“Mothers shouldn’t be grateful for their husbands’ help”
May 7, 2019 10:35 AM   Subscribe

Most of them did the lion’s share of the work and were angry with their partner. Yet many of them told me they were “grateful.”

Studies have also found that fathers who work long hours have wives who do more child care, while mothers who work long hours have husbands who sleep more and watch lots of television; that working mothers with preschool-age children are two and a half times as likely as fathers to get up in the middle of the night to tend to their kids; that men with babies spend twice as much weekend time engaged in leisure activity as their female partners do.
....
One Oklahoma City mother, a court bailiff, broke it down for me in the starkest terms: “He thinks he should bring home a paycheck and do nothing else, but it could be worse. He doesn’t beat me. He doesn’t drink excessively.” The possibility of an ever-lower bar only highlights how nonsensical such gratitude can be.
posted by a strong female character (147 comments total) 53 users marked this as a favorite
 
Studies have also found that fathers who work long hours have wives who do more child care, while mothers who work long hours have husbands who sleep more and watch lots of television; that working mothers with preschool-age children are two and a half times as likely as fathers to get up in the middle of the night to tend to their kids; that men with babies spend twice as much weekend time engaged in leisure activity as their female partners do. Mothers remain more likely to miss work to tend to sick kids, to spend time with kids in the absence of another adult, and to maintain overall responsibility for managing the details of their children’s lives.

I have a lot I'd like to say about this, but I just can't. Suffice to say, I'm the primary wage earner in my household. I'm (yes) grateful that my husband is a good partner, and a very good father. He is the only parent at home 3 - 4 nights a week while I work the second job that enables us to make ends meet. But even so I still do so much of the work. I was surprised this weekend to find that my husband had done our son's laundry while I was at work - I can't think of the last time he did that.
posted by anastasiav at 10:49 AM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


I was surprised this weekend to find that my husband had done our son's laundry while I was at work - I can't think of the last time he did that.

I'm a father of two, work full time, and do all of our kids' laundry, the grocery shopping, the majority of our house cleaning, and around half of the cooking (due to our work schedules, my partner is currently doing more of the parenting, picking the kids up after school and staying w/them until I get home around 6:30) and have to ask: how do these men get away with it? What are they bringing to the table?

Honestly, if I pulled shit like refusing to do laundry, I strongly suspect I'd find myself divorced before too long. It blows my mind, really.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:00 AM on May 7, 2019 [18 favorites]


> how do these men get away with it? What are they bringing to the table?

These are society-wide issues, not "why does this individual woman put up with this particular man" issues.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:16 AM on May 7, 2019 [126 favorites]


"How are these men getting away with it?" Is really a question for the ages. "Because they can" is I guess what it comes down to. Having any help at all is better than none. We are all starved for help these days. I wish I had some help and I don't even have kids and I pay for house cleaners but they don't do everything and it's all too much.
posted by bleep at 11:16 AM on May 7, 2019 [16 favorites]


These are society-wide issues, not "why does this individual woman put up with this particular man" issues.

Please notice my use of the plural. It makes no more sense to me scaled up to the society-wide level.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:24 AM on May 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


Wow. A not all men and a blaming women for putting up with this crap. All in one comment.

I’m glad there are men who do some or all of the laundry.

I’m also most likely on the path to having a baby with a guy who needs to be asked to wash dishes after I cook dinner and also has to be asked to fold his pants that I have washed and hung to dry. I’d engage in good faith conversation about why I’m in this relationship but this doesn’t feel like the way that question is being framed above.

I will say that most men claim they’re doing an equal or equitable amount of housework until (and sometimes even after!) the time diaries are collected and reviewed. Very rarely is a man’s claim to be doing more or most of the housework supported by time diary or video recording. Not never. Just....not often.

Time diary studies are among my favorite.
posted by bilabial at 11:24 AM on May 7, 2019 [53 favorites]


Father of a seven month old, coming up to briefly stop working and handle the last two months of parental leave when my partner goes back to work.

Reading articles like these has made me think about this a lot, and my plan is to cover absoultely one hundred per cent of the domestics while she's at work and I'm home, as a kind of shock or reset, as we've definitely drifted toward her covering more than normal as she's been home. This should help make sure the split continues as fairly as possible when we're both back in our jobs. More than anything else, wanting to model healthy examples for the kiddo is making me super concerned with this. It took a long time as an adult dude to learn to really, really pull the correct amount of weight on these things - and for the time my own parents weren't even the worst examples themselves! - and I want him to know better.
posted by ominous_paws at 11:29 AM on May 7, 2019 [8 favorites]


Sunk cost fallacy, too. At least they're doing something, right? I have heard my mother say, countless times, that she hit the jackpot because my dad doesn't "hit her or call her names." That is the fucking bar for our elders, man."Holy shit, he actually does laundry occasionally" really does seem like a huge win.

One of the big things they often (but not always) bring to the table, at least in my experience, is another income. Being a single person on a single income is fucking hard, man. Forget having kids with one income, while having a job. My good friend is pregnant with her second, and her husband "does things" - he really does, he does all the grocery shopping and cooking, and is constantly making improvements on the home. But I was there a few months ago and he didn't know where their toddler's diapers were. Like. What? And I've always found it really interesting when I hear a laundry list of things men say they do in the home (this comes up frequently in these discussions both on- and offline), because it kind of implies that this kind of household/kinship labor is easily labeled and quantified. But it isn't; so much of this work is invisible. It's memory work. It's empathy work. It's not something you can write down on a list and point at and say: "this is a thing I do."

Anyhow, my friend: the situation with her husband is so hard, and a lot of it stems from the stuff described in this article. But it would be legitimately irresponsible and reckless to do anything else: who would leave their home, their support net, while mothering a toddler and pregnant with a second? So she's stuck. And maybe things will get better. Her husband is smart, and friendly. He has good values. Everyone has faults. But probably things will not get better and she will endure this for the rest of her life. Getting ground down and devalued, surrounded by men standing on their mountains of fresh laundry, proclaiming a list of their contributions.
posted by sockermom at 11:30 AM on May 7, 2019 [58 favorites]


I'm currently reading Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, and it has some great data on how sexist bullcrap can be measured and how current policies enforce it.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:32 AM on May 7, 2019 [21 favorites]


Mod note: One comment deleted. We've had a lot of threads on this. If we're going to have another, it needs to not turn into going after other Mefites in the thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:36 AM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


Just as a data point, I'm a man in a relationship/household with another man, and I'm the only income-earner in the household (for the past year and a half). I'm out of the house for about 10 hours per day or more, and when I come home, more often than not (so much so that it's an event when it's different), literally nothing in terms of housework, errands, chores, cooking, or upkeep has been done. I have pointed out endlessly to him that he needs to step up so that we're at least approaching equal chore distribution, and he thinks he's trying his best, but honestly, when I come home and he says, "What's for dinner," from his prone position on the couch, I want to burn the house down sometimes.

I think men are very, very conditioned to think that "someone" is responsible for the household management, but it sure isn't them.
posted by xingcat at 11:37 AM on May 7, 2019 [97 favorites]


I feel like it might be noteworthy, for folks who wonder some variation on "why women put up with this" and suggesting that "men can/should do better" that a significant number of the men in the comments on this article were hurt and/or hostile when it was suggested that they try to do more of their own emotional labor rather than relying entirely or almost entirely on women to be their emotional supports. The hostility in those responses may provide some insight about why women are often hesitant to call out imbalances in household labor!
posted by Kpele at 11:38 AM on May 7, 2019 [85 favorites]


It is interesting that in these types of discussions about gender roles and sexism, some of the very first comments always include a man saying some version of “not all men, not me!” But the data also show that the majority of men vastly overestimate how much housework and childcare they do in comparison to their female partners. So instead of men looking at this and thinking “wow, how am I contributing to this and what can do I better”, they look at it and say “well I’m not like most dudes, so I don’t have to think about any of this, I’m golden!” They are giving themselves a get out of jail free card they haven’t earned.
posted by a strong female character at 11:41 AM on May 7, 2019 [73 favorites]


I'm not gonna say that the inequitable distribution of household tasks was the sole reason I chose not to have kids, but it was absolutely a factor. In my twenties, I understood that the best I could help for in an "equal" partnership would be someone who "babysat" his kids and expected applause for loading the damn dishwasher.

In my mid-forties, I get that some men do contribute, but even with someone who I consider a real partner there are things that don't get done in our home if I don't do them. And yeah, I don't mow the yard, but I'm not ashamed to pay someone to do so. I'm not sure how he would function if I stopped existing because he would be eaten alive by the pets and drown in sea of clean and dirty clothes. When I'm out of town for a week, the dirty pan on the stove is still there when I get home. He's a good man and he understands he needs to step it up around the house, but as much as I love him and enjoy having him in my life, I'm glad there isn't another human in our home to raise and make more mess.
posted by teleri025 at 11:41 AM on May 7, 2019 [14 favorites]


Yeah, “He may be useless in the house but at least he doesn’t spend his entire paycheck at the bar every night.” is a thing my mom would often say about my dad as we were growing up.

She also complains loudly that my brother “does EVERYTHING” at his house and his wife does nothing. She does not see any irony here.
posted by greermahoney at 11:43 AM on May 7, 2019 [23 favorites]


Why do women put up with it? What's the alternative?

