Housework and couples

[antoinettechigur]

Just wondering how housework is divided in your home? Are some things seen as "women's work"? Or if you are a same sex couple, does each partner have certain jobs that are "theirs"?

When I met my partner he was very much the product of a traditional upbringing, but learned to share household tasks. Except laundry. He just won't do it. He does far more than me overall, however (I work more).

I accept the laundry thing due to the amount of cleaning, cooking, hoovering etc that DP does. But it doesn't sit completely comfortably with me that there is this one thing he won't do. Thoughts on the realities of housework in couples please..

at takver

also v. impressed at takver's DH, for general "firefighting" stuff - my DH can't "see" mess and would sooner fall over stuff than pick it up.

DH tends to do more washing up and washing clothes (in the machine).

I tend to do things like vacuuming and wiping surfaces down.

Generally we do our fair share, but we each have our own foibles and attend to our own 'needs'.

I nearly always end up doing the most decorating though and that really gets on my tits.

Oh also, because I'm the only person who scrubs the toilet, I think I can be forgiven for being slack in any other area of household cleaning.

Both work FT -Sorry but dont buy the whole "He helps scenario" He makes just as much mess/washing/dust so why are men seen as helping!
Its a bit like men cooking -women cook everyday but if a man cooks hes a bloody chef !
After years of nagging/argueing have found the best solution for us was to sit down and negotiate -We each have specific areas of the house to clean- He does it his way and as long as its done I couldnt care less /how /or when he does it.
What about older DC does no one give them chores?
Mine do dishwasher/clean kitchen and feed pets-they get a monthly allowance and feel they have really earnt it.
As I frequently say "I am not running an Hotel"!

We are pretty fair when we're both working, I'm on ML at the mo so I do most of it (though not all).

We tend to have an unspoken rule about cleaning/general housework: if it bothers me, I clean it. If it bothers him, he cleans it. If it bothers neither of us, it doesn't get cleaned. This way we don't get annoyed if one of us gets a bit slovenly.

when DH and lived in the UK it was a bit of a nightmare at first. he had never not had home help and basically just expected me to do everything. and so did i..........

i did the whole 'oh he just doesnt SEE the mess' etc etc. oh yes he bloody did. he just knew i would crack before him.

it lasted about a year and then i thought what the frik am i doing???? and i went on strike. seriously. i did NOTHING not one bit of housework, cleaning cooking, nothing.

it was actually far harder for me than for him. because i was workinig out for myself that my time was just as valuable as his, and it was a difficult thing not to feel guilty about.

after about 3 weeks, DH came home one night and said, ok, i get it. and he really did. he could see that i was doing far more than my share and that if he wanted to carry on living in a nice clean tidy house with laundered clothes etc etc he had to do his share.

plus, he really saw the VALUE in what i had been doing for him. so when he did his share he didnt feel resentful, he felt good about it. well eventually anyway

Thumbwitch, phokoje, I always find it funny that men claim not to be able to "see" housework and yet will insist that "men are more visual" when it comes to looking at naked women. Which is it, are you better at seeing or not?

Not accusing your husbands of ogling. I just find it amusing that both of those "facts" are accepted unquestioningly by so many people, and yet they're contradictory.

Agree with tortoise. The 'men can't see it' line just makes me snort with disbelief and contempt.

Some men have been used to/trained not to see it and some men don't want to see it. Either way if they are not able to rectify this when asked then they are royally taking the piss. Or showing themselves to be utterly incompetent at simple basic tasks to an extent where it seems unbelievable that they are able to hold down a job or drive a car.

When we women put up with this crap I sometimes suspect it is because we are trying to have control over something/anything in our lives. Housework (and childcare)is about the only domain that is officially recognised in patriarchy as being an area of ability and control for women. How convenient.

true but I've never been too worried about needing control or having to feel better at dusting. I'd rather be great at my career than the best person at cleaning a lavatory in my county. But I was lucky - made sure I married someone who wasn't sexist and had run his own house and had his own cleaning systems. I remember him showing me how he hung his shirts after washign them. Beware the man who lives with his mother or whose place is a tip and do what phok above did - far far too many women enable male behaviour they dont' like and then spend 20 years moaning about it.

