The politics of housework
by Mira and Charles on August 20th, 2009A husband and wife go to bed. The man sleeps like a baby. The woman tosses and turns. Sound familiar? Indeed it turns out that women report more troubled, less refreshing sleep than men. Why?
Well, it turns out that an important reason why women don’t sleep as well as men, and are more stressed, is that married women still do more than their share of the housework, which includes childcare. And that needs to change. Here’s why and how.
Let’s put this is perspective. There is a huge difference between today and a couple of generations ago. Today men routinely pitch in and help with chores that used to be considered women’s work.
The good news is that in the past forty years men’s contribution to household work has doubled. That’s a lot. And that’s great.
But the bad news is that this doubling came from men contributing 15 percent of household work to men today contributing about 30 percent of household work. Yep, that’s right: women on average do more than twice as much household work as men. Check out this link for a lot of good info on what’s going on with the housework in the family today.
And here’s why that’s a problem.
First of all, most women think it’s unfair. And that creates an acid-like corrosion of the love in a marriage. Long-term unfairness is very damaging to relationships. It creates simmering anger and leads people to withhold affection. It deprives the marriage of the affection it needs to thrive.
Second, it leads to women being stressed out and overburdened. And that makes them angry, anxious, and depressed. And that too feeds back into the marriage and damages it.
So what can you do about it?
First, men have to get rid of the idea that they “help” with the housework. This “helping” idea puts the responsibility and worry on women, and that’s just what they need to avoid. Household chores and child care have to be everyone’s responsibility. Taking out the garbage is not such a terrific achievement if your wife has to remind you to do it.
Second, men have to stop the little games men play to get out of house work. We all know them: if you’re slow and sloppy about cleaning up the kitchen, at some point a lot of wives will say, “Oh, just go away, I’ll do it myself.” The guy thinks he’s won. But he’s lost. His wife is now pissed.
Third, you need a once-and-for-all solution. Say to your spouse, “We need a fair division of the house work. I just don’t think it’s fair now. So you write down what you think would be a fair division and I’ll do the same and then we’ll get together and compare notes.” There will probably be a lot of overlap. That’s good. That’s where you agree. Where you don’t agree, go through each item one by one and see if you can agree on who it makes most sense to do that chore. There will be some left where you just can’t agree how to share them. For those, you just take turns choosing one of the undesirable chores.
This is fair and it’s workable. And now you’ve got an agreement. And that’s sacred, otherwise trust is broken.
But don’t cheat. If you finally agree on a division, keep to it. Every time you “forget” you hurt the marriage.
If you need more help figuring out how to divide chores or how to recover from the hurts past unfairness has caused, Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad will give you a lot of shortcuts that really work.
