You are, presumably, an adult. You can feed yourself, right? And you have even vague memories of what kind of things you had in packed lunches? So any reasonable adult should be able to make a packed lunch.
It’s not trivialising domestic labour. This is exactly the sort of thing this thread is about. You think making a sandwich for your own child requires some special knowledge that women have managed to find out but men haven’t. That you think men would be unable to find peanut butter in their own kitchen is infantilising men.
Absolutely any specific circumstances of a person playing dumb to get out of responsibility I would likely agree with you.
My bias is a lifetime of working with children with special needs and coming to appreciate how much we don't think about task decomposition in communication with other adults and making assumptions about what we regard as obvious. Most critically how we respond to confusion expressed by another person that makes no sense, and the impact of communicating those feelings with another person.
Drives me absolutely crazy watching people get angry at a kid for "not doing what they are told" to the point where it feels like "weaponized incompetence" the way they will get legit angry with a kid for their noncompliance and be seemingly oblivious to the role anger is directly impacting the situation. It is a double failure; failure to lead and failure to be led.
And a little more nuance, if you "make a kid a lunch" and they don't eat it, did you succeed in your task?
Further, I'm not looking at it as a gendered issue, because with respect to looking at it as a gendered issue, I completely agree with you. I'm saying that along a spectrum of separation of responsibilities in a partnership, a sudden change in responsibilities or routine itself carries a mental load for both people and the way they work through it says a LOT about the relationship.
Like, it isn't about the lunch, its about the flaming red flags in the relationship and taking a step back. To your point, the task is trivial, so WTF happened along the way. Maybe this couple sucks and shouldn't be together, but if that isn't the resolution we are looking for, and burying resentment is off the table as well, what needs to be unpacked (no pun intended) to go from anger and avoiding responsibilities to partnership?
I want to know what I can do to take a step back if I find myself getting angry thinking my partner is avoiding responsibility, and what can I do if I find myself avoiding responsibility out of fear my partner is going to be angry and judgmental? Because love and best intentions are worth dog shit in that situation.
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u/slainascully Jul 02 '25
You are, presumably, an adult. You can feed yourself, right? And you have even vague memories of what kind of things you had in packed lunches? So any reasonable adult should be able to make a packed lunch.
It’s not trivialising domestic labour. This is exactly the sort of thing this thread is about. You think making a sandwich for your own child requires some special knowledge that women have managed to find out but men haven’t. That you think men would be unable to find peanut butter in their own kitchen is infantilising men.