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AIBU?

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Original poster

AIBU to think this is a fair split?

227 replies

Yourcatisnotsorry · 04/04/2025 20:53

Person A works Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, various shifts totaling 25 hours per week. No commute time, no out of hours work, low stress job.

Person B works Monday - Friday 9-6. No regular commute but some business trips with 14 hour days at least a couple of times a month. Regular out of hours/late night work and high pressure/stressful job.

3 primary-age children and some pets.

Person A does all the ironing, cleaning, gardening and 70% of the school runs plus after school childcare/taking kids to hobbies 3.30-6pm three days a week.

Person B does all the life admin, pays bills, sorts birthdays and play dates, Christmas, kids hobbies, appointments and holidays etc. All shopping (weekly food shop and anything needed for the house, pets and kids), meal planning and looks after the children after school 2 days a week from 6pm until they go to bed and all day Sunday.

Everything else such as looking after the kids on Saturday, general tidying up, DIY, laundry, cooking, kids homework and pet care are shared fairly equally. Both parents get time to do their hobbies/gym/socialize occasionally.

yanbu to think this is a fair split of chores and both parties should be able to manage their obligations.

yabu if you think one partner has it much tougher than the other.

OP posts:
ItsAWonderfulLifeforMe · 05/04/2025 07:18

Op, as person B I would be sitting down with person A and asking them to take on part of the admin, whether it’s the after school clubs, sorting holiday cover, pets, dentists, hair cuts etc. or even just knowing what’s for school lunch each day or looking at the swim schedule etc. I don’t think you should be responsible for organising all holiday cover, it’s a joint problem. All these little things add up and sounds like you feel like it’s all on your shoulders, which is hard. I’m surprised there isn’t more sympathy on here, how does ALL the school admin, hobbies stuff, gifts, bills, errands, food shopping and planning, play date sorting, holiday booking, clothes, buying house stuff, etc only take 30 mins?!!! Maybe you have a quick family meeting at the weekend and explain to each other what’s on your to-do list that week and look at how you can help each other

Goinggold · 05/04/2025 07:19

If my partner was earning 8x what I was earning I'd completely expect cleaning, ironing and gardening to be outsourced regardless of whether in theory I had time to do it. Why did you stop having cleaners?

ThankULord · 05/04/2025 07:44

Person B needs one childfree day to help.

Life admin does not take a few minutes a day or one hour a week. Lucky for those who it does.

Person A needs to change the sunday to another week day.
The person B has either the Saturday or the Sunday to themselves to recover physically and give the brain some space and time to ease up.

Rest is important. Very important. And Person B is not getting any. Person B will make themselves ill.

Drowninginprobate · 05/04/2025 07:45

I sometimes wonder if a life admin PA role would actually be worth starting as a business and if not someone needs to write an app that sorts it all out for you, like an Alexa for life admin

alexa make dentist appoints and a cardboard Viking ship by 9am tomorrow.

sending you hugs OP and hope that you feel less frazzled soon

Ophy83 · 05/04/2025 07:47

Outsource the cleaning and ironing, and have your partner take over the shopping and life admin.

MoreDangerousThanAWomanScorned · 05/04/2025 07:49

ItsAWonderfulLifeforMe · 05/04/2025 07:18

Op, as person B I would be sitting down with person A and asking them to take on part of the admin, whether it’s the after school clubs, sorting holiday cover, pets, dentists, hair cuts etc. or even just knowing what’s for school lunch each day or looking at the swim schedule etc. I don’t think you should be responsible for organising all holiday cover, it’s a joint problem. All these little things add up and sounds like you feel like it’s all on your shoulders, which is hard. I’m surprised there isn’t more sympathy on here, how does ALL the school admin, hobbies stuff, gifts, bills, errands, food shopping and planning, play date sorting, holiday booking, clothes, buying house stuff, etc only take 30 mins?!!! Maybe you have a quick family meeting at the weekend and explain to each other what’s on your to-do list that week and look at how you can help each other

That was my estimate - and I think it's a really generous one! How you could make it take more than 30 mins a week is beyond me, especially since meal planning is listed as a separate task. I also have primary aged kids. Very few of the things on that list are things that need doing every week, a few seem to be yearly!

Drivingmissrangey · 05/04/2025 07:54

To be classic MN I do think you are making life difficult for yourself.

Need to organise the kids making cards - just buy them
Need to respond to 100s of school parents WhatsApp’s- WTF?
Buying birthday presents - takes two minutes on Amazon (or any online retailer)
Organising play dates - not sure why this takes so much time. Quick WhatsApp to ask if little Jonny or julie is available on X date.

PinkFrogss · 05/04/2025 07:58

I think you’ve deliberately made it look like person B does more as you’ve split tasks up, added detail, and left out that you had them all day Sunday as A works that day (rather than being off playing golf or something).

At most I’d ask A to pick up the weekly food shop, but otherwise I think it sounds like a pretty equal split while you’ve got 3 children young enough to need supervision.

rosiebl · 05/04/2025 07:58

Depends who does the cooking?

Mountainfrog · 05/04/2025 08:04

Top tip for kids birthdays…. We have a local independent toy shop in town which does gift vouchers - the kids love going to choose something themselves… useful to have a few in the drawer and a multipack of children’s cards. Could you do something similar?

LBFseBrom · 05/04/2025 08:06

Person B does a lot more than A.

