KEY POINTS:
* Samir, a young immigrant from India, was normally a mild-mannered man. But every few months, something set him off and he would lash out violently at his younger wife, who was then a fulltime student.
His wife recalled him saying something like: "All these degrees you have, you only earn so much."
And she would say: "You don't even earn enough and you don't have a degree."'
The sequel: 30 seconds of extreme violence, followed every time by dreadful remorse.
* Susan, a middle-aged administrator, found her husband's temper deteriorating during their 13-year relationship. At first it was just "door-slamming and kicking and throwing things". After the children arrived, he began to insult and control her, sometimes by staying out late so she couldn't go out with friends.
"He couldn't handle the attention I was giving the children," she said. "He wanted all the attention himself."
They lived in Susan's house and she worked fulltime to pay the mortgage. But although he had long periods between jobs he still expected her to do most of the housework.
* Stephanie, a happy-go-lucky teacher, was in a relationship with a man who went from job to job. Depressed, he tried to control Stephanie's movements and gave her "the third-degree" when she went out with friends. Eventually he became violent.
"He has never felt good enough," she said. "My psychologist believes that he controlled me because he had no control over his own life. He never kept jobs down for long."
These three stories from the Herald in the past year have a common theme. In all cases, desperate men turned to violent or controlling behaviour at least partly because they had lost the prime breadwinning role that gives a purpose to most men's lives.
More than a third of New Zealand couples are now coping with the same phenomenon. In the 2001 census, the woman was in the same or a higher income band than the man in 37 per cent of all couples aged 15 to 64 who stated their incomes - up from 20 per cent in 1986.
Dr Paul Callister, of Victoria University's Institute of Policy Studies, points to other signs that men's traditional economic domination is crumbling. Women's average hourly wages have gradually crept up from 79.5 per cent of the male average in 1986 to 84.1 per cent in 2001 to 85.5 per cent in this year.
And, in a sign of things to come, young women have already surpassed men educationally. In 1986, women made up 47.8 per cent of enrolments in bachelors and postgraduate courses. Today they are 57.1 per cent - although there is still a big contrast between female-dominated subjects such as teaching and male domains such as computing.
These changes are welcome in terms of achieving a fairer, more equal society. Biologically, men are physically stronger than women on average, so it makes sense for more of them to work in manual jobs that may not require as much academic education as more sedentary work, where women now predominate.
But psychologically it's hard for some men to hand over the role of primary income-earner.
Traditionally, it has been men's role to hunt the moa or the buffalo or, in modern times, toil in the factory or office while women stayed home looking after children.
Auckland counsellor Rex McCann, who has run Essentially Men workshops since 1991, says men's violence against women derives from a sense of powerlessness that often stems from losing a clear role as the family's "provider".
"To be violent to those you love is the act of a powerless person," McCann says. "At the core of it, guys still feel they should be providing. When children come along, men have this absolute commitment that 'I should be providing'."
Andre Grobler, who co-ordinates anti-violence programmes at Friendship House in Manukau, says many men in his groups have lost their jobs. Others feel inadequate because they earn less than their wives.
"Some other men will say: 'Well done, I don't mind her earning more than myself, that's better for the family's financial situation'."
"The question that is open there is that a lot of men might say that - but what they feel inside, they might not express," McCann says.
Mal Lange, of Man Alive, in Henderson, says society teaches men to suppress such feelings of weakness.
" 'Real men' don't speak about this stuff, so I'll bottle it up and then explode, and I'll define all those emotions as 'anger' because for some reason anger is considered a 'manly' emotion.
"Women have changed their whole culture. Men haven't followed that," Lange says.
"They have left themselves floundering and feeling lost and powerless: 'If we are not the main ones bringing home the bacon, what are we?' "
It is no surprise that many men are struggling to catch up because, as social changes go, this revolution has been astonishingly swift.
Just 50 years ago, in 1956, only 23 per cent of women in the prime child-rearing years of 25 to 55 were in paid work. Today it's 75 per cent.
In the same period, male paid employment in the same age bracket has slipped from 97 per cent to 90 per cent.
"My father went to work and my mother stayed at home and looked after the kids," says Liz Olsen, of the Rotorua Violence Prevention Service. "In my generation we are all out working."
Women have fought for the right to paid work, and are still fighting for equal pay, to even out a gross power imbalance.
Until 1952, married women did not have full rights to own property - when a woman married, all her property passed into her husband's name on the basis that a married couple was a single legal entity.
A husband had a legal duty to provide for his wife, and his wife could divorce him if he failed to support her for four years.
Conversely, a wife had what was in effect a legal duty to cook, clean and look after the children. Her husband could divorce her if she "neglected her domestic duties".
Despite obvious exceptions, the legacy of this division of labour persists. Last year men still made up 97 per cent of the chief executives of sharemarket-listed companies.
And in 1999 women still did an average of three and a half hours of unpaid housework and caregiving a day, against just under two hours a day for men.
In her group sessions on stopping violence, Olsen tests the men by asking if they clean the toilet.
"Very few of them do it," she says. "It's a funny thing. They say, 'Oh, that's her job'."
For couples aware of the power imbalance, all sorts of experimenting has been going on.
David Kenkel, advocacy manager for Unicef, was the primary caregiver of his first child when his scientist wife was studying fulltime and was given some "weird looks" from mums at Playcentre and kindergarten.
