WomensStuff

Every man I've ever lived with has been a slob. They say you should just stop doing chores and let your partner get upset when things don't get done - that only works if you have a partner who isn't perfectly content to live in a slimy dumpster. One thought I was a germaphobe because I once watched him drop chicken on the floor and throw it back into the pot of already cooked food and wasn't OK with it.

I live with my mom now and we have a similar comfort level when it comes to tidiness and sanitation. We keep things generally picked up and take care of the truly important things like dishes and toilets, but neither of us enjoys cleaning so we're both willing to put up with a lot of dustiness and unvacuumed carpets. We share work pretty evenly.

No kids in our house. I HATE vacuuming so he does that. He hates cleaning the bathroom so I do that. We both hate mowing the lawn so we pay someone. He does the garbage I do the recycle. We're pretty 50/50 on dishes and food.

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.

I don't know this sub so I hope it's ok for a man to respond. When I first got married I think my wife definitely did most of the chores. But when I retired and she kept working, I did most of the chores. Then she retired and I still do most of the chores.

But I have to admit I do most of the messing up. So it could be a reluctance to clean up after me. Although I'm not sure that true with for instance vacuuming, which I do.

An additional note though is that, is it fair to only consider chores in the division of labor? I mean I do all car and household repairs (and I'd like to point out we have three cars all over 20 years old so that's a lot of repairs). I'm also the only one who washes the cars. When the house gets painted, inside or out, that's 100% me.

I do most of the cooking and virtually all of the dishes. She does a ton of laundry. As a man, I only feel the need to do laundry when I'm running out of my plentiful underwear. She does laundry, I don't know, in her sleep even. I vacuum, she picks up around the house. Etc.

I can see that it would be a real problem if it's very one-sided, but I think you also have to look at the big picture. Just my $0.02.

Before cohabitation I always have a conversation about our living together social contract. What are you willing to take responsibility for?

The last relationship I was in started out with a partner who split things evenly and turned into learned helplessness on his part. It was awful. He did nothing at the end.

The guy I'm with now comes from a relationship where his partner did nothing. We occasionally discuss who should do what, and then get mad at each other because the other person wants to take on too much.

We split fairly according to who is able to do something at the moment. We have some chores one of us will standardly do daily, and some we do together.

It was a bit difficult to figure out who prefers what and who's better at what, but we've figured it out and it works well now.

I do majority of chores because I have significantly less time in office than my poor SO. SO did same for me when I had 2 hr commutes (one way) so I won't complain.

There has never been a situation where I haven't been the one who does all the chores.

So I'm dating a woman now who I live with and I thought, "Now I'll finally get an equal distribution of household labor." Lol nope. But everything else in our relationship is great other than that.

lol. Yeah they weren’t. I did literally everything… Did

Many years ago I was withy ex and he was "one of the good ones". Really nice man, and a good person. But he just did NOT do his fair share of things. His dad did nothing and mum did it all, so although he denied it, he expected the same.

He had to be screamed at repeatedly to do anything. He'd forget tasks because he made no effort whatsoever to try to remember them, and would NEVER put it right when he forgot. I would often literally sob and plead, saying how hurtful it was that he saw me as a servant. He just wouldn't do it.

I've never been able to fathom how so many men just sit and watch their partners doing it all. I just can't fathom treating a partner like that.