@lurkerhasarisen

No doubt. It took a while for us to find the balance even after we were married. As I said: I grew up with a neat freak for a mother and she grew up with a pack-rat for a mother. I had been in uniform for several years by the time we met (including countless room inspections), and I literally had to teach her how to clean once we were married and living under the same roof. It was a little rocky even then because a level of untidiness that would break my brain wouldn't even register on hers She wasn't working at the time and had all day to keep a one-bedroom apartment in shape, so I really wasn't asking for much. She eventually caught on. Fine-tuning takes time and is probably not even be possible until you're living together.

Truth is, a much bigger adjustment was getting her to understand money. She was, quite literally, a farmer's daughter (farmhand, to be precise), and she grew up even poorer than I did. Suddenly she had all the money in the world (compared to what she had before we met), and I had to get her to understand that although a First Lieutenant made more than a farmhand, my income had real limits. The thing that finally caused her to have an epiphany was when I started making her write out checks for all of our bills.

Fortunately my wife understood the need to do certain things and refrain from doing other things, and complied even when she didn't see the point. That's honestly a bigger flag (green or red) than whether you mesh right off the bat. A ship can only have one captain: and both of you need to know that it's you.

That reads as a challenge I expect any man in a relationship to deal with. Being you're former military, was the woman you married an American herself or a foreigner?

@carnold03 No doubt. It took a while for us to find the balance even after we were married. As I said: I grew up with a neat freak for a mother and she grew up with a pack-rat for a mother. I had been in uniform for several years by the time we met (including countless room inspections), and I literally had to teach her how to clean once we were married and living under the same roof. It was a little rocky even then because a level of untidiness that would break my brain wouldn't even register on hers She wasn't working at the time and had all day to keep a one-bedroom apartment in shape, so I really wasn't asking for much. She eventually caught on. Fine-tuning takes time and is probably not even be possible until you're living together.

Truth is, a much bigger adjustment was getting her to understand money. She was, quite literally, a farmer's daughter (farmhand, to be precise), and she grew up even poorer than I did. Suddenly she had all the money in the world (compared to what she had before we met), and I had to get her to understand that although a First Lieutenant made more than a farmhand, my income had real limits. The thing that finally caused her to have an epiphany was when I started making her write out checks for all of our bills.

Fortunately my wife understood the need to do certain things and refrain from doing other things, and complied even when she didn't see the point. That's honestly a bigger flag (green or red) than whether you mesh right off the bat. A ship can only have one captain: and both of you need to know that it's you.

@lurkerhasarisen

I generally work from home and travel a couple of times a month. My wife works a regular job and punches a clock. I do most of the housework because, frankly, I don't have much else to occupy my time when I'm not traveling... plus it gets done the way I like it, I'm much more of a neat-freak than my wife is, too: a trait I inherited from my mother (her mother was a pack-rat / borderline hoarder). I've broken her of that tendency, but my tolerance for chaos and clutter is less than hers.

It's not "all work and no play" for me: In fact, she works a lot harder at her job than I do at mine, although I out-earn her by about 3-to-1. I spend my days surfing the net, working out (my squat rack is less than ten feet behind me), and sipping coffee and reading at a sidewalk cafe about a mile from my house.

When I was in uniform and she was a SAHW I expected her to do the housework - and she did. The mix of who-does-what has evolved over the 34 years we've been married, but it's pretty easy when you have two neat adults and a bunch of cleaning gadgets.

It reads like you and your wife have reached a good balance of give and take that works well for the family you two made a long time ago. The problem I've had is girls pretending to be women, making a game of it, angling for more of me than I believe they've earned.

@carnold03 @Eurm

I generally work from home and travel a couple of times a month. My wife works a regular job and punches a clock. I do most of the housework because, frankly, I don't have much else to occupy my time when I'm not traveling... plus it gets done the way I like it, I'm much more of a neat-freak than my wife is, too: a trait I inherited from my mother (her mother was a pack-rat / borderline hoarder). I've broken her of that tendency, but my tolerance for chaos and clutter is less than hers.

It's not "all work and no play" for me: In fact, she works a lot harder at her job than I do at mine, although I out-earn her by about 3-to-1. I spend my days surfing the net, working out (my squat rack is less than ten feet behind me), and sipping coffee and reading at a sidewalk cafe about a mile from my house.

When I was in uniform and she was a SAHW I expected her to do the housework - and she did. The mix of who-does-what has evolved over the 34 years we've been married, but it's pretty easy when you have two neat adults and a bunch of cleaning gadgets.