"There was always a number of women who regarded me with suspicion, as a man - not overt hostility," he says. "But generally I found women to be quite welcoming so long as I wasn't arrogant or up myself."
Dave Thiele, who produces a radio show and, until recently, published the Titirangi Tatler from home while his wife, Tracey, went out to work as a graphic designer, loves being the primary caregiver of their daughter Edith, 8.
But it hasn't always been easy: "A couple of times I felt funny walking along the street with the pram at 11 o'clock in the morning. I felt like a loser sometimes."
Cary Hayward, practice manager at Relationship Services, says that when he and his wife had their first child they set out to make it as even as possible.
"We decided that our child should be both breast-fed and bottle-fed so it would get nurturing from the mother and that I would also have a role in that early nourishment process too.
"That was really hard. We both had two jobs - we were both the provider and the nurturer.
"So for us, the second time we tried it the more traditional way with me going out to work and my partner being the primary caregiver.
"That was easier in terms of roles, but in some ways more difficult in terms of other dimensions because our worlds got more separated because we were living quite differently. So I don't think we found a perfect solution."
Brendon Smith and his wife, Blue Holmes-Kinsella, of Mt Wellington, took a different approach.
Holmes-Kinsella, a corporate training manager, took a year off after the birth of their daughter, Madeleine, 9. But at the time her son, Keegan, was born two years later she had been offered a contract job and went back to fulltime work after nine months.
Then it was Smith who cut his hours. "It was a bit of a surprise to me when I realised it didn't seem like my wife was happy at home with the kids and she did genuinely miss her working life," says Smith, who was then selling computer-aided design systems.
"We had two or three months when we were both in fulltime work. That period to me was really awful. It was harder on the kids."
"They were at a daycare in the city, a very good place, but I felt like we were just working five days and barely having time with the kids in the evenings."
They decided on a change. Smith gave up his sales job, found a part-time weekend labouring job and started a website-design business that he could run from home while looking after the children.
Six years later he has the same mix of jobs, plus part-time work for the Father and Child Trust. He picks up the children from school each night and helps them with their homework and other activities until Holmes-Kinsella gets home from work.
"Ever since they have been little I have been able to accommodate beach swims and a bit of water fun into our after-school. There are still occasions where one night a week I offer them beach, mountain or park," Smith says. "We have been to all Auckland's mountains now."
Then it's back home to get the children bathed and tidy while Holmes-Kinsella cooks dinner.
For those couples who decide to swap traditional roles there are obvious biological limitations.
The Ministry of Health recommends that babies should be breastfed exclusively for the first six months.
On average, it may also be true that, as Olsen says: "Women are far softer and more nurturing generally."
But, as Kenkel says people have a spectrum of abilities. "If you look at it statistically there is probably a clustering of men at one end, and of women at the other end. Men are taller than women, but I know an awful lot of short men.
"My partner is a materials scientist and works with objects. I'm the one that gets clucky about kids."
Waikato University psychologist Darrin Hodgetts says the average man's brain is wired to be stronger spatially - to work with objects, for example - while the average woman's brain is more strongly wired for relationships and verbal communication. But there are many women who are more spatially oriented than 99 per cent of men, and there are men like David Lange who are more verbally oriented.
"If we have a society in which the options are open to both then we are in a better position to respond to the economic realities that some women earn more than some men."
Hodgetts has interviewed 12 working-class men who are or have been Territorials and found that, although all but one have fulltime paid work, their lives "are becoming increasingly home-centred".
As one of them put it: "If I could sum up in three words what it means to me to be a Kiwi bloke, it would be 'Love your family'."
Louise Chapman, Relationship Services' clinical leader in Auckland, says couples under about 35 are more likely to share childcare and housework.
"They are committed to working together as a team. There seems to be a bit more equality," she says.
"I know of couples who have had an absolute equality which has worked really well for household chores until the first child. Then he doesn't do as much, and that is kind of agreed by them.
"Sometimes that is not accepted and sometimes that causes issues that we deal with, but it can be worked through. If they have experienced working well together as a team at some stage, then that's easy to bring back."
Neville Robertson, 55, also a Waikato psychologist, says his 26-year-old son is "streets ahead of where I was at that age" with a wide range of friendships and interests and "clear that he doesn't want to work every damn hour there is".
"For me, it was like rugby, cars and pretty shallow friendships," Robertson says. "I think we are seeing a much greater diversity among young men these days, so I think we have ditched the idea of there being a single model of what it's like to be a bloke.
There are still more changes required - starting, says Hodgetts, with simple things such as nappy-changing facilities in men's toilets or in unisex structures, not just in women's toilets.
Craig Davis of Shore Fathers, a solo dad for 13 years, says schools need to teach parenting and cooking to boys as well as girls, and parents need to put children ahead of material possessions.
"We live beyond our means and both parents have to work, so our children get left at home. If we learned not to do that, that might make it easier," Davis says.
Robertson advocates greater availability of flexible working hours and part-time arrangements that allow fathers to get involved in childcaring, and a publicity campaign backed up by tough enforcement that makes domestic violence as unacceptable as drunk-driving.
"I think the answer is incredibly simple. It's giving up the idea that the man is going to be in charge."
Get Organised Auckland, a huge garage sale to raise money for Preventing Violence in the Home, takes place next weekend at the ASB Showgrounds
* Real names not used.
