Jancee Dunn > Quotes

“I'm a sucker for a man who giggles—not a high-pitched serial-killer sort of giggle, but a lighthearted laugh.”
― Jancee Dunn

“I keep in mind what Ann Dunnewold told me: when a mother takes care of herself, children absorb important lessons. “Both boys and girls learn that mothers have needs, too, which is also very important if they have children of their own,” she says. If you must conquer guilt, she adds, tell yourself, ‘When I take time for myself, I come back and I’m more the mother I want to be. More patient. Less reactive.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“What most people find festive—a weekend at a beach shack with friends, a boat trip down a river, a crackling bonfire on a summer night—I see as a bleak nightmare to be grimly endured. I would sooner put lit cigarettes in my eyes than share a vacation house with a crowd.”
― Jancee Dunn

“Who thinks to interview their own mother? As a self-fixated teen, I never imagined that she had an actual personal history. To my young eyes, she was Source of Cash Obsessed With De-Cluttering”
― Jancee Dunn

“It hit me that being hip was a full-time job, and I was only a part-timer. I couldn't hide forever that I liked county fairs, particularly the goat booth at the 4-H tent, or that I once spent a week with my grandmother at her house in the giant retirement community of Sun City, Arizona, and it was one of the most carefree times of my life.”
― Jancee Dunn

“doing everything ourselves isn’t heroic—it’s toxic.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“Expressions of gratitude were the “most consistent significant predictor of marital quality.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“fathers who regularly do household chores, according to a University of British Columbia study, have daughters who are more likely to aspire to less stereotypically feminine careers, instead voicing an ambition to be an astronaut, professional soccer player, or geologist. When girls see fathers pulling their own weight, they receive a direct message that they are not—and should not be—destined to shoulder all the tedious work by themselves.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“all the ways you can say yes, and sprinkle them throughout your daily marital interactions: Yes, that’s a good idea. Yes, I’m totally on board. Yes, that looks fun. Couples who make a practice of doing this, he has said, are much more likely to go the distance.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“One of the most insidious and probably profoundly dangerous coping mechanisms that we have absolutely glommed on to as a culture is staying busy,” she tells me. “And the whole unconscious idea behind it is ‘If I stay busy enough, I will never know the truth of how absolutely pissed off I am, how resentful I am, how exhausted I am from juggling everything.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“I feel like he’s a guest at the hotel I’m running. I’m constantly taking a silent feminist stand to see if he’ll step up and lend a hand. The scorekeeping never ends.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“My father is the most genial Midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner—financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy—so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to try to goad his daughters into being more prepared.When he retired, he reached new levels of preparedness, so his car contained bottled water, hand wipes, a roadside emergency kit with flares, books on tape, a coin dispenser, and two hand towels to use as makeshift bibs so he and my mother could drive and eat without making a mess.”
― Jancee Dunn

