In recent years, women writers have made a highbrow cottage industry of the family-stress confessional. Honor Jones demolished her family after realizing during a kitchen renovation that she wanted a divorce. Emily Gould had a mental breakdown and crowdfunded a divorce attempt before reconciling with her husband. Anne-Marie Slaughter kicked off the trend in 2013, in an essay for The Atlantic, on “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”
These authors draw on a rich literary tradition of women venting about parenthood and marriage. This tradition includes such texts as Dana Spiotta’s 2021 novel, Wayward, the autobiographical work of Deborah Levy, and Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, published in 2012, which Gould calls “the go-to literary divorce bible.”
Few if any of these women claim to be suffering from evil or abusive husbands, or to be burdened by particularly egregious domestic toil. The sick-of-my-family genre is about having the bravery to blow up a normal domestic life in the name of the woman wanting something different for herself: mental independence and space to think, with time to focus on professional goals.
Why, then, do we hear so little from struggling fathers on this question? Most of the well-known male authors one might cite — Knausgård, Updike — were unfaithful, divorced, or both. What about the fed-up fathers who are still hanging on? Can we express the anxieties and downsides of fatherhood, the ways in which it crowds out our independence and creativity, instead of blowing up our families for novelistic material?
The answer is no, as I learned to my chagrin this month, when a chorus of disapprobation greeted a reflection I posted on the X app (formerly Twitter) about just this issue.
It began with my 4-year-old son asking me to play catch in the street. I was drinking my coffee, still waking up, but I said sure. I also posted to social media: “Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic, peak experience.” But I wasn’t enjoying it, as I confessed in my post. I wanted to be drinking my coffee in peace. The truth, I said, is that I just don’t like being around my two little kids, alone, for very long. I asked the internet whether I was a monster, or whether my feeling was within a certain range of normality.
The post garnered more than 19 million impressions. Men, many of whom granted that my feeling was normal, accused me of being weak and unmanly for complaining in public. Women said I was pathetic: mothers spend so much more time with children, and yet I could barely endure 10 minutes before needing to complain. I hit back that contemporary mothers have no idea what it is like being a father today, and was called a misogynist. Both genders agreed that I was selfish and immature, focused on petty and short-sighted matters like having my coffee in peace or getting back to my work.
The truth is that fatherly pain is exceptionally taboo for a good reason. Contemporary fatherhood is a much darker place than mothers, maidens, and bachelors are ever supposed to know. And one of its proper responsibilities is keeping everyone else in the dark about male suffering. Despite the modern rhetoric about gender equality, women still require men to be strong and silent, as my social-media firebombing shows. Many fathers are so strong and so silent, I suspect, that women are unaware that they’re enjoying the benefits of the man’s protection, or that they require it in the first place.
How can this be, in a world in which men and women are supposed to be equals? According to a contemporary ideal, men should be able to speak to women frankly, and shouldn’t need to protect them. But what we have in reality is a very unequal equality: men are expected to help out with domestic work and hands-on childcare to the best of their ability, while they are also expected to maintain all of the traditionally male responsibilities — not least, the responsibility to keep those responsibilities secret.
Consider time spent with children. Studies confirm it has increased dramatically: American fathers spent seven hours per week on childcare, up from about two and a half hours in 1965. Another study found that over the same period, fathers’ average daily childcare time rose to nearly an hour, up from about 16 minutes. That won’t sound like much to women. But given that there hasn’t been any corresponding relaxation of the exclusively male responsibilities, it’s nearly a full work day a week — a significant expansion.
There’s also the question of what this childcare time is for. Biologically, men are not evolved to care for small children, and historically, men were rarely expected to be around for them. The argument that it’s for ethical reasons or child-development reasons seems a bit too conveniently correlated with women’s entry into the workforce. I find the amorphous nature of the rationale behind the demand especially frustrating, because it presents me with no way of knowing how much time is optimal, or even enough. The requirement becomes uncapped, all-consuming, and impossible to fulfill.
But haven’t other male responsibilities been relaxed in our equal-rights modernity? We tell anxious fathers to worry less about money and focus on quality time with kids. But surveys find that in more than 50% of dual-income households (and in 90% of the wealthiest), husbands are regarded as the family’s “financial expert.” And even when wives earn more, men still carry the moral weight of ultimate financial responsibility. If creeping destitution or spiraling debt were to conquer, for instance, nobody would have any doubt about which of the two parents is most guilty.
Thus, in many crucial ways, the “dual-income household” is a myth and doesn’t solve the economic anxieties of men; indeed, it makes them worse. Many women earn little more than the cost of childcare, which makes the woman’s work mostly for her personal edification or satisfaction. The man enjoys no such luxury. He’s also, whether his wife earns a lot or little, always calculating, behind the scenes, what he is going to do if and when she wants to stop working. Even if she said, before parenthood, that she planned to work until retirement, the husband knows it will fall to him to keep the family fiscally whole if she changes her mind.
If I don’t prepare for that, I live every day at risk of disgrace. If I’m preparing, however, it might seem I don’t believe in my wife, or I might seem “not present” with my kids. Not to mention, if a man’s wife earns as much as he does, she may become accustomed to a standard of living that may not be sustainable once she taps out — but how can he say any of these things? This makes the burden of fatherhood much more difficult than it used to be, psychologically and practically.
Breadwinning, also, has become complicated in ways that have hardly been noticed, let alone understood.
