Heteronormative culture is rooted in subsistence culture optimizing for survival of the human species under dire circumstances where people didn't have much education and didn't have reliable birth control and good medical care etc, so we were counting on monogamy and being a virgin on the wedding night to limit the spread of disease and two parents providing for the inevitable large brood of children to try to guarantee at least some of those kids lived to adulthood so someone would care for you in your old age.
Life expectancy is up, we have birth control and antibiotics and average number of children per family is down and we increasingly expect people to move to an old folks home rather than be cared for by their adult children in old age.
But we STILL raise little girls as if they will be full-time wives and moms their entire lives and little boys as if they will have a hard charging serious career capable of providing for a wife and many children.
We design our serious careers with the baked in assumption that it will be held by a married man with children whose wife is taking care of the cooking, cleaning and other women's work so his time, physical energy and MIND can be fully taken up by his career without harming him and his capacity to add something of real value for other people.
Once the children are grown, the little wifey is defacto chattel property, a servant owned by one person and largely serving one person with little to no hope of establishing an income on par with his such that she can reasonably hope to leave him and continue to enjoy the quality of life to which she is accustomed materially and it seems few women feel as I do that breathing free while poor is a step up from rotting in a polite form of slavery while everyone pretends that's not what's happening.
When life expectancy was lower and people had more children, being a full-time homemaker took all of a woman's time and she frequently still had minor children at home at the time of her death.
My mother was the seventh of twelve children and her mother died when my mother was sixteen. So she was a legal minor with multiple younger siblings still at home.
Last I checked, average number of children for US families was 1.5. If you have two kids two years apart, you will spend about twenty years maximum raising children while living into your sixties, seventies or eighties and having spent your first two decades as a kid yourself.
That still leaves substantial time in which to pursue a career, more time than many people used to LIVE.
It would help if society would get with the program and stop trying to cram heteronormative culture and heteronormative careers and heteronormative housing down everyone's throats.
It would also help enormously and we would get there faster if WOMEN stopped acting like the highest achievement of womanhood and the goal we should all set for ourselves is marrying well and ideally having a husband who can afford to hire maids and order in takeout and leave the kids with nannies while your only real obligation is looking good on his arm while hiding the dirty truth that you frequently "have a headache" and don't like putting out because it makes you feel like a whore knowing you are earning your living on your back since you don't really cook or clean or raise kids, don't really have a serious career and didn't even give birth to enough kids to be a giant imposition on your life.