@WokeDown I, too, rarely watch movies, but what I've noticed is that when there is a series of movies they start out more overtly masculine (to attract their audience), then veer into left field, so to speak.

The original Captain America movie was unapologetically masculine... not surprising since it was set during WW2. I think that's true of several of the early offerings in the MCU. Later movies are much less so: Thor getting his ass kicked by a mere Valkyrie being one example of that. I don't think I've bothered to see another movie in that series since then.

Or take Star Wars. I was in junior high school when the original came out (the book was better, by the way), but after the long hiatus between the original trilogy and the movies that followed the entire tone changed to one of girl-power. After reading what red-pill guys said about them I didn't bother to watch any of them, even when I could do so for free.

Shoot... compare the LOTR trilogy (2001-2003) to the Hobbit trilogy (2012-2014). The latter created a major character (Tauriel) out of thin air so as to inject a female warrior and an inter-species love story. What a difference a decade made. Granted, The Return of the King (released in 2003) featured the shieldmaiden Éowyn in a significant supporting role, but the fact that she was a woman was vital to the plot, and even then she barely escaped with her life.

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The last movie I watched in a theater was Midway, and that was about as manly as it gets.

@WokeDown

Can someone explain to me how and why trannies got all this power in the west all of a sudden?

Short answer: It's their turn.

Long answer: Patriarchy is the only system that creates sustained progress in the long term. Despite that, there are a lot of people who don't like that (Smash the Patriarchy!!!!"), or who think they can improve on it. It's been going on for a very long time, and it's been incremental. It started with the "Tender Years Doctrine" that legally codified the idea that women are natural parents while men should shut up and be providers.

That was followed by allowing women to vote without requiring them to accept the responsibilities inherent in wielding political power (paying taxes and fighting in wars whether you want to or not). Even most guys in the manosphere react in horror at the thought of repealing the 19th Amendment and forcing women to accept responsibility for the power they possess at the ballot box.

But that question was settled a hundred years ago and nobody even thinks about it any more... but those were the first clicks of the ratchet. Women entering the workforce (largely during WW2) began the decades-long process of fundamentally changing the workplace from a place where men got things done to a place where women would never feel the slightest bit of discomfort or inconvenience.

Then it was determined that women should have the same educational opportunities as men (even though they tend to drop out of the workforce when babies arrive)... and the pendulum has swung so far that all levels of education are pink ghettos.

Then it was decided that women should not be expected to be sexually responsible (which meant that men were quickly divided into Alphas and Betas. I'm not a fan of the Greek-letter over-simplification - just making a point about the way women see us). It also meant that men had to pick up the slack regarding the consequences of the women's shirking of sexual responsibility (if you're both equally drunk then the man is guilty of rape, for example. Inability to decline parenthood like women can for another.)

Then it as decided that women should be able to leave their marriages for any reason or no reason at all and retain all the financial security "to which she has become accustomed."

Every step along that path was considered radical at the time, yet here we are looking at all of that as normal. Conservatives now find themselves defending the "right" of girls to get athletic scholarships ahead of boys who are vastly better athletes... a complete inversion of the natural order they claim to want to conserve.

Obviously by that point matriarchy had replaced patriarchy and women had become, "The First Sex" by any reasonable measure. But matriarchy doesn't work: it can coast along on the momentum of the patriarchy it displaced for a while, but that can't last. It did, however, open Pandora's Box... although a better metaphor might be that it created Frankenstein's monster, because once patriarchy is refuted there are no logical stopping points: if women can be "equal" to men, why can't everybody be equal to everybody? If marriage means nothing but a slight tax break, why not have same-sex "marriage?"

Which brings us to today. We have tacitly (and often explicitly) accepted the fiction that biological sex is irrelevant at best and discriminatory at worst. Since that is now the "Textus Receptus" of our legal system and Social "Science" curricula, by what reasoning can we deny that a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man by mere declaration?

Can someone explain to me how and why trannies got all this power in the west all of a sudden?

Again: it's just their turn... the next logical step on the path. It's not the last step, though: I expect to see a push to legalize polygamy pretty soon (indeed, there's even less reason to oppose that than there was to oppose gay "marriage"). Somewhere along the line we'll see pedos (or MAPs, as they like to call themselves) getting some traction.

Obviously the momentum will stop at some point and the whole edifice will collapse under its own weight, but it's too soon to tell which straw will break the camel's back.