Husband Demands Wife Follow 'Gender Roles' to Keep Him Happy

A 22-year-old woman on Reddit was shocked after her 29-year-old husband told her that she needs to follow traditional "gender roles" to keep him happy.

Content warning: Emotional abuse

"I have been with my partner for coming up on three years, and our daughter is 4 months old. He makes sure to let me know how lazy I am, even though I’m the only one to care for our daughter or clean our house. He works a lot and when he comes home, he spends a couple hours on the game and he might hold our daughter for a couple minutes," she wrote.

Her husband has demanded that since she's a stay-at-home mom, when he comes home she should have "dinner made, the dogs and pig should be fed, watered (obviously), and walked."

"Trash should be burned. Dishes should be clean. Floor swept and mopped. His other kids' rooms clean. Every surface wiped down. He also says that there ARE gender roles and this is what a woman should do to keep her man happy," she continued.

Her husband believes she doesn't "deserve to be loved on" until she has completed all the chores and the baby has been put to bed.

"Our daughter won’t take a bottle and he won’t help me with bottles so I can’t go back to work but I’m also not helping financially. He doesn’t stay up with our daughter. If I don’t initiate sex, we don’t have sex. He straight up said he won't touch me in ways that please me because he’s 'not in high school,'" she explained.

The woman's husband says it's "disrespectful" if the house isn't clean when he comes home, or the baby "has been a little fussy." He also often calls her a "fat, lazy waste of space."

"I don’t text him throughout the day telling him sweet little nothings, so I must not love him. I can’t choose between being a mom and a partner even though sometimes I have to because my daughter ISN'T CAPABLE OF CARING FOR HERSELF," she concluded.

Users tried to comfort the woman in the comments, with many suggesting she divorce her husband.

"I'm going to go ahead and say there's a reason why his other baby mama is proudly wearing her title of EX and you should probably go ahead and explore that same title and also wear it with pride once achieved," one person wrote.

"He is definitely gaslighting and abusing you," another commented.

"He thinks real men would side with him because in his mind, he is a mature male figure of a traditional household. He ain't even traditional at all if he treats his wife like that," someone else chimed in.