“Often, men simply feel more entitled to take leisure time. A University of Southern California study of married couples found that at the end of a workday, women’s stress levels went down if their husbands pitched in with housework. No surprise there—but the mind-boiling part is that men’s stress levels fell if they kicked back with some sort of leisure activity—but only if their wives kept busy doing household tasks at the same time (an effect I term While You’re Up, I’ll Take Another Cold One). When study author Darby Saxbe started looking at the data, she says, “We sort of thought it would probably be all the more relaxing to have leisure time if you have a spouse that’s doing that leisure with you,” she tells me. “So it was kind of surprising that we found the opposite effect—that the more leisure time dads had and the less leisure time wives had, the more men’s cortisol levels dropped.” The somewhat dispiriting conclusion: a man’s biological adaptation to stress is healthier when his wife has to suffer the consequences.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“If you’re yelling and calling names, your kid thinks, ‘If I get in a disagreement, the way to resolve it is to speak more forcefully, more loudly, and to say harsher things to get my way.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“In a commencement speech at the University of Texas, Admiral William H. McRaven, commander of the US Special Operations Command, said that when he was training to be a Navy SEAL, he was required to make his bed every morning to square-cornered perfection—annoying at the time, but in retrospect one of the most important life lessons he ever learned. “If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day,” he told graduates. “It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another.” Making your bed, McRaven went on, reinforces the fact that the small things in life matter. “If you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right. And if, by chance, you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better. If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“It’s especially important to have boys lend a hand around the house. As mentioned, from an early age, boys in particular tend to assert their independence by refusing to do something they’ve been asked to do. A study by the educational children’s magazine Highlights found that 73 percent of girls reported that they had chores to do, while only 65 percent of boys did. Not only are girls more likely to be asked to help out at home, they are less likely to get paid: the national nonprofit Junior Achievement found that the pay gap between males and females starts squarely at home, with allowance: 67 percent of boys said that they received allowances, while just 59 percent of girls did. Similarly, a British study discovered that boys get paid 15 percent more for the same chores done by girls. Think about the message being given here: that when boys feed the dog or straighten their rooms, they deserve a reward, but girls are just “doing what comes naturally.” And when boys with female siblings see the grunt work being off-loaded onto their sisters, the effects can carry into midlife, according to a paper published in the Journal of Politics.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“that couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats. This dynamic has arisen, she says, because men have less to gain by changing their behavior, while women are more likely to want to alter the status quo—which means they also initiate more fights.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“I’m so tired of asking Andrew to do things around the house. No one has to ask me. You know why? Because I just get on with it.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“Finally, many experts tell me that the best—some say only—way to teach one’s husband to learn the ropes and appreciate the volume of work you do is often the technique that is least used: leave the damn house.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“males are socialized to assert their independence. Instead, he advises me to present the tasks in the spirit of negotiation. “Say, ‘Here’s a list of five things that need to get done—you can pick three.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats. This dynamic has arisen, she says, because men have less to gain by changing their behavior, while women are more likely to want to alter the status quo—which means they also initiate more fights.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“I devised a sort of strategy for any sort of discussion that was over my head: I became the moderator. If you're the group's John McLaughlin, you can fake being informed while still being involved by deploying a few pointed but vague questions. If a person is holding forth and another is twitching to interrupt, jump in and ask her why she disagrees. Ask follow-up questions. Nod vigorously while saying things like 'in what sense?' or 'How, specifically?' That way, you smoothly take control of the conversation without actually contributing anything even remotely worthwhile or informative.”
― Jancee Dunn

“Working mothers are now the top earners in a record 40 percent of families with kids—yet a University of Maryland study found that married mothers are still doing nearly three and a half times as much housework as married fathers. And when you’ve been picking up nonstop after a two-year-old, your husband’s formerly innocuous habit of shedding his socks into a bounceable ball shape—within view of the hamper—is suddenly deeply irritating.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“I want to fully enjoy the family I have been yearning for all my life, and to take active notice of the many good things that my husband does. Our home should be a place of safety and comfort for all of us.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“No surprise there—but the mind-boiling part is that men’s stress levels fell if they kicked back with some sort of leisure activity—but only if their wives kept busy doing household tasks at the same time (an effect I term While You’re Up, I’ll Take Another Cold One). When study author Darby Saxbe started looking at the data, she says, “We sort of thought it would probably be all the more relaxing to have leisure time if you have a spouse that’s doing that leisure with you,” she tells me. “So it was kind of surprising that we found the opposite effect—that the more leisure time dads had and the less leisure time wives had, the more men’s cortisol levels dropped.” The somewhat dispiriting conclusion: a man’s biological adaptation to stress is healthier when his wife has to suffer the consequences.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“girls with more involved dads develop greater self-esteem.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“mothers drove the fathers’ cortisol changes, while, in a dismaying trickle-down effect, fathers drove changes in their kids’ cortisol.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“Perhaps the knowledge that certain behaviors are in some sense hardwired in your spouse—rather than a conscious choice to stick it to you—will help dial down the frustration.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“it’s not children who extinguish the flame of desire—it’s the adults who fail to keep the spark alive.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“your kid has peed into your mouth, there’s a level of connection with that child. Whereas if anybody else in your life did that, you’d probably cut off all contact.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids