MSNBC: ‘I’d trade my husband for a housekeeper’

Article here. Excerpt:

“People are actually less happy today than in the prior generation,” Joshua Coleman, Ph.D., author of The Lazy Husband, explains. “The first problem is expectations. Today we expect our partner to be everything to us. Our workout partner, our coach, our lover, our friend.” The next problem, Dr. Coleman says, is that we tend to enter into marriage with ludicrously overblown notions of what it will be like. We think we’ll have perfect communication; star-aligned value systems; great sex after kids; the perfect house; a long-lasting, healthy, best-friendship marriage... the list goes on and on. And while that’s all really nice, we need to get those visions out of our heads and start talking realistically about marriage if we want to be happy in it. Marriage and motherhood are difficult — but they can also be magical and worthwhile. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we’ve got to start acknowledging real marriage — flawed marriage — if we want to learn to enjoy the marriages we’ve got.
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Compounding the problem, many of us assumed our husbands had these same rosy expectations of marriage. In reality, many did not. As Bill, a father of two daughters, told us, “I have two little girls, and their favorite stories are about princesses getting married! Guys have a much less romantic view of marriage. When guys talk about marriage, we buy into this idea of ‘giving things up.’ We’re doing our duty. We go into [marriage] automatically thinking the romance is out of it. And I didn’t know it at first. It was a running joke: “Welcome to the team,” and all that. Your pals make fun of you and tell you what it’s really like. And later on you go, ‘Oh, you meant it?’ It’s tough — it’s a lot of work! Guys expect to work. This is just another form of work.”

Women, however, tend to think that finding the right person is the hard part of getting married, not the beginning of a life’s work. As Dr. Pat Covalt, author of What Smart Couples Know, explained to us, “I think what happens is we women are totally unrealistic about love and romance in marriage. We get caught up more in the gown that we’re going to wear than what our conflict management style is.”'