"Traditional" household roles

[LorlieS]

How far have we really stepped away from these in reality? How does your household operate?
My mother is appalled that I do very little cooking at home; hubby does nearly all of it for myself and the kids. She does EVERYTHING for my dad and as a result he is a man child and extremely lazy!
However, I would say I do 90% of cleaning of the house, clothes washing and ironing etc. I also do majority of DIY.
We both work ft on similar wages.
When I returned to work from mat leave, hubby took a day off work to look after our little girl and absolutely loved it! Took her to classes etc; they have a fantastic bond. Difficult for us financially but no regrets.
He was very often the only dad there but that didn't bother him. He says he would give anything to be a SAHD if he could whereas the thought of myself being a SAHM fills me with dread!
I guess the key is our division of jobs works for us 😀

I do most of the cleaning, dp does all the cooking and we both go food shopping. I do all the organising/ life admin as I have more time. When dc’s were younger we shared nursery/ school drop offs/ clubs etc as per our working patterns.

@SurrenderedWife Just curious... why does he have to give you all of his money for you to spend? Doesn't seem quite right to me. Imagine if it was the other way around?

He doesn't have to. He just does. And I spend it to our mutual benefit. Because we are a partnership.

@SurrenderedWife Great if it works for you both.

That's my point. It does. But it wouldn't necessarily work for the next couple.

@SurrenderedWife Does he have any money he can do with as he chooses?

When we first started living together, we divided up all the household tasks. Some are shared (eg cooking, childcare, shopping) and with those ones there is flexibility on who does them depending on who has more time, others are the sole preserve of one person (although the other person might offer to help sometimes). Key to harmony is avoiding any criticism of tasks that aren’t yours!

DH does probably 60-70% of cooking and more than half of food shopping but no meal planning He genuinely thinks this is at least half of all chores and mental load.

Yes. We both have our own spending cash out of the main pot

Before kids we both worked full time and shared everything. I don't know how equally as it's hard to work out, but it seemed a fair split.
After kids I haven't worked full time for 19 years so I do a lot more, but he still does plenty (although very little cooking or shopping) and I have a LOT more free time than he does, even so.

The problem with "traditional roles" within the home is that most men no longer earn a traditional amount - ie enough to put a roof over their family's heads feed and clothe them etc whilst the wife didn't work so had the school day to do housework etc. Now that a single salary is usually no longer enough to provide for a family and women also have to work the school hours are no longer available for housework - so both parents need to pull their weight around the home.

We share parenting stuff pretty well, as in, he does the boring/grunt work and not just fun stuff.

I do a lot of the mental load too, appointments, organising holidays or day trips. DH does big admin stuff.

We share cooking and cleaning although I think I do more actual cleaning whereas he doesn't see dust and dirt and is content to tidy without actually cleaning. Laundry is shared but usually instigated by me.

I do all the DIY, driving and car cleaning stuff.

So on the whole, I think I do more around the house.

My MIL was appalled her darling son lifted a finger. He worked from home and I was always out of the home.
It worked for us.

But, she did resent me every single day that he dared move away, so...

Hmm I think dh and I split things along quite traditional roles. I do 90% of cooking and food based chores including cleaning the kitchen and probably 70-80% of the rest of the household cleaning and organising. I also do all of the school organising.

The difference and reason I'm ok with this is that I only work 2 days a week and he supported everyone while I was building up my business. He runs all our finances, speaks to our agent who runs our rental, does all the mortgage/banking stuff and researching savings accounts etc. He also is my tech support and sorts out finding new cars for great deals, runs his own side hustle buying and selling online and ploughs all his income into mortgage, high interest savings or improving our long term stability.

He has just been made redundant and took over all the school drop offs and pick ups without any discussion and has suggested that for the next few weeks while he sorts out his next job that he do all the childcare so I can focus on work (it can vary by season and jan-march can get busy)

I think that every couple should be free to arrange how they live as long as both parties are happy and that over a long marriage, things may change over time, quite substantially.

This is especially true when one person does a more unusual job, think military, rig work, jobs where you travel abroad at the drop of a hat. You can't do 50/50 split when one partner never knows whether they will be at home or not. In this case you have to act as if the partner at home is a single parent and has to be able to do everything without any input from partner.
If you have similar work patterns then it is simpler to split responsibilities, but there are jobs that this doesn't work for, but these jobs still need doing.