Are there are tons of other men out there who are actually willing to do their fair share of the work? Is it easier to be a single mother with no husband at home at all? Can they actually afford to raise kids on one salary?

Women put up with it because the alternatives are to be childless and/or alone.

Instead, let's ask: why do men have so little self-respect -- never mind respect for their wives -- that they allow this to happen?
posted by jacquilynne at 11:44 AM on May 7, 2019 [85 favorites]


If not really strongly wanting kids is 50% of why I never had them, the dragging, nagging certainty that I'd be consigned to a life of constant, unrelenting drudgery was the other 50%.

I will not willingly sign up to be glad someone else managed to do the bare fucking minimum. No.
posted by Medieval Maven at 11:44 AM on May 7, 2019 [34 favorites]


Are there are tons of other men out there who are actually willing to do their fair share of the work? Is it easier to be a single mother with no husband at home at all? Can they actually afford to raise kids on one salary?

This times 1000.

Not a single heterosexual woman of my acquaintance in a partnered relationship with children thinks that their husband is doing half of the child-work. Let alone the other work of running a household, or their own emotional work. They praise them and pet them for doing 20%, because that's a smashing deal, these days.

And let me say from my and others' experience, that when you try to raise the issue of "hey maybe you could do more" it does not go well. When you start laying out all the tasks that have to happen in a household for it to be 'nice' and the amount of them you do, it does not go well.

So you have to think "do I want to be divorced, with kids he still won't do the work for, or do I decide half a loaf is better than none?"
posted by corb at 11:49 AM on May 7, 2019 [61 favorites]


In my husband's case, it took seeing his mother divorce his father specifically because she was tired of being the sole breadwinner AND the sole housekeeper AND the person expected to deal with his untreated, misplaced anxiety.
posted by joyceanmachine at 11:50 AM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


why do men have so little self-respect -- never mind respect for their wives -- that they allow this to happen?

because the vast majority of these kinds of men are looking for a mommy or a caretaker, not a partner. the fact that they can also fuck this person is not a mental disconnect for them.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:51 AM on May 7, 2019 [45 favorites]


I think this is why workers' rights, considered broadly, are women's rights - and why hatred of women and hatred of unions tend to go together on the right. Women who partner with men put up with this stuff because it's harder on one income in general and harder to raise kids on one income in particular. I'm not saying that the patriarchy can be dismantled through wage increases, but women would have a lot more options in a society with, eg, universal free daycare, universal free healthcare and a right to housing.

On the individual level, there are a lot of temperament/situational reasons why some women "put up with it" and some women leave, but the whole Overton window would move more in favor of "not putting up with it" in a society that made it easier for women to manage alone. And my bet is that men would, in the aggregate, change their behavior if women had more options.

~~
While reading a seventies Margaret Drabble novel and a late sixties Doris Lessing novel, I recently encountered male heroes who are meant to be both supportive of women and intensely desirable, and both of the feminism-adjacent authors treat it as a personal foible that the heroes hit women - it's just something that happens. This is not the norm in contemporary feminism-adjacent literary fiction, and I think it's substantially not because we are smarter and better as individuals but because women have more rights under the law and more ability to earn money.
posted by Frowner at 11:55 AM on May 7, 2019 [57 favorites]


These fathers are then setting an example for their children that this is the normal gender-binary breakdown: emotional labor is women's labor, from which men are applauded for doing something, some times.

I'm not an equal partner in terms of work done in the house, or with our children. We split some duties, but the time to do those tasks isn't equal. I flake off, space out, or spend time doing nothing particularly helpful too often, and my thresholds for "is this room clean" are lower than my wife's. When our boys say "my room is clean!" we semi-jokingly, mostly seriously ask "it is Mom-clean?" to which the answer is usually "... no." We also have discussions about even though cleaning up isn't fun, it's not fair to have mom do it all. But it's an ongoing battle of toys vs open space.

Thanks for this reminder to do my part, and set a better example for my kids.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:59 AM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


I, a man, do literally all of the household chores in my household and am the sole breadwinner.
Admittedly, that's because I am a lone parent. :)

You know the really fucked up part?
Most people are very disapproving that my child doesn't "help" with the chores.
They couch it in language of her being a spoiled child or not being independent but it's just straight up misogynist bullshit.

Luckily, she gives no fucks about what they say because her dad raised her something fierce.
posted by fullerine at 12:00 PM on May 7, 2019 [21 favorites]


It really grates that articles like this are still framed in terms of what women are doing wrong.
Andrea’s misplaced gratitude is not only common, but also an impediment to the elusive goal of equity in the home. . . . Only once gratitude is relinquished for righteous anger will gender rules in this realm be rewritten.
Wow, thanks a lot Andrea for creating and perpetuating this pervasively sexist world! Stop hitting yourself!
posted by sallybrown at 12:02 PM on May 7, 2019 [75 favorites]


My husband and I have a quite equitable division of labor at home, but this article touches on why I feel compelled to thank him for doing stuff. I mean, it’s nice to give and receive praise, but is my urge to thank him for doing stuff caused by my constant awareness that it could be so much worse? Does he feel the urge to thank me for always including our kid’s laundry with my clothes? I don’t know. Do I feel the urge to thank him when he feeds our kid breakfast every morning? Yes. Should I stop thanking him? Maybe?? I have no idea.
posted by Maarika at 12:02 PM on May 7, 2019 [20 favorites]


Standard economic theory has a lot to say about this (see Division of labor within the family, from the Family Economics wikipedia page).

One perspective: preferences. The person who cares more whether the house is clean or the kids are cared for are going to end up doing the work. Or as my kids say, "Why should I pick up my clothes? I don't care if they are on the floor."

This of course raises the question of whether those preferences are real, and if they are, where they come from: I agree that they are largely determined by culture (though you can't ignore the possible contribution of biology. For example, Personality differences between the sexes are largest in the most gender equal countries).

Another: Bargaining power, which has been mentioned above. At the extreme, if a woman wants an employed husband who doesn't hit her and there's a low supply of those men, the men are in a strong bargaining position.

This is not a moral perspective; it's clearly not right for a man to use his bargaining power, but clearly many will.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:08 PM on May 7, 2019 [7 favorites]


Andrea’s misplaced gratitude is not only common, but also an impediment to the elusive goal of equity in the home. . . . Only once gratitude is relinquished for righteous anger will gender rules in this realm be rewritten.

The world is large, and it's likely enough that some women could improve their situations by refusing to be grateful and dealing with the changes that would ensue, but I think what's really going on here is the refusal to believe that it really is that bad. I think a lot of people (Americans? White Americans?) have been socialized into this "dream it be it" attitude, sort of Maoism for capitalists, where we think that all that stands between us and perfection is getting our heads right - if we "decide not to be grateful", that internal decision will transform external circumstances. But really, in the aggregate, picking "two incomes and occasional help with the dishes" over "one income, constant battles over child support if you can even collect any and no help, no help at all" is a good decision, a realistic decision.
posted by Frowner at 12:10 PM on May 7, 2019 [17 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted; if your impulse is to say "but women are bad in other ways", just skip this and go do something else.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:13 PM on May 7, 2019 [19 favorites]


what if it's that human society in general was a mistake and we should all go back to being jellyfish
posted by poffin boffin at 12:15 PM on May 7, 2019 [29 favorites]


what if it's that human society in general was a mistake and we should all go back to being jellyfish

If we can be sea turtles instead I'm in.
posted by Frowner at 12:16 PM on May 7, 2019 [27 favorites]


yes i respect your turtlesona
posted by poffin boffin at 12:17 PM on May 7, 2019 [36 favorites]


anomalocaris
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 12:17 PM on May 7, 2019 [5 favorites]


Can I be a manatee? They seem to lead extremely peaceful lives.
posted by praemunire at 12:20 PM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


I’m also most likely on the path to having a baby with a guy who needs to be asked to wash dishes after I cook dinner and also has to be asked to fold his pants that I have washed and hung to dry. I’d engage in good faith conversation about why I’m in this relationship but this doesn’t feel like the way that question is being framed above.

You really don't have to answer if you're not in the mood, but I would ask it in good faith.

Because once a woman is in the situation, with the kids and the bills, it's clear that her options become difficult and limited. But if you already know that your partner will not participate in household management after the child is born (I assume you're not thinking he's going to reform?)...why? Both from a practical perspective (so much work for you!) and a romantic one (you don't find those qualities unattractive?)?

Like I said, though, if you don't want to revisit your personal life choices here, I understand.
posted by praemunire at 12:24 PM on May 7, 2019 [5 favorites]


This of course raises the question of whether those preferences are real, and if they are, where they come from: I agree that they are largely determined by culture (though you can't ignore the possible contribution of biology.

I think this is very true, however, the particular survey isn't saying that women are spending more time taking care of their children now than in the past, nor that changing preferences have made some tasks take less time and some more time, meaning that the tasks grandma used to do take less time, but mom and grandma allocate the same amount of time, just on different tasks culturally.

So really conversations like that are side data/anecdotes, and even if the labor allocation were the same same as grandma and nothing had changed culturally, women would still be spending more time raising kids than men.

