Have you guys ever considered that by expecting women to be nuts you subconsciously choose the crazy ones because "that's the way they are supposed to be?"
Because many women subconsciously suppress the crazy/neurotic behavior until marriage, or children have bound the man to them permanently. Or conversely, once they have reached their goals, they feel entitled to that behavior.
In my case at least, the old adage, "A man marries a woman hoping she won't change, but a woman marries a man hoping he will" is dead-on...
It's not intolerable, but after our kids were born, I'll be honest, Mrs. Dual became someone I'd have never married, much less dated. Granted, our situation with two sets of twin girls born eleven months apart was unusual and stressful, but she is the kind of person who is unable to hate a "situation", she has to hate
someone.
No person in their right mind hates
babies, especially your own, so there was only one natural choice. Me.
I was despised for having to leave the house and go to work and do my job.
I was despised for not asking her what she needed, or what was going on in the tight schedule of keeping four babies fed, napped, and bathed.
I was despised for asking what she needed, because that meant I didn't know what she needed.
I was despised for not having a college degree and making more money for us. (which would almost 100% certainly have meant I'd have probably never even met her, and our kids wouldn't exist...)
I was despised because she had a college degree (in theater/arts) and while we were both working full-time, I made more money in IT than she did at her various jobs.
When I was downsized from my job, I was despised for losing my job.
I was despised because she now had to work full-time.
I was despised when I went back to work, and she had to be at home full time again.
Things are somewhat better now. After speaking with her mother, Mrs. Dual found out that becoming angry and generally disagreeable after children around their early thirties in age, seems to be something that runs in the maternal side of her family and both her mother and her aunt were helped immensely by common pharmacology. However, some of the attitudes and double-standards remain.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the modern media culture is giving women a constant barrage of quasi-subliminal and contradictory messages, both about men, and themselves, and they can never be happy. Witness the "stupid man/dad" of commercials and sit-coms. Or that a smart, capable man almost automatically has to be an emotionally unavailable, irascible, or "flawed" somehow.
And the constant attack on masculinity that paints men as abusive, insensitive etc. yet if a man conforms to all of that, a woman is saddled with a metrosexual wet-noodle she resents, and is no longer attracted to, because he is no longer "manly" and she feels insecure in dark alleys. Then the parts of modern feminism that portray marriage and motherhood as "slavery", put women in deep conflict with some of their most basic instincts to be wives and mothers. And when a woman does try to have it all, she'll probably fail at something, either hit the glass ceiling because of the demands of motherhood, or will jeopardize her fertility, when she finally decides it's time to get pregnant, or worse marrried, and finds either is not working out for her very well...
There's also the onslaught of the fictional characters in movies and TV, romance novels, romantic comedies etc. where men who magically manage to somehow be both perfectly feminine emotional/sensitive AND "manly" at the exact same time, or changing instantly exactly when needed, do exist. And the woman protagonists neuroses are inevitably just "cute"...
Honestly, women on gunboards
seem to be the exception to all this. Unfortunately there's not nearly enough of them to go around, and we must make do.
