Bacon and BMWs: Men Tell Us What It Means to 'Have It All'

Uuuuuuuuugh, "having it all." Enough already, right? I'm so goddamn sick of
talking about "having it all" and who can "have it all" and what "it all"
even means and whether wanting "it all" is the ultimate feminist goalpost or
if it's just a reductive construct meant to keep women dissatisfied,
unfulfilled, and cheerfully night-vacuuming for their entire lives. Yawn/
barf. But a recent survey—which found that men and women have very
different visions of what "having it all" means—actually got me intrigued.
This is a concept that's discussed almost exclusively within a feminine
framework, so what would it look like for a dude to "have it all"?
According to the survey—published last week by Citi and LinkedIn—79% of
men think that "a strong, loving marriage" is essential to the concept of
"having it all," while only 66% of women feel the same way. And over just
the past 15 months, the number of women who don't factor any form of
relationship or romance into their definition of success has doubled. All of
that indicates, in the Atlantic Wire's estimation , that "men have a more
specific and simpler definition of success, while women have more fluid
goals (and, not coincidentally, far more hurdles to climbing the career
ladder)."
It got me thinking, why would a disproportionate number of men value a
strong family structure in their conception of an ideal, balanced life? My
suspicion is this: For a lot of men, a traditional family includes a "wife,"
which is a kind of sexy butler that you also love. Even if wives aren't
performing every single domestic duty with their own hands (like, maybe
you're the kind of landed gentry with a nanny and a housekeeper or
whatever), in the traditional model women are at the very least expected to
be the stewards of the domestic sphere. They're manning the calendar.
They're getting everyone out the door. There's a whole lot of invisible
mental work that goes into keeping a family running, and I have a feeling
that (even in the most egalitarian couples!) those tasks don't make their way
into very many men's visions of the "perfect" life.