Here's a study that does make that point:
Modern parents spend more time with their kids. Dad's time with kids has doubled since 1965 to where they spend as much time raising kids as mom did in 1965. Mom spends more.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:28 PM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


From a relationship science perspective, score-keeping is a symptom of accumulated resentment. Just saying that the roots of most households' dynamics around distribution of labor go way deeper than mere gender inequity.

Another factor is the dynamics of who decides what lists of tasks and standards of performance constitute "acceptable" housekeeping. Early in our relationship, my wife and I decided that whoever does the work decides the standards to which it is done. After 30 years, I fold towels into vaguely rectangular shapes and my wife lets me. If she wants sharp corners, she can go behind me and do that. So, I "guy clean" most of the house in an hour and she does her deep clean thing in one room in the same time. When she organizes the pantry, she does it so that things are organized for easy visibility. When I do it, I want it to be optimized so that the items we use most frequently are easiest to reach. Neither of us are wrong. But, since it matters much more to her, she organizes the pantry way more often than I do.

When you "keep house", you're not just reconciling different genders, but different temperaments, formation from families of origin, and a bunch of other personal histories and differences in the same shared space.

That said, dried-on food is never acceptable for "clean" dishes in the cabinet for either of us.
posted by cross_impact at 12:37 PM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


I mean, as women go, my standards for household and childcare aren't especially high and my husband is pretty methodical and organized about those tasks he takes on. But this whole line of 'it matters much more to her, so she does X' is riddled with gross gender bias. In the example X is always some nit-picky organize the pantry, fold the towels this way type of thing but honestly X in my household is mostly stuff like knowing when the child's dentist appointment is, getting shoes for the child that fit, every once in a while cleaning the ceiling in the bathroom that gets mildewy. It's part of overall life maintenance: men get credit for the minimum and women get accused of being control freaks and being high anxiety when they do the rest of it.
posted by vunder at 12:53 PM on May 7, 2019 [95 favorites]


Raising children is not an area in which “whoever has the lowest standards sets the bar” can generally apply. Although there certainly are a lot of couples where a mother is shouldering 90% of the effort on, say, teeth-brushing because her male partner has managed to convince himself that “kids need teeth brushed to avoid cavities” is in the same category as “kids need Pinterest-worthy homemade Easter bonnets”: pointless things women only do because, dunno, maybe they like making work for themselves or something.
posted by Catseye at 12:54 PM on May 7, 2019 [36 favorites]


we've definitely drifted toward her covering more than normal as she's been home

This was a thing that happened when I was on maternity leave and the shock of my I-thought-he-was-feminist husband just blithely defaulting to the idea that I was both the default parent and the default domestic manager and responsible for pulling in 50% of our household income with my fulltime career did real damage to our marriage.

Like, three years after our kid was born, after I had recovered from the sleep deprivation and things had calmed down -- we also sold one house and bought another during that time, and guess who was responsible for literally every single detail of that saga while also handling ongoing childcare emergencies and working fulltime while also enduring twice-nightly wakeups from sleep-training-resistant baby? -- ANYWAY, three years in, I finally had the emotional energy and space to get really angry and betrayed. Like, how dare this man treat me like an exploitable public resource? Why does he think he's owed an easy domestic life at the expense of my mental and physical health? And when I asked, he had no good answer. Because there isn't one.

My husband owned every one of his fuckups. He changed his behavior. I no longer feel like I got the worse end of the deal in our marriage. I remembered why I liked him enough to build a life with him. I began to trust him again. We're modeling a relationship that will not actively contribute to my daughter internalizing a lot of sexist bullshit about what to settle for from a partner. And when she's older, I'll be extremely frank about all of the opportunity costs attendant in a hetero partnership.

And I tell you what, if I'm widowed, I'm never marrying again. The shock of learning that my partner's default when things got challenging was to put it all on me? That is a betrayal I have forgiven, but I will never forget it. And I will not give another man an opportunity to have a nice retirement at my expense.
posted by sobell at 12:55 PM on May 7, 2019 [167 favorites]


Raising children is not an area in which “whoever has the lowest standards sets the bar” can generally apply

This is kind of where it usually gets hard. Because so much of child-raising is a lot of doing actions or items consistently, for years, before you see the results of those actions. Toothbrushing is a great one! It's super important to be done every day for the rest of the kid's life. But it's also a pain in the ass to ensure it. Same with other hygiene, especially because habits form in the years they're with you.

Same with things like patiently encouraging children's interests and listening to them about their emotions. So, for example: my partner thought it was kind of dumb to make time and space to listen to the kid talk about the (admittedly boring/irritating) things they were interested in, instead of talking about the things he was interested in. Eight years later, I am the close confidant of the kid, and he gets mad about it. "Why do they go to you instead of to me? Why do they always go to you?" Well, because over a decade ago, I decided to invest in this and start doing the lengthy boring things that would help the social/emotional development.

You can't skimp on that stuff - someone has to do it. If one person doesn't value it, it will be the other one.
posted by corb at 1:07 PM on May 7, 2019 [61 favorites]


Talking about this with my book club one time, we all had great feminist husbands who did 50% of the housework when we got married, but things went downhill when we had kids. And I said that I thought my husband's problem was that he was still doing 50% of the housework for two people and felt like he was doing his fair share, but now there were 3 of us, so he was doing 1 person's worth of housework and I was doing 2 people's worth of housework, and he truly, deeply, intuitively felt like he was doing his fair share because he was doing the 50% of the work for two people he'd always been doing, without realizing how much that third person adds to the mix. And even as he picked up more over time as he realized how much extra there was, it's never gotten back up to 50/50.

Several of the women concurred that their very feminist husbands kept doing the 50% of 2 people housework and seemed oblivious to how much work having a child added to the household. And there's one of your magical transformations of great feminist husbands turning into fathers who don't do their share of housework and how women end up "stuck" in those relationships. And look, I don't feel "stuck" in my relationship, I love my husband, he's a great father, and I know he's trying. There's just a whole lot of social forces and socialization in general pulling in the opposite direction, it's an uphill slog. So it's something I "put up with" because, well, I'm almost 20 years into this, and we were ten years into it before we had kids, and while this is a super-maddening and exhausting dynamic to deal with, it's also not really worth (in my case) throwing 20 years of a good marriage overboard over, at least when he knows it's a problem and tries to do better and I know that a lot of the problem is social and structural and not individual malingering. But it is still frustrating.

(For many women it'd definitely be worth throwing 20 years of marriage overboard and I support you, sisters!)

I had a nasty bug a few weeks ago that laid me out flat for almost a week and the house fell completely apart and my husband kept grousing about what a catastrophe the house was and I finally said, "I am choosing to take your bitching about the mess as subtle recognition of the amount of work I do now that you have noticed the house falling apart when I couldn't do it for a week." He stopped complaining and went to clean the bathroom.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:12 PM on May 7, 2019 [111 favorites]


Yeah, “He may be useless in the house but at least he doesn’t spend his entire paycheck at the bar every night.” is a thing my mom would often say about my dad as we were growing up.

She also complains loudly that my brother “does EVERYTHING” at his house and his wife does nothing. She does not see any irony here.


This. My MiL told my husband not to do so much work or he’ll get taken advantage of. She was likely more than a little bit projecting here.

Or like that Polish joke:

Woman 1: how’s your new son in law?
Woman 2: he’s amazing! He cleans, he cooks, he helps with the kids. I couldn't be happier for my daughter! So different from back in our days. How’s your new daughter in law?
Woman 1: awful! She doesn’t lift a finger. My son has to do everything!
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:12 PM on May 7, 2019 [7 favorites]


Early in our relationship, my wife and I decided that whoever does the work decides the standards to which it is done.

It seems like it's impossible to have a thread about domestic labor without a man posting this kind of advice. Like, maybe it works for you and your wife, we don't know you. But, even if we assume you're accurately assessing how fair the division of labor is (since men often are wrong about this), it doesn't work as general relationship advice. Because this is exactly the excuse that many men use to weasel out of completely reasonable expectations.

This is why I'm the one that scrubbed the cough syrup off the bathroom wall that my roommate spilled - and then left there for weeks. Because I'm the one that cared. This is why I'm the only one that has ever cleaned the fridge, the only one that has ever vacuumed the furniture, the only one who has ever done a number of small things that are necessary in order to keep the place clean. Because I'm the one that cared. I'm also the one that was raised to see keeping the place clean as a responsibility. He was not. He was not raised to see a dirty house as a to-do list, so he can just relax in his filth and be unbothered.

There is also the matter of respecting what makes your partner happy and comfortable in your shared space. Obviously, there is a limit; it would be absurd to ask you to always fold the napkins into swans. Reasonable people can work out what that limit is, but many men are not reasonable about this. They expect their partners to compromise in order to meet their standards, but do not compromise in return. And "if you care about it, you do it," is the weapon they use.

