A reader sent me the following message the other day:
“Would move heaven and earth and all celestial planes in between to hear your take on this”
My take?
First, like all social-media bangers, it’s vastly exaggerated and lacks context. Two adults working can easily keep a house clean. We expect one adult working to keep their own place neat, why on earth would two adults sharing the same space struggle to do it?
The degree to which this post is true depends on the number of working hours each person has, whether they work from home, whether they have any help (cleaners, etc), and of course — whether they have kids. Kids are the main source of mess in a house. The more kids, the more chaos. I can tell you from experience they accelerate messes exponentially.
But I don’t want these added considerations to take away from the core argument. So let’s assume a basic modern nuclear family: two adults working 40 hours a week, each outside of the home, with two young kids. Is the house always going to look nice? And are people going to be regularly getting home cooked meals?
Honestly? Probably not.
My wife still works (for now). She probably would have quit her job in 2021 after my daughter was born, and definitely would have quit after my son in 2023, but that wasn’t exactly doable at the time considering I was facing federal trial and prison. And although business is great now, we’re still clawing our way out of the $1 million in damages we sustained from my J6 legal fight — we’ve lost nearly half a decade of earning, and have had to do what we’ve had to do. We’re blessed in that she’s had a solid paying job that’s work-from-home with great benefits, so she isn’t really away from the kids or overwhelmed. It’s not ideal, but with my parents around to help with both cooking and childcare, the downside has been minimized.
But I’ll be candid — very often rooms in our house do look like a mess (partly because there’s not enough space for all of us, partly because of time), and on days when my parents are out, if we’ve both had long days and didn’t plan anything ahead of time — dinner is takeout. This still probably happens about twice a month — usually now when my wife is craving some cuisine we don’t cook like Thai. But before we became conscious of this and organized our lives better to mitigate it, it was probably 2-3x that.
I didn’t like this, but I could hardly blame my wife considering she had work herself, and after work wanted to maximize her time with the kids, not come up with something from scratch. I realized to change this we’d have to plan meals well in advance, to have everything on hand for the evening’s cooking, and if a meal took longer than an hour to cook, to do some preparation earlier in the day.
I don’t think most people are going to make a big deal about takeout once every other week, or maybe even once a week. But the point is that it was so easy, you could feel it wanting to become a habit. Why cook when you could just click an app? It took conscious effort and honestly a degree of disgust to stop ordering-in from becoming a trend.
I doubt most modern families care to the same extent as we did. They’re tired from their commutes, and will choose the path of least resistance. (Takeout was the norm in overworked NYC, and people didn’t even have kids!). And the same thing goes for messes. If people are coming over, OK, the house is going to get cleaned up — and there’s probably going to be some general tidying over the weekend anyway. But you better believe through the week the clutter accumulates. There might just be pile of clothes in the corner on the floor until Saturday comes and it’s time for laundry.
So all of this is a longwinded way of saying — yes, homemaking (taking care of dinner, cleaning, kids) is very much a full time job. Your mileage may very just how much your home is going to fall apart if you’re both working, depending on your organization, the nature of your work, and the amount of help you get. (I don’t agree that it feels like a “hotel” to get a cleaning service; cleaners don’t pick up stuff — they actually make you clean up, because you ironically need to prepare the house for them.)
Which brings us to the (literally) thousand-something dollar question: given all these consequences of both spouses working, should you retire your wife?
I cannot make this decision for you, because everyone’s situation is completely different. All I can do is provide the following observations for your consideration.
Although much is fairly made about feminism’s brainwashing to put women into the workforce, the reality is that in this economy, it is typically hard to raise a family without two-income earners. I know, I know — if there’s a will there’s a way — there’s nothing stopping you from moving out to the boonies and homeschooling. This is cool and I respect it, but please do not take your niche lifestyle decisions and insist they be adopted by society as a whole. Most people live in the suburbs, their kids are anchored in public school, and they have car payments and a mortgage. This is the reality they live in and they are looking for a way to navigate it, not leave it all behind.
Accordingly, your wife quitting work — even if she’s only making half of what you make — can put enormous stress on the family’s finances. When you’re on fixed income it’s a very risky decision: you are going to have to cut spending. How much stress is this going to cause? Stress is the #1 killer of happy relationships and sexual polarity — so you need to ask yourself if her being unemployed makes your relationship more stressful or less. The answer to this is going to depend on your personal financial situation, your respective jobs, and your wife’s disposition. I don’t think most women like full time work, but some manage it pretty well, while others can’t handle it at all.
So practically speaking, I only think it makes sense to retire your wife when you can actually retire her. This means the choice should be made only when your family isn’t financially at risk from the lost income; it should be made when you are comfortable, when it won’t jeopardize your lifestyle significantly. Her “retirement” should be little more than a “lifestyle cost” — you’re paying more (or losing income) in order to have a better home life.
