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Note: In its original format, this article made no sense whatsoever. The items in bold are my annotations, which hopefully will give you an easier time figuring out what’s really going on here than I had the first time I read it. Apologizing in advance for not blockquoting all the article excerpts!

No kids, no jobs for growing number of wives

By Sarah Jio, author of articles such as “Do You Mommy Your Husband?” and “She’s Just Not That Into You–Or Is She,” an article that has such story highlights as Study: Woman better at reading facial expressions, body language and Expert: Men more likely to heed woman’s words, than her actions.

(LifeWire) — “What do you do all day?” is a question Anne Marie Davis, 34, says she gets a lot. This is an intrepid attempt to instill indignant sympathy in the reader at first go, as Sarah is aware that the next few lines are going to inspire most readers to say Well…yeah, given all that, I’m kinda not surprised she gets that question a lot.

Davis, who lives in Lewisville, Texas, isn’t a mother, nor does she telecommute. She is a stay-at-home wife, which makes her something of a pioneer in the post-feminist world. This is very much like someone living in the Bronze Age declaring a flint knapper a pioneer in the Iron Age world, but if the reader doesn’t accept this as fact, they will be unable to swallow the rest of the article at all.

Ten years ago, she was an “overwhelmed” high school English teacher. “I didn’t have time for my husband, ” she says, “and I didn’t have a life.” Given that most of us work jobs that don’t even have extended winter, spring and summer vacations built in like that one and still manage to find time for our significant others and our lives, this is clearly a personal problem. However, we are obviously being invited to empathize.

She presented the idea of staying home to her husband, a Web engineer. “I told him it was something I wanted to do, and he supported it. It was a great relief.” Now, don’t you wish you had someone in your life who when you said, “I’m tired and stressed all the time and I just don’t want to work anymore, please say you’ll take care of me if I just quit my job and sit at home all day, please please please!” just WENT for it..? Aren’t you secretly just DYING of jealousy here..? Isn’t she SO lucky? …are you following the script here yet?

Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” says stay-at-home wives constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years, many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home,” he says. While his research is ongoing, he estimates that more than 10 percent of the 650 women he’s interviewed who choose to stay home are childless. Here is some background on Dr. Scott:

Sex is something that will keep men happy, Haltzman wrote in the fifth chapter of his new book, “The Secrets of Happily Married Women: How to Get More Out of Your Relationship by Doing Less,” which was released last month. The crux of Haltzman’s book can be gathered from the chapter titles alone: Chapter 1: Know Your Husband, Chapter 2: Nurture His Needs – and Yours, Chapter 4: Talk Less and, of course, Chapter 5: Have Lots of Sex.

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