As vunder points out: "this whole line of 'it matters much more to her, so she does X' is riddled with gross gender bias."
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 1:20 PM on May 7, 2019 [124 favorites]


And "if you care about it, you do it," is the weapon they use.

also unfortunately so applicable to sexual pleasure in women's relationships with cishet men
posted by poffin boffin at 1:24 PM on May 7, 2019 [49 favorites]


how do these men get away with it?

if a woman stops doing all the housework, to see what will happen, the worst that can happen is the housework doesn't get done. if a woman stops doing all the childcare, to see what will happen, the worst that can happen is the child will die.

but

Is it easier to be a single mother with no husband at home at all?

yes, very often it is. rhetorically gesturing at the spectre of being "alone" (= without an adult man in the house) is not the conversation -ender it's meant to be. it just isn't that terrifying an idea. plenty of women do live that way, on purpose.
posted by queenofbithynia at 1:40 PM on May 7, 2019 [24 favorites]


Whenever I read stuff like this, I always think of this quote from Samantha Irby's "an open letter to my nieces, who are currently fighting over a dude"

i have never been embroiled in emotional combat with one of my homegirls over a dude because LOL WHAT IS THE PRIZE. have you dated a man before!? that's like arguing over who gets to fistfight a possum inside a dumpster
posted by euphoria066 at 1:42 PM on May 7, 2019 [103 favorites]


if a woman stops doing all the housework, to see what will happen, the worst that can happen is the housework doesn't get done.

Unless there's a child, in which case, the worst that will happen is that CPS may get called by someone who sees the home, and the child may get taken away for neglect.
posted by corb at 1:43 PM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


yes, very often it is. rhetorically gesturing at the spectre of being "alone" (= without an adult man in the house) is not the conversation -ender it's meant to be. it just isn't that terrifying an idea. plenty of women do live that way, on purpose.

No, I get that -- there are relationships where the alternative of being alone is actually better. My point is that the alternatives aren't easy options of 'oh, just get a different better husband' or 'oh, just decide that you will no longer tolerate this husband being an entitled ass and then he won't be'. The alternatives are hard -- in many cases financially and logistically more difficult than living with a husband who does the minimum. Are they more or less hard than living with whatever entitled ass she's living with at the moment? That's the calculus.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:53 PM on May 7, 2019 [7 favorites]


But. What if you don't care about it? Or not to the same degree as your spouse?

This has been a big thing in my relationship. I don't see what she sees. I'm ok with the cleanliness level, she is not. And, she won't actually ask me to do certain things.

I'm trying. Try to do the dishes, the vacuuming, the laundry. But, I often don't see the situation as "critical", and don't do it right then. This leads to issues.
posted by Windopaene at 2:27 PM on May 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


But. What if you don't care about it? Or not to the same degree as your spouse

I peddled this line until I left one relationship and moved in with two housemates, both women as it happened, who were way messier than me, and I was suddenly furious that they conveniently "were less bothered" than me and thus got a free ride on my cleaning. All the time. And realised how badly I'd been bullshitting myself and my ex.

Now again cohabiting with someone much cleaner - honestly, my solution is to aggressively schedule jobs I can do, and make sure to take the really gross jobs she won't do as regularly. But the tendency to ease up and let her take over is still THERE, and it takes effort, all the time, to fight it. The effort is worth it not to have her think I'm as much of a jerk as I thought my old housemates were. Hoenslty, it's not a good excuse.
posted by ominous_paws at 2:35 PM on May 7, 2019 [38 favorites]


Because I'm the one that cared.

Hoooooo boy have my partner and I had some arguments on household responsibility allocation based on that one sentence.

For example: I really enjoy cooking as a hobby, and enjoy experimenting with new dishes that stretch my abilities. The partner doesn't really enjoy cooking unless it's a dish that interests him in particular, and genuinely doesn't mind eating whatever whenever.

What that has unfortunately translated to in our day-to-day, is that because I have any opinion on it whatsoever, I am de facto responsible for figuring out every meal we eat in our house. With very rare exceptions, we typically either eat something that's cooked by me, leftovers, or we order out - and the decision for both what option we go with as well as what type of food I actually cook (or we actually order) is also in my court.

We've hit a pretty decent equilibrium with other chores around the house, but on this and certain others (*cough* *folding and putting away laundry* *cough*) that involve opinions on how it should be done, I've honestly considered just giving up. I'm tired of hearing "I don't care" or "uh, I dunno" in response to "Feeling like anything in particular for dinner?" after I've had a long day/week/month/lifetime at work and just want a shred of an opinion to go off of that isn't mine.

Equal division of labor doesn't just mean splitting chores up 50/50, as it turns out.
posted by westface at 2:36 PM on May 7, 2019 [18 favorites]


idk what your relationship is like but in general when women dislike asking men to do things, it's because they've asked in the past to no effect, or because the asked man then completed the requested task so deliberately badly that they will never be asked to do it again. ymmv.
posted by poffin boffin at 2:37 PM on May 7, 2019 [37 favorites]


like I absolutely guaranfuckingtee that there are things she doesn't care about at all but which she does anyway bc it's something you care about and you just don't notice bc you assume it's also important to her, when the real thing of importance to her is your happiness.
posted by poffin boffin at 2:39 PM on May 7, 2019 [83 favorites]


But. What if you don't care about it? Or not to the same degree as your spouse

This is me most of the time. I spend a lot of mental energy anticipating the way spouse wants it done and do it that way. By the way, he's a dude, I'm not, is there a pattern?
posted by Ralston McTodd at 2:42 PM on May 7, 2019 [9 favorites]


It's easy to say score-keeping is a sign of resentment and a huge problem when you're the one winning 70%+ of the time.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 2:46 PM on May 7, 2019 [64 favorites]


This has been a big thing in my relationship. I don't see what she sees. I'm ok with the cleanliness level, she is not. And, she won't actually ask me to do certain things.

I'm trying. Try to do the dishes, the vacuuming, the laundry. But, I often don't see the situation as "critical", and don't do it right then. This leads to issues.


It seems that you *do* see the things she sees, you just choose not to interpret them the way she interprets them and so you decide not to deal with them. Because you don't factor in her comfort level into your thinking or because you aren't thinking big picture about the overall management of the home, and the fact that later there will also be other chores that need doing. This kind of executive functioning is a skill and a chore on its own, and choosing not to engage in it is something men do really, really a lot. Here's a helpful comic to explain why that's a problem.

You can learn to do this. I did, as a young adult, because I tried to use that 'oh, I don't notice what needs doing, just tell me and I'll do it' bullshit on my mother and she was sick of having to be the one who noticed everything.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:46 PM on May 7, 2019 [37 favorites]


But. What if you don't care about it? Or not to the same degree as your spouse?

I don't know, don't do it? Keep that up and see how it goes? Why are you even asking the question?

This has been a big thing in my relationship.

Oh, okay. I see why you're asking the question.

I don't see what she sees.


Yeah, you do: the first time she pointed it out to you, you became aware of it, and now you can see it. You just don't act on what you see.

I'm ok with the cleanliness level, she is not.


That's at least a more honest statement of the problem than "I don't see what she sees."

And, she won't actually ask me to do certain things.


?
So?
You know she'd be happier if you did those certain things, right? So do them. Why does she need to ask you to do them?

I'm trying.

I'm sure it feels that way to you. It doesn't sound that way, though, based on your above statements.

Try to do the dishes, the vacuuming, the laundry. But, I often don't see the situation as "critical", and don't do it right then.


You often don't see the situation as critical and don't do the job, huh?

Even though

This leads to issues.

That it leads to issues would seem to indicate that it's critical, whether you see it as critical or not. So you do the laundry on the regular, the way she does it, sorting the whites from the darks from the delicates and so on and using whatever additives she wants used and whichever cycles she prefers. You make a study of her methods, and you get better and better until you know how to do it her way. Same with the dishes, same with the vacuuming. Presently you'll be able to do it unconsciously. Et voila, life is easier and more fun.
posted by Don Pepino at 2:51 PM on May 7, 2019 [36 favorites]


Or:
Some [divorced] men — fathers, in particular — need an overhaul of their real life before they can start to tackle the virtual one. This is the focus of Lisa Dreyer’s business, the Divorce Minder.

Ms. Dreyer came up with the concept after experiencing what she calls the “2008 financial crisis effect.” In 2009, as she and her husband were splitting, so were six couples whom she knew. Her male friends, she said, were successful professionally, but began regressing as humans.

“They can run a trading desk, but six months later they’re still eating off paper plates,” Ms. Dreyer said. They were coming home, she continued, “to an apartment that would have been depressing at age 25.”

So for divorced men, Ms. Dreyer provides full-service home management. She will find and decorate an apartment, get laundry and groceries delivered, work with the ex-wife to organize a digital calendar, buy birthday presents, plan vacations, hire a nanny and a cleaning lady, and buy extra sets of pajamas for the children.

Newly divorced women have their life issues too, like simply asking for help or advice, which can affect their dating confidence, said Liza Caldwell, a former stay-at-home mom from the Upper East Side who divorced 10 years ago.
From a NYT article about people who have enough money to hire services to do all this. Which, I don't know, maybe once it's all monetizable again it will be respected even within a family? Probably not.
posted by clew at 2:51 PM on May 7, 2019 [5 favorites]


the only one that has ever cleaned the fridge

ow, this hit home. I've been the sole fridge cleaner in various households of assorted gender configurations, and it's weird and hard, because there's usually mental health stuff and gender stuff all over the place, and sometimes abuse aftermath. It's like - I know you're having a lot of feelings about having displeased someone, and conflicts you've observed around housework, and things you wish you'd been taught, and so on and so forth. But like, I actually just want the fridge to be clean.

being a person is so much work, I would also like to be sea turtle
posted by bagel at 2:54 PM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


The jellyfish and sea turtle options are really appealing, I have to say. I would also enjoy being a housecat.
posted by Don Pepino at 2:57 PM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


But. What if you don't care about it? Or not to the same degree as your spouse

What if your spouse doesn't care enough? Then you get our fridge, where the CSA good intentions (aka veggies) go to rot. Every day I open it and think "I need to clean this thing out", but every day I also need to cook food, clean the kitchen, walk the dog (Big Purr walks him in the evening), get LP breakfast, sometimes empty the dishwasher. So our fridge stays gross and overfull, and I have been gradually throwing stuff out one trash pickup at a time, but have no emotional energy to make/ask for time to fully get it clean. I'm sure we would all love a clean fridge, but not enough to put in the work. so, yeah, it stays gross.

