The role of women used to be to stay at home, look after the children and cook and clean. Times have changed and women are now expected to work whilst still doing all the above.
Relationships on Female First
Something has to give, and Denise Richards says that it’s a woman’s marriage that will suffer from all of the stress placed upon her.
She recently wrote in a Radio Times article, “Careers have given women independence, but gone is the tranquil world my mother knew,’ she writes in an article for the Radio Times.
“In most two-career homes, it is women who still bear most of the domestic responsibility. And not always because the man is lazy – there is an in-built compulsion in some women to remain domestic goddesses while holding down a demanding job.”
The agony aunt believes that women often put more effort into their marriages because they were under a lot less stress when without a job.
Now, households often require both partner’s to have to a job in order to provide for their family, pay a mortgage and live a comfortable lifestyle.
Not all marriages were happy as Larry back when a woman would stay at home, and Denise acknowledges that women would stay because they had nothing to leave for, but now that’s changed.
She said, “If I am right in thinking marriages in previous generations endured because the woman, in particular, had no means of escape, it was inevitable that women’s hard-won economic independence would make them unwilling to stay in an arrangement that had become unbearable.”
Marriages are also a lot easier to leave these days in terms of legality. Divorces are so easy to obtain that it allows for people to simply leave if they can’t deal with the pressure or are unhappy.
So does your independence have to cost you your marriage? Denise believes not, she’d rather believe that couples are just no longer trying hard enough to keep it together.
She said, “Leaving simply because you can is defeatist and if our new independence makes us less likely to see marriage as a life-long commitment, that is sad.”
Do you believe that you have to choose between and career and independence or a marriage? Let us know your thoughts by commenting below or tweeting us @FemaleFirst_UK
Cara Mason
tagged in Marriage Love career Relationship