Great question from Two Women Blogging in response to my post, ‘Sorry, is our struggle stifling your productivity?’ And Jay’s question is why don’t women stop this, why don’t they just stop doing everything?
This question reminds me of last weekend when Bill and I took the kids shoe-shopping at one of those horrible big shopping complexes in the suburbs. Before I tell you my anecdote let me first note that it was me, and not Bill, who noticed that the children needed new shoes, so that’s the beginning of the question, isn’t it? Anyway, my anecdote is from when we stopped to eat sushi at the food court in this horrible shopping complex, and we were all sharing a platter of sushi and suddenly there was all this stuff going on.
It was quite chaotic, yes, again.
It was stuff like opening soy sauce sachets for children; finding serviettes to mop up the soy sauce spilt by Cormac; reminding Lauca to use table manners; stopping Cormac from eating sushi dropped on the floor; making sure the kids were sharing the drink fairly between them; encouraging Cormac to finish the piece of sushi he was eating before grabbing another off the plate; spooning the sushi to him that he’d crumbled everywhere; reassuring Lauca that Cormac wasn’t going to get any of her sushi, even if he did waste all of his by throwing it on the floor; and finally, finding a bin for all the rubbish that was rapidly accumulating on our tiny table.
… And at some point during all this stuff I thought I better eat some sushi myself, before it is all gone and it is at that point that I realised I was the only one running about tending to the children – Bill was contentedly lost in some advertising material he had picked up from a computer store, peacefully nibbling away on sushi. I made a jab at him – are you right there, quite comfortable, everything to your satisfaction? He acknowledged my point by way of a chuckle and then folded up his advertising material and started participating in all that stuff which was going on at our table.
How did this happen? It happened because when you’re in the thick of it, parenting, that is, you don’t have time to take stock of what is going on and you slip into some very traditional roles/ bad patterns. It happened because Bill is good at switching off and I am good at switching on. It happened for so many reasons, and before I could really complain about them all we would probably have moved right on to a brand new situation of unfairness. Frankly, it is kind of hard to keep up, even as a feminist mother who thinks about this stuff all the time. And as Bitch PhD so brilliantly observed, if it is your job to keep an eye on the fairness in the relationship then you sure as shit ain’t the one with the power in that relationship.
Anyway, I’m going over to Jay’s blog later this week to join in the conversation over there and you should come too.
My take on this is undoubtedly influenced by the fact that I’m the one who is more likely to be absorbed by the advertising flier (or any other words on paper) while chaos swirls on around me. Having two makes it all exponentially more complicated, no question.
If Sam were that kind of partner, I’d avoid the situation completely, which is what we mostly did when Eve was a toddler. I took her shopping by myself on targeted missions that did not include any food other than the occasional ice cream treat.
So maybe we just practice avoidance, and again it’s easier when you only have one, and I was working part-time at that point and could take her during the week when things were less crowded (plus I’m an inveterate morning person and so is Eve, so even now we can hit the mall at opening bell on Saturdays if need be). I do see – now that you’ve pointed it out to me! – that such strategies are, of course, not available to everyone. Duh. Once again my class privilege bites me in the butt.
And yes, of course, to BitchPHd’s observation. I suspect that being the primary wage-earner is one of the reasons I do have power in my marriage.
Being primary wage earner and female, I’m still the one doing all the looking out while man gets absorbed. Just in this case it’s justified by ‘well, I look after the kids all week so its your turn at the weekend. Like I’ve been going and having fun for 8 hours a day five days a week, and the 16 or so hours small child is at kindy etc. count for nothing. OK, rant over, just saying that being primary income earner is no guarantee of shit if you’re female.
I meant to say that is my UNAWARENESS of my class privilege that is biting me.
This is so glorious – I love how honest you are about your relationship’s power dynamics. So often this is only discussed in regards to OTHER people’s relationships, never MY Nigel.
Just wanted to say (apart from great post bluemilk) – thank you for ‘MY Nigel’. It has now entered the vernacular, at least my vernacular.
Sarah, I think you’re right about how important it is for women to be specific about these problems and to share them a little more honestly with one another.
Definitely MY Nigel. It took me years to get him to understand that feeding the children at a food court or a cafe doesn’t just happen by magic, and that when we got there our priority was finding food for them and ensuring they were happy, not finding food for ourselves (meaning him, of course).
A few months ago he spent a Saturday morning in bed, working. I brought him a couple of cups of coffee, but then he observed that it was a very effective way of working, and in fact he had read a biography of Potemkin and had found that it was one of the ways that Potemkin got through a huge amount of work, and he rather thought that he might continue to do it in future. “Potemkin had an army of servants,” I observed, in tones that perhaps weren’t the sweetest. To his credit My Nigel got it, but I was still angry about the bland assumption that he could just choose to spend Saturday mornings in bed and the household would just continue to function without any input from him.
I spend Saturday mornings in bed, he spends Sunday mornings in bed.
The length of the morning varies according to fundraising sausage sizzles/farmers market/family birthday to attend and so on, but the principle remains.
Yeah. I’ve been living with “my Nigel” for almost 7 years. He’s a good man and I love him. And when I ask him to work with me to split up the housework equitably, he does so with no complaints.
But if I don’t put energy into maintaining an equitable split, reworking the housework schedule as our work schedules change, things settle back into their ground state. And the ground state is that I plan and prepare dinner; I do a load of laundry when the hamper gets full; I unload and load the dishwasher; I make the coffee in the morning; I keep track of the household budget.
And the thing is, I have ADD. I’m very capable of getting lost in something I’m reading or working on, and ignoring stuff that needs to be done. I don’t keep up with things perfectly by any means. The dishes pile up sometimes.
But still. We talk about it and agree that we need to drink coffee at home rather than spending money at a coffee shop on the way to work. Yet when morning comes, I’m the only one who actually thinks to make the coffee. It so often seems to go like that. Stuff just doesn’t occur to him. And the only way it doesn’t go like that is if I sit him down to work out a fairer way.
He always sincerely thanks me for making dinner, making coffee, doing laundry, doing the dishes. He appreciates that I am taking care of these things so he doesn’t have to. I just wish that appreciation translated more often into him taking care of things so I didn’t have to.
We don’t have kids yet. I predict the ground state of parenting will be just like the ground state of housework.
“But if I don’t put energy into maintaining an equitable split, reworking the housework schedule as our work schedules change, things settle back into their ground state.”
To C: Yes, yes, yes. It makes me feel bad to complain, because my husband is truly an amazing hard working man. He really does hear me and takes steps to work things out when the equality is tilted. But at the same time, the energy it takes to point out that the equality is tilted is energy I could just spend doing one of the 10 billion things that need to get done!
The work of organising everything is huge, I completely agree. It is draining being the one to notice what needs doing and initiate the negotiations. This is one of my biggest gripes.
It’s the same reason why the government doesn’t tell the opposition OK FINE, you’re blocking all our bills, we’ll just DO NOTHING, THEN! The stakes are too high. ‘I told you so’ doesn’t cut it for permanent damage like that.
It’s the same reason that you don’t have half hour showers and you still recycle, even though your neighbour drives an SUV and runs their air conditioning every day of the year.
It’s the same reason you don’t just ignore all the rancid frying pans that your flatmate clearly has no intention of ever washing, despite the fact that you are a vegetarian and there’s rotting steak juice in all of them. Because while you don’t want to wash them, you don’t want to live in a house full of rotting saucepans, either.
That said, I do know one or two women who booked a plane ticket and went home to mother, with a ‘ don’t call me when it gets hard, I might be back in a few months if you are lucky’. Strength of will there that I don’t have.
Yes. This.
After 14 years of marriage and now with two children I am still trying to negotiate this with MyNigel. He goes to Uni two nights a week. I don’t get two nights a week off. I have however, started not doing things. The dishes have sat in the sink for days (irritates the bejesus out of me but fortunately he gave in and cleaned up his mess [as in he made the mess in the first place]). I have started telling the kids to ask Dad for whatever it is they want and purposefully not getting involved in making things like hot chocolate drinks. But I still do 95% of the housework while he does ‘projects’ on the weekend.
My Nigel likes to raise the stakes, and then only do part of the work he’s just added.
Like, last week he was out of the country. So me & kiddo ate at a restaurant every night (and, it was the same cost as groceries, because 5 year olds eat cheap almost everywhere. Sometimes we just shared a plate.) At the end of my solo parenting week the house was cleaner than at the beginning, several urgent errands had been done, all doctor appointments had been made, family birthday cards sent, etc. I did lean on a friend for 2 afternoons of child care, which I can’t do on a regular basis.
Now he’s home, he didn’t even take a day off to do stuff to catch up after being gone a week, and he’s all “oh but we can’t just eat out like that it’s not good we ought to cook.” So off I went to the grocery this morning. And then I arranged for dinner, and he promised to do dishes. Except, they’re not done yet and I just reminded him and he was all, oh maybe but maybe I don’t have time.
It’s the toilet at our house. If the kids need food/attention then I hold on, if MyNigel needs to go he just goes. (And he could be gone for some time.) It’s a bit ridiculous how cranky this makes me. My kids are 10 and 7, I’m pretty sure they could await my convenience.
I’m quite positive there’s a male/female dynamic at play here but added to it is a Birth Order dynamic. I’m a firstborn, he’s a third-born baby of the house. He’ll never organise anything but he’s always happy to come along, and if you point out that help is needed he can often manage that too.
I’ve just started to get into the habit of saying “where have you looked?” when family members ask me where their shoes/lunchbox/tie/gadget/phone/etc… is.
It was through doing this that I found out that asking me was the first course of action for my kids and Nigel if they’d lost something.
And of course, that doesn’t even begin to touch on the level of unexamined inequity in regard to organising our family life.
This comment is several years late, but I have just found this blog so have a bit of catching up to do.
After a few years of always having to find missing objects, or just tell the children where I saw them last, I weaned them off the habit of asking me first before looking themselves. It was simple. When they asked “have you seen my shoes/ lunchbox/ homework/ book/ school bag/ etc? ” – I just said ” No”.
The result was usually a pronounced Hmphh accompanied by a toss of the head/ slammed door/ or stomp out of the room. However, it did work at least partly – it made me realise I don’t need to do everything for them, if they can’t find the shoes/ lunchbox/ homework/ book etc the consequences are not usually all that bad. They have also learnt they can help themselves. Along the same lines, I stopped making lunches for my girls when they were about 8 or 9. They haven’t starved and make their own lunches with what is available. my 15 year old bakes whatever she wants during the weekend and then rations it out across the week. She is very self- reliant.
Great post and comments and relate to it all, but slightly off topic – the food court itself is the absolute freaking nightmare. I think I’d rather stuff everyone with drive through macdonald’s on the way home than sit in one. One of the circles of hell for me.
It was bad planning on Bill’s and my part that we ended up in the food court. We did so much faffing about before we left for the shopping trip that we ended up leaving when the kids were due for a meal again. I weighted up the circle of hell that is the food court and the circle of hell that is hungry/difficult children shoe-shopping.
You just made me feel a lot better about the last argument about household chores I had with MY Nigel.
He started it. He was the one who thought I was slacking and he started the argument.
At the time I felt bad that I thought everything was OK and he didn’t. How could I not notice? Now I think maybe that is a sign of the equal distribution of power in our relationship?
(Of course, the reason that he thought things were out of balance was because he was not noticing that I was getting up 1-2 times/night with the baby- and he wasn’t counting that in my column. I was counting it double, because 2 a.m. requires overtime pay, right?)
I’m also intrigued by the interplay of income with all of this. I am not the primary wage earner, but I make quite a bit more money than my husband does. I’ve often wondered whether that has something to do with the power balance in our relationship.
So you make more $$ but you aren’t the primary wage earner? I always assumed that the bigger source of $$ coming into the house was the primary wage earner. /OT
Maybe I am. I guess I don’t think of either of us as the primary wage earner. Neither of us “supports” the other. A family of four that made some different choices than we did (primarily with regards to housing- I live in a very expensive housing market) could live off of either of our salaries. If either one of us walked out the door and refused to pay child support, the other one would be able to support the kids fine. But would have to sell the house.
Huh. Did I just argue that either my husband or I am working primarily to pay our mortgage? That is an interesting way to think about it. We both like what we do, so we don’t think about our jobs strictly in terms of what the salary buys.
I don’t know- econ people? What’s the definition of primary wage earner? Does this term even make sense for a couple of two fairly high earners?
I used to think that too until I became an Army wife.
This is a common conundrum amongst military families.
The spouse employed by the ADF is seen as the primary wage earner, since all other decisions come in second place to the demands placed on the ADF member by the ADF. (Which is also a demand placed on us as the spouse)
You’ll find amongst our ranks, the women either work jobs that allow for transfers (like nursing and working in supermarkets) or you have spouses who work part time, who may earn more than the ADF member but due to the transitory lifestyle is only able to work part time (if they’re lucky) so they aren’t considered the primary wage earning. Many of us don’t work for that reason.
In town that have a heavy military presence, even finding a job stacking shelves can be tough because employers don’t want to employ you, knowing you’ll be moving on at any given time.
I definitely see myself as the primary wage earner and always have.
I do not see myself as the primary parent and never have, even when I was between jobs (Sam saw me as the primary parent during that period, and that pissed me off no end). At the moment, since he can get out of work earlier and has more flexibility during the day, Sam is the go-to parent for pick-ups, school activities, doctor visits, etc. Because he sees the other kids and parents more, he’s also become the point person for Eve’s social life, which I had not anticipated (but which I’m enjoying!)
Cloud – you are the primary income earner but you’re right, not such a useful term anymore with modern relationships and contemporary work arrangements.
Cloud, I wonder about the effect of income, too. I earn about twice as much as my husband. We had the greatest difficulty maintaining a balance during the nine months when I was home with our daughter (this was not planned – I left a job that became untenable and was actively looking for the next thing). Since then we’ve had several go-rounds when he thought I wasn’t doing my share. At one point I realized that I was working part-time, still earning twice what he was, with less flexibility during work hours and was also responsible for the doctor visits/play dates/child care.
As soon as I realized that, I started agitating for change 🙂
What happened with your conversation? I do believe 2:00 AM counts twice as much.
He had the good sense and grace to recognize that I’d won that argument once I pointed out how much I was getting up in the middle of the night.
I blogged about some of the gory details: http://www.wandering-scientist.com/2011/03/scenes-from-marriage.html
After that post went up, we discussed things again and ended up getting our housecleaners to come in twice a month instead of once. So now we don’t argue so much about chores, but I do know that he thinks we’re wasting the money on the housecleaners. He’s dead wrong on that one.
We haven’t really settled into the new routine- this is the first month with the increased housecleaning schedule, and my younger child keeps getting sick, which throws everything out of whack. But I think things will settle into something fairly equitable soon. We do use a chores schedule, which helps if one partner is very forgetful and the other is very sleep deprived. Importantly, we each have areas that we’re totally in charge of, too. So while I have to keep track of whether we have food to send to day care, he has to keep track of whether we need to get the toys off the grass because the sprinklers are going to run. For instance.
This is so interesting. I love how your blog (and the conversations it starts) forces me to take a closer look at my own life. I think the key to achieving some sort of equality in this area definitely comes down to walking in the other person’s shoes. When my son was 10 months, I switched from part-time to full-time, and my husband switched to part-time. Best. Decision. Ever. He is totally on top of feeding, cleaning, playing, etc. No prompting. Grocery shopping and doctor’s appointments etc still seem to be my domain, but we’ll get there. We talk about the status quo pretty constantly to make sure we remain on top of it, but after three months, it still feels mighty dreamy.
Still, your blog forced me to draw attention to the fact that even though bub is now night-weaned, I’m working full-time, studying and pregnant, I am still the one to get up to him at night. Multiple times. Thanks to you, I drew this to Nigel’s attention and we have now reached a more equitable split – he 5 nights, me 2. Thanks guys!
If you’re at a children’s birthday party you can pick the fathers who did a stint as SAHPs or primary parents or whatever – they are way more switched on to the children, they anticipate things better, they notice shit. The shared parenting thing really really helps.
Oh, and YES to BitchPhd’s genius comment! I am definitely the one who monitors equality in my relationship. Such a great point.
Wow, how many typos can Pirra make in one post?
My apologies if my above post requires more than one read through to make sense. (I have a child asking me to explain scientific notation to her while I type. Failing at multitasking…that’s my Wednesday. 😉 )
Pirra, I thought your take was fascinating, because it shows how many factors besides the obvious are at work in influencing division of responsibility. Have you observed anything about how the husbands of enlisted women regard their contribution to the household?
Not deliberately but you’ve piqued my curiosity enough to make the effort to find out from other spouses I know.
The only observations I can truly make at present are superficial of course, (unless I ask spouses for direct anecdotes) but most of us seem to just accept it as part of the lifestyle without really questioning it too closely (which wasn’t your question but your reply has me chewing on it anyway!).
As for enlisted women, whilst I know several, most of them are lesbians, so I think their power paradigms might reflect something else entirely…and many of them are in relationships with other enlisted women. (so rank trumps rank)
The heterosexual enlisted women I know are either single or have spouses that are also enlisted.
In cases where both partners are enlisted I’ve noticed that the higher ranking member is seen as the primary wage earner (obviously).
Having said that, a lot of ADF members can and do request to stay in one place to accommodate their families. Whether that be for educational purposes of children and/or spouse or for the benefit of the non-serving spouses career, or for a larger support base for the non-serving spouse the downside to staying put in one location is the adverse effect it has on the serving members opportunities for promotion.
Sometimes, being a supportive Army wife can make you feel like a failure as a feminist. (but those are generally bad days when you’re feeling bitter about always being left behind while he’s off having adventures & you’re at home with 24/7 drudgery in a strange town with no friends or family….it’s why I love the internet!)
Wow, sorry for the word vomit.
All I really had to say was, you know what, I’m interested to know the answer to that too so I will go crowd source my military spouse friends. 🙂
My Nigella is just perfect ; )
There is a lot to be said for a good Nigella.
Don’t mean to come across all ‘smug lesbian’ – it’s not all happy household here either, but we do constantly talk/negotiate the housework and we are either both ‘switched on’ and actively parenting (a la your shopping centre foodcourt experience) or we take it in turns (at parties etc). I think the best thing for that has been both of us working (outside the house) part-time and sharing care of our child.
We also employ a reward and recognition program and also, our housecleaning standards are pretty low on the scale, so that does help… I get sick of cooking all the time and she gets sick of washing all the time, and goddamnit there is no recycling bin fairy, that’s ME ok????? So it’s not perfect, but we usually address these issues when they arise and work through them.
This just hits home for me at the moment. I am so unhappy with the lack of balance with housework/chores at the moment, but when I’ve tried to bring it up I get a very quick and definite brushoff, to the effect that no, he actually puts in equally but I just don’t acknowledge it. This is, not to mince words, bullshit. BM you describe beautifully the way they can just not see how much work goes on even when there isn’t anything apparently going on.
There’s this really fucked dynamic where he periodically puffs his chest up and goes after the kids for not doing enough – which they don’t – but it’s as if he wants them to join me in the servant status before he does anything, plus he doesn’t realise, or acknowledge, how bad his example is.
Now that one kid is pretty much an adult and the other is teenage I’m thinking post-VCE (for him) may be a time of reckoning. With kids gone I may not be willing to keep on living with the big kid.