Another task that gradually got put on my plate- packing daily trip bags. Who (almost) always remembers to pack water, snacks, sunscreen, hats, maybe a blanket? Who yells "don't forget to pack X!" while getting ready, but never actually finds or packs X? Whose fault is it if we are missing one of those things in the bag?

Big Purr does a lot of stuff, which I'm grateful for (see title!), but there is always this undercurrent of "stuff Mom does or knows" that just seems to get bigger and bigger as time goes on, until you're stuck in sunk costs.
posted by Hermeowne Grangepurr at 2:58 PM on May 7, 2019 [12 favorites]


if a woman stops doing all the housework, to see what will happen, the worst that can happen is the housework doesn't get done.

I feel like when people say this kind of thing they're imagining the house getting a little... dusty.

Years ago my (male) housemate decided that it was acceptable to not do dishes after he dirtied them. Instead he would leave them lying around (in the sink, on the kitchen counter, elsewhere in the apartment) until the next time he needed to use a particular item, at which point he would wash that item and usually only that item.

In practice this meant that our exceedingly small kitchen was constantly a sea of dirty dishes, the single-basin sink next to unusable. He resisted my complaints that this meant I almost always had to do dishes before I could cook anything, and insisted that it would be no big deal for me to adopt his way of doing things. Typically I'd get fed up with the mess and clean everything so I could have a clean usable kitchen at least for a short time.

Then in the summer I went away on a short vacation. Before I left I asked my roommate to please do the dishes before I returned. He didn't. I returned home, put my suitcase down in the living room, and followed a trail of large black ants into the kitchen. And then I screamed. Because every single surface in that room was swarming with ants. However many you are picturing I can assure you it's not enough. There were so many of them that you could hear them.

That's what can happen if the housework doesn't get done.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 3:01 PM on May 7, 2019 [72 favorites]


The advice I give a lot about relationships all fits here, specifically aimed at what men should be doing:

Sliding vs Deciding basically, have a mutually agreed long term commitment with your partner before you move in/have kids. Pre-marital experience contributes to the quality and stability of marriage. Guys, think about whether this offer of marriage your extending is actually a good thing to propose to your partner or if you plan to "unwittingly" extend the status quo. If you can't make the commitment to be a good solid partner, why not?

John and Julie Gottman have been researching marriage for decades. John's work started with an interest in childhood attachment and health and he found that children whose parents were in healthy relationships had the best relationships with their caretakers. All of their books are worth reading. There is lots of actionable advice for how to improve your relationship and I think every man should read all of them. Sure, it will feel stupid and hard. Do it anyway.

The Five Love Languages is super heteronormative and otherwise has some problems but I still am able to take what I like from it and discard the bullshit. You should too. The big BIG takeaway (and the author says this) is that finding out how your partner feels loved and then doing those things is important because you want your partner to feel loved. Insisting on showing your love in ways that don't resonate with your partner is selfish. So, for a gift preferring partner, figure out when and what kinds of gifts are preferred and do that. For an acts of service partner, figure out what they need to feel safe and loved. If you miss the mark, just try again.

Don't make a scene about your failed attempts to meet your partners needs. That's exhausting for everyone. The second big takeaway from this book is that everyone needs all of the five. Just in different frequencies and in different ways. For example, gift giving is not the same for everyone. I'd cry if you bought me a glass paperweight in the shape of....anything. But a ball of Koigu sock yarn? I'd likely be delighted. You can't just stop at "gifts" and throw any kind of tangible item at your partner.

And guys, please, please tell your adult male friends that they should do the work at home. Invite over a bunch of guys and their kids to hang out with you while your wife/wives go out and do whatever they want. Take your kids out of the house so that your wife can stay home and sleep, or do whatever she wants. Keep time diaries in your own home and honestly assess what you're actually doing to contribute to your home. Model these things for your kids.

Sit down and make a list of all the things that make a house run. Get a list of the default parent stuff. There have been several asks on the green over the years. Big maintenance things, little daily things. How to be an adult things. Get a sense of the frequency of these things. Change the air conditioner filters is less frequent than wipe the toothpaste out of the sink. Set calendars. For the tasks that are time distant and for the recurring daily tasks. Do the tasks.

Every x months, change the filter and tell your partner that it's done (because that's a not obvious task and one where duplicated effort is wasted.) Every day or every other day, spray some cleaning solution into the bathroom sink, the toilet, and make them clean, whether it looks to your eye like it needs doing. Figure out how often the tub gets cleaned, take that over. Learn how to mop. Run the vacuum. DO NOT mention this to your partner. They will probably notice. They might not. Keep doing the things. Every night before you go to sleep, make sure the sink is empty. If your partner has cooked a meal, you clear the dishes and wash them as soon as you're done eating. Thank your partner for cooking the meal, every time. Learn to cook a few things that you're pretty sure your partner will enjoy. Let your partner know that you'll be making "mac n cheese" or "meat loaf" or whatever for dinner the next night. If you're not a great cook, let them know that you'll be ordering takeout if the meal is a flop. I could go on and on. Pick a dozen things and do them consistently, whether you are ever thanked or not. Why can't you expect to be thanked? Have you thanked your partner every time they picked up your socks/didn't leave a sticky spill/pulled the drain hair out of the bathtub? When you see shoes in the style your kid likes, and are in the next size for your kiddo are on sale, get them. Don't just send your partner a message that they're on sale. Get the shoes. Bring them home. Tell your partner you got the shoes, because duplicate shoe buying is not necessarily great.

If a task is obviously at a point where it needs to be done, then it's gone untended for far too long. Think of a home as like a car. If you let the oil go without checking/topping up/changing until you notice that it's needed because the engine is overheated or clanging, you'll end up at some point with a ruined engine. If your child has only shoes that are too small, the child will be uncomfortable. The not noticing is a luxury, and I've had enough of the just so story that women are better at it or care more about these specific things.

Now go to the kitchen. Empty the cupboards. Check all the packages for expiration dates. Look inside the packages. Discard anything that is past date or has weevils. Wipe the shelves. Replace the current stuff when it's dry inside. Now do the fridge. Now go clean out the silverware drawer. Notice how many crumbs are in there. Use a damp cloth to clean them up. Think about the foods that were close to their expiration dates. What are you going to make with them so they don't get wasted? There are lots of recipes online. Your partner figures out what to make by using google, or a stack of cookbooks somewhere. She's not magically conjuring a meal. Don't ask her what to make, but maybe consider checking if she had something special in mind for that ingredient, or would she mind if you made "thing you found that sounded good."

That was tiring, wasn't it? Don't worry, it gets easier with practice. Not less tiring. Just easier. You may never enjoy it. I don't. But I enjoy knowing that it's done for now.
posted by bilabial at 3:08 PM on May 7, 2019 [68 favorites]


(also there was one depression kitchen omnishambles I coped with by buying a mini fridge and keeping it in my bedroom under my desk for like six months before moving out, but I was also busy enough that I basically only ate cold breakfasts and snacks there anyway)
posted by bagel at 3:09 PM on May 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


ow, this hit home. I've been the sole fridge cleaner in various households of assorted gender configurations, and it's weird and hard, because there's usually mental health stuff and gender stuff all over the place, and sometimes abuse aftermath.

My roommate doesn't bother to go through the food in the fridge and throw out what's gone bad, so I do it, even if it's his food. I've stopped asking, because it's so tiresome. This means that I sometimes make mistakes, but I won't apologize for that. If he didn't want me to throw out his food he could take responsibility for throwing it out himself.

The highlight was when I threw out half of a sous-vide pork loin. He has a habit of cooking a too-large hunk of meat, and then leaving the leftovers in the fridge until I throw them out. I thought it had been in there for over a week, but he had actually just gotten it out of the freezer to thaw. (By the way, it was in the freezer in the first place because I put it there - he'll just put off doing that until it's too late.)

Luckily he's not the type to get mad at that kind of mistake, but many people are and that would make just this one task so emotionally draining if I was worried about it.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:12 PM on May 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


But. What if you don't care about it? Or not to the same degree as your spouse?

You care about what your spouse cares about as part of caring about them, and you work the problem. You collaborate on a plan that works for everyone and then do your part of the damn plan on your own initiative with the full intention of doing it well so that EVERYONE, even people who aren't you, are happy with their lives.

Women get stuck doing a hundred dumb-ass tedious bullshit necessary things that are not some kind of joy and passion, they just need to get done and done well enough that they don't create more work than payoff, which is the math men seem unable to do. That shitty towel-folding job someone was so proud of because it was the bare minimum very likely means a) the cabinet holds half of what it could if the job was done right b) people are fighting the cabinet to get a towel and probably having to pick up shit that falls out c) she gets to see his "fuck you I don't care" message every time she reaches for a towel, knowing this too will eventually become her responsibility because she cares.

