Weaponized incompetence is back, and it's driving modern women out of their marriages

Yahoo

15 hours ago

Mila had been dating her boyfriend for a year when she got pregnant. They had been keen to have a child together, but shifting into "nesting mode" gave Mila fresh eyes.
Her boyfriend would constantly dodge basic tasks like grocery shopping, she said, telling her he didn't know "how to do it," even if she gave him an itemized list. She said she shouldered the cooking and cleaning, even as intense pregnancy symptoms left her sick and depressed.
"You know everything, inside and out, about your favorite car. All the things that you truly care about, you know all the details," Mila recalled thinking about him. "But when it comes to basic necessities like getting groceries, buying stuff for our child, remembering things about us, you act as if you're incompetent."
Mila's ex-boyfriend didn't return a request for comment from Business Insider. Her surname has been withheld to protect her family's privacy.
Already feeling like a single mom, Mila left her boyfriend when she was about three months pregnant. About one year after welcoming her daughter, while scrolling on her phone, she came across the term "weaponized incompetence," and the unsettled feeling in her gut crystallized.
"I'm like, that's what I've been dealing with for so long," she said. "It was so nice to put a name to it."
The term "weaponized incompetence" emerged in the mid-2000s. Two decades later, it reenters viral discourse every few months. Stories like Mila's are littered across Reddit and TikTok, usually pertaining to heteronormative relationships. People — mostly women — vent about the people in their lives — mostly men — who seem to excel at the office, at school, or in their fantasy football draft, but regularly drop the ball at home.
Despite measurable advances in gender equality, the workload is not shifting at home, the Pew Research Center found in a 2023 report.
Dennis Vetrano, a divorce and family attorney in New York, said he's been hearing a familiar complaint from female clients increasingly over the past five years, "and that is the failure of their husband to be a true partner in their relationship."
"In fact," Vetrano added of weaponized incompetence, "that's become one of the core issues or one of the leading reasons for divorce these days."
Matt Lundquist, psychotherapist and founder of Tribeca Therapy, echoed Vetrano's observation and timeline.
"I see this in my work with female patients, I see this in my work with straight couples," he said, noting that the pandemic reignited tension over the division of housework. The widespread lockdowns, which confined many working couples to their homes, raised questions of whose paid work is "more valuable" and deserving of undivided attention — such that a whining toddler or the chimes of a dryer in its final cycle will go unheard, or worse, ignored.
"The sum of all of this was, for many couples, regressive. The default party responsible for domestic labor again became women," Lundquist said. Even now, with return-to-office mandates in full swing, the psychological ripples remain. "It feels like we've gone backward a couple of steps."
Incompetence becomes 'weaponized' when 'I don't know' really means 'I don't want to'
Feminists have been studying weaponized incompetence for decades. In her 1989 book, "The Second Shift," Arlie Hochschild describes how women tend to assume the unpaid labor of cooking, cleaning, caregiving, and emotional maintenance, even after returning home from their paid jobs.
The concept went mainstream in the aughts, when The Wall Street Journal's Jared Sandberg coined the phrase "strategic incompetence," as a useful way to "deflect work one doesn't want to do — without ever having to admit it."
I see men offering counterpoints in the comment sections of women's viral TikTok videos, arguing that women are simply observing genuine, harmless ineptitude. When I polled a group of my straight, male friends about this buzzword, the majority said they'd never heard of it. One said he hadn't considered how it plays out in the dating world; he added that between mothers and sons, it's "100% a thing."
Only one friend could define the term in his own words: "It's like intentionally playing dumb, right?" He sometimes tells his fiancée that he doesn't "know how to make a salad," he said, because he knows she'll do it anyway — but he also insisted that she makes salad more delicious than he ever could.
It's true that some people are not natural cooks or don't know how to change a diaper, and find it difficult to learn the right technique. For a man, it's possible that he was raised not to know these things and struggles to break out of that mindset. This incompetence becomes weaponized when he doesn't take the time to learn, improve, or understand how his role as a partner can broaden beyond the patriarchal archetype of "breadwinner" or "provider."
"It's the continuous presentation as if, 'I don't know how, this is hard for me,' when in terms of your capacity and capability, you are actually equipped to learn and do it," Bukky Kolawole, a couples therapist and founder of Relationship HQ, told Business Insider.
Jordan, who asked for her surname to be withheld for privacy, said that preparing to coparent with her ex-boyfriend illuminated a labor divide that already existed in their relationship.
"I was like, I know you know how to clean a bathroom. I know you know how to flush a toilet. I know you know where the laundry goes, or what the bed looks like in the morning," Jordan said. "It was like I was already hanging out with an infant."
Colette Nataf, a 35-year-old marketing executive, said she filed for divorce three years ago because she was fed up with "managing another adult" on top of her own life, job, and kids.
