Do Men Need a New Purpose?

And is it up to women to help them find it? Don't we do enough already?

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

This is a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. About half of my female friends are the breadwinner in their households or make significantly more than their spouses. All of them are married to wonderful and supportive spouses (well almost all of them…there’s like one dud), but navigating the “roles” of who does what for the family has almost universally been a challenge because a lot of this is brand new, uncharted territory of who does what and how and, most importantly, how do we feel about it.

But let’s face facts. I live in a bougie progressive bubble most of the damn time. Still….I see many of the men around me struggling with the concepts of purpose and their roles in society and in a family.

The Wall Street Journal published a piece last week about the “House Husbands” (dumb name) who support their corporate finance exec wives. It’s definitely worth a read for the stats alone.

For the men, being a househusband can come with a stigma: Society often still assumes men will be the bigger earners and women the primary caregivers. But that is starting to change.

In 45% of U.S. opposite-sex marriages, the wife earns as much as or more than her husband, a share that has roughly tripled over the past 50 years, according to a 2023 report from Pew Research Center. Dads represented 18% of stay-at-home parents in 2021, up from 11% in 1989, another Pew study found.

Many couples say they started out with parallel professions but reached a point at which the woman’s career accelerated. When one person needed to devote more time to parenting, it made more sense for it to be the man. 

But, I would argue, these kinds of arrangements are often happening within highly educated, progressive-minded couples.

I was listening to The Daily the other day where they tackled the record breaking gender divide between young men and women in America when it comes to politics.

More and more young men are voting Republican than ever before. The Daily talked to a handful of these guys and their answers were very similar. They all said they felt like their purpose in life and their place in society was shaped by being able to “provide” for a family so that their partner didn’t have to work. They thought that Trump/Vance supported these kinds of values and would also help them get the kinds of jobs that would allow them the financial security to do this.

Lots of thoughts on this. The first is that I felt true empathy for these young dudes. None of them were actually married yet. They didn’t have kids yet. But this ideal of a “strong” man supporting a family with their wife at home with kids was burned into their brains. And I get that because I don’t think they’ve had a lot of other models out there to look towards.

Think about it. How often do we see a sitcom with a dual income family where everyone contributes equally to the business of keeping a family running? And if we do see that how often does it look aspirational?

And how often do we see women as the parent working outside of the home and men as the lead parent within the home?

Never.

Men have been told since the beginning of men that their role is provider with a capital P. Not caregiver or support system. Not community builder or memory keeper. Not connector or friend.