This isn't actually hard. It's just work - not just physical but emotional work - and some people don't want to do it and figure it's fine to bail on their partner because it's their fault anyway.

If you agree to build a life with someone, even if that someone is a roommate with the kind of life that implies, that's going to mean making an effort to not make it miserable for all participants. Yeah, if your partner is making demands that can't be reasonably managed by two people in the normal course of a working life, like repainting a room every week or maybe your family is so large that it's not feasible to home-make all the school lunches or whatever, then you work it out, but otherwise you just split the shit up and get it done. Do it well, and on your own initiative, and alert to when it needs doing or extra work or some improvement/modification. You decide together what stuff gets a lower bar, you decide together when the situation has changed in ways that require re-evaluation or a new strategy or some kind of trade-off.

Look, nobody is born knowing how to do this, and very few people actually receive free-standing pleasure from doing the dumb-ass tasks of daily life. Learning to appreciate the benefits of it being done is something a lot of women manage about most of it, at least enough to be like "my life will be more difficult if X isn't done, so I will do it so that my life is nicer". Men can learn that too, I know they're real good at it if it's a hobby or work they like doing, so it's not like starting from scratch.

Step one is stopping to consider how many nice/functional things you enjoy in your life because you make someone else do it for you, and do that analysis with actual honesty and empathy about the person you (I hope) chose to partner with because you like them and not because you wanted a caretaker. Yeah okay, maybe you'd be delighted to live in squalor if it was just you, but if you've got a partner and kids, doesn't that make you want to aim a little higher? For them? Or for general well-being of the "family" unit? Why is it only your standards that matter?
posted by Lyn Never at 3:32 PM on May 7, 2019 [52 favorites]


Couples that refer to the husband as "babysitting" his own goddamned children are throwing up a big red flag that we can never be friends. I don't like watching the female half of that couple go through that bullshit, I don't like my kid seeing terrible examples of basic human functioning like that, and it strongly correlates with generally stupid attitudes about all manner of things.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:36 PM on May 7, 2019 [26 favorites]


I'm trying. Try to do the dishes, the vacuuming, the laundry. But, I often don't see the situation as "critical",

So, here's the thing. Babies aren't born with any innate sense of housekeeping. Indeed, one could marshal a convincing argument to the complete contrary. Yet somehow children, most especially girl children, learn what a clean home looks like and how to maintain it. This is a learnable skill. When I was eleven I did my own laundry. When I was eleven I took a turn in dish-washing rotation. I did an eleven-year-old's job at it, but that's because I was an eleven-year-old.

Now, of course people are free to decide what their own housekeeping standard is. I don't care about things my mom cared about. That's fine. (Truth be told, I'm pretty messy.) But the idea that it's somehow just asking too much to ask a grown man to learn or negotiate a standard and take actions to maintain it...this is literally what we ask most girl children to do throughout their childhoods. It is not something a grown man cannot learn to do, if it's important to him. If he knew he was going to be executed if he didn't keep up the household standard, you bet he'd learn.
posted by praemunire at 3:41 PM on May 7, 2019 [32 favorites]


Just wanted to say thank you to the people sharing and discussing in this thread, and its progenitor threads. You’ve helped me care for my home and my partner better, and surprise! when I do those those things better I also care for myself better.

Two things that have worked well for me (as a person with attentional issues):

- Switching from “to do” lists to “attend to” lists. Every day I check the sink, the dishwasher, and the three waste bins to see what needs doing. I get to reward myself with a checkmark for the actual hard part — not taking out the garbage, but remembering to pay attention and see if it needs taking out.

- For two months I logged every cleaning / maintenance task I did. No advance planning, just what actually happened. (This really helped me feel good about Doing A Thing, even though it might not be getting done consistently — and without needing rewards from my partner.) That log became a benchmark. I took that two months of tasks and made it into a checklist that I tried to get through in six weeks. Then four. Then three. Currently two!

Long ways to go still before parity. But the needle’s moving — and I can prove it to myself.
posted by sixswitch at 3:56 PM on May 7, 2019 [23 favorites]


This has been a big thing in my relationship. I don't see what she sees. I'm ok with the cleanliness level, she is not.

Hey. So I’m a dude. Gay, but not relevant here. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from keeping my own household running, by myself, for most of my adult life, is that there is a... moment of time when a dwelling goes from “eh, it’s fine” to “holy shit I need to clean RIGHT NOW or I’m going to die of a bacterial infection.”

That line can’t be taught. It comes from observation experience. And if you never do the cleaning, you’ll never realize where that line is.
posted by Automocar at 3:58 PM on May 7, 2019 [13 favorites]


Mod note: Folks, we all know this is a topic that is kinda fraught and tends to get hot. Let's please keep making the collective effort to not let it go that way.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:06 PM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


I recommend that all men should spend at least a year or two on their own, away from both parents and spouses. When you're the only one responsible for whether food happens, you make/buy all the meals. If you want the laundry done, you have to do it yourself.

That gives you the baseline to know "here are the things that are required to make a nice home life." You discover all the things that might have been invisible to you because your mom just did them for you.

Now you learn to do those things. It takes practice to learn how to plan meals and run your own schedule and to clean your home properly.

And then you are better equipped to keep doing those jobs when you get into a relationship. Expect to do all these jobs forever; it will help keep you from slipping back into letting your spouse handle everything, and it will keep you grateful for anything she does take over from you.
posted by JDHarper at 4:24 PM on May 7, 2019 [3 favorites]


(Male POV here)

A lot of the "we have different standards" stuff can and should be negotiated, but with both partners (but especially especially men) understanding that:

- Women will be held more responsible (by family, friends, etc.) for any perceived shortcomings than men -- and this is true even when the man is the primary caregiver. Some women will prefer to say "fuck that shit" but they will be the ones absorbing the cost regardless.
- Keeping track of things that need doing is work (and often more work than the doing)
- Negotiating every SINGLE thing could be super tedious and acrimonious, so, y'know, have the deep discussion over the ones you find difficult for whatever reason and just step up and do stuff for everything else
- Having said that we all bring SO much baggage / assumptions from how we were raised that it's almost always worth unpacking that stuff and examining it together
- Life changes should trigger renegotiation -- obviously having kids, but also having the *next* kid, kids growing older, health issues, caregiving for elders, job changes, etc.
- You should also keep an eye on how you're allocating chores & teaching life skills to your kids to make sure there's no gross patterns there either

My own experience is that most of these differences are tilted in exactly the gender direction you'd expect (and should be correcting for) -- but family background can go the other way sometimes. Like "Oh, your family played no role facilitating childhood friendships, so you think it's weird that I think we should be doing that" kinds of things.
posted by feckless at 4:30 PM on May 7, 2019 [27 favorites]


Heh, feckless, I knew that was you before I got to the end.
posted by crush at 5:08 PM on May 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


I often don't see the situation as "critical"
One thing I think about a lot is that the men that I have dated that haven't done their fair share at home always seemed to be totally fine and capable at their jobs. They didn't have to be in critical crisis mode in order to do their jobs effectively. Why does something have to be critical at home before it gets attended to? Why do you have to be wearing a bathing suit instead of underwear and wiping your butt with paper towels before you get your shit together and do the basic maintenance of living as a human being who shares space with other human beings? This is a serious question. Housework, I learned through my own experience, is way easier when it never becomes critical. Maintenance is never sexy or fun, but its necessary.
posted by sockermom at 5:36 PM on May 7, 2019 [53 favorites]


Something I think is worth saying, if you're inspired to change by the conversation here: you do not get to walk in to systems that your partner has developed to compensate for your non-participation and change them or take all the good bits. This isn't the workplace, you don't get to be in charge just because you're a man and you have Ideas. Ain't your show, you declined a managing partner position when you had the opportunity.

You start out by consistently doing - to a high standard - the stuff you were allegedly supposed to be doing in the first place, the stuff you said you'd do as well as the stuff that is entirely your realm in the first place (your own laundry, cleaning up after your hygiene routines, picking up stuff you left lying around, finding your own shoes/wallet/keys). You then ask for the crap jobs she least wants to do and is willing to trust you with, the ones that won't fuck up the system entirely if you don't do them. You can bitch INTERNALLY about how she wants things done her way and bossin' you around like you don't know - you DON'T. You don't, you haven't been the one who's had to run it, she's already had your ideas and kept or rejected them. (You don't get to decide you're going to cook dinner tonight for damn sure, you get to ask if Tuesdays and Sundays are good days to start being responsible for dinner, and it's entirely possible that her System means that you can, but you can't start for two weeks.)

You've lost trust here, and it's as serious as cheating or hiding money or lying about parenting/work situations. This stuff, ultimately, is why almost all my peers got divorced. One day the realization came that if I'm going to have to do all this myself anyway, it'd streamline it if he wasn't another person to accommodate. If there's kids, she hopes he rises to the occasion but if he doesn't at least her house will be a consistent and reliable place for them part of the time.

