Women aren't giving up on love. They're giving up on the deal.

Something important is changing in heterosexual relationships, and it is not adequately explained by saying that women have become more demanding, that dating apps have ruined commitment, or that feminism has convinced women they do not need men.

Women have not suddenly stopped wanting love, companionship, sex, marriage or families. What appears to be changing is their willingness to accept a relationship structure that asks them to participate as modern equals economically while continuing to behave like traditional wives domestically.

That distinction matters. For generations, heterosexual marriage operated around a relatively obvious — if deeply unequal — division of labour. Men were expected to provide financially. Women performed most of the childcare, housework, emotional support, family administration and invisible labour required to keep a household functioning.

Then women's economic lives changed.

Women entered universities and workplaces in unprecedented numbers, built careers, started businesses and became financially independent. In many households, a woman's income is not supplementary. It is essential to the family's standard of living.

The domestic revolution has not necessarily kept pace.

The result is a strange halfway version of equality in which women gained another role without fully relinquishing the old one. Increasing numbers of women seem to be asking a perfectly reasonable question: if I am expected to earn like a modern woman, why am I still expected to serve like a traditional wife?

Women did not necessarily lose the old job when they got the new one

This conversation can increasingly be measured rather than simply argued.

Pew Research found that women earn approximately the same as or more than their husbands in 45% of opposite-sex marriages in the United States. Even among marriages where husbands and wives earn roughly the same amount, wives spend about two additional hours each week on caregiving and another two and a half additional hours on housework, while husbands enjoy approximately three and a half additional hours of leisure.

When the wife is the primary breadwinner, she averages slightly more paid working hours than her husband and still spends more time on caregiving and housework, while her husband has almost nine additional hours of leisure every week.

Nine hours is another working day.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics tells a similar story. In 2024, 87% of women performed some form of household activity on an average day compared with 74% of men, and women continued to spend considerably more time specifically on housework. Among adults living with children under six, women averaged around three hours of primary childcare per day compared with around two hours for men.

None of this means that men contribute nothing, or that every household looks the same. Men have substantially increased their contribution to childcare and domestic work over the generations, and there are millions of highly involved husbands and fathers.

The more interesting question is whether women's domestic responsibilities have decreased at the same rate that their economic responsibilities have increased.

Frequently, they have not.

The problem is not necessarily housework. It is ownership

One reason couples can have completely different perceptions of whether they share fairly is that visible chores are relatively easy to count, while responsibility is much harder to see.

A father might take his child to every dental appointment and reasonably consider dentistry a shared parenting task. His partner, however, may be the person who realised the child was due, found the dentist, registered the family, booked the appointment, put it in the calendar, remembered to tell school, reminded him the night before, and then arranged the recommended treatment.

He performed the task.

She owned the responsibility.

The same distinction runs through family life. Cooking dinner is visible; noticing that there is nothing for dinner tomorrow is not. Taking a child to a birthday party is visible; maintaining enough awareness of their social world to know whose birthday it is, buying the present, replying to the invitation and remembering they need to arrive as a pirate is not.

This is why "you should have asked me" can become such an inflammatory sentence in a long-term relationship.

On the surface it sounds cooperative. Underneath it can contain an assumption that one adult remains responsible for noticing, planning and allocating the family's work while the other waits to receive instructions.

A woman who says she does not want to have to ask her husband to do things is not necessarily expecting telepathy. She may simply be saying: I do not want to be the manager of our shared life while you wait for assignments.

Motherhood can expose inequalities that dating concealed

Before children, it is relatively easy for two people to feel as though they have created an equal relationship. There are fewer moving parts, considerably less administration, and usually more discretionary time.

Then a baby arrives and the household becomes a small organisation operating twenty-four hours a day.

Somebody needs to understand feeding, sleeping, clothes sizes, vaccinations, nursery, developmental milestones, medical appointments, school communications, activities, friendships, emotional difficulties, birthday parties, childcare, and the astonishing number of tiny practical details involved in raising another person.

This is often when one parent quietly becomes the default parent.

You can usually identify that person because the entire family begins using them as a human search engine.

Where are my shoes? Ask Mum. What time are we leaving? Ask Mum. Can I go to my friend's house? Ask Mum. When is swimming? Ask Mum. What are we doing this weekend? Ask Mum.

The burden is not simply answering those questions. It is being the person expected to know the answers.

When one adult becomes the repository for the family's needs, schedules, preferences, belongings and emotional states, it should not be surprising if that person eventually feels less like an individual within the family and more like its operating system.

Then we wonder what happened to desire

This is one of the places where conversations about relationships become strangely disconnected.

A couple says they have a libido problem, so they begin discussing date nights, lingerie, hormones, novelty and how often they should have sex.

Sometimes those things matter.

But sexual desire also exists inside a relational dynamic, and it can be remarkably difficult to experience somebody erotically when you increasingly experience them as another person you have to manage.

If a woman has spent the afternoon reminding her husband about an appointment, asking him repeatedly to complete a household task, explaining something concerning their child and picking up after him, expecting her to experience him as an autonomous, sexually compelling adult several hours later may be asking a lot of the human nervous system.

There is something fundamentally unsexy about feeling like somebody's mother.

Sometimes what appears to be a bedroom problem actually began years earlier in the kitchen, the laundry, the family calendar, or the hundredth conversation in which one partner asked the other to start noticing what needs to be done.

