When you don't want to do something, but you also don't want to be blamed for not doing it, you can transfer the blame to someone who isn't there.
Boss wants to go out drinking after work which is his idea of 'team building' but you don't feel like it right now? "Well gee boss I'd love to come, but my wife's expecting me home by 7pm. Happy wife happy life, right?"
About 75% of the time when you hear people in the workplace saying "happy wife happy life" what they actually mean is "thanks for the offer but no thanks, and don't bother trying to cajole or peer-pressure me"
(Veterans at transferring blame will go even further, transferring blame to abstract concepts like 'market conditions' and 'company policy' )
> You’re socializing around your wife being abusive.
Not at all, for all they know you're living some 1950s lifestyle where your wife has dinner on the table just as you get home, and it'll be cold if you're late. Or if they prefer, they can imagine you're a progressive modern father, going home to change diapers and help with bedtime. Or they can imagine you're deeply in love, and eager not to disappoint your best friend in the whole world.
There really is nothing abusive about a man saying he likes his wife to be happy. Making an effort to make the other person happy and them making an effort to make you happy is the whole point of a relationship, isn't it?
I’m good at cheering people up and making them laugh. You can’t make people happy ESPECIALLY women. You’re just setting yourself up for failure. All you can do is support people and enable good decisions so that they can learn how to have a fulfilling life.
I don't think it needs to be "wife" other than to rhyme. Having a happy partner instead of an unhappy partner (regardless of gender) is certainly better (speaking from experience).
Marriage has for most of its history been an arrangement for securing alliances and ensuring transfer of generational wealth. Since the sexual revolution [1] the pendulum has swung completely back the other way and attitudes toward marriage have focused almost exclusively on romance. The problem since then is that hormonally-driven romantic attachment is fleeting and unreliable, so security of relationships has dropped dramatically.
If people want to have a long-lasting and successful marriage they need to be clear-eyed and pragmatic about it. The fact that Hollywood makes a fortune selling romantic stories has not helped!
And now forced marriage is included in the category of modern day slavery. Marriage is work but it’s not a hostage negotiation situation. I see a lot of guys crushed by marriage, this idea that it pure benefits men is nonsense.
Honestly, the relationships are similar. They both require a lot of trust and companionship to be successful, you spend a lot of time with both people but in very different ways
Same... Or that the husband is objectifying the wife as a thing that just needs to be kept happy, regardless of what the husband actually truly thinks. Inauthentic.
It always reminds me of that creepy old Lana Turner quote “A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.”
I don’t think it’s suppose to sound like that. At least for me and the situations I have heard it, it’s a genuine expression that if you make your partner happy, it’ll also make your life (together) happy.
It works very well for me. We both appreciate each other and actively make an effort to make one another happy.
