The antidote to wife guys
Also, are dual income households really the best case scenario?
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I’m breaking my usual publishing schedule with an off-week post today because I wanted reflect on a few random things that seem worth discussing, but which maybe aren’t entire posts on their own. Here we go:
The problem with, and antidote to, “wife guys”
This week, one of the Try Guys was exposed for cheating on his wife. He subsequently left the Try Guys. In case you’re unfamiliar, the Try Guys are four YouTubers who started out at BuzzFeed1 before branching out on their own to do videos trying random things.
In the wake of the cheating scandal, there have been a bunch of think pieces about how the philandering Try Guy had been a “wife guy,” and that other famous wife guys such as John Mulaney have also recently fallen from grace for failing to, essentially, be good wife guys.
This is how BuzzFeed defined the term “wife guy” this week:
A Wife Guy is a man whose fame or branding is largely predicated on the fact that he’s in love with the woman he married.
The problem then is that when a wife guy falls out of love or errs, it torpedos his entire life (and the lives of those in his orbit). A YouTuber cheating on his wife isn’t necessarily a career-ending peccadillo — unless his entire public persona revolves around being the kind of guy who wouldn’t cheat2.
One obvious solution to the disgraced wife guy problem is for guys to stop making their significant others a major part of their public identities. Another would be for wife guys to stop behaving badly. And still another would be to create more varied versions of masculinity. Give people choices beyond, say, Ryan Reynolds (famous wife guy) on the one end and Alex Jones (famous toxic guy) on the other.
But part of the problem is also love itself. I’ve previously gone on the record saying that love leads to flimsy relationships. If your love wanes, your marriage falls apart, your finances fall apart, and if you’re a wife guy your career is probably over too. And love is capricious3.
In that light, I’d like to propose an alternative to the wife guy: The corporate family guy. Corporate in this context doesn’t mean an actual corporation in the modern sense, but is instead a nod to the way families used to be structured, which was as kinds of collective enterprises. Think of a family farm. Or a family working to advance its political interests (the Kennedys in real life, or the Lannisters of Game of Thrones).
So you might love your spouse. But your identity is more about your role as the leader, the CEO if you will, of the family. Obviously this needs some modern updating — two people of any gender could be co-CEOs of a family — but I like the concept because it separates romance and enterprise. The family rests on two foundations, not one. And if the couple falls out of love, their relationship doesn’t necessarily have to end because they’re also in it to advance the broader interests of the family. Think of old timey European aristocrats, whose political marriages and public roles were not derailed in the slightest by affairs. Again, this idea needs some updating, but there’s no reason in my mind an equitable version couldn’t exist4.
Are dual income households really the best case scenario?
Do you love your job? If you won the lottery, would you keep working?
I’m fortunate because I do love my job, but based on the deluge of recent news coverage of “quiet quitting,” real quitting, and return-to-office battles, it appears many people are tired of work and would prefer not to do it. And yet, having both parents work is a matter of survival for many families.
The fact that both men and women can work professionally today is a triumph. It wasn’t so long ago that women had few professional opportunities. Opening up more opportunities for more people, especially women, is progress. (And of course there is more progress to be made.)
But sometimes I like to imagine an alternative reality where gender equality didn’t mean everyone has to work. In this imaginary timeline, single income households are still common but are supported equally by men and women. Maybe 50% of married women are breadwinners and 50% are homemakers. And the same goes for married men, 50% work and 50% take care of the kids5. It's an equal world but one with mostly single-income households6. And in fact, it’d be a lot more equal than what we have today.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a better world to me. Everyone has the same opportunties, but fewer people are required to work in order to survive.
There are obviously a lot of financial, economic and cultural reasons we didn’t get that reality. And if you and your spouse both love working, that’s great. Do it. But I guess what I’m saying is that the rise of ubiquitous dual income households is a sad version of equality because a lot of people would apparently have preferred not to do wage labor. We’ve moved toward greater equality, but at some point went from increasing opportunities to imposing the worst case scenario — constant work — on moms and dads alike7.
Now, someone is going to read this and be like, “yeah duh the fantasy of less work is great, that’s obvious.” But I don’t actually see many people saying, “hey single income households are great and not mutually exclusive with gender equality.” Mostly, I see discourse focused on pushing every last adult into the workforce. Policy debates about things like childcare and parental leave, for example, are frequently about enabling more work, not creating a situation where work is less necessary. In other words, most family policy aims to enable more dual income households rather than making (egalitarian) single income households more feasible.
