@Eternity this post has spoilers. Don’t read it until after you go through stuff from my earlier posts.
You should do brainstorming exercises in the future. Maybe after paragraph trees.
The hair/clothes/makeup answer is a typical one but I think it’s part of a societal bias. It omits some common stuff which makes the woman look better and the man worse. It doesn’t explain being late very well as I think you were saying regarding organization (if one person always takes 60 minutes to get ready, and another always takes 15 minutes, they can both be on time every time using a simple strategy). And it also doesn’t discuss why women spend that much time on hair/clothes/makeup.
One thing that happens is sometimes women aren’t actually late. They just spend a long time getting ready and men complain. One reason this may happen is the man and woman may start getting ready at around the same time, so the guy finishes early, then feels like he’s waiting for her. In that case, the man may have started getting ready too early.
Another thing that happens is the man doesn’t help with a bunch of stuff that both the man or woman could do. He’s waiting and complaining while she’s doing things that aren’t just for herself such as getting/preparing snacks for the whole family which she’ll be the one to bring and carry. She’s also the one who brings aspirin, moist toilettes, and a variety of other things like she often has the tickets and knows the itinerary which she planned. She’s also the one who e.g. keeps track of the food allergies of everyone in the family. Another thing men reasonably often don’t help with, but could, is dealing with the babysitter.
Even when people are unmarried with no kids, it’s reasonably common that the man is irresponsible with his health, and the woman pushes him to go to the doctor, keeps track of his medical conditions and medications for him, and also pushes him to eat healthier. If the doctor instructs the man to eat lower cholesterol, it may well be his girlfriend trying to make that happen while he often forgets or tries to cheat. (Some of these things are a lot less common with people under 25 or 30, and with unmarried and childless people. But the people in the reddit post are early 30s with 5 years of marriage behind them, so it’s likely that even without any children the woman is doing some responsible adult stuff not just youthful partying behaviors.)
I’ve described some of the “mental burden” women often face. The man writing this reddit post complained about the “mental burden” of subtracting 40 minutes from a clock time as if it were comparable to the burdens women have. That wasn’t an accident; he was using a trendy term (also called “mental load”) with a specific meaning to try to say basically “men (or at least some like me) have burdens too” and to try to claim to be a victim of a big burden comparable to how women often are (he’s using a grievance that is currently considered legitimate by a lot of people including a lot of the reddit audience – but it doesn’t actually apply to him and he’s showing his male privilege by trying to claim to have that problem when his problem is much smaller so it shows he doesn’t actually understand the size of the mental burden women are complaining about). Besides using the term “mental burden” he said it’s “mentally exhausting for me to always have to stay on top of making sure we both get ready according to plan” which is basically falsely claiming to be the oppressed woman in the relationship – he’s trying to steal her victimhood when she’s probably carrying more of the mental load than he is. If you think victimhood or feminism stuff is dumb or problematic, note that he brought it up and used its terminology and tried to apply it to himself (if the underlying stuff is wrong, and then he wrongly applies it to himself, he’s wrong twice).
Regarding unequal burdens and why women are late, you can read lots of stories on reddit that go kind of like this: “We were having a dinner party. While I was trying to get the house ready before the guests arrived, my husband decided to repair the shed in our back yard. I had asked for help but that’s what he did instead. He was avoiding helping with anything relevant so I had to do everything.”
Another typical story is “My husband has weaponized incompetence or learned helplessness. When getting ready for guests, he can’t think of any tasks to do by himself. To get any help, I have to tell him every task that he should do, one at a time. After he’s done with a task, I have to check that he did it acceptably and around half the time I have to redo it, and I have to find him and assign a next task. This applies to any sort of task related to cooking or cleaning – he won’t take initiative or learn how to do them well. This is so much hassle that it’s easier to do everything myself, which seems to be the point. He’ll then complain when I’m still putting on makeup when the first guest arrives.”
Why doesn’t the woman know how long her routine will take to get ready and start early enough? There are some reasons that doesn’t always work well. But it sounds like in this case she has been starting early enough and been consistent with how long she takes, and they’ve been on time to things. The man is trying to take credit for that and say he’s doing all the work to get her there on time, but he’s just doing a bit of communication while she’s the one who actually does hair/clothes/makeup, plus influencer stuff, plus whatever else she does that the man didn’t mention (like bringing snacks and medicine) and she apparently keeps finishing on time until this one exception on her birthday where something went wrong. But all the other times recently, it sounds like the raw facts are she started early enough and wasn’t late, but the man isn’t giving her any credit and considers her terrible at time management.
