According to every poll ever conducted on the topic, most men still leave the vast majority of "the second shift" to women (cooking, housework, childcare, elder care, emotional labor). 69% of divorces are initiated by women, largely because they are sick of the entitlement, emotional and physical labor, and loss of autonomy. Overwhelmingly, widows or divorcees aren't keen to remarry or live with a man again. If they want a relationship, they want him to have his own place. Many young women (around the world) are not all that interested in marriage or cohabitation for all of the above reasons. Pretending all this isn't a well-documented phenomenon is putting your head in the sand.
My husband cooks and does more housework than most men. We have a pretty great relationship. I'd still never marry or live with a man again if something ever happened to him. This doesn't mean men are evil and women are perfect. It means that the legacy of patriarchal gender roles that was considered "normal" a mere 50 years ago is still in fuller effect than most women are willing to accept in their lives. As I noted above, women today are more interested in their peace and sanity, and if they can't find a guy who adds to that in their lives, they'd rather live alone.
This is all extremely well-documented and not in the slightest bit of dispute. If it hurts your feelings, that's irrelevant.
https://www.asanet.org/women-more-likely-men-initiate-divorces-not-non-marital-breakups/
Rosenfeld said his results support the feminist assertion that some women experience heterosexual marriage as oppressive or uncomfortable.
“I think that marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality,” Rosenfeld said. “Wives still take their husbands’ surnames, and are sometimes pressured to do so. Husbands still expect their wives to do the bulk of the housework and the bulk of the childcare. On the other hand, I think that non-marital relationships lack the historical baggage and expectations of marriage, which makes the non-marital relationships more flexible and therefore more adaptable to modern expectations, including women’s expectations for more gender equality.”
Drawing on a sample of 23,088 mothers living with children under the age of 13, they found that married and cohabitating mothers racked up approximately 3 hours of housework per day, compared to 2.5 and 2 hours respectively undertaken by divorced and never-married mothers.
Married women also get the least sleep and the fewest hours of leisure-time.Interestingly women who live with a male partner but haven’t married him have more leisure time — an extra 35 minutes per day — compared with married women.
This suggests that it’s not just having a man around that’s the problem. Rather, the issue seems to lie with the expectations that come with being his “wife”.
