Please tell me about the 'balance' in your relationship...

[blueskydrinking]

...and does it work for you?

And did you have to work hard to get it that way or did it just evolve?

I mean in terms of responsibilities, who does what, where your balance lies in terms of family/home/work responsibilities.

As you might suspect, I'm feeling a bit frustrated in this area at the moment, but I'd love to hear other people's experiences first because it tends to come to a head when I'm pregnant/breast feeding(/knackered) and I'm not sure how much is just down to hormones.

TIA

Before we had the baby, we both worked full-time and shared the housework equally. I do a bit more cooking as I enjoy it more and am a better cook. My husband usually washes up if I've cooked.

Now we've got our son, I am home full-time for now, and my husband still works f/t. I keep the place as clean & tidy as I can (with varying degrees of success) during the week and we both do all the proper cleaning at the weekends.

My husband does most of the hoovering and I do most of the laundry - it's just worked out that way and we don't mind.

If I feel that it's his turn to do something, I will say so: for instance, I cleaned the fridge the last 5 or 6 times, so told him, 'next time the fridge needs cleaning, it's your turn'.

If my husband gets home before our son's bed time, he will take over and do the whole bath & bed thing, otherwise he'll tidy up the toys and hoover a bit if the living room needs it while I'm still upstairs.

We do supermarket shopping online together. He mows the lawn and I do the weeding.

Ever since I stopped BF-ing, we have taken it in turns to get up in the night with the baby, and get up in the morning with him. We used to do a shift system - one of us doing bedtime til 2am, the other doing 2am onwards! But now we do alternate nights. We each get one lie-in at weekends.

DH and I both work FT, we have 3DCs who are now at secondary school so childcare no longer a problem thank goodness.
We share mornings, Dh gets kids up and starts breakfast, I finish and organise the leaving the house and maybe a lift if it suits. We do equal amounts but not the same things:
me: almost all cooking and about 60% of shopping
buy all children's clothes, house stuff, orgainise holidays and most social stuff
I clean bathrooms and kitchen mostly
DH: washing for all the family
40% of shopping, hoovers, dusts, cleans the loos, washes kitchen floor, changes the beds.
Other housework and big stuff we muddle through but I noramally instuigate what needs doing.
We share school activities admin,etc and he pays all bills and organises cars MOT, tax,etc.
Sounds like he does more... surely, that can't be right . In my defence DH has teachers' holidays and I am limited to 6 week a year. It works for us because from the start we shared everything - no expectations that stuff was my job. Also we are both quite feisty and will rapidly say 'oi, pull your weight' if one or other thinks they are being taken advantage of.
DH was a SAHD for 7 years so he did almost all domestic stuff and I focused on being with the children in the evening, weekends and during holidays. I left him to it and was shocked by the number of surprised faces when people learnt of our arrangement.

New babies and job changes are the trickiest times as they require adjustment or shifting tasks around a bit. We found the biggest adjustment was my DH going back to FT work. He wasa bit proprietorial about domestic stuff and I was anxious about how we would ensure the children got enough attention. We got through but it's imporatnt to keep an eye on the balance to avoid resentment.

I just wanted to pop back in and say that my post about the OP earning 4/5ths of the income (mistakenly, but that's moot) wasn't coming from a position of who earns most does least housework. Just that usually, one of the difficulties in negotiating a fair split of chores is that the woman of the relationship is the lower earner, and therefore has, or feels she has, less power. The man can turn around and say "but I'm supporting the family, what more do you want" and that sort of thing. So when I thought that the OP was out-earning him significantly I was overcome with "what the actual fuck do women have to achieve in order to get anything like a fair deal?". Not because I think that it's reasonable to judge on the basis of salary alone.

Right now, we earn the same but DH 'works' fulltime to my 3 day week, because his other two days of work are unpaid now that his PhD scholarship has run out. So I do more because I have less external commitments, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

It's been so interesting to read how everyone else organises their household!!

I've made my frustration clear this week and things are much improved - DH has cooked every evening AND cleaned the bathrooms. And bathed DS and put out the bins. And suggested that I go for a sauna and a swim this eve while he organised DS's dinner.

I did want to say though, just because the balance doesn't always work perfectly, doesn't make any of us a doormat. Sometimes, when you love your other half and DON'T want to turn everything into an argument / an ultimatum to leave, it just means that some of your partner's quirks can be downright annoying for a while. Doesn't mean much else than that, really.

I'd like DH to be better at talking about stuff / being sympathetic, but we get there in the end. We did sort things out but it took a small meltdown on my part to get there - it's not something I intend to do on a regular basis

Having said that, MajorBoo 's suggestion really made me laugh, and I will be saving that one up for some future occasion

Glad the situation is improving, and glad I made you smile, seems like you deserve to