There is an endless audience for the art of influence grifting, and influencer Paige Connell has found her niche: giving relationship “equity” advice. Truly, Connell’s antics reveal that she is just as unsatisfied with culture as the rest of us.
A five-minute video filmed on Connell’s kitchen counter and titled “Why I considered divorcing my husband” gained traction this week on X. In the video, Connell dedicates about four minutes to discussing specific grievances against her husband and one minute to the imperative of attaining a totally equal distribution of household tasks.
“On paper,” Connell says, “what more could I ask for?” She has a loving husband, but in the end, “women tend to carry a disproportionate amount of work in the home.” It chafes at her when they make dinner together, but he asks her what to make. He drops the children off at day care, but asks what to put in their backpacks. She tells him he needs to take more of the “mental load,” so he asks what he can do. Their marriage involves a possibly unhealthy, definitely straining level of husband cowing to wife: Connell’s husband is willing to accommodate her push to work full-time, as well as the neuroticism that comes with it. One would think that his deference would be satisfying to her, given his wife’s ambitions.
Instead, Connell is incredibly frustrated, still incensed by the things she claims to have solved. It comes through in her screen presence alone. True, the societal bar is higher for women than for men. Women are subject to much more immediate judgment from both sexes and are expected to be more put together. The interwoman discourse measuring motherhood is poor, as the shades of influencer type from trad-crunchy to Connell make clear. However, her problem seems to be more with human nature as a concept than unequal opportunity.
By Connell’s account, her husband offers her as much respect as he can: “It’s not because my husband didn’t love me or did anything to me,” she says, describing one instance when he was running late and forgot to take out the trash, that “I felt so unseen and unvalued.” Maybe he is forgetful, or maybe he is a utility lineman with a pressing, dangerous job. In either case, it comes through that Connell is unwilling to accommodate his male brain the way he accommodates hers. “The mental load” is everything, but it applies only to the woman in the relationship. The reason, of course, is that, for Connell, “domestic labor does not equal acts of kindness.”
It is here that Connell’s most critical problem shows itself: “We fell into these roles in our family despite the fact that we never wanted to,” she says in the initial video. This sounds a lot like natural selection. Connell’s complaints, along with her politically left-lean, exemplify that there must be some outside force pressuring her and her husband to adopt their respective traditional roles.
To the liberal-feminist mind, it must be so. However, the explanation is especially confounding to that framework: it doesn’t align with the emphasis all good institutions, especially Christian ones, place on free will. Moderns have an incredible amount of choice available to them, and Connell’s life seems an excellent example of swimming against the tide.
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What Connell wants is for “homemaker” to count as full-time work. Never once has she considered quitting her more conventional — dare I say, masculine — job to save her marriage. Instead, Connell is happy making educational videos on how “to prep my husband” for an evening with the children and then ones on how to beef up his independence by not making his dinner (only hers).
The callousness is real, but it shows us exactly what we already know: motherhood needs greater status if modern women are going to assent to the task. Women know they are capable of what comes most easily to them — but do they know they can be happy doing it?
