My mom is taking time away from her business and traveling 10 hours round trip at least once a month (usually more like 2 or 3 times per month) to take my grandmother to doctors appointments. She has two brothers who live closer but she’s still the one who is expected to drop everything if there’s an issue.

Seriously, I’m a woman and I do all that shit in my house. It’s an hour a week, max.

Hey cousin! Are we related from the “persnickety” side of the family? JK!

Thanks! :-)

A great way to start out your upcoming marriage. Good luck!

I can’t even imagine a world like that. It sounds like paradise.

Isn’t it ironic that a common complaint about modern men is that modern women don’t “need” them and they want to feel “needed”. And yet, because of their attitude or behavior, we take it upon ourselves to do most if not all of what needs to be done, and thus learn to not “need” them that much.

Wow, yeah. That does sound like a major “aha” moment!

And it’s a part that often puts women in the role of nag or surrogate mother, which can lead to conflict itself.

These aren’t daily activities. They take up a fraction of the time and energy of what is expected of a woman.

It’s very interesting; about a week ago, I had my wisdom teeth out (at age 30. It suuuuuuuucked.) My guy was AMAZING at taking care of me, making me food, cleaning up, running errands. He even admitted that he rather enjoyed the caregiver role. What’s ironic about this is we’ve had many long conversations in therapy…

You’ve pretty much described my husband. But I think I got really lucky. Plus since he was the youngest of 7, he just kind of had to learn to take care of himself. And I think having 4 older sisters helped him to be more emotionally in-tune (although that has also improved through our years of couples counseling).

How sexist. I take my own car to the shop and my husband’s too. I’ve also check oil levels in my own car and changed a friend’s tire because she didn’t know how to do it.

Speaking only for myself, my husband will frequently ask me what I want him to wear. 99% of the time I really don’t care. I think he sees me dressed nicely and wonders vaguely if he should wear something nicer than a Super Mario t-shirt (he’s a programmer). I’m not trying to dress him a certain way, but he thinks I…

Oh man this resonated with me. I asked my brother the same thing, only it was to pick up some of the slack of caring for our father. Because the person who was handling it all was our baby sister, who was sixteen at the time. I lived over an hour away. He was 10 minutes away. But I got the guilt trip from him because…

It’s not even that we think men can’t do it, either. Mr. Bells is really good at some things! Like, we’re watching TV and every time he gets up he’ll ask if he can get me anything. EVERY time! He’s clearly thinking about me. It’s just that some things it doesn’t occur to him that he could actually just handle. That he…

Thanks for your kind thoughts and I am glad my situation does not apply to yours.

May or may not apply to your wife at all:

For me, it's hard to ask for help because I grew up in a household where people were expected to do their chores without prompting. If a parent had to remind me to start a load of laundry or do the dishes, it meant I'd made a mistake by forgetting to do so. No one would be mad at me, but I'd be embarrassed about…

Ha, I was thinking of adding "tuning the other person out" (a little less dramatic than talk to the hand) but that ventures very close to the stonewalling dangerous territory