Men who struggled to anticipate domestic problems or follow a project through to its end frequently described success in occupations requiring the very same skills they were said to lack at home.
Nina, for example, described her husband, Julian, as temperamentally ill-equipped for the frenetic multitasking and constant forecasting she relied on to juggle home, paid work, and child care. "If something is broken in the house and Julian gets used to it, he will not consider it a problem," she explained. This pattern predated their marriage: "In his apartment before we got married, there was a hole in the wall, and [he and his roommates] just left it. They were just like, This is okay... It was sort of tragedy of the commons in that situation, where, like, no one -- five roommates, no one felt the responsibility. If something is broken in our lives today, in terms of a physical appliance or something, and he's gotten used to not having it, it filters out of his mind. Whereas for me it's an ever-present issue."
In another couple, Trevor drew a contrast between his "super-organized" wife Mindy, and his own "deadline-challenged" and "scattered" tendencies. He struggled with follow-through: "I'm in charge of laundry, so I will wash it, put it in the dryer, but somehow I lose interest by then. Getting it from the dryer and folding it, it slips my mind that that's also part of doing laundry." He described himself as slower to learn new things, too: "In general, as a personality trait, I would say, it would be a lot more difficult for me to do things which my wife is doing for her than to pick up things which I have been doing. Just overall, she's better at that kind of thing, like picking up a task and doing it."
It seems obvious that the guy who doesn't notice holes in the wall shouldn't be in charge of managing home upkeep, or that the man with a tendency to overlook deadlines should probably not be the calendar-keeper. But these particular men worked as a surgeon and a nonprofit founder, respectively -- positions that certainly rely on attention to detail and deadlines.
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