236 upvotes, 6 direct replies (showing 6)
View submission: What's something you never understood about the opposite gender?
This isn’t a men thing, it’s a boomer thing.
Marriage being MUCH more socially important in an age where people got married younger and without knowing whether they would actually get along when living in the same house (not to mention the much higher rate of shotgun weddings and immense social pressure) mean that people who should never have been married are.
“I hate my wife” is the joke, but they don’t actually mean it. They don’t hate their wife, they hate being married - they feel like they were forced into it, they didn’t spend enough time actually getting to know each other (dating was different back then), they didn’t spend time living together before getting married, they spent most of their marriage at work and therefore don’t understand how much work it takes to keep a house clean and running when you have kids because they didn’t see any of that work while it was being done (because it was being done while they were at work), and they see other married couples (especially younger ones - you know, the young ones they hauled ass to ensure wouldn’t have to endure the same hardships they did, and turns out their entire set of social values come from having endured those hardships, so the fact that the kids these days have different values is literally their fault) getting along just fine. They don’t understand why other marriages are so perfect when theirs isn’t, and don’t understand that the couples their age whose marriages look like the ideal are either faking it in public or were the rare few who actually understood each other before getting married.
Then they turn on the TV and the only characters who look like them and have the same life experience as them are in miserable marriages (because a couple with a good marriage who don’t fight about everything do not make for as good television as a couple whose fight of the week can be endless content for season after season, who knew?) and the only joke those shows have is “I hate my wife”. That character on TV doesn’t hate his wife - he hates being married.
It’s a shared commiseration at feeling trapped in an institution that no one properly explained to them when they were teenagers (exactly like how people in our generation complain about student loans because college is a scam and no one told us so until AFTER we graduated with mountains of debt), and deprecative humor isn’t always aimed at oneself.
tl;dr They don’t literally hate their wives, they hate that their wives are their wives because they were sold a lie and didn’t realize it until it was way, waaaaay too late
Comment by Douchecase at 09/03/2025 at 01:09 UTC
18 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is so, so sad. I've never really thought about it like that.
My maternal grandparents absolutely adored each other. It was almost impossible to tell where one ended and the other one started. They were married for almost sixty years before my grandma passed away, and my grandpa just seemed emptier until he passed a few years later.
My grandpa, the big jokester of the two, would joke about my grandma being "the ol' ball and chain," and he'd tell people he'd have to ask her permission for things, all that, and everybody knew he was kidding. They were just constantly attached at the hip.
I miss the two of them so much every single day, more than a decade later.
Fast forward all these years later, and I'm the one joking about being my boyfriend's ball and chain. I like to think my grandpa's looking down and laughing... and my grandma's smacking him on the arm for it.
Comment by Spirited-Sail3814 at 09/03/2025 at 05:32 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The worst part is that college *isn't* a scam - as the market is flooded with bachelor's degrees, it gets increasingly difficult for people without a bachelor's degree to compete for anything other than minimum-wage jobs or possibly trade jobs if you're able-bodied and don't mind a job where an injury could put you out of work.
So you're still better off getting a degree than not, but if college costs keep skyrocketing, eventually it'll cross the line to not being worth it.
Comment by VeganMonkey at 09/03/2025 at 04:44 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Happy cake day!
Which country are you talking about because it varies a lot per country. My aunt is a true boomer: conceived on the day her country got liberated from Germany, born in ‘46. And she had access to modern birth control, she had some boyfriends before my uncle. They got the time to get to know each other properly. She and him are still together and you can see they are crazy about each other. My grandparents too (her parents), they were also a very happy cute couple, so none of them ever were unhappy about marriage. And this sounds weird, but my grandparents who were born in early 1900s had birth control and it worked. They were together from when they were only 18 but married at age 26. So they had a long time to get to know each other. My parents, Silent Gen, lived together before they got married. They married before said aunt and uncle.
I think there is a big cultural difference in the cases you mentioned and the ones I’m used to.
Comment by gurnard at 09/03/2025 at 05:40 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The song *Paradise by the Dashboard Lights* is a great, raucously maudlin take on the same subject.
Comment by mijikui at 09/03/2025 at 06:17 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I feel like this is pretty accurate, at least for older American couples. Unfortunately my family has tons of examples of this.
My grandma married 5 different men. Most of her marriages only lasted a few years and most of the men she married ended up being horrible to her, but she always remarried quickly.
My mom has been married twice. My dad's own father warned her not to marry my dad, but they still got married quite quickly and had kids after only a year despite my dad not really wanting to be a father. She hated a lot of things about him and he was, unsurprisingly, not a great father.
Eventually, they get divorced. My mom ends up dating another man after a few years who had JUST gotten divorced and within less than a year, they decide to get married. He refuses to live together until after they're married. They get married, buy a new house, and move in together for the first time. End up fighting a lot, threaten divorce, and constantly complain about one another.
Same exact situation has also happened to many of my aunts and other distant family members of similar age.
It really just seems like a lot of them get married because it's what's expected, and also tend to have kids for the same reason.
Comment by Royal_Visit3419 at 09/03/2025 at 11:37 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It’s not a boomer thing. It’s a sexist, misogynistic thing.