Her ex-husband declined a request for comment from Business Insider.
Nataf said she was married for years before she came to grips with the dirty plates stacked next to the empty dishwasher, or the fruitless pleas to share chores because, paraphrasing her ex-husband, "it's too hard to remember everything."
Some men have been coming to terms with the ubiquity of this dynamic. In a 2023 essay for GQ, Sammi Gale described his slow, somewhat agonized epiphany after seeing the hashtag #weaponizedincompetence take off online: "For all my feminist talk, pub probity and pussy hat marches, I realize now I'm not so different to the men getting called out on TikTok."
Women are tired of working two jobs without help
In her current work as a divorce coach, Nataf said she hears the same from female clients all the time: They aren't reeling from betrayal, falling out of love, or yearning to pursue someone new. They're just tired.
"You don't need your husband to financially support you anymore. You're still doing all of the household labor. So now you just have basically an additional child you're taking care of, and that is exhausting," she said.
Data shows the average woman is outpacing the average man. As single women continue to gain power and prominence in society — earning more bachelor's degrees, buying more homes, dominating healthy sectors of the workforce, and even living longer than their married counterparts — pushback has manifested in the form of "trad wives" and "manosphere" influencers, most of whom label themselves as anti-feminists and boast about their return to "traditional" gender roles.
This kind of content romanticizes and fortifies the conservative ideals that a woman's domain is the home, while men are responsible for bringing home the bacon. Poll after poll shows that Gen Z men are particularly receptive to these ideals, while women of the same age are increasingly resistant, overwhelmingly expressing support for female leaders in politics, preference for female bosses in the workplace, and interest in advancing social causes. As the ideological gap widens between men and women, expectations for the division of relationship admin fall further out of alignment.
"Feminism brought women into the workforce, but men haven't had the same social movement into the home," Audrey Schoen, a licensed marriage and family therapist, told Business Insider.
Vetrano has seen this mismatch bring couples into his office. "My dad was the primary wage earner. My mom took care of everything in the household. Now, what you're finding is women are more often doctors, lawyers, CEOs running their own companies — high-powered professions that take 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and in addition, they're doing everything else just like my mom did when I grew up," he said.
"They're paying the bills, or even the bulk of the bills, and they're doing everything else," Vetrano added of his female clients. "They're getting frustrated and they're getting burned out."
This frustration has trickled into the herd mentality of social media. Earlier this summer, a TikTok went viral when a woman showed the disastrous results of asking her boyfriend to help paint a room in their home: visible streaks, stained baseboards, and splatters on the floor. The video has over 10 million views, and a quick scroll through the comments reveals a chorus of disgust: "This is weaponized incompetence omg," "Dump him," "That's not a boyfriend, that's a sworn enemy."
The original creator shared a follow-up video with the caption, "We broke up." The top comment? "A HAPPY END FINALLY."
So, what can straight couples do?
Therapists I spoke with said it's important to remember that it's not always helpful to accuse your partner of "weaponized incompetence."
The term implies malicious intent. Yes, there may be a premeditated or even vindictive element to this — if your partner performs a task poorly on purpose, for example, because he's angry you asked him to do it — but that's a tough place to start a conversation.
"Most people who are accused of weaponized incompetence often feel criticized because that's not their intention," Schoen explained. "Their thought process stops at, 'I don't want to have to do that.' They don't see the next part."
It's more important, Schoen said, to focus on the "practical impact," which is real and tangible regardless of intent.
"Often," she continued, "I find that when I'm able to bring the partners into view of the totality and the gravity of the impact, it shifts their position."
Approach the topic with generosity, Lundquist advised: "If somebody's trying to raise this issue with a partner or a coworker, I think to come in too hot — unfortunately, as much as I think the frustration is justifiable — is a sort of missed opportunity for development and for reorganizing how things work in a culture."
For men, that opportunity starts with getting proactive instead of defensive. Take the time to understand where the discrepancy is coming from, then make an effort to bridge the gap, without waiting for your partner to give you a blueprint.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Allow for a learning curve or suggest redistributing tasks — evenly! — to suit different strengths. However, Lundquist said, if your generosity isn't reciprocated and no changes are made over time, it's OK to decide when you've had enough — especially if you have the economic means to go it alone.
"Increasingly in relationships, women's expectations are matched by women's earning capacity," Lundquist said. "I think men are going to have to figure out how to catch up with that."
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