I am only going to speak from my eperience of living in a few nations.
I have lived in Scandinavia, Belgium, USA, and the UK for extensive periods of time. One thing that is unusual in Britain and the USA is that women will makes excuses or lie about housework. In the more self-assured Scandinavia, women whose husbands to the cooking will say that. My experience in the UK was that if I did hte cooking, she would say she did the cooking and could not trust me to boil an egg. I think this shows there is still huge pressure on women in the UK to put up a show and have a domesticated ideal.
(I think the equivalent for men is if Pfizer had asked men about their potency, they would have concluded there was no market for Viagra).

I am very lucky, my wife works and we split the housework. I have certainly had partners who did neither.

My Mum is the same, she hears women of my generation talking about how they do everything and takes it on face value (just as I very rarely hear about friends saying they are impotent or have no sex drive). I think it is why for my generation, there often seems to an alliance with the Mother-in-law as opposed to the sterotypical antipathy.

From your description, you sound like an absolute dream wife. I would imagine that your husband would brag to his friends about how lucky he is. I think for the older generation, it is hard to accep that the relationship centering around their husband's needs and them being responsible for the house was arbitary and silly. They were brought up with it and wasted a chunk of their lives on a false presumption.

Hate when people smugly proclaim they wouldn't put up with it and why aren't all women like them. Do you know how draining it is trying to get your partner to do their fair share? And why is it my fault I haven't magically found a way to make him be less lazy? Why isn't it his fault for being lazy? Or the fact we live in a sexist society so a large proportion of men will be like this and you often don't find out until you've got 2 kids?

We fall loosely on traditional lines in terms of house responsibilities too, but when it comes to daily living chores it's split fairly. I couldn't be married to a man who needed me to write him a chore chart or treat him like a child.

Sometimes people tell me I'm "lucky" DH does housework. I don't think it's luck. We've had times where I've been a SAHP, we've both worked full time, and a range of part time work patterns. We also did shared parental leave which I think was a game changer. Our default position is whoever is at home more picks up more, because we both know the value of someone running the home and we're both willing to do it as circumstances require.

I brought my Danish girlfriend to England. She was having a drink with some women and she commented that she did not have their issues: I did plenty of housework and was quite stoic when ill. She was promptly cold shouldered by them. I think she was being rude by being evidently secure enough not to claim I was borderline abusive.

Dh does most of the cooking, food shopping and washing. He works 3 days a week, I work full time.
Cleaning is probably about 50/50.
He does a lot of maintenance jobs and anything car related, I do more life organising (booking holidays, sorting kids stuff out, buying presents) and general tidying / keeping on top of life.
Works for us - we're late 40s.

My mum and dad had very traditional roles, although he always did the washing up and made cups of tea. I wouldn't say my mum waited on him, but she did do all the traditional wife work.

Definitely. It's the same with the ones who are modern enough when it comes to sex outside marriage but decide they're massive traditionalists when it comes to proposing. Too many men expecting to have their cake and eat it when it comes to relationships and division of labour.

What really annoys me about the question about "traditional" roles, is why it's always about whether the cooking/cleaning/childcare is split so that women do it all when actually, while this might not be true across the board, it seems to me that 50 years ago, in more or less middle class families, "traditional" roles may well have seen women doing the vast bulk of the domestic load - cooking, cleaning, shopping etc, sure. but there were a bunch of things that were traditionally "men's jobs that somehow, now seem to be done by women.

eg working. For a start. Lots of those "traditional" families had a man working and mum at home, which immediately made the "traditional" split less hard for the woman.

Also, there are a lot of things that growing up my dad and most of my friend's dads did that we saw as "men" jobs that somehow today have been dumped back on the women. eg, anything that was a bit more onerous - so even where the mum was in charge of the garden overall, it was the men (and our brothers) who were mowing the lawn, doing the heavy pruning, doing the skip runs etc. Bins and DIY - absolutely the men. In terms of children/childcare - I'd say overall, the dads were the ones who did the weekend sports runs/sports activities/match watching. They DEFINITELY did the majority of late night lifting and carrying for teenagers. It was Dads who did the "outdoorsy" stuff - we went for walks, to the park, camping, taught us to ride our bikes (and in time, drive our cars) etc.