Helen, on the bad days it just unbearable, isn’t it? I am reaching another period of burn-out with the housework/chores inequity in our house, too, right now. I keep fantasizing about running away to a little cottage on my own.
The ‘why don’t you just stop doing everything’ argument is an excellent one – it does, indeed, force you to contemplate the power of not participating in something you don’t like.
In my own house, the ‘sorry, is our struggle’ problems that I outlined in that post have been corrected to some degree by Bill working a day a week from home while I am at work in the city. Having one day a week where we have switched responsibilities entirely for pick-ups and drop-offs, as well as primary care of the toddler has really improved things, though, we still have some terrible days. I can see from this experience that you kinda need to be totally removed from the equation for real change to happen – for me to get better at switching off and him to get better at switching on. Or maybe that’s just us? But it certainly broke through some ‘but, it can’t be changed’ thinking.
I think it is also probably easier for women doing paid work to tackle this whole issue. I honestly don’t know where or how I would draw lines about domestic work if I were a SAHM. And I should clarify, I believe I would be right to draw lines, but I am not sure how I would negotiate them. I am very interested to hear how SAHMs have done so.
I think you need a few key ingredients before women fight against inequality in their relationships with their partners – you need to know it is unjust, and that information won’t be readily available to you so it has to be sought out; it helps to know that other women are fighting against it also; you benefit greatly from knowing how other women have fought against it and what arrangements they’ve relaced traditional roles with in their relationships; you need energy, because you will have to fight it continually; you will need some head-space in order to think through things, particularly where you meet with strong resistance to change; you need some safety – it is no good if the children are literally held to ransome against you and it is no good if you will lose your job on account of a housework-strike.
Something I really don’t like about the individualism evident in so many of the comments on the Motherlode site is the idea that women bring this upon themselves – No, no, no, you know many institutional barriers keep women in these roles, it is such a cop-out to simply point fingers at women and say, well, you *chose* this. Another thing I hate, that came up in those comments? You hear this woman describing the fight she is taking on in trying to address the inequality in her relationship with her partner and then some dick comes along and says either – if you’re fighting like that then there must be some serious problems in your relationship that you’re not telling us about OR thank goodness we don’t fight like that, my partner respects me and we have such a great relationship. First, bully for you, and second, maybe this woman is just more honest than you or even braver or has higher standards of equality than you.
Anyway, I think my basic conclusion is that this stuff just has to be talked about and talked about – people want to talk about it.
This happens with our washing pile. Why is it that I am the only one who notices that Mt Versuvius is about to blow it’s top. Pisses me off to say the least! As for shopping cetres, I avoid them at all costs. Jacinta
[…] who interrupted my story about this pattern I was observing in my relationship with Bill where he is always switching off and I am always switching on to say how much she loved how relaxed Bill always is. Well, switching off, it will do that for you, […]
Something occurred to me today which I would put on my own blog but that would be too problematic for me to do… maybe I need to set up a very private vent blog somewhere. But maybe it can go here.
I think that one of the diffierences between MY NIGEL and me is that I always do the family things first, and only when the family things are done to I get around to doing things things for me, and he does the reverse. So if I’m doing some ironing, I do the girls’ school shirts, and then some teatowels and tablecloths, and only after that do I get onto my own shirts. He does the exact reverse, but not only does he do his own stuff first, but if he runs out of time, and only manages to do his own shirts, he still counts it as doing household work. Whereas my personal stuff is never counted as household work.
I hear you, and it is so hard to change that behaviour. If you say – can you do some of X first, then you are taking the responsibility for getting it done, regardless of who does it. Personally I would cut out ironing teatowels – if you can. I just fold and put in the drawer – they are spread all over the house in what seems like a matter of minutes anyway.