Here’s an example of a way that a woman might start early enough, but end up a little late anyway, and be blamed for it. Her stuff takes an hour. She gets ready just on time. The man was waiting and complaining for the last half hour of it instead of either helping with anything or doing better time management by planning out an activity that’d take the right amount of time so he wouldn’t be bored waiting. His complaints slow her down but she gave herself a bit of extra time for that so she manages to get ready just on time. Then she comes to the front door and he says “finally” and starts getting his shoes, coat, wallet and keys and delays her by 2 minutes. Then they get to the car and he remembers that he forgot his water bottle, so he goes back in and delays her another 3 minutes. Then they’re 5 minutes late. Then he says that she took an hour to get ready, so it’s her fault that they’re late. If only she’d been ready earlier, they would have been on time. She caused over 30 minutes of delay, while he caused only 5 minutes of delay, so their lateness is clearly her fault. He might complain on reddit about her poor time management and leave out the 5 minutes of delay that he caused since he thinks that was normal/reasonable and didn’t cause any lateness since he was ready 30 minutes early then wasted 5 minutes at the end so he still had 25 minutes of buffer left for himself. (Similarly, there could be a getting ready task she thought he was going to do. She finds out at the last minute that he didn’t do it, so she does it, but then she’s a little late and he blames her.)
And then also, the other thing I wanted to bring up is why women spend that much time on hair/clothes/makeup. How would the man like it if she didn’t do that? He wants her to do it, and would complain if she didn’t do it, but he also complains about the time it takes her to do it, and doesn’t try to be helpful and do his best to carry half the burden. He wants her to look hot, without him participating/helping, and without it taking any extra time or being an inconvenience to him. It’s kind of a milder version of the stories I’ve seen about 50’s housewives who woke up early before their husband, put on makeup, and got back in bed, every morning, so that he’d never see her without makeup (and also never be inconvenienced by waiting for her to put on makeup – she does it at a time that is hidden from him and entirely her burden just like when they were first dating and lived apart).
Men could learn more about clothes/hair/makeup and actually help her get ready competently as her girl friends no doubt could. Or they could try to maximize how much of all the other getting ready tasks they do in order to even out the load as much as possible given the hair/clothes/makeup part is fully done by the woman. They could see the woman doing hair/clothes/makeup as the bottleneck and try to take all work away from the bottleneck that doesn’t have to be done by the bottleneck. Or they could not help but not be judgmental. Or they could not help, complain, and be judgmental. Or they could blame her in a thorough way, say or imply that they the man are the rational one while women like her are fundamentally irrational, and be really aggressive and pushy about their framing.
The whole implied framing of the reddit post is that it’s another case of a rational man trying to deal with an irrational woman, and I think you and others here (and many redditors) accepted some of that while you also saw some of the man’s flaws too like him being mean. But I don’t accept the basic idea that he’s good and rational at time management while she isn’t. It seems more likely that he’s incompetent at time management, has no idea what a bottleneck is and how to handle it, doesn’t even know all the stuff she does that’s beneficial for him, isn’t approaching the issue cooperatively as a teammate to her, and takes credit for her being consistently ready on time despite him not helping much (he was just doing a small portion of the work with some communication which he decided was too much burden for him so he decided to entirely stop helping plus likely something about how he did the change misled her in this case). He’s likely equally rational or less rational than her (based on his post, I’d estimate him at below average rationality while thinking he’s well above average. Whereas based on her apparently getting ready on time a lot while also doing influencer stuff and having a jerk for a husband, and also having some success at gaining social media followers which is hard, I’d estimate her rationality a little above average. Marrying him is a bad sign but not a reason to think she’s worse than him.)
@lmf There’s more analysis FYI since you complained about the limited detail in my original post. I think it was reasonably predictable that there would be more even if you didn’t participate in the discussion, plus it’s a weird thing to complain about when I was open to discussion and also my original analysis was adequate to reach one of the typical success outcomes with you: finding a significant point of disagreement.