Even just things like shopping - my dad actually did a lot of the shopping and I feel like that might have been true for my friends too. But was DEFINITELy true was, for example, if Mum and I did the shopping, Dad would be there unloading the car, helping to unpack the shopping etc. And I think that was pretty routine.

School runs - in most cases, the dads did the school run on their way to work. Admittedly, I grew up in another country where school started much earlier so that was a more practical option than it might be here where schools tend to start later.

Also re finances, I remember my great aunt telling me that after her DH died, she'd been a bit surprised to discover how little money he had. She had actually worked a lot of the time, but he had always had the "main job" and had paid all the bills etc. She said that he never once let slip that actually, his disposable income was very little. She was embarrassed that she'd never realised that he didn't buy things for himself because he just didn't have the money. I think that was true for a lot of men of this sort of generation - they worked and perhaps they had their sports or golfing activity or whatever, but they prioritised their wife and children over themselves in terms of spending. A friend told me a few years ago that while her DH paid for everything as she was a SAHM, she needed a little part time job on the side to pay for things like getting her hair done or whatever. I couldn't get my head around it. If anything, I feel like when I was growing up there was a slightly paternalistic attitude of, "ooh, must give wifey the cash so she can look nice etc" which obviously wasn't great, but my point is that I'm so tired of "traditional" roles only being looked at from a cooking/cleaning/childcare perspective.

Sorry, very long. Bit of a rant.

EDIT: the reason this annoys me SOOO much is that MIL was annoyed that SIL wasn't cooking every night for exBIL.... even though, exBIL didn't earn any money, do any chores etc etc etc. She didn't seem to think THAT was a problem, only that SIL wasn't doing her traditional role. sigh.

I can only write of my own experiences.
I am a man getting n for fifty years of age. I have been in relationships where women barely lifted a finger of housework, and could not cook. I was the one who did it. Of course, if you asked them, I was useless and could not do a thing.
My experience of moving to Scandinavia is that the women I have lived with would happily say that I am a good cook and do plenty of housework.

I am aware that there are wives who earn more than their husbands and do not resent this. I have been in a couple of relationships where I was out earned and believe me, they certainly resented me. It might well be my lack of charm! :D Yet, is seems almost taboo for women to be able to say this, there is pressure to put up a front.

Men often have to pretend they are sexually potent and popular with women in a way that is clearly nonsense. Just as there are average men feeling very inadequate unnecessarily, I sometimes think there are women who are abused and think it is just normal because of the same front being put up.

...to waffle on, if I look back at my parents, I think the main thing that has changed is somehow it was taken for granted that my Dad was the central character of the household.

I remember having a diagnosis that could be exacerbated by stress, and knowing I woud have to tell my wife. I realised my Dad thought I was hesitant as she would be concerned about me (as the central character) rather than the further stress it would bring me. When a friend of mine had his brother commit suicide and his girlfriend did not give him a hard time about cancelling weekend plans but instead travelled with him to his parents and supported, they just saw that as normal. This shows how much they swa the man as inherently important.

Of course, we are a long way from that now and that is progress.

I do the vast majority of the food shopping and cooking. I enjoy it, he doesn’t. He does all the washing up, regardless of who cooks.
Laundry is about 60/40 with me doing more. We each do our own ironing.
I’d say cleaning is also about 60/40 with me doing more, but it’s hard to tell, as I do little bits constantly and he does big jobs like cleaning the oven and fridge. I clean my bathroom. I don’t think he ever does his, but I never go in it so have no idea.
Bed changing is 50/50.
Putting the bins out is probably 70% him.
DIY and gardening tends to be him doing the hard stuff as he knows what he’s doing and I don’t. I’m learning, though.
Household finances, he manages because he thinks it’s necessary to check everything every month. If I was single I’d just put everything on direct debit and let it happen. We each pay 50% of shared household bills, and then each take care of the rest of our money individually.
We each sort our own car out, although sometimes I get him to get quotes for me as I’m fairly sure they give men better prices.
Holiday booking we always do together.