It was impossible for me to resist an article titled Why I Left My Beta Husband. It’s about a woman who got fed up with her stay-at-home life partner. I stayed home with our daughter for six months after she was born while Mark continued, yes, looking for a job. In 18 months, he got just two calls. Meanwhile, I was being pursued by headhunters. Eventually, I took an editing job at a health magazine. That setup made it easy to start judging him as a loser instead of a husband.

A man’s role changes with time. When you’re just dating it’s about satisfying a woman sexually and providing her with nice company that keeps the good bedroom times rolling. In a relationship it moves to protection and comfort and then in a marriage with children it’s about being an able provider. Having an interesting and witty personality will not cut it when your kids are hungry and need new clothes. You can be funny all you want, but hunger makes the joke stop.

The truth is, I wasn’t attracted to Mark anymore. It wasn’t that he’d changed—he still had the same floppy brown hair, bright green eyes, and long freckled limbs that had literally made me quiver when I first met him. But in my head, I’d neutralized him as a sexual being. I wanted to be overwhelmed by the sheer power of his masculinity in the bedroom, but I wasn’t. Because I felt like the man in our relationship. Once that feeling sets in, attraction starts dying from the inside.

So she wised up, dumped Mark and found her alpha stud, right? Of course not. You can never listen to a woman’s words because women have no idea what they want. This one simply went and found a Mark-clone who also likes poetry. So nobody was more surprised than I was when I went ahead and fell for another stay-at-home dad. Jason knows what he wants—and it’s not a corner office. He wants to have his afternoons free to hit the park with my daughter or paint or translate the writings of Pablo Neruda