After the arrival of the first child, marriage changes drastically and there are only few words to describe it. Many responsibilities come to light with the birth of a newborn. These responsibilities and duties are to be divided among the couple. But sometimes men don’t want to share the load and instead find creative ways to escape.
Journal of Marriage and Family did a study and found that 95% of the heterosexual couples want egalitarian marriages so that duties are shared equally among them and does not fall on one person only. However, research shows that reality is a bit different. It is often found that women in the relationship are forced to put in a lot of effort as compared to their male counterpart.
A study also revealed that before the birth of a child, the couple worked for about 15 hours a week in the house. Also, after the birth of the child, when he reaches the age of nine months, the mother continued to do the housework for 15 hours and additional work of 22 hours to take care of the child. In comparison, men added only 14 hours to take of the child and lessened their hours of housework to 5 hours a week. This doubled the workload for women.
One set of parents faced the same issue. When the wife could not handle his husband shirking his parental duties, she decided not to endure it any longer and found a practical way to make him to do his share of the job. The Reddit user, FinalWintersEve, narrated her entire story on Reddit.
She told that they had twins who were less than a year old. The issue she faced was that whenever it was his husband’s turn to look after their children, like, changing their diaper, bringing the bottle to feed or just soothing the fussy newborn, he always ran to the bathroom first.
She also added that these constant trips might seem that he his running from his responsibilities but he had some health issues and had to visit the bathroom frequently. He also made sure to visit the washroom once before rocking the baby to sleep. But for the past few months, he had been spending more and more time in the washroom with an average session of 25 minutes. He always took his phone and watched YouTube. It’s pretty obvious that he is taking advantage of the situation. Netizens agreed with the wife.
To teach her husband a lesson, she started keeping track of the time he spent in the washroom. He also spent 8 hours a day on his PC in his office playing video games as they are on parental leave from work. So, whenever her husband went to the bathroom to avoid taking care of the baby and watch YouTube instead, she switched off the Wi-Fi. She said that whenever he spent more than 10 minutes on the pot, she flipped the wi-fi off. She also revealed that one day he could not spend more than 15 minutes on a stretch in the bathroom and was upset.
The wife had to go to such lengths to make his husband realize his responsibilities shows that they had some major flaws in their relationship. Many people on Reddit applauded her for her efforts and confessed that they faced the same issues.