In terms of bringing in the money, most legacy institutions have declined in standards and vitality. Jobs don’t look the same as they once did, and they’re less secure. Many fathers today must become entrepreneurs, either by necessity because they can’t get stable employment; or to maintain standards or integrity in their vocation; or to protect themselves economically as a side hustle, in case their legacy institution goes sideways next year. We’re working more — much more — but getting less credit for it, and the childcare demands have increased, too.
On a deeper level, securing an honorable vocation that does justice to a man’s gifts has always been a major requirement of a successful male life. The structures that made this possible have been so liquidated by modernity that it barely sounds like a reasonable aspiration anymore — but we still yearn for it and hold ourselves to the standard.
How much money is enough to have conducted yourself with distinction? We have no idea. Just recently, the writer Michael Green published an article arguing that $100,000 a year should now be considered the real poverty line, or perhaps it was even $140,000, once you update the old methodology for today’s costs. The argument was flawed, but it went viral, suggesting that people really no longer know the difference between rich and poor. I might read up and form an accurate model of the economy, but if my mother, wife, father-in-law, and peer group aren’t reading the same material, then I can’t know whether I earn or possess enough money to be content. You can say that a father should use his own judgment, but for a good father, the only judgment is: I would kill myself to do right by my family, so if there is no shared standard, then I’ll just kill myself trying, just to make sure.
It was once the case that people from different classes and situations would settle into different occupations. Before capitalism, the options were more or less fixed: the cobbler’s son became a cobber; the duke’s first son a duke. Today, there are no longer shared standards around meaningful work, vocation, or station (except for whatever money and internet clout measure). If you are a professor, does that mean you are a smart, thoughtful anchor of your community? It’s no longer clear. If you have a million followers on TikTok, does that mean you are successful or impressive? You could very well be a working prostitute, the canonically low-status occupation, and be very high-status indeed, depending on how you manage it.
Under these conditions, the contemporary father can never “arrive.” No matter how successful he is in terms of money or clout, the father must bear the terror that perhaps he did not do justice to his gifts, or that he did not do justice to his family’s name. Whether his mother tells him that she’s “proud” of him means nothing; he judges himself in the agora. Now add to this bundle of anxieties, both material and psychological, the expectation to be ever more present at playtime. It’s maddening. And crushing.
There is another, deeper burden that is rarely spoken. For the man, having children is not itself a source of immediate joy or meaning in the same way that it can be for women. I chose to have children, and I have no regrets. And yet no man ever thinks to himself, “I would love to have two toddlers in the house because the presence of these two creatures would increase my own happiness.” Whereas for the mother, as the Bible, Nietzsche, and Freud alike taught, children are much more immediately meaningful. A man is more motivated by a larger sense of responsibility: to procreate, to give the world a little bit more life than he took from it, and to give his beloved wife something that is significant and meaningful to her.
There is a meme about how a man, left to his own devices, will default to sleeping on the floor and eating canned beans every day in an unfurnished, one-room apartment. The image is typically invoked to roast the male sex for its barbarous nature, implying how much men need women to organize and beautify their lives. I’ve always thought this to be an outrageous misunderstanding. Instead, consider how much heroic effort the average father expends to provide his wife with things he does not need or desire himself.
Those who find these observations outrageous, cowardly, selfish, or unrepresentative only display how little can fathom the darkness of fatherhood today.
If a wife could see or feel her husband’s terror, she would hardly be able to function, let alone be a good wife or mother. We hide it out of love but not purely out of love: for a father to bear his responsibilities every day, he needs his wife to be happy, in part because he needs her to stay calm and be functional. If she falters under her own heavy responsibilities, he could quickly lose control of everything. “Happy wife, happy life” is a laughably sweet euphemism for the infernal fact that if your wife is not happy, there is no reason left to live.
This might seem extreme, but when a man builds a family, he voluntarily sets his own happiness to the side, which means the wife’s happiness is the only reliable daily indicator of success and reliable daily reward. So if the wife is unhappy, none of it makes any sense and nothing feels worth doing. As I write this, stoic silence is the only thing keeping millions of families on the right side of the precipice.
Before I got married and had children, I was horrified by the prevalence of fathers who walk out on their families. Today, I am no longer confused by the phenomenon. My own household challenges have thankfully never been so severe, but it is now obvious to me how even the normal challenges of the ordinary husband could lead a man’s life to spiral so far out of control that he breaks and leaves. The gap between my perplexity over this issue as a young man and my current knowledge is a reasonable index of how much darkness fathers hide from the world.
I spend many days and nights churning through these issues in mortal terror. My wife probably has a decent sense of how dark and lonely life sometimes feels for me, but that’s because I’m a little weak and I tell her too much, too often. And then I feel terrible about that, terrified that I might break her happiness and lose everything for the both of us. It is part of my job to protect her from all of this, and I can handle that, most of the time.
Most men do not want sympathy, and I certainly do not. There is no appeal, to my mind, in “rights for men” or any kind of ridiculous “men’s movement.” I only submit for the public record, once again and without fear, that if contemporary fatherhood continues to feel as impossible as it feels to me, it is better for a man to occasionally snap in a small way, rather than snap in the big and silent ways that husbands have too often snapped in the past. And perhaps the weaker, average fathers, such as myself, will take a few hits — or 19 million of them — for the team, so that the really great fathers can carry on, dutifully, in silence.
I would rather be scorned for revealing my weaknesses honestly, while holding myself and my family together, than be applauded for making art out of its destruction. Buzzy celebration simply for snapping is another one of the rewards fathers must be prepared to forgo.
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