It does not at all preclude romantic partners from deciding together that they want one partner to be a homemaker or take a less highly paid job in order to pursue their interests.
It can be either, or a part of both.
Many people, especially older straight males who make a decent salary, wish to support their partner and have their partner focus primarily on raising their children. They would prefer this to the alternative where their partner works.
This can be more complicated than it seems. For example, I have much higher salary than my wife. We could easily live all on my salary alone, but we could not keep our current standards on her salary alone.
Therefore, I “choose” to keep my job, because I don’t have much of an option. And I would be okay if she stayed at home, because it wouldn’t make much of a difference for our family budget, so if it made her happy, why not. Sounds like mostly a free choice I made, doesn’t it?
But if you investigate deeper, you could ask, why the difference in our earning abilities? And a part of the answer is that I have spent large parts of my life trying to increase my salary (not perfectly, I made lots of mistakes), while my wife optimized for having a convenient job. And as a result, now I have a well-paying job, and she has an enjoyable job. And by her long-term choices, she helped create this situation where I don’t have a choice, but she does.
Even if in our society, women are mostly expected to have a job, the expectations are not the same. Men still grow up expecting the need to have a well-paying job, enough to feed the entire family. For most women, a job is more like a hobby; they expect to pay their own bills and that’s it; beyond that, the job is a source of prestige or social contact or meaning. Many men would take meaningless, low-status, socially isolating jobs, if it allowed them to make more money.
So in some sense it is similar to the game of chicken, where the female player already threw her steering wheel out of the window… and the man, seeing that, voluntarily swerves.
Yes, my point was just that the graph alone cannot prove that people aren’t able to avoid “money-hungry” spouses and shouldn’t be cited as if it does. Arguments comparing it to a game of chicken make more sense to me, especially in child-free marriages, although for most marriages, I think it’s important to remember the specific unavoidable burdens on the child-bearing players of the game, a biological “throwing” of the steering wheel out of the window that isn’t at all symmetric between players.
I personally am planning to fully support my future spouse and be the primary breadwinner if they’re amenable to it, and in doing so have unintentionally opened up a larger amount of potential partners I could end up with. In my particular (majority male) social group, I am far more likely to hear complaints about not being able to find a partner who will be a stay at home parent than I am to find complaints about wanting a partner to pay for half of the bills.
I think it is strictly the better position to be in to be the working one while the other partner is taking care of the home, and am personally too ambitious to be willing to take a low paying job or ever be a stay at home parent, but men who wish to do so are of course fine to live their lives that way too.
I agree that the biological burden is asymmetric. But also, in the past, women used to have about dozen children (most of them died at infancy), while today, it is maybe two on average? From this perspective, women today are more similar to men, than to the women of the past.
I am far more likely to hear complaints about not being able to find a partner who will be a stay at home parent than I am to find complaints about wanting a partner to pay for half of the bills.
I suspect that many of them will find neither. Instead, they will probably find a partner who likes their job too much to stay at home, but not enough to pay for half of the bills (and definitely not enough to let your friends stay at home). Because the job is not optimized to pay the bills.
It can be either, or a part of both.
This can be more complicated than it seems. For example, I have much higher salary than my wife. We could easily live all on my salary alone, but we could not keep our current standards on her salary alone.
Therefore, I “choose” to keep my job, because I don’t have much of an option. And I would be okay if she stayed at home, because it wouldn’t make much of a difference for our family budget, so if it made her happy, why not. Sounds like mostly a free choice I made, doesn’t it?
But if you investigate deeper, you could ask, why the difference in our earning abilities? And a part of the answer is that I have spent large parts of my life trying to increase my salary (not perfectly, I made lots of mistakes), while my wife optimized for having a convenient job. And as a result, now I have a well-paying job, and she has an enjoyable job. And by her long-term choices, she helped create this situation where I don’t have a choice, but she does.
Even if in our society, women are mostly expected to have a job, the expectations are not the same. Men still grow up expecting the need to have a well-paying job, enough to feed the entire family. For most women, a job is more like a hobby; they expect to pay their own bills and that’s it; beyond that, the job is a source of prestige or social contact or meaning. Many men would take meaningless, low-status, socially isolating jobs, if it allowed them to make more money.
So in some sense it is similar to the game of chicken, where the female player already threw her steering wheel out of the window… and the man, seeing that, voluntarily swerves.
Yes, my point was just that the graph alone cannot prove that people aren’t able to avoid “money-hungry” spouses and shouldn’t be cited as if it does. Arguments comparing it to a game of chicken make more sense to me, especially in child-free marriages, although for most marriages, I think it’s important to remember the specific unavoidable burdens on the child-bearing players of the game, a biological “throwing” of the steering wheel out of the window that isn’t at all symmetric between players.
I personally am planning to fully support my future spouse and be the primary breadwinner if they’re amenable to it, and in doing so have unintentionally opened up a larger amount of potential partners I could end up with. In my particular (majority male) social group, I am far more likely to hear complaints about not being able to find a partner who will be a stay at home parent than I am to find complaints about wanting a partner to pay for half of the bills.
I think it is strictly the better position to be in to be the working one while the other partner is taking care of the home, and am personally too ambitious to be willing to take a low paying job or ever be a stay at home parent, but men who wish to do so are of course fine to live their lives that way too.
I agree that the biological burden is asymmetric. But also, in the past, women used to have about dozen children (most of them died at infancy), while today, it is maybe two on average? From this perspective, women today are more similar to men, than to the women of the past.
I suspect that many of them will find neither. Instead, they will probably find a partner who likes their job too much to stay at home, but not enough to pay for half of the bills (and definitely not enough to let your friends stay at home). Because the job is not optimized to pay the bills.