WomensStuff

Well, I have a lot to say about this (someone needs to turn my verbose mode off, ugh).

The phrase "to each according to their need, from each according to their ability" seems to be an implicit organizing principle in my relationship, whoever is best situated to do a task most easily is most likely to do it.

However, this creates some unfairness.

Just because of the way my brain is, I have a harder time planning ahead, being reliable to a schedule, and maintaining an regular level of executive functioning. Especially historically I suffered from what I now realize were fairly bad levels of depression and anxiety, which put too much burden on my partner, who is extremely hard-working, reliable, and capable.

Small example: if I need to call a doctors office for something, it might take me weeks to do it and it was exhausting and difficult for me to do (both initiating the task was difficult, but also handling the anxiety of talking on the phone was overwhelming).

So I basically constantly feel like I'm not doing enough, esp. relative to my extremely industrious and capable spouse.

My depression and anxiety are much better now, so I'm more likely to finish a task like calling someone within a week rather than sitting on it for a week or longer, and I have much less anxiety during the call. I even pro-actively pick up social tasks like making a phone call sometimes to lighten my spouse's plate, which is something I rarely ever did before.

A lot of the time we end up competing to do tasks, e.g. I constantly have to fight my partner to be able to drive if we're going somewhere together (she tries to monopolize that labor).

Because I do all the cooking, my partner is also very aggressive about doing the dishes to compensate, which makes me feel bad, because I think it's not fair (doing dishes is dull labor, cooking is often fun - they're not equal). So I try to sneak a few dishes in, and try to wash as many dishes from my cooking before she can get to them, as a way to pull my weight there (even though she would prefer I don't do any of the dishwashing).

With laundry she always initiates washing clothes, because I wouldn't do laundry more than once a week, but she initiates laundry three to four times a week, so it's harder for me to ever initiate doing the laundry (and even if we were on the same page about doing loads once a week, I tend to struggle to initiate tasks like that anyway, so there would probably be inequality there just because I'm more flaky, essentially).

So to compensate, I try to be proactive and sneak down to swap loads and fold the clothes to help out, but it never really balances out the labor, e.g. the cognitive labor she does keeping track and initiating so many of the tasks isn't made up for by my inconsistent and minor contributions.

It's the same story with cleaning - she initiates cleaning more, and I try to make up for the inequality by doing some of the harder cleaning (like scrubbing the shower or bath, sweeping and mopping the dirty kitchen floors, etc.).

So we try to be egalitarian in our household work, but I don't think it works out perfectly.