There’s a simple reason why so many women are a ball of rage

Why do modern women find marriage so difficult? This is the question that journalists, academics, politicians and, of course, husbands never tire of asking. The tone of the enquiry tends to be wellmeaning, dispassionate, data-driven – as if the problem is so puzzling that only complicated equations can solve it.

This week we learnt of a new study into marital relations by a professor of economics, no less. Dr Saurabh Bhargava, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, asked nearly 3,900 heterosexuals in committed relationships to record their feelings every half hour for 10 days. He then compared the responses of those in relatively new partnerships with those who had been together for more than three years.

Women in the older relationships showed a sharp reduction in romantic feelings: a drop of nearly 60 per cent. Among men, the decline was tiny: just 0.4 per cent. What could possibly explain such rapid disillusionment among the female of the species, while the male remains so steadfastly – touchingly – devoted?

To be fair to Dr Bhargava, he seems to have a pretty shrewd idea. His research also found that, as relationships mature, women spend more and more time doing household chores, while men are increasingly prone to napping and relaxation.

What’s annoying (apart from the inequity itself) is that this should still be news to anyone. Women have been complaining about it – howling about it, in books and articles, and in real life – for decades. But it seems there’s something about the pitch of the female voice that the world, and the husbands in it, can’t quite register.

The statistics are clear enough. In most couples, both sexes now go out to work. Yet when they get home, the women are six times more likely to do the laundry and five times more likely to do the cleaning. If they have children, the gap widens further – and further still, with each new arrival. A 2016 study in the US found that the average married woman with more than three children did 28 hours of housework per week: fully 18 hours more than her male counterpart. In fact, men with three children somehow contrive to do less housework than men who have no children at all.

Women so easily get caught in a pincer movement of internal and external pressures. You have a baby, and you love it, and you want to be with it as much as possible, even though it’s often boring and ruinous for your career. Since you’re at home much of the time anyway, you might as well put on a wash – and do the ironing, and cook the supper and pair up the socks and do the nursery applications and wipe down the surfaces and make the beds and host the playdates and fill in the permission slips and find the lost doggie and sweep up the Lego and put on another wash.

The more unpaid work you do, the less time you have for the paid variety. The man becomes, if he wasn’t already, the breadwinner – and now he has a justification for doing less housework than you. A hard knot of panic, resentment and self-reproach lodges, permanently, in your gut, as you realise you have delivered yourself into servitude. My sister calls it “the Ball of Rage”.

So here’s the scientific answer, men. Your wife is nursing a Ball of Rage. It doesn’t mean she no longer loves you. But it will make her feel at least 60 per cent less romantic.