Right now I am also dealing with, of all things, guilt because MyNigel picking up housework stuff has allowed me some free time. So I read on the couch while he does the ironing and feel guilty that he is doing my ironing. But I sternly tell myself that he got a free ride for literally years and that he can suck it up, and he is happy to. He has done his own washing for two weeks now, and since it is one load once a week he is coping. I think he is starting to appreciate how much more smoothly things run in the morning when the house is tidied the night before, esp. getting the kids ready and out the door. We still have a ways to go with floor mopping and bathroom cleaning but it is better than before.
Mindy, my Nigel still likes to remind me occasionally of the day I was reading Susan Maushart’s “Wifework” on the sofa while he did the washing up. Like you, I instinctively feel guilty if he is doing housework at a time I’m not, but remind myself that I don’t stop to think about it at all if I’m doing some while he’s not.
I’m curious about all the people who mention everyone doing their own washing. Isn’t it more efficient to pool a job like that? Does everyone have separate dirty clothes baskets?
Yes, I was wondering about the individual washing as well! But then we don’t even separate by colour…
[…] recently discovered her — and we happen to have the same blog theme!) both T and M were “switching on” (and staying on). They seemed to have a beautiful grasp of ease-fully sharing parenting tasks […]
[…] was reminded while reading it of this great post from blue milk, and this one too. Like this:LikeBe the first to like this. Tags: books, […]
“It happened because Bill is good at switching off and I am good at switching on.” Yep, that pretty much sums it up. So simply. Thank you.
Just want to mention first of all that when I am in one of our/my harder times with the work/life/marriage/parenthood balance, I almost always come to your blog for support and well-written arguments. So thank you for that!
Couple points to offer to the discussion:
1. Last night during one of these arguments in our house, my husband’s suggestion/solution was that on Sundays (before we both go back to work full-time outside the home for the week) we sit down and go through what’s going on that week, what needs to be done, and who’s going to do it. Nice suggestion. I actually do appreciate him engaging enough to offer this reasonable solution. But of course in my head I’m thinking “and who does the preparation for this meeting??? me of course!” And that’s significant…the household/life organization always falls to me. I’m the one with the running list of “to dos” on my phone…but these to-dos are for the entire family (find and hire an accountant, get our will squared away, pick up his grandfather’s 90th birthday gift, invite daughter’s school friend’s family over for breakfast, plan and prepare said breakfast, etc….) If I don’t tell him what needs to be done he has no idea.
2. If I decide to “stop doing everything” (which right now is occurring to me for the first time)…I lose too! I lose out on a fulfilling,organized,healthy,clean,active,fun,community-engaged life. If I don’t take the time to prepare for and cook a healthy dinner and just wait for someone else to do it…it won’t get done, and I’ll also be left eating fast food crap. If I don’t take the time to arrange for social gatherings..it won’t get done, and I lose because I miss out on the community that I cherish. NOT doing everything doesn’t really help. We all lose. But the work of making sure everything is equal (ie: preparing for Sunday night meeting) is almost more work than just doing everything myself. ugh.
Whenever a woman I know stops doing everything, the house turns into chaos. It seems that if the woman stops doing everything (including asking the man to do something, anything), nothing gets done. I don’t understand why men need to be asked when they are not vision impaired in any way. The mess is clear to see after children have eaten. And it is clear that toddlers need a certain amount done for them. And it is clear that when clothes are dirty, they need washing. And it is clear that if the family wants to eat, dinner doesn’t prepare itself. This is why single men live in tips and eat takeaway, mostly. They just don’t want to do it and if they can get away with not doing things, they will. I don’t know why women don’t tell me BEFORE they get too serious that if any bloke wants to be with them, they have to do household duties without being asked, because no one likes having to ask the other adult living in the house to do something. And if she finds after living with him that he lied to her about doing stuff un-asked (ie he doesn’t actually do things), then she should kick him out immediately, citing this as the reason. Once a bloke get kicked out by a few women for the exact same reason, watch him step up and behave like an adult! But women are too weak to do this, unfortunately. My partner is a house husband and has to do everything, because I work and he doesn’t. And he’s fine with that because he actually has some respect for me and himself. When we both worked, we split it 50/50 and that was fine, too.
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