If everyone loved work that would be fine. But it’s bizarre how we’re trying to get more people working at the same moment when everyone also seems to be collectively saying they hate work.
How to never say goodbye to little kids
I have three kids right now, ages 4, 2 and 7 months. I find the baby stage challenging, but the older toddler and younger kid stage is amazing. It’s truly one of the very best things I’ve ever experienced. Though my 4 year old has her rough moments, she’s generally a pleasure to be around. My 2 year old is just learning to talk, and it’s so fun. It can be hard at times, but on balance I love being a dad to young kids.
When we’re out, I also end up hearing from a lot of other parents who similarly loved having young kids around. And many of these parents tell me to relish the experience while it lasts, because it passes quickly and never returns. I cannot count the number of times people have made comments like this.
To some extent that is and always has been true. Your own kids are only toddlers once.
But I’m also struck by how American living arrangements mean that many people never have any sustained contact with young kids after their own grow up. By encouraging everyone to branch out on their own, in their own houses and in pursuit of their own careers, we ensure that there is distance between generations. Sometimes this distance is just across town. In other cases, generations are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. And the result is that, yes, you really only experience the toddler stage once.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Adults could be having these fun relationships with their toddler family members for literally their whole lives. That was closer to the historical norm.
Imagine, if you will, a world in which it was more common for multiple generations to live together. A world in which multigenerational living was celebrated, rather than laughed at. This is a common arrangement in many cultures even today, but it’s not the quintessential vision of the American Dream (which is supported both culturally via popular media about nuclear families, and via policies that govern the housing sector etc.). And as a result many people have only a short window in their lives where they get to experience the unconditional love and glee that little kids bring to the world.
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Disclosure: I technically worked with the Try Guys at BuzzFeed. When they first started out, everyone at BuzzFeed in LA worked in the same big room on Beverly Boulevard. I was on the news team and they were on video (I think), but we were in generally the same space. To say I knew them would be a stretch, but we sometimes crossed paths in the snack room. I’m sure that now they have no idea who I am.
My take is that the rise of the wife guy has happened because there aren’t a lot of really high profile examples of positive masculinity out there. There are plenty of bad examples, but if you’re a man and you want to not be terrible, who are your role models? How many different flavors of good guy are there? Modeling yourself after, say, John Legend and becoming a wife guy might earn you some eye rolls, but you’ll basically be accepted as an upstanding member of polite society.
Love also wasn’t always the basis for marriage, and in fact has not typically been the basis for marriage until very recently.
This begs a question: What is a family enterprise? If you have a family business, it’s obvious. You want to keep the business afloat, perhaps increase revenue or whatever. But most of us don’t have family businesses, so we have to choose other objectives for our families. But I do think finding an objective on which the entire family can work together is a worthwhile pursuit. Think of it like the family’s thesis statement, to pull a metaphor from my own profession of writing. I’ll explore this in more depth in a future post.
There is a movement afoot to redefine household labor as “work.” And while I’m sympathetic to the aims of those efforts, it’s also still somewhat confusing to use the word “work” to refer to both wage labor and household labor. Like, if I say 50% of men work in the office and 50% work at home, does that mean they’re homemakers, or that they are working remote office jobs? I know people who are trying to work around this and figure out better terminology. But I also know that pretty much everyone will hear “work” and “home” and realize what I’m talking about. Hopefully it’s obvious (and I think it is for most people) that running the household is also a form of “work.”
In practice this would be an interesting experiment to see if there are any general preferences between men and women for the types of labor they do. In a world where men and women truly have equal opportunity (and things like equal pay) would men more often choose to work or homemake? What would women choose? Would it actually be 50/50? Right now women tend to drop out of the workforce more often, which isn’t fair but makes financial sense because men tend to earn more. My family did this; when my wife and I started having kids, my wife significantly cut back on her wage labor work because I earned a lot more than she did. But if that factor were eliminated, what might happen? I don’t know but it’s an interesting question to ponder.
There’s a trend on TikTok that uses a Bo Burnham song asking “How is the best case scenario, Joe Biden?” Users juxtapose it with images of some mediocre situation, with the implication being that the reality we got surely can’t be the best case scenario. That’s how I feel about work. How is the the best case scenario de facto mandatory dual income households?