing her children of the mother she should be by not living up to her motherly duties (which include modelling a good marriage and selflessness in front of them).
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Spot.On.
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As an aside, I’m pursuing a career as a home based writer. It’s something I put on hold when I had children but was stepping up a great deal, with full encouragement of my husband and children. Recently, we’ve had two new additions to our household, and that leaves me beginning the whole parenting of young children journey over again, with the addition of them being quite damaged by the neglect of their biological father. While I haven’t stopped writing entirely, I went into this knowing that the gains I’ve made would be lost in the process. That comes with having children. To do otherwise would have just continued the harm their father had done. So I don’t buy her “I’m working so hard” excuse. She’s got her priorities severely messed up.
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Don’t be silly, Chris. I mean yes, I agree someone male or female should return SOME initiative as to what they think of being treated this way, but if the marriage is suffering in general, the FAULT is clearly with the wife. Honestly, this vacuous latter is so blatantly self-absorbed and ludicrous I doubt it’s even real.
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Is this a response to me? If so, I feel like it’s misunderstanding what my comment was about. I wasn’t making a judgment or an opinion, just noting that the poll options should be more comprehensive, and I cited two examples that were missing. I wasn’t even saying that I would agree with or choose either of the examples I gave. WK revised the poll to present all the possible combinations.
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Rejecting “traditional” roles, she says? Yeeaaahhh, sex in marriage is a tad traditional; sorry men made up that silly rule. You sure give them a hell of a lot of credit, you empty-headed hen.
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Honestly, that’s what tipped my BS flag over into full-on “I caught this fish, one time, as big as a boat” territory.
Women don’t have men’s sex drive, sure, but oy.
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Oh my gosh, I cannot believe the poll results.
The correct answer is that the man is 100% to blame. 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.
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Don’t worry, dearie, some of us aren’t voting because it’s too restrictive. ;)
She obviously knows she’s got faults, but rather than fighting them she wears them as a badge– as someone who spends a lot of time angsting about her temper (which goes to good and bad ends) that clearly establishes responsibility as an adult human that isn’t… well, retarded, on a biological or deeply clinical level.
Seems that the man isn’t complaining… though, depending on how the kids are, maybe he should be. Hopefully there are grandparents around, though they’re not mentioned.
Or, it’s a big old agnsty thing about how she’s really a horrible person who doesn’t do jack and it’s not her fault because I TOLD YOU SO…..
…
…which I only halfway do with my husband, before he sighs, rolls his eyes and points out I’m mom, not God, and the kids aren’t going to die from mom only doing a punny cake for their birthday, and probably didn’t even notice that the soap-paint for the bath wasn’t colored.
**************
Sure, she might actually be that bad– we live in a world where my cousin’s toes were burnt off by her birth mother, 30+ years ago before she was adopted– but I keep getting an “Erma Bombeck without a religious background” vibe.
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Hi Wintery,
I have been following for sometime now, but haven’t commented before. I enjoy the blog and your thoughtful insights. However, on this one, it seems quite ungraceful to blame the man 100% No doubt he made a mistake in choosing this woman. But once the mistake has been committed, does he not have the right to realize his folly and suggest (even demand) to his wife to make changes. He is not EVIL as you condemn him, however was unwise in choosing his spouse. She is however quite EVIL because she clearly realizes that her choices are demaging her relationship with her spouse, her children, and even compromising her own desire for happiness. Someone who realizes their folly and tries to correct it is not EVIL. One who realizes their folly and delights in it is EVIL. Her narcissism is to have some blame in the situation.
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Well stated Brad.
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One question for you, Wintery. If the names of the people involved were Hosea and Gomer, would it change your mind any on who is to blame? I ask because that situation is akin to this one, and clearly, God set these things in motion and then told Hosea to love her anyway, to buy her out of the slavery she sold herself into, even though she had never been a good wife or mother. The blame, then, is not on Hosea for marrying a prostitute when he knew exactly who she was, but on Gomer for refusing to respond to Hosea’s love.
There’s a lot here we don’t know about the guy – we only see her description of him and it says nothing about his life outside of what he does for her and what she refuses to do for him, whether he has any spiritual background at all and so forth. I’m not excusing him from apparently making a poor choice so much as I’m saying we’re missing a ton of context, and sometimes the context would make a difference in how we judge things.
I don’t think God is normally in the business of telling us to go out and marry bad people and expect them to change, but if God is willing to love and die for people who will never love Him…well, let’s just say that in light of that I am not in agreement with fully laying the blame when the wife is so obviously and proudly selfish that she refuses to respond with anything loving. She must carry some of the blame, at the very least.
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The results are quite interesting, just from a perspective of who believes what. Apparently, none of the women (married or unmarried) believe the man is solely to blame. They blame the woman or both. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to blame the man than to blame the woman, though there are some in both camps. By far the most common response is to blame both.
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Husband isn’t happy that wifey hasn’t achieved a work/life balance.
He also wanted her to stay at home with the kids for the first 5 years. Can you blame him for those small wishes?
Whereas wifey can’t go even 1/4 of the way to please hubby. She’s quite selfish. And he allows it. Even plans for it when he goes on work trips.
He chose a wife poorly and she chose very well.
However when she says she loves him, she is lying. She appreciates all he does which is his love for her. Her love for him (love is an action word) does not exist.
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