It's not just their assumptions.

This follows on a piece titled The Assumptions Your Spouse Makes. You may also wish to read Trined.

I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and married a total fucking loser who is probably a twice exceptional individual with a very high IQ but with problems, so he can't really make his life work and live up to that hypothetical potential without a personal live in servant. AKA traditional little wifey supporting his career.

What follows are probably stereotypical feminist complaints that most men are big babies looking for a mommy and calling her their wife. If you are AMAB, please realize I'm trying to help YOU achieve the goals YOU want and wherever you go, there you are, sweetie. (That's Southern for RETARD in this case.)

Men complain that women are only after their money and are all gold digging whores. Men are collectively the gatekeepers of earned income and don't want to take women seriously as people who want serious careers and the income that goes with it, then are OFFENDED when bitches survey their options -- "Whore myself out to him and help make his career succeed OR be homeless and potentially get raped twice a day everyday by countless random strangers." -- and decide to be your bitch though they resent it and don't really like you. 

I spent several years prior to getting married at age 19 to another 19 year old plotting to get a real career and support myself. I wasn't after my loser boyfriend's money. He didn't have any. I paid for most of our dates and covered the $300 in costs involved in our quiet little elopement.

We were best friends for a year before we slept together. For the next like nine years or whatever, I believed I initiated our relationship because I initiated sex that first time. After having two kids and buying a house together, I finally learned he picked a fight with me over the pronunciation of a word when we were sixteen "as an excuse to talk to a pretty girl."

So much for my liberated woman internal narrative. I'm an IDIOT. 

But as far as I could tell at the time, my relationship met a very high bar for high school sweethearts, true love, blah blah blah. He had NOTHING when I married him. To this day, I cannot imagine a better start to a marriage between a couple of kids if you're imagining "We shall be partners supporting each other's dreams and it will be a two-career couple lifestyle."

So I wasn't after his money nor really wanting him to solely pay our bills, but I'm a very practical person and I would not have married him if I imagined this was two total fucking losers who couldn't cover rent between the two of us marrying "for LOVE!" I married him because HE said he wanted one and only one thing in life -- a military career -- and I understood military life and knew that would pay adequately to support us.

I figured I would support his dream, it would pay our basic bills and then the two of us together would figure out the two-career couple thing. Wow, was I ever so wrong. 

I then spent the next decade mystified by my 1950s style marriage and reading feminist literature and studies checked out from the library because I had no money to buy myself fuck all, wondering where the hell I went wrong. 

Most men don't really know how to do the women's work. They count on a woman doing that. 

Women with real careers sometimes complain that they have sex with a guy and now he wants to "play house" and he has a lot of implicit assumptions about cooking, cleaning etc. being her responsibility. 

My understanding is that the husband of Ruth Bader Ginsburg took on a lot of responsibility for raising their kids etc. because he felt her first priority should be her career.  And this seems to be the default mental model most people have: If we don't want her to be your bitch and we want her to have a serious career, you need to be her bitch instead.

I don't agree. I don't think that works.

But I do want to say that heternormative culture creates a lot of make work for women and in a heternormative marriage, the husband is typically the biggest problem for a woman wanting to stop being chained to the stove and get a real life for herself. 

My husband was terrible about using six spoons instead of one if he did do any cooking. My sons participated in cleaning the house and would keep an eye on dad when he was cooking to limit the damage because they had to do the cleaning after he breezed through the kitchen like the Peanuts character Pigpen and left it a disaster zone.

The ex would cook with a George Foreman grill to make himself something to eat and he would let the drip pan overflow onto the countertop and drip down to the floor. My kids monitored his cooking and emptied the drip pan to avoid letting their father create ten times as much work for them completely unnecessarily. 

When I argued with my husband about his military career preventing me from finishing my education and pursuing a career of my own and proposed living apart during the week and seeing each other on weekends, he accused me of trying to destroy our marriage. 

I wanted to go to college and there was a college an hour away. He was an introvert on recruiting duty, which is a sales job, and wanted nothing to do with me during the week. But he expected me to be there to do his laundry, have sex once in the middle of the week and do all the cooking and cleaning. 

I was financially dependent on him. We had two elementary school aged kids and I have health problems. With him choosing to be intentionally obtuse, it wasn't possible to say "Well, it's only an hour away. We could have a Wednesday night date night and you could come see me for sex mid week if that's your big objection." Or "What if we do meal prep on Sundays and leave you meals to eat?"

He was far more committed than I was to arranging a life where the only viable answer was he needs to be the breadwinner and there's absolutely no hope of me establishing a career so I might be capable of supporting us. He stubbornly refused to have any kind of meaningful discussion of the details of how that might even look. I was shut down hard with extreme prejudice. 

Before you go complaining that the little wifey is an albatross around your neck and it's her fault you are trapped in the breadwinner role, get with the person in the mirror. Because you are probably a large part of the problem. 

You may wish to read Nutrient Dense and a book called More Work for Mother. I'm trying but largely failing to create resources aimed at establishing housing options and lifestyle stuff that frees women up from the women's work not by making him take over the workload but by reducing that workload.

There's a post on r/CleanHomeDesign about best practices and a languishing dream of a site by me about clean home design going nowhere fast called Mic Digs.

But you could start by showing her this post and asking her to make a written list of the stupid shit you do that is similar to my husband letting the drip pan overflow and then trying to come up with solutions so you both have more time and fewer headaches.