In a few months when you've established you're going to actually do this, and shown that you're going to respect her experience and her system, you can ask to be part of the steering committee. Strong recommendation you still don't take this opportunity to tell her how she's doing it wrong.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:15 PM on May 7, 2019 [75 favorites]


I babysat my kid when she was a tiny infant and basically just slept and I sat there. But she just turned one and now I am babyrunning.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:15 PM on May 7, 2019 [3 favorites]


Lyn Never's advice is perfect. Do NOT announce at IKEA that you want to go to the kitchen section to buy things to make the kitchen sink "more *organized*" when you haven't washed a dish in 8 years. Oh, is that the problem eh? Your Hermione Granger of a wife just needs HELP to make things ORGANIZED????
posted by bleep at 8:20 PM on May 7, 2019 [15 favorites]


And when she tells you she needs a gadget or some other system enhancer,
odds are very good that you don’t know enough about the system to contradict her.

Also, here’s a recent thing in Medium about mother’s day. https://medium.com/critical-frequency/lets-return-mother-s-day...
posted by bilabial at 8:40 PM on May 7, 2019 [2 favorites]


"we all bring SO much baggage / assumptions from how we were raised that it's almost always worth unpacking that stuff and examining it together"

Yeah, moving in with my now-wife has been eye-opening.

When I was growing up, my father worked literally 120 hours a week, at the kinds of jobs where you know how many hours you work because you clock out for every 10 minute break. He slept in his car 6 nights a week because he only had 8 hours between shifts. Understandably, he did zero housework except his own laundry. (He handled some scary stuff sometimes and was always worried about exposing us secondhand.)

My mother did everything. We didn't help because the plan was for us to study a lot, get into a good school, and get the kind of jobs where you don't have to work 120 hours a week. Which we did.

Along the way, mostly in college, I learned to cook, launder, sew, and sort of clean. I say sort of because I can get a kitchen to pass a health inspection, but I have no idea how to put anything away unless someone's written out a shelving chart for me. I'm not used to owning so much stuff that I can't just spread it all on the floor. (I hoard stuff like nobody's business, but I'm used to abandoning most of it every 3-6 months when my sublet ends.)

My wife's been extremely patient with what I now recognize were things most people learn much younger. It's taken me multiple years to learn to recognize her tumble-dry clothes, because I didn't use a drying machine until I started doing her laundry. (In my defense, she owns multiple weeks' worth of clothing and replaces some of it every year with different items, so it's a bit of a moving target.)

What's really been motivating me is the thought of raising my children with similar blind spots. I would like them better acculturated to middle-class American norms in this area than I was, if only so that they can have room-mates who aren't sworn to them for life.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 9:49 PM on May 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


"Are there are tons of other men out there who are actually willing to do their fair share of the work? Is it easier to be a single mother with no husband at home at all? Can they actually afford to raise kids on one salary?
Women put up with it because the alternatives are to be childless and/or alone."


I feel like I've said it elsewhere here before, but almost all of the time a bad, lackluster, lazy or just meh dude is considered to be far better than no dude at all in our society.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:28 PM on May 7, 2019 [7 favorites]


I dated a guy for a while that had a messy place. I was criticized for not keeping his place clean even though I didn’t live there.
posted by Monday at 12:10 AM on May 8, 2019 [18 favorites]


I recommend that all men should spend at least a year or two on their own, away from both parents and spouses. When you're the only one responsible for whether food happens, you make/buy all the meals. If you want the laundry done, you have to do it yourself.

in theory this should be an excellent learning experience but in practice it just means that the guy and everything he owns will be sticky with his own filth for a full year. and some poor woman he tricks into dating him will have to deal with that.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:37 AM on May 8, 2019 [32 favorites]


For those who suggest “the one who cares the most does it,” this article (NYT, “What Good Dads Get Away With”) mentions a study showing that in the workplace in a group of all men, people volunteer for tedious and undesirable tasks pretty equitably. In a group of women and men, men simply do not volunteer for those tasks. They sit back and wait for the women to step up.
posted by Kriesa at 3:38 AM on May 8, 2019 [57 favorites]


I recently went through the level of health scare that involves being glad at least you probably don’t need chemo, and I had like 4 weeks of deciding that life isn’t about chores or homework. My mother in law picked up the slack and so I got to live like a man and it actually was kind of glorious because unlike when I’ve had a health issue before, I didn’t care. And yet laundry was done! But gradually I have noticed the sticky shelves and started to care about the holes in my kid’s pants again. I dunno man. I’m just tired.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:28 AM on May 8, 2019 [7 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted. Everyone is aware that not every single man is messy and not every single woman is tidy. The post begins with "Most of them [mothers] did the lion’s share of the work." If someone makes a comment about "men" assume that it refers to most or many and not literally every man.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:08 AM on May 8, 2019 [11 favorites]


I recommend that all men should spend at least a year or two on their own, away from both parents and spouses. When you're the only one responsible for whether food happens, you make/buy all the meals. If you want the laundry done, you have to do it yourself.

I mean, in theory it might help reduce the more extreme or, um, comical results of young men not learning domestic skills - like the guy I know who went right from his parents' house to an apartment with his girlfriend and one of their first big arguments was about her supposed lack of laundry abilities when his underwear developed holes because he literally had no idea that clothing wears out; his mom who did all the laundry kept a stash of new underwear in the laundry room and when she discovered holes she would just break out a new pair without ever mentioning it.

But having lived the bachelor life for decades myself . . . man, those social/cultural lessons and training run deep and strong - and I was raised in a situation where my Silent Generation dad did a (comparatively) hefty amount of domestic labor. No, my pad doesn't look like the one I shared with 3 other dudes when I was 21, with Mickey's Big Mouth cans used as ashtrays on every table and a big pile of (flammable!) art supplies in the corner, but sitting here on the couch I can see a pair of socks on the floor and I know my bathroom sink needs a scrub and when I sit down at my desk in a minute I know I'm going to think, "Hmm, I should really vacuum over here" and I guaran-damn-tee that I'm not going to do any of that until tomorrow night at least and more likely Saturday or Sunday. (Ok, maybe I'll throw the socks in the hamper.)

And so regarding the "different standards" idea, let me refer folks to an article linked in the main article: Why Teen Boys Have More Leisure Time Than Teen Girls. (Hint: it's because moms spend time with their daughters doing domestic labor, and men spend time with their sons. . . not.)
posted by soundguy99 at 6:24 AM on May 8, 2019 [4 favorites]


So what is a fair breakdown when one parent is the sole breadwinner? Should the household/child care duties still be split 50%? I would think that if one parent is staying home, then they should take care of the vast majority of the household maintenance and childcare duties, even when the breadwinner is home. So maybe a 65-35 split (or even an 80-20 split, depending on how much time/stress the job requires) would seem fair.

I'm also having issues wrapping my head around allocation of tasks based on what that person more cares about. I know of one couple where the stay-at-home mom spends more time planning her son's 2-year birthday party (which is way more elaborate and involved than her peers) than she does washing dishes after meals (Secret Sparrow's comment about dirty plates comes to mind, although thankfully the deluge of ants hasn't happened yet), with the dad having to pick up the slack once he gets home from work after 8pm. The argument that the dad should actually be washing those dishes because he cares more about that aspect (while the mom cares more about the birthday party) and to yield a more equitable distribution of household responsibilities doesn't seem fair in this context.
posted by Basement at 6:54 AM on May 8, 2019


It is interesting that in these types of discussions about gender roles and sexism, some of the very first comments always include a man saying some version of “not all men, not me!” But the data also show that the majority of men vastly overestimate how much housework and childcare they do in comparison to their female partners.

I'm suddenly reminded of that line from When Harry Met Sally - "It's just that all men are sure [a woman faking an orgasm] never happened to them, and that most women at one time or another have done it, so you do the math."

...I think I have a better idea than being a sea creature - I could declare myself a pirate queen and we can make Crone Island our base of operations. Make occasional raids along the coasts picking up boytoys to fool around with and then make 'em swab the deck before we send them back ashore.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:55 AM on May 8, 2019 [11 favorites]



Early in our relationship, my wife and I decided that whoever does the work decides the standards to which it is done.

It seems like it's impossible to have a thread about domestic labor without a man posting this kind of advice. Like, maybe it works for you and your wife, we don't know you. But, even if we assume you're accurately assessing how fair the division of labor is (since men often are wrong about this), it doesn't work as general relationship advice. Because this is exactly the excuse that many men use to weasel out of completely reasonable expectations.


Oh god, I love you for saying this. Really, please just listen to the women as if what they were saying is true... please, gentlemen.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 7:33 AM on May 8, 2019 [7 favorites]


So what is a fair breakdown when one parent is the sole breadwinner? Should the household/child care duties still be split 50%? I would think that if one parent is staying home, then they should take care of the vast majority of the household maintenance and childcare duties, even when the breadwinner is home

So the thing that I think is often forgotten in things like this is that “household maintenance and childcare duties” is not just equivalent to one full time job, but equivalent to multiple full time jobs, except without the limitations of a 40 hour workweek.

So: are you expecting the stay-at-home person to clean house? That’s a housekeeper job.
Are you expecting them to also plan and cook meals and prepare lunches? That’s a cook’s job
Are you expecting them to take care of the child? Nanny job.
Are you expecting them to handle scheduling, dropping off dry cleaning, arranging appointments? Executive assistant job.

