One that always annoyed me is when it is around the holidays, when stores advertise gifts for men. They always assume a guy is into toilet humor, beer humor, assuming they’re a lumberjack who needs to survive out in the wilderness, are into bbq-ing all of the time so gotta have those available all year around for some reason.
Even when I used to have identified myself as a guy, I never once fit into any of those traits. Just because guys grow beards, doesn’t always mean they’re chopping wood somewhere and always wearing plaid.
Many reasons.
Some people are taught gender essentialism from a young age. Women are like this, men are like that, and there’s no way to change it. It’s just nature (or God) that women clean and take care of the house, and men go out and hunt.
Many boys are socialized from a young age not to cook or clean. Many girls are taught that that’s what they do. Have you seen this in your life? A family gathering, where the boys run off to play and the women and girls stick around to clean up? Children learn from what they see and what they’re taught.
It’s only recently that women had any shot at financial independence. Women weren’t guaranteed the right to open a bank account until 1974, in the US. Sexual discrimination is a problem with finding a career to pay one’s own way. From that, one can infer that some women “put up with” shitty men, because the alternative is destitution.
Some women may believe that changing it is just too much work- it’s not an immutable nor innate property of men that they don’t cook or clean or know anything about the children, but changing that would be an overwhelming amount of work. If the man’s not interested in changing anything, it’s even more daunting, and may damage the relationship.
Also some men get violent if they feel threatened, insulted, or hungry.
These are just some things I’ve read or women have talked to me about. I’m a dude doing the best I can. Talk to the women in your life (but don’t make them teach you a whole seminar for free, heh.)
That’s what I mean though. Why stay or care about damaging the relationship? Sunk cost fallacy. Some times a hard choice needs to be made. This choice should be made before children/mortgages etc. There’s the old stereotype of men enter a relationship thinking the women wont change and women enter a relationship hoping the man will.
Well, sunk cost fallacy is extremely common.
But also people don’t have perfect knowledge. And people change, and change at different rates.
Imagine a couple that meets when they’re both pretty immature in their 20s. They have fun and fall in love. Then they buy a home together, and the woman slowly realizes she’s matured into an adult role while the husband is still basically the 20 year old bro. Would you casually suggest burning the whole thing down? Finding a new relationship in your mid 30s, especially if you want kids, when there’s no guarantee the new person will be any better, is daunting.
What if they’re not financially independent?
It’s easy to sit back and tell people how to behave in the abstract, but real situations aren’t always so obvious.