Talking about 50:50! [AI External Video] [3 min read]

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This is yet another video find I came across on YouTube. I believe this particular video is useful because it shows what I believe, what I have come to understand is a common male failing. The husband requested a “50:50” marriage. For anyone unaware, that means a marriage where the husband and wife contribute equally to the bills. But then the wife continued doing all the housework as before, until she finally snapped and demanded that that should also be split equally.

Here is the flaw though: when he was dividing things equally, it genuinely did not occur to him to think of the housework usually completed by his wife as something that might also need to be divided. I can confidently state that this is a consistent flaw in male thinking, because it apparently happens all the time. There have been so many accounts of this happening online that I have read or watched – that the husband would demand 50:50, and then sit back and let his wife do all the housework in their supposedly 50:50 marriage. And then when the wife finally brings it up, the husband will typically look surprised or even shocked.
“Well all the housework…cooking…cleaning…those are just things that women do!” Or, sometimes women report that their husbands claim:”But I thought you liked to do that!”, “that” meaning any individual one or all of those tedious, unending, sometimes backbreaking jobs which all the same have to be done to keep a household running. Or maybe there is something which can be enjoyable when done every so often, at your leisure, but which becomes an absolute chore when it has to be done every day, to a strict schedule. It’s like the difference between a hobby and a job. So a wife could feasibly have told her husband at one point “I love to cook!” or “I find cleaning therapeutic!”, and could then still feel resentful if he just sat back and allowed her to do all the necessary said cooking or cleaning indefinitely.

I personally think you have to be careful about deriving lessons from fictional stories because they are after all made up, someone could simply have written their own agenda into the story they were writing, from their limited, finite perspective. However, something about AI is this: AI has access not only to all the fictional stories that people have made up but also the countless hours of footage that have been uploaded where people share their real stories and their real accounts of 50:50 marriages, or other problems in marriages. I am sure that the real stories vastly outnumber the made-up stories. And then whoever puts together the AI video can just simply prompt something generic like “create a story of a realistic problem that people might have in marriages” and AI will look through all the billions or even trillions of hours of data that it has on marriages and it will pull together a composite story from all those stories. Which is why many AI stories can be surprisingly realistic or accurate. This is why I think that this particular video presents a realistic, nuanced view of this subject, but it is still sympathetic to the husband, and shows he has sincere and well-meaning intentions and spoiler, this particular couple manages to work through their problems.

I hope that other similarly sincere and well-meaning husbands, husbands to be or would-be husbands will watch this video and take the lessons to heart, if they are not already demonstrating understanding about this subject.