The Myth of Women Who Sacrifice Family for Happiness

There’s a new-ish trope floating around the manosphere that goes something like this: men sacrifice their happiness for their families, while women sacrifice their families for happiness.

Here’s just one example:

(I particularly love Clarabelletoks’s response, of course.)

It’s a very efficient little story. The man gets married, gets a job, provides, gives up his ‘freedom’ (LOL), puts up with the inevitable misery of domestic life, and nobly soldiers on because he loves his family. The woman, meanwhile, wakes up one morning and decides she’s ‘not happy anymore’, so she blows up the marriage because apparently she’s too selfish and superficial to appreciate everything her husband has sacrificed for her. I am rolling my eyes so hard, y’all.

Notice what’s doing the work here. The man’s ‘sacrifice’ is treated as a material fact. The woman’s legitimate unhappiness is treated as a mood.

And that’s convenient, because if you define women’s unhappiness as some vague emotional fluctuation rather than the accumulated consequence of living in an unequal and unsatisfying relationship, you never have to ask what actually happened before she left.

Women don’t leave just because they had a bad Tuesday

The story we’re supposed to believe is that a woman decides she’s unhappy and then decides she wants a different life out of the blue. Maybe she’s bored or suddenly wants freedom, or she’s discovered feminism and is being brainwashed by it (LOL). Maybe there’s another man or she saw some TikTok about ‘living your best life’ and suddenly remembered that she used to enjoy having hobbies.

What tends to disappear from this story is everything that happened beforehand.

A woman saying she’s unhappy in her marriage isn’t usually saying, ‘I’m experiencing a temporary dip in positive affect and would like to pursue greater personal fulfillment elsewhere.’ She’s saying that she’s spent years asking her husband to participate more with the children, do his share of the housework, pay attention to her, listen when she’s upset, show affection, have difficult conversations, stop treating her needs as criticism, or otherwise behave like an equal partner.

And she has said it repeatedly. (Almost) no one leaves at the first sign of disfunction.

(And don’t even get me started on abusive marriages, I’m deliberately leaving that aside in this article because I want to focus only on this stupid claim of women leaving because of some shallow feeling of unhappiness).

That’s the part the ‘women leave because they want happiness’ narrative conveniently skips. The absence of happiness that leads someone to leave a marriage usually isn’t some superficial emotional fluctuation that could’ve been solved by booking a holiday or telling her to appreciate what she has. It’s often the accumulated result of legitimate grievances that have been raised repeatedly and ignored repeatedly.

The unhappiness isn’t necessarily the reason she leaves. It’s the thing that’s been happening while she’s trying to stay.

The marriage was happy for who?

Because that’s the inconvenient detail here: marriages still tend to benefit men and women differently.

We need to explicitly name this because the claim that marriage is simply an arrangement in which men sacrifice and women collect the benefits is bullshit. This paper summarizes evidence that women continue to perform the lion's share of unpaid household, caregiving, management, emotional and cognitive labor, while women also tend to reduce employment or take time away from work after parenthood.

Global OECD data also says that women continue to do a disproportionate amount of unpaid domestic and care work, even when they’re also employed. They also tend to carry more of the invisible administrative and emotional work involved in keeping family life functioning.

So when a man says, ‘I sacrificed my happiness for my family’, we should probably ask what his family life actually requires from him and what it requires from his wife.

Because people have a predictable relationship with arrangements that benefit them. They tend to be reluctant to disrupt them or to admit that maybe they don’t work as well for the other person.

If your wife is unhappy but she’s still cooking dinner, doing the laundry, remembering the children’s appointments, organizing birthdays, managing school logistics, maintaining the household and reminding you that your mother has a dentist appointment next Tuesday, there’s considerably less incentive for you to conclude that the relationship is in crisis.

You’ll even think the system is working pretty well. For you.

This is one of the reasons I find the manosphere’s ‘women just suddenly leave’ narrative so ridiculous. The husband may genuinely experience the marriage as fine right up until the moment his wife leaves.

Of course he does. The arrangement was working for him.

And then the divorce ‘comes out of nowhere’