I could go on for days about women in the work force, the construct of gender and gender roles. I can give you anecdotal information about the stay at home dads I know and the very happy marriages and lives they have. I could talk about the false narrative most people have been fed regarding hunter/gather society and how paleo-anarchal societies are far more egalitarian and non-monogamous than they were taught as children. But it's irrelevant because like trying to gender marriage problems it's pointless. Relationship dynamics are rarely influenced by gender roles and are far more influenced by the issues of the people in them like communication, caretaking work load, mental illness, trauma, personal history, etc.
Bad people do bad things because they are bad people not because their spouse was too feminine or masculine. Good people make a series of mistakes because for any number of reasons they become self focused and lack empathy, not because their spouse treated them too well. People in crisis behave irrationally and do completely illogical things regardless of reproductive organs.
No one should waste their time feeding into gender dynamics when they could be doing a lot more work on themselves. And in particular Steve should not feed into gender roles being the crux of the problems in the MR when we can all see the the biggest issue is the stbxw. Just as a whole. She's a walking red flag of a human person. She was the problem. She is the problem. And all the Monday morning quarterbacking in the world trying to deconstruct the MR to find what went wrong will not help moving forward and beyond the chaos here. DBing and whole lot of IC is the only path here.