The emotional apprenticeship can be exhausting too

Domestic labour is only part of this. Some women also find themselves becoming responsible for the emotional development of the relationship.

They notice that the couple has become disconnected. They initiate the difficult conversations. They suggest counselling, find the therapist, buy the book, send the podcast, introduce the vocabulary, and repeatedly attempt to teach healthier ways of managing conflict.

There is nothing inherently wrong with teaching your partner something. One of the privileges of intimacy is that we influence one another.

The problem emerges when development becomes persistently one-directional and one partner effectively becomes responsible for dragging the relationship towards emotional maturity.

At some point the question becomes uncomfortable: am I growing alongside another adult, or am I supervising their development?

Those are very different relationships.

Women's financial independence changed the bargain

This may be the most important part of the story.

For much of history, women were not free to evaluate marriage purely according to the quality of the relationship, because marriage provided access to economic and social infrastructure that could be extremely difficult — and sometimes legally impossible — to obtain independently.

Marriage provided housing, financial security, social legitimacy and protection. Leaving a bad marriage could mean poverty, social exclusion or losing access to one's children. Remaining unmarried could severely restrict a woman's economic future.

Under those conditions, mediocre marriages had an extraordinary structural advantage: women often could not afford to leave them.

That advantage has weakened.

When a woman can earn money, rent or buy a home, maintain a bank account, build a pension and raise children independently, she gains the ability to ask a question that many of her female ancestors were never genuinely free to ask:

Does this relationship make my life better?

That does not mean effortless, permanently romantic or perfectly equal. Good relationships involve sacrifice, inconvenience and periods when one person carries far more than the other.

The question is whether, taken as a whole, the partnership increases or decreases her capacity.

Can she become ill without the household falling apart? Can she pursue a demanding opportunity without preparing everybody else for her absence? Can she rest without first organising the conditions that make her rest possible? Can her partner take full responsibility for their children without receiving a briefing? When she is struggling, does somebody notice her, or is she still responsible for noticing everyone else?

Those are much harder questions for an unequal relationship to survive.

This may also explain something apparently paradoxical about divorce

Single motherhood is extraordinarily demanding, so it can seem counterintuitive when divorced women say that life became easier after leaving a marriage.

Workload is not simply the number of tasks somebody performs.

There is an enormous psychological difference between doing something because you know it is your responsibility, and doing it while looking across the room at another capable adult who has implicitly decided it is yours.

There is also the labour involved in trying to change the imbalance: asking, reminding, arguing, explaining, becoming disappointed, attempting another system, lowering expectations, and eventually doing it yourself.

A woman can therefore leave a marriage, continue doing many of the same practical tasks, and nevertheless experience a reduction in psychological burden because she has removed the expectation that another adult should be participating.

Some women are not discovering after divorce that they can do everything alone.

They are discovering that they were already doing an extraordinary amount alone.

And this is where the dating conversation becomes interesting

We frequently hear that women are too picky, have unrealistic standards, prioritise their careers too much, or have become so independent that they no longer "need" men.

Perhaps female independence is not the problem.

Perhaps independence simply removed the subsidy that allowed mediocre relationships to remain competitive.

If a woman can provide for herself, build friendships, create a home, travel, parent and construct a meaningful life independently, then a prospective partner is not primarily competing against other men.

He is competing against the quality of the life she can create without him.

That is a much higher bar than previous generations of men faced.

It also explains why telling women that they will "end up alone" does not necessarily have the persuasive power it once did. The threat only works if being alone is perceived as worse than being badly partnered.

Increasingly, some women are not convinced that it is.

Women are not necessarily rejecting men. They may be withdrawing free labour

That is the more precise way to understand what is happening.

For centuries, heterosexual marriage depended heavily upon women's unpaid labour. Modern economies gradually removed women's financial dependence on men without simultaneously redesigning family life around the disappearance of the full-time female caregiver.

We therefore created the two-income family without always creating the two-adult household.

For a while, women absorbed the difference.

They worked, organised, nurtured, remembered, anticipated, accommodated and carried. When the strain became unbearable, we told them to rest more, communicate their needs more clearly, and perhaps download an app.

Increasingly, some women appear to be choosing another solution.

They are refusing the arrangement.

Not necessarily marriage itself, and not love, but the assumption that loving a man should require providing him with a level of domestic, administrative and emotional service that he would never be expected to provide in return.

The future of marriage may depend on this reckoning

None of this requires relationships to become perfectly 50/50.

Human relationships do not work like spreadsheets. Pregnancy is not 50/50. Breastfeeding is not 50/50. Illness is not 50/50. Careers surge and retreat, children go through difficult periods, parents become sick, and sometimes one partner has almost nothing left to give.

Equality is not everybody performing exactly half of every task.

It is two adults who understand that the life they have created belongs equally to both of them, and that neither person's time, rest, career or wellbeing is automatically more expendable than the other's.

There are already enormous numbers of men living this way. Those men may be far better positioned for the next era of relationships, because women's independence is not a threat to a genuine partnership.

It is only a threat to relationships that depended upon women having fewer choices.

The uncomfortable truth may therefore be that women are not abandoning heterosexual relationships because their standards have become impossibly high.

Their standards may simply be catching up with their circumstances.

If a woman can earn, organise, nurture, remember, anticipate, parent and provide for herself, she has much greater freedom to ask what another adult actually contributes to her life.

A loving, competent, emotionally mature partner has an extraordinary answer to that question.

A relationship that still runs on her unpaid labour increasingly does not.