"Wife Training"

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Guys perspective: I think the homemaker thing can sometimes kill a relationship. And it's not always the 'submissive' thing it seems to be.

The first girlfriend I lived with, after we moved in together, she insisted on doing most of the cooking and cleaning. At the time, I sort of thought of it as temporary, maybe like some sort of courting or something, temporary special treatment. At first it was great. But it wasn't long before she started using it as leverage. A sort of debt was implied, which allowed her to play puppetmaster. At this point I decided I'd better pitch in, but ... then I discovered there was something almost territorial going on. I was blocked from doing things because, she claimed, I couldn't do them right. Everything was supervised, and inspected. A kind of powerlessness set in.

This was all decidedly unsexy. It literally got to the point I couldn't perform, it was like she'd transformed from sexy woman to evil stepmother, and that didn't really work in bed too well. I think we lived together only about 4 months. And none of it was very easy, because it was very very difficult at the time to articulate exactly what the problem was. I couldn't really explain why it wasn't working - it's not like we were having arguments or anything like that - and I had to go with some pretty lame excuses when we broke up.

Feel free to correct your grandmother - the song, "Shake, Rattle and Roll," is originally by Bill Haley & the Comets and the lyric is, "Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans/Get out that kitchen 'cause I'm a hungry man."

He's not talking about food hunger.

Also, this thread is AWESOME. I'm learning so much!

This is an interesting thread to be sure. My mom still says I need "wife training" but flips it on herself to say she needs "exercise training", my grammy needs "cell phone training" and my brother needs "cooking training." So we all need to learn a little something, huh.

My mother sometimes says things that I feel are pretty... offensive. Usually, she's just being herself. She's not the "ideal housewife" herself, but sometimes what she says is pretty odd. If I dress in a strange manner or say something the wrong way. Also, she has this strange belief that people without kids are not doing what they're supposed to do. I don't know whether it's because she has two kids and never got the benefits that people without kids have.

I don't need "wife training". I need to find something to spend the rest of my life with. Or at least for the next ten years.