I’ve Volunteered At Our Local Senior Center For Years, And Once I’d Gotten To Know The Women Who

I’ve volunteered at our local senior center for years, and once I’d gotten to know the women who came, I’d eventually ask about their husbands, and they’d confide to me that they felt like a nurse, not a wife, because he expected to be waited on hand and foot, three hot meals a day, his medicine handed to him exactly when he needed to take it, her to make all his appointments. And I’d suggest, oh, they have those pill bottles that tell you when you last took your medicine, there are these services for seniors to help get you to appointments, I can sign you up for meals on wheels!

And they’d say, no, it wasn’t that he couldn’t manage his own appointments or pills or dinner, because he’d done it for years, but he stopped when they moved in together/got married/bought a house/had a kid/two kids. A woman told me she dated a man for years, had a child with him, got pregnant again, moved across the country for his job - and the second she had no job, no nearby family, a toddler, and a newborn, his personality did an immediate 180. I heard this story from every woman, the only difference was when it occurred. After marriage? The first kid? The second? When did he feel like she was in too deep to divorce him, and stop pretending to give a fuck about her?

So I started gently inquiring with middle-aged women and younger, trying to figure it out. And they all described the same thing. Some of them were bewildered, trying to fix it, thinking it was temporary. I met a woman who described her husband’s “postpartum depression”, which involved him reneging on his promise to take paternity leave, laying around when he was home, accepting every offer of work travel he could, and yelling at her constantly. Five years later, his “PPD” is still going strong. One woman wistfully told me about how they used to go grocery shopping together and cook a delicious meal together for them and their kid, but when he got a job across the country and they moved, he stopped helping and she became responsible for cooking all meals, or he’d feed their kid a microwave quesadilla for dinner every night. I know a childfree woman who separated from her husband because he started dumping all the chores on her, but went back to him when he promised to fix it and started acting like when they were dating. And then five years later, once they’d bought a vacation home together and were renting it out, he immediately struck again. Only this time, divorcing him was going to be such a financial tangle that she just decided to suck it up and pick up his socks for the rest of their marriage.

There was one single man who came to the senior center with his wife, doted on her, was an absolute Prince Charming until the end. He was so endlessly kind and adoring with his wife, she raved about him. They would look through the classes we offered, each circle on their own pamphlet the ones they wanted to do, and then do the ones they both circled, and he would peek over her shoulder to circle the ones she did - we all knew it, and it was hugely adorable.

Then she died, and he tried to alter her will to give her family farm that she’d inherited from her mother to their son instead of their daughter, who had been running it for years.

And after all these stories, I kind of just had to accept it. All of these women were intelligent, and aware of male violence, had vetted the men they were dating, and thought they were getting a good one. Literally making the same mistake as their mothers, over and over again, because they thought, “well, I checked him out! I dated him for years before we got married/had a kid! I lived with him, I know what he’s like! I looked for red flags!” not realizing that, yeah, so did lots of women.

But the problem is, we’re not talking to each other enough, so every woman is evaluating her relationship under the assumption that he will continue to act the same way he’s acting right then. Which makes sense, but doesn’t seem to be a good predictor of behavior in men. Every single woman would tell me, “oh, he turned out just like his dad, you have to look at the dad,” “it’s because he went to vietnam, I shouldn’t have married someone who went to war, “it’s because his mom did all the chores, you have to look at the mom,” “his parents were abusive, you have to marry a man who goes to therapy,” “i think he didn’t really want kids and was just going along with me, you have to make sure the guy suggests kids first,” and they were blaming themselves for not being able to see it - although, as far as I could tell, it was pretty universal.

And I had to accept that I was not smarter than them, I didn’t have any innate talent for reading people that they didn’t, there was no secret red flag, and I wasn’t going to do any better at vetting men than they did. I find it confusing, that men can put on a mask for years. I couldn’t do that, it would be literally impossible. But all my evidence suggests that many men are capable of this, and many women aren’t great at seeing through it. So why would I even bother? I don’t find it to be worth my time to invest in a relationship that has a countdown clock on it. I don’t want to put in the time to bond with a façade. I have like. real shit to do.