But there’s another, less “practical” yet IMO more important argument for retiring her earlier — especially if you have your own business where income growth is in your hands. And that is that being the sole breadwinner puts more responsibility on you, which makes you feel like more of a man. This responsibility naturally leads to more authority, and not only improves the sexual polarity in the relationship, it typically leads to you earning more money. Masculine men progress further in their careers; they conquer their worlds.
The manosphere usually talks about “retiring your wife” from the perspective that it’s good for your sexual dynamics, or a status symbol. All this stuff is true. But in many strains of manosphere thought there’s a bit of dissonance here, because many red pill commentators also resent the idea of a man providing for a woman. They are looking for sex with the least amount of responsibility. From a retaliatory measure against female opportunism, I get this strategy, but it misses something essential at the same time.
The masculine grows with challenges and obligations.
The fact is, a lot of polarity issues in modern relationships are a result of men not taking on as much responsibility as they could. Men want women to act more feminine and submissive, but at the same time they’re unwilling to bear a greater weight so women don’t have to.
Case in point, Echo’s post the other day. A lot of guys don’t want to hear this, but there’s no question this dilemma goes through a lot of women’s minds. They’d like to be at home rather than in their office, but their man doesn’t want it, and they just can’t trust him to handle it.
This of course doesn’t mean a lot of cared-for women don’t still have entitlement issues — believe me, I’ve heard the other side of the story. The reason we are so messed up today is because of this lack of trust between the sexes. But what I want guys to understand is that someone needs to take the step to reestablishing that trust, and it might as well be the man. If you want a polarized, passionate relationship — you need to take the lead in giving her the space to be a woman. Let her know what you want, communicate up front and have some agreements about roles, and iterate from there as necessary. But take the plunge.
I know there is going to be some trepidation for many of you to take this jump. I know, because I have felt the same trepidation. My business is successful, but income has always been variable. Even though I’ve been the primary earner, it’s been a solace to know in the back of my mind that there’s a steady paycheck coming in. It’s taken pressure off of me.
But I know that lack of pressure on me is ultimately more pressure on my wife. Even if her job has a good work-life balance and decent compensation, it’s still work. And I’ve seen — twice now — how hard it was for her to leave her maternity, when she was relaxed and at ease, and return to company responsibilities once again. I didn’t like that, and I won’t let it happen again.
We’ve done an amazing job creating a polarized relationship in spite of all of this. Our sex life is fantastic, because in spite of our responsibilities, we make time for each other. But it still hasn’t gone as far right now as either of us want it to go. I want to be more of a man, and she wants to be more of a woman. I want to give her the space to make her only responsibilities our household and family. Which of course are real responsibilities, but ones with a lot more flexibility and peace.
So the final answer on both spouses working is this:
I think every man should plan to retire their wife from the 9-5. Even if you are dealing with an intelligent, competent woman who has many abilities and would like to do more than just take care of the household — you should still spare her from having someone else as her boss. Starting a business with her is the ideal route here. She’s able to be productive and creative, but in a way that keeps the polarity and prioritization of the family and marriage — to harness what she has to offer for you.
That doesn’t mean, however, that now is the exact time to jump for you. It’s not a decision you should take lightly, because although it’s not technically “no coming back” — it’s always harder to reenter the job market after leaving it. And it’ll jar her more to go back and forth, and likely hurt your dynamic more too.
But you also shouldn’t let your wife working be an excuse for a lack of romance or intimacy. In fact, if you think this alone will solve it — you have another thing coming for you.
Lower-stress and more polarized roles might help your relationship, but your dynamic with your wife is fundamentally a product of how you conduct yourself in the marriage. As the red pill knows all too well, there are plenty of husbands who earn all the money yet still have dead bedrooms and get disrespected on the regular. And there are also sex-fueled, affectionate marriages despite the fact that both spouses are working.
What you need most of all is to just know the right relationship skills, and structure your marriage in the right way.
So long as you haven’t waited too long and she’s already one foot out the door — there is an extremely high likelihood I will be able to save your marriage. If you are fighting and feel disconnected, I can show you exactly what you’re doing wrong and how to repair it. If things are OK, but you want even more passion, I can help you there too. Nothing is ever guaranteed in an industry where the outcome doesn’t simply depend on you, but your wife, but the odds of a breakthrough are pretty good.
You should be warned, the red pill does NOT provide the tools to do this, and 80% of you are going to find your marriages suffer by following most of advice you see floating around today. You are going to get jostled between the overreaction of bitter boys or the ignorance of squishy nice guys (and their misleading female counterparts). This is hardly surprising consider most of the guys offering marriage advice are either not married or have bad marriages. They either cater too much to women or resent them; you shouldn’t take advice from both.
Who you should take advice from are the men who have the kind of relationships you’d like to emulate. Maybe that’s me, maybe it’s not. But for all the complaining guys make about how disloyal women are, or how they stop getting laid after commitment I can tell you this — in my marriage, that is not a problem. And we have been tested by some of the worst circumstances.
