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LadyButterfly @lemmy.world

Those who've ever cohabited, how have chores been shared?

Women still do the bulk of household chores, management, raising kids and the mental load of it all. When cohabiting, how have you shared them, and how did it effect you?

22 comments

  • I have lived with men and women

    Having roommates is a nightmare.

    You agree on a chore plan and within a month you become the only one interested in sticking to it, and you're the bad guy for having to force them to do the shit they agreed to.

    Every roomate situation i have been in has devolved into free for all where i need a mini fridge in my room where I keep my food, keep my own cookware and eatware in my own room and wash it after every use while everyone else lets the dishes and kitchen pile up with shit.

    I hate roomates

    With my wife she is a lot better about doing a fair share of the chores. Probably because she gives a shit about people besides herself.

  • No kids in our house. I HATE vacuuming so he does that. He hates cleaning the bathroom so I do that. We both hate mowing the lawn so we pay someone. He does the garbage I do the recycle. We're pretty 50/50 on dishes and food.

  • Well, I have a lot to say about this (someone needs to turn my verbose mode off, ugh).

    The phrase "to each according to their need, from each according to their ability" seems to be an implicit organizing principle in my relationship, whoever is best situated to do a task most easily is most likely to do it.

    However, this creates some unfairness.

    Just because of the way my brain is, I have a harder time planning ahead, being reliable to a schedule, and maintaining a level of executive functioning on par with my spouse's. Especially historically I suffered from what I now realize were fairly bad levels of depression and anxiety, which put too much burden on my partner, who is extremely hard-working, reliable, and capable.

    Small example: if I need to call a doctors office for something, it might take me weeks to do it and it was exhausting and difficult for me to do (both initiating the task was difficult, but also handling the anxiety of talking on the phone was overwhelming). I would have to work up to such a task, and then I would need a recovery period after.

    So I basically constantly feel like I'm not doing enough, esp. relative to my extremely industrious and capable spouse.

    My depression and anxiety are much better now, so I'm more likely to finish a task like calling someone within a week rather than sitting on it for a week or longer, and I have much less anxiety during the call. I even pro-actively pick up social tasks like making a phone call sometimes to lighten my spouse's plate, which is something I rarely ever did before.

    A lot of the time we end up competing to do tasks, e.g. I constantly have to fight my partner to be able to drive if we're going somewhere together (she tries to monopolize that labor).

    Because I do all the cooking, my partner is also very aggressive about doing the dishes to compensate, which makes me feel bad, because I think it's not fair (doing dishes is dull labor, cooking is often fun - they're not equal). So I try to sneak a few dishes in, and try to wash as many dishes from my cooking before she can get to them, as a way to pull my weight there (even though she would prefer I don't do any of the dishwashing).

    With laundry she always initiates washing clothes, because I wouldn't do laundry more than once a week, but she initiates laundry three to four times a week, so it's harder for me to ever initiate doing the laundry (and even if we were on the same page about doing loads once a week, I tend to struggle to initiate tasks like that anyway, so there would probably be inequality there just because I'm more flaky, essentially).

    So to compensate, I try to be proactive and sneak down to swap loads and fold the clothes to help out, but it never really balances out the labor, e.g. the cognitive labor she does keeping track and initiating so many of the tasks isn't made up for by my inconsistent and minor contributions.

    It's the same story with cleaning - she initiates cleaning more, and I try to make up for the inequality by doing some of the harder cleaning (like scrubbing the shower or bath, sweeping and mopping the dirty kitchen floors, etc.).

    So we try to be egalitarian in our household work, but I don't think it works out perfectly.

  • We split fairly according to who is able to do something at the moment. We have some chores one of us will standardly do daily, and some we do together.

    It was a bit difficult to figure out who prefers what and who's better at what, but we've figured it out and it works well now.

  • Before cohabitation I always have a conversation about our living together social contract. What are you willing to take responsibility for?

    The last relationship I was in started out with a partner who split things evenly and turned into learned helplessness on his part. It was awful. He did nothing at the end.

    The guy I'm with now comes from a relationship where his partner did nothing. We occasionally discuss who should do what, and then get mad at each other because the other person wants to take on too much.

    • it's amazing to me how many people rush into having children and getting married (let alone just living together) without basic conversations or logistics being figured out ...

      Like, it seems so reasonable to sit down and have a conversation - like you say, hashing out a social contract of living together. It builds consent, avoids resentment, creates fairness, deepens trust and reliability ... it just feels like the bare minimum to make a relationship work, to be honest.

  • Many years ago I was withy ex and he was "one of the good ones". Really nice man, and a good person. But he just did NOT do his fair share of things. His dad did nothing and mum did it all, so although he denied it, he expected the same.

    He had to be screamed at repeatedly to do anything. He'd forget tasks because he made no effort whatsoever to try to remember them, and would NEVER put it right when he forgot. I would often literally sob and plead, saying how hurtful it was that he saw me as a servant. He just wouldn't do it.

    I've never been able to fathom how so many men just sit and watch their partners doing it all. I just can't fathom treating a partner like that.

    • I know people IRL that are like this, it's always shocking to me the way even decent men (kind men, liberal men, emotionally sensitive men) are just so entitled and blind to the way they expect the woman to do all the housework...

      Honestly I don't see a relationship like that working in the long term, I think it undermines marriages and builds resentment, it's a shitty and impractical approach as well as unjust.

      It only "works" as long as the woman is willing to subject herself to that, but no matter how much she tries it is going to be exhausting and create problems in the long run. (If not total failure of the relationship, at least increased instability and conflict. )

      Unfortunately then it makes it look like the woman is at fault, when things fail because she just can't keep going, especially when the man just thinks this arrangement is "normal". The victim becomes the bad-guy and is easy to blame (when someone is at the end of their ability to keep going they don't always act in the best ways - they probably get angry, or spiteful, or cold - either way it's easy for the man to think the problem is the woman).

      But men sometimes get even worse notions in their head, I listened to a man complain once about (trigger warning: sexual assault) how women he let stay at his place were so awful for not understanding the "obvious" rule that if someone lets you stay at their house they have a right to have sex with you any time they want. Honestly it sounds like he initiated sex non-consensually and was frustrated when the woman didn't go along. I was so shocked and then scared I didn't say anything, but this kind of thinking among men is terrifying and I worry more common than is comfortable to consider.

22 comments