- ex wife soup
- 6.30.24
this helped me think more critically about what marriage can turn into because of the social + historical undercurrents of gender roles + inequality
the majority of the author’s gripes with marriage focused on unequal distribution of domestic labor and relational effort, backed with stats on how women are the ones initiating divorces and the ones doing the work in the relationship:
“In a 2019 study, sociologist Allison Daminger found that women carry the majority of the cognitive load in their relationships. Meaning women are the ones noticing, analyzing, and monitoring the issues in a marriage. Daminger broke the concept of mental load into four parts: anticipating, identifying, deciding, and monitoring. The aspects of cognitive load where Daminger noticed that women do most of the work was in anticipation and monitoring. Women are thinking of the problems, working to solve them, and monitoring them for success.”
“Getting a body that makes him regret everything he ever did to you; looking so hot he’ll wish he never left: It’s still not a body that completely belongs to you. It’s still a body performing for a man. The body exists for other people to look at and judge. To see and appraise. ... When do our bodies ever exist solely for ourselves?”
she also talks about how women are often pressured to prioritize fitness because men often equate self-worth with physical prowess, a metric by which women are always measured but can never live up to, especially with the bodily changes of bearing and raising children