I very much believe though in separate jobs. When I was married I didn't really do washing. I remember having to learn how the machines worked after. Same with many men. I did our tax returns. I plaited the girls' hair. He took them to the dentist for 17 years. try to divide up jobs and each get on with your own and make sure in terms of hours it's a fair division.

I think it is a bit too simplistic to blame women for enabling behaviour, not to mention lacking in empathy. We all stand somewhere on the privilege ladder and it is always going to be easier for some groups than others to obtain a fair deal for themselves.

I feel uncomfortable with the arguments which suggest that it is somehow the women's fault as an individual for 'putting up with it'. Partly because it implies that the man is not responsible for his own behaviour, attitude and education (which is itself behaviour which bows to and enables male privilege by making the women responsible for both their own behaviour and that of their partner). And partly because it sounds very similar to the argument which blames women for not leaving abusive relationships. (I am not saying this is what Xenia has done here BTW).

Also this argument ignores the fact that all of this operates within the framework of a patriarchal system which is so pervasive that much of the time it is invisible to us.

no really, DH can't see it! I know what you mean but he will actually tread on stuff because he hasn't seen it. He's so unable to see stuff that I've worked out I can "hide" things in plain view because he just doesn't notice them! I usually tell him he has the observational skills of a peanut...

Trust me, I am not remotely into "enabling" men to be incompetent in any way. However, if I waited for him to notice mess, we'd be knee deep and unable to move around before he'd realise. If I ASK him to pick stuff up, he will do so - but I'll still have to go round after and find the things under tables/chairs etc that he hasn't noticed.

My Dad otoh notices everything.

The BBC Four Women programme was about exactly this last week - definitely worth a watch. Very insightful, especially in the couples with a very traditional division of labour - they were the ones who didn't seem to conflict at all. Also the hilarious tale of a breadwinning mother who paid her husband £15k a year to be a SAHD!

I work 3 days a week and look after DS two days, DH works 4 days a week and spends one day a week, plus most evenings, working on his part-time business. We split our domestic labour roughly like this...

Me:
Most cooking
Meal planning
Food shopping
Most laundry
Tidying DS's room, toys etc
Shopping for DS's clothes, nappies etc
Financial planning, Tax credit applications, shopping around for best deals etc
Cleaning the bathroom
Gardening
Nursery drop off/pick up

DH:
Most washing up
Bins out, recycling
Feeding cat and empties litter tray
Sorting car out
Cleaning kitchen
Most DIY, including painting as apparently I can't do it properly - this takes up quite a lot of time as we're renovating our house. Also means I have to look after DS while DH does this, mainly at weekends.

Both:
We alternate doing DS's bath and bedtime every night
Dishwasher emptying

Neither of us:
Ironing!

What's missing from that list is general tidying and cleaning, which isn't allocated to one particular person, and (if I'm honest) doesn't actually get done often enough. I would like to get a cleaner but DH doesn't 'approve'. I find it really interesting to hear how others do it.

Our half-renovated house means there's often dust and paint everywhere, and it also makes me not want to bother tidying and cleaning a building site. Longing for the day it's finished and we can be normal again!

Am pg at the moment and DH has been brilliant getting up with DS every morning, giving him breakfast and often emptying the dishwasher together. I think we have a pretty even split, and DH knows I wouldn't have it any other way. I might be inclined to do more when I'm next on ML - looking forward to those nap times...

We share childcare, 50:50 and both work part time in paid work, similar hours overall though some years one of us is working more but it tends to even out. That is fairly unproblematic.