Hire a cleaner and put ironing in the ironing shop, do main grocery shopping online then redistribute the work load between A&B so it is fairly balanced,

Eddielizzard · 05/04/2025 08:08

The trouble with 'life admin' is one person can have hardly any, while the next, loads. Depends on how many dependants you have and their ages. Small kids = heavy life admin, as does an elderly parent. Add in extra responsibilities like DC with SEN or health conditions, an old house that has constant maintenance issues, pets etc.

So while someone might think life admin is a doddle, it varies hugely.

Iamnotalemming · 05/04/2025 08:09

Who does the cooking?

LePetitMaman · 05/04/2025 08:10

MoreDangerousThanAWomanScorned · 04/04/2025 21:16

I think it's clear you're person B! You may not have done it deliberately but B's is all split down into sub tasks and A's very much is not. 'life admin, pays bills, sorts birthdays and play dates, Christmas, kids hobbies, appointments and holidays etc' is a very long way to describe something that must take less than half an hour a week on average, whereas 'does all the cleaning' is a huge task for a family of five with young children and pets, and could easily be broken down into a very detailed list, but gets glanced over in a couple of words. If you wrote out both lists in a similar way I don't think you'd get this deluge of people saying B is getting the much worse deal.

Exactly this. You can see the disdain for person A just in the writing style in the first 3 lines.

And making a right meal of trying to maximise "kids parties" and tiny things whilst glossing over cleaning the entire house of a family of 5 with 3 small children.

PinkFrogss · 05/04/2025 08:14

Eddielizzard · 05/04/2025 08:08

The trouble with 'life admin' is one person can have hardly any, while the next, loads. Depends on how many dependants you have and their ages. Small kids = heavy life admin, as does an elderly parent. Add in extra responsibilities like DC with SEN or health conditions, an old house that has constant maintenance issues, pets etc.

So while someone might think life admin is a doddle, it varies hugely.

And some of it is how much you want to make of it. Bulk buying a load of birthday cards each year vs supervising the children making birthday cards for example, or automating bills vs paying them manually.

One persons 30 minutes life admin regularly throughout the year is another persons 30 minutes life admin once a year.

Sux2buthen · 05/04/2025 08:16

Making homemade cards 😂😂😂
it would have been quicker to carry out the tasks than type them out

travelallthetime · 05/04/2025 08:17

hmmm, so person b's looks on paper to be a lot however. 'pays bills' - sort out direct debits - bills sorted and takes zero hours a week. Does food shop - get it delivered - takes 30 mins a week to do online (max, all your favourites are all in one place). Sorts birthdays - so 3 times a year.....appointments - unless one of your children has a medical condition then what appointments? Dentist twice a year?

I think your person B trying to make it look like you do a lot!

StartAnew · 05/04/2025 08:17

Yourcatisnotsorry · 05/04/2025 06:07

I hate the life admin the most! I’d much rather clean toilets than sit on one organising stuff 😂

Show quote history

Then why not swap? If you have a desk job something more physical would be a break.

Strawpollplease · 05/04/2025 08:18

If you have ADHD then life admin can be completely overwhelming. I do all the life admin as DH has quite severe ADHD. If he had to do it I think it’s fair to say it would take him possibly 10 times as long as it takes me. Poor executive functioning is one of the absolute hallmarks of ADHD and therefore one of the problems may be that A and B are dividing up the jobs wrong!

whathaveiforgotten · 05/04/2025 08:21

Even if he earns minimum wage, if you earn 8x his salary then it’s absolute madness not to have a cleaner for a couple of hours a week. Unless you’re crippled with debt repayments or something then you can definitely afford it. Why on earth did you stop having one?

Stagshear · 05/04/2025 08:22

Person A needs to get a better job and bring in more money. Then hire a cleaner, someone to do the ironing, and a gardener. That will then free up some of their time to take on the admin tasks.

Person A is an adult and doesn’t get to opt out of trying to get a decent job, because you have done that.

It can also become intensely stressful over a long period when one of you is responsible for so much more financially. When it is balanced if one of you loses your job for example then there are two of you sharing the burden. Here if A loses their job the household wouldn’t notice, if B lost their job then they’d be fucked. I found it exhausting and stressful knowing I had so many people financially reliant just on me.

StripyPanda · 05/04/2025 08:22

I think it would be wise to see if person A would prefer to be a stay at home parent or cut shifts so that person B can be the main earner and get a little downtime …. obvs when u come home you could take over the childcare and help out but not have such rigid commitments 🤷‍♀️

whathaveiforgotten · 05/04/2025 08:22

What does ‘pay bills’ mean in an admin sense? Surely you just have direct debits that automatically come out? If not why not sort that out once and it’s done?

RandomMess · 05/04/2025 08:23

I agree the issue may be having AdHD and doing the admin, can you swap something around even as a trial period?

nc43214321 · 05/04/2025 08:24

Unfortunately when you have kids it’s rarely shared equally. You could look at it 2 ways person A is sacrificing career/ pension in order to deal with the kids, sickness etc and enabling person B to have a career they are good at with pension. Person A could ideally do with getting Sunday hours put into a weekday so you can share more of the load at the weekend, but again if kids are unwell they around to sort children. Person A may also feel resentment as they would never be able to work person B hours due to having to do most the childcare pick up / drop offs. Not sure how it can ever be fair.