The real reason dads take forever to poop

It’s an age old double standard that is oft complained about online… but my partner explained to me the reason dads take 40 mins to poop and it’s quite simple.

Us women have spent most of our lives hiding the fact that we poop (or fart) from men. So we let it build and wait until the last min and then sneak off discretely to use the powder room, and attempt to squeeze everything out in the same time it takes to take a pee, so nobody might notice that we’re gone for a long time and thus suspect us of the sin of pooping. This probably starts in our pre-teen years and is a skill refined in our pre-reproductive eligible dating years, so we’ve had a lot of practice timing our poops to be a quick and efficient. By the time we are moms, the skill of pooping quickly is even more encouraged, as putting the newborn down long enough to poop fills us with anxiety.

On the contrary, little boys love all things poop (my 5 yo recently asked me “why are boys so obsessed with poop?”) And as they get older the poop talk and jokes are only encouraged by peers. By the time they were preteens my boy cousins were already claiming their “Cave of Solitude” and just chilling in the bathroom, completely unembarrassed of the fact that everyone in the house knew they were pooping. By the time boys grow into men, they’ve had decades training their bodies to rush to the bathroom at the first sign that they might have a poop coming, and chill there for as long as it takes, often waiting for more tiers. As dads the bathroom further becomes their refuge from chaos and responsibility, but taking all the time in the world was normal for them long before they became dads.

So biologically, from a young age the two sexes took very different paths and have trained their bodies to poop in different styles for their whole adult lives. Parenthood only encourages these divergent pooping patterns. It may now be too late for men to adopt our feminine super powers of fast poops… however us moms can still reclaim our rights to the Cave of Solitude! It took me awhile to get used to being more vocal about my pooping habits. I used to not say anything, or just say “I’ve got to use the bathroom”, but now when I tell my man “I’ve got to poop, watch the baby” I can be confident that in his mind, pooping takes the time it takes, so he is now expecting me to be gone for a decent chunk of time… just like he does ;)