Living Single and Double Income Households

I have to start with this - I'm so stressed out right now, that I'm not certain how coherent this post will be, but I've been thinking about it for the last 2 weeks and today, I had to ask myself WHY is marriage happening so much later and WHY do couples insist on both working?

When I was in college, every vacation I would work 45-50 hours at a movie theatre. I worked there for 3 years, and my boss used to call me a workaholic. If you asked my boss now, he'd say I'm lazy and have a lot of potential that I don't use - simply because I refuse to work more than 40 hours a week.

This phenomenon in differences between my work ethic has recently begun to get to me...what has changed that I am no longer willing to work that many hours? My boss even yells at my young team (all of us under 30), claiming we should all be able to work more hours because we're so young. And then it dawned on me. In college, I had a mother who went shopping, cooked me dinner, cleaned the bathroom, did the dishes, vaccuumed the house...I had little brothers that helped take out the garbage, feed the dogs and cats, and help with other chores. Of course I had time to work 50 hours at work.

Now, I'm responsible for the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, the garbage removal, paying the bills, and balancing the check book. PLUS working 40+ hours a week. But not only that, when you are trying to live a healthy life style, you have an additional hour a day to devote to that. Its like...where does the time go? I'm so stressed out that I'm ready to ram my head through a wall.

So...what could make this life a bit less stressful? I could definitly handle having my mom move in...but I think my dad would miss her only a little bit. It makes sense that having someone in my home devoted to managing the household while there's someone there taking care of providing the money to manage the household would actually work. And yet my generation is getting married later and later... Aren't they as stressed out as me? Or is it just me?

And then...double income homes...there has to be even more stress there...I mean, 2 people's messes and 2 people to do them...still the same amount of time taking care of bills, chores, and other responsibilites. PLUS working their own hours AND trying to make time to build a healthy relationship.

It just naturally makes sense that one of those 2 would make it their full time responsibility to care for the household and provide a relaxing and stress free environment for the both of them to spend time bonding and relaxing at the end of the day.

And I have a much better understanding of the following verse because of all of this:
"Her husband is respected at the city gate,
where he takes his seat among the elders of the land."
~Proverbs 31:23

When her husband is able to take the time that would've been spent doing his doing his laundry, cleaning his home, feeding himself, he can now spend that time gaining respect and being more lucrative at work without sacrificing the time spent with his own family.

I know it sounds so sexist, but the tradtional roles make so much sense =p