The Marriage Counseling Blog

Gender roles are learned behaviors that have been reinforced in social groups, especially family. For Sean and Debby, the difference in their learned Gender roles played a large part in the disruption of their marriage.

Debby said:

Growing up, there was a clear division of girl chores and boy chores in our home. My mother cooked and cleaned and took care of us kids. My dad worked and took care of the outside chores and fixing anything that needed to be fixed. You might think that my sisters and brothers and I were all raised to believe in those same roles, but that wasn’t really the case. My father made sure that all of us, including the girls, knew how to change a tire and the oil in a car. He made sure that my brothers knew how to do laundry and cook a meal and every single one of us, to our great dismay, had to take turns with lawn chores. Strangely, my father made it very, very clear that, while he liked his marriage the way it was, he expected that none of us would ever need to depend on a husband (or wife) to fill a need for us. He made sure we went to good colleges and had great careers. Marriage wasn’t a career choice for women, is what he said.

Sean, on the other hand, was raised in a traditional gender-divided household that reinforced gender roles.

My mother worked until she started having us kids. After that, my Dad told her that she needed to stay home to raise my brother and I. I don’t ever remember having to learn to cook or clean anything. That was all taken care of by my mom. My father talked about careers and sports and finance. I’m not a male pig or anything, I always believed that a person can do whatever they want to, regardless of gender, but honestly I guess that, looking back, that didn’t include myself.

The problems in this marriage came about when Debby was enthusiastically juggling both a high-end career and raising a family as well as taking part in many masculine-gender type of roles such as maintenance. Sean, however, was not crossing that same gender divide and was only fulfilling the traditional male role in the household, essentially leaving Debby with twice the workload.

Marriage counseling was very helpful in assisting this couple by looking at their gender role expectations and finding a compromise that would work in their lives, regardless of tradition.

Related Posts

• Gender Roles in Marriage
• Traditional Roles Meet Couples Counseling
• Marriage Counseling and Traditional Roles
• Counseling – When the Roles Change
• Counseling at the Right Time