Hacker News Reader

Better than being dependent on a soulless employer, while still having to take care of the family.

Actually, being able to depend on someone you trust is the real liberation.

In premodern times, it wasn't so much trust as societal mandate. You have to imagine that domestic abuse and neglect ran rife and was just accepted as par for the course.

What’s so different in modern times? Exploitative employers have taken their place via social mandate.

As pointed out elsewhere, far more flexibility in changing employees over changing domestic partners, even if that has gotten easier as well.

And as terrible as bad employers might be, they usually cannot inflict the levels of physical and emotional abuse that bad spouses can. Business, not personal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com