Officially we share housework 50:50, it depends what you count. We have huge and bitter rows about this, every so often I threaten to move out, purely on feminist principles in that I will not do more than my share of the drudgery around the house, and I won't live with a man who isn't pulling his weight. DP agrees totally in principle, he loves feminist assertive women and agrees with most feminist goals. He is a great partner and father in many ways. But he is hugely untidy and leaves housework indefinitely. It's a source of tension.

your link took me to a written article, Betty - but still an interesting one! In the end, it's down to what you can individually put up with - and IME most men (apart from my Dad and my friend's DH) can put up with a whole lot more mess than most women, so women will often "crack" first.

The thing I really hate is how every time I have to ask/remind/ask again DH to do stuff it constitues "nagging". I wouldn't HAVE to "nag" if he would fecking well do the stuff in the first place! "nag" = "ask me to do something I don't want to" in men's brains.

Sorry, blame pregnancy hormones.

This should work

We share about 50-50, according to inclination/ability.

You have to factor in that some people, both men and women, are simply tidier and more organised/affected by environment than others. If you have a bloke who is also mess-blind, he's not necessarily making an anti-feminist statement as just being himself.

But then if thumbwitch is right, messy women (like me) feel bad and learn to tidy up even if it doesn't come naturally , but messy men just feel they are being normal (particularly if they've been tidied up after, all their lives).

Tidy women are taken for granted, tidy men are "treasures".

So it's not just what might be inclined to do naturally but how it's reinforced by society????

tootootired, sometimes a man IS making an anti feminist statement just by being himself

Fennel your setup sounds exactly like mine -we have not had to fork out for childcare and have both kept our careers going. Although now both F/T
TBH we used to have huge rows about the fact that DP just did not SEE the stuff that needed doing and it occurred to me that women (mostly) have a very emotional response - we are fed the line that If you do everything and bake cupcakes and make bloody bunting you are a good /wife/mother
Whereas to men(mostly) cleaning is cleaning- there is no guilt agenda attached.

Once I realised this and sat down with DP and decided who would like to do what chores-
He does upstairs / I do downstairs - Have not changed bedlinen or cleaned the bathroom in 2 years -I found that we had a solution.
Hilariously he gets quite competitive about how well he has done HIS cleaning
The best thing is that we no longer argue and cleaning is done fairly.

Forgot to add that we both send Christmas cards to our side of the family and this extends to Birthdays/present buying also -if he forgets its his problem.
He is a grown man-cant stand the way men are infantilized in this country.

We both work full time. We share the cleaning at weekends, the loading and unloading of the dishwasher and most of the washing (I probably do a bit more). I do the internet shop and most of the cooking. DH tends to cook 'under direction'. DH sorts recycling and the bins. He cleans out the chickens. We take it in turns to do the gerbils. We are both very untidy and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing (not that we're untidy, but that we're both untidy). But it works. We got here pretty seamlessly from me doing most of the housework when I didn't work and DH did, which both surprised and pleased me.

Who ever is there in our house gets on with it although DH tends to do the weekend ironing, the main shop and the washing.

I tend to do the hoovering before work while he gets the kids lunches ready.
Dh tends to do the homework with the boys.

Whoever is in around about tea time tends to do it but often if I am at home on a Sunday afternoon I will batch cook a few meals especially if I know I am going to be working beyond 6ish that week.

I'll probably pick bits up from round the house more but DH will give the boys a bollocking if they have left cereal bowls, milk, cups, lemonade bottles etc and make them come back and put them away.

Seems to work ok for us.

DP, before we lived together, lived with another man in a men behaving badly type house. He cleaned the bathroom once a year. You'd pick up a cushion and find food mouldering beneath it. Cooking Pots in the kitchen festered for weeks, with mould in. He took "not seeing mess" to whole new depths.

sigh

On the birthday cards and presents for relatives though, absolutely, we each do our own relatives. and if we have guests then the one who is their family or friend is in charge of making beds, cooking, shopping etc. that works OK. Because DP does forget his family's birthdays but I don't have to live with the consequences. His family miss out but I shrug it off - and I do remind them that it's DP who forgot, not me. The housework is a problem because I do.

do have to live with the consequences, I meant to finish there.