If you’re expecting them to do all of the above, you are expecting four full time jobs. And most of the time, you’re not expecting fair hours for that. Are you expecting them to work 8 hour days with an hour lunch break, and then their work is done? Or are you still expecting them to work in the “hours that the breadwinner is home” even though their “job” is over? And are you taking into account that you’re then essentially insisting someone work mandatory overtime at the job they probably already hate and also want a break from?
posted by corb at 7:57 AM on May 8, 2019 [41 favorites]


There is definitely a Young Male expectation that groups of them living together will not even try to be clean, but will live in utter filth and squalor until they get a girlfriend and move in with her.

If you are a young guy who would prefer to live better, if your roomies fulfill the stereotype, you will be outnumbered and overwhelmed and probably give up trying.

I'm raising my kid to know how to wash clothes, and clean up, and that you don't let the carpet get crunchy before you vacuum, etc. He's resistant because he's a teen but I'm hoping some of it sticks.
posted by emjaybee at 8:13 AM on May 8, 2019 [6 favorites]


So what is a fair breakdown when one parent is the sole breadwinner?

I mean, in the specific, each individual couple has to work that out for themselves - the point of the article and this discussion is not to come up with a set formula for divvying up labor, it's pointing out that a wide variety of influences have resulted in a continuing gender imbalance across the population despite individuals' best intentions.

I'm also having issues wrapping my head around allocation of tasks based on what that person more cares about.

I think it's less that this is an intentional plan (although choosing to use this factor can be one way couples decide how to divide domestic duties) and more that any living situation tends to drift towards the person who cares about Thing X running out of patience first and just doing the thing rather than have an argument or discussion for the umpteenth time. Which often results in women doing the lion's share of domestic and child-rearing labor.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:21 AM on May 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


The thing about
I would think that if one parent is staying home, then they should take care of the vast majority of the household maintenance and childcare duties
is that many women (not all) with children report that going to work is a welcome relief from all the cleaning, touching, listening, anticipating of some parts of motherhood. 8 hours a day of adult conversation that rarely needs to be cut short by saying "because I said so." 8 hours a day where it's unlikely that someone will lift your shirt up in a supermarket or fling a box of donuts across a grocery store.

For full time stay at home parents the work is literally never ending because at the very least you need to be alert that the child isn't hanging themselves in the cords that hang off the living room window fixtures or crawling into the toilet. Children are incredibly messy. They create mountains of laundry (bedsheets should be washed once a week. That bit of laundry alone is a hellscape with more than one child, and then what if you get a kid like me who literally wet the bed a few times a week until the age of 14?)

There just is not time to do all of the things that need doing while also being home with a kid. You eat at home, there are dishes to wash, the bathroom gets more use and needs more frequent cleaning.

Now, staying home with no outside work or volunteer role, no kid and no limitations on physical ability, that might justify a sole responsibility for homekeeping, if both parties agreed that it was equitable and reasonable, but it certainly shouldn't be assumed that this will be how things shake out.
posted by bilabial at 8:36 AM on May 8, 2019 [15 favorites]


I recently went through the level of health scare that involves being glad at least you probably don’t need chemo, and I had like 4 weeks of deciding that life isn’t about chores or homework. My mother in law picked up the slack and so I got to live like a man and it actually was kind of glorious because unlike when I’ve had a health issue before, I didn’t care.

My mom came to stay with me once for about a week before we went off on an extended vacation and, despite my specific requests that she not put herself out, she cleaned my place while I was at work. It was, indeed, super nice to come home to a house that had been cleaned without my involvement (or paying and managing a cleaning service); like magic! No wonder men find this seductive, I thought.

But, as we know, the real world isn't magic.
posted by praemunire at 8:57 AM on May 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


My mom came to stay with me once for about a week before we went off on an extended vacation and, despite my specific requests that she not put herself out, she cleaned my place while I was at work.

I've had similar experiences from both of my parents and my stepfather -- bless my mother for modeling acts of service as a way to care for someone, and bless her for marrying men who picked up what she was putting down.

But noticing that my late father or my stepfather will cheerfully and quietly tidy up a house as an act of love only throws into stark relief how my father-in-law will sit in his recliner and shout until my mother-in-law comes in so he can tell her, "Get me a beer."

And to be honest, I wish I had paid more attention to the dynamics of my inlaws' domestic arrangements before getting married. My husband's not so odious as to demand I disrupt what I'm doing to get him a drink. But since he's going by the "At least I'm not my dad" standard for housekeeping, I've had to do the work to explain that subjective improvements over prior precedent are not the same as being objectively good at domestic parity. Repeatedly.
posted by sobell at 9:08 AM on May 8, 2019 [15 favorites]


Long held resentment over unequal parenting was a big part of the reason my mom divorced my dad five years after all of us kids had left for college. I would really caution against feeling complacent about what you're getting away with not going. You may find yourself wishing you'd done some relationship maintenance before things got critical.
posted by carolr at 9:16 AM on May 8, 2019 [17 favorites]


Basement: So what is a fair breakdown when one parent is the sole breadwinner? Should the household/child care duties still be split 50%? I would think that if one parent is staying home, then they should take care of the vast majority of the household maintenance and childcare duties, even when the breadwinner is home.

Even when the breadwinner is home? If I was working doing household/child care duties during the hours that my partner was engaged in paid employment/commuting, I would expect my work to be respected as work just as much as theirs. If anything there's an argument for the work-at-home partner getting an extra 30-60 minutes of rest time in the evening to compensate them if they're spending their "lunch break" and "coffee breaks" on-duty supervising small children. What makes you feel that the work-at-home partner should always work longer hours than the work-outside-the-home partner?
posted by Secret Sparrow at 9:28 AM on May 8, 2019 [65 favorites]


I was going to write a comment here, but Secret Sparrow seems to have read my mind and typed it out for me.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:31 AM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


I would think that if one parent is staying home, then they should take care of the vast majority of the household maintenance and childcare duties

Even not having kids, I can see the flaw in this. Childcare actually has a dollar-and-time value, you can go look at your local market to assess that, and housekeeping has a dollar-and-time value, and (this quantity is variable depending on the age and school status of the children in question) it can't be done simultaneously - not efficiently, or safely in some cases.

Additionally, if there are two (or more!) parents/nuclear parenting-type adults, they should all be spending childcare time with the children for the children's sake. A parent who works all day should be involved in dinner and bedtime, otherwise the child barely has a relationship with the person, this isn't really about workload anymore. Also a parent who spends all day (especially before school-age) with a kid needs to disengage some for their own and the child's benefit. The breadwinner really ought to spend quite a bit of time in child-engagement on their days off in the service of relationship-building.

If there's no kids, or they're old enough to a) participate in the domestic life of the family b) generally only require relationship interaction rather than literal caretaking, that's the point where an adult who is not working should probably take on the bulk of domestic tasks, but that's not to say that everyone shouldn't self-maintain certain tasks.

I do think if you're dependent on someone else's job you should do what you can within reason to support that person's ability to work well/pursue promotion/keep paying those bills. If there's not childcare involved that may very well mean taking on the bulk of domestic work, but once children (or elder care, etc) comes into play that is an entirely additional 24-hour workload with specific interaction requirements, and the only reason to assume the person doing the domestic work should consume that entire additional workload him- or herself is to think that childcare is not work or not valuable work, and that one or more parenting adults should be expected to not parent very much because they're doing something else.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:32 AM on May 8, 2019 [13 favorites]


Why do women put up with men who do less than 50%? So many reasons. Maybe they’re 36 and they want to have kids and having kids with 2 incomes and 4 sets of hands and doing all the dishes is still easier than being a single parent. Maybe they are tired of being alone and want some emotional intimacy. Maybe they know that there are 5% of men who are capable and willing to do a fair share of work and the simple math is not every woman is going to get one of those 5%. Maybe they grew up in a household where women are just supposed to work really hard all the time (an actual quote from a friend) and that’s the norm to them. I read a lot of parenting forums which means mostly moms and when a woman posts about ‘having an extra child’ or realizing that her life would actually be easier if she divorced, that’s pretty much the tipping point where divorce is on the table. That or infidelity.
posted by bq at 9:33 AM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]


Just came across this timely blog post: So you want to help around the house!
posted by Lyn Never at 9:38 AM on May 8, 2019 [12 favorites]


My wife and I both work demanding full time jobs and do a 50% split on chores and childcare. Some weeks one of us may do a bit more if someone is sick, has something going on, or just needs rest. But, we don't keep score and we communicate our needs and expectations. We also make sure each of us get their fair share of "down time". Not sure how any working married couple could do it any other way without someone being resentful. Marriage is a partnership, not something you half-ass because *reasons......
posted by remo at 10:43 AM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


the thing for me that has, for all my life, pretty clearly encapsulated the difference in how cis ppl in het relationships behave, is that , very generally, many times when men spill something on the floor or the table or whatever, unless it is right on something else they were doing, they feel absolutely no pressure, either internal or external, to clean it up immediately. it's not even on their radar. it's someone else's problem, even if that someone else is Distant Unknowable Future Themselves.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:34 AM on May 8, 2019 [15 favorites]


I'm sure we would all love a clean fridge, but not enough to put in the work. so, yeah, it stays gross.

This chore alone makes me so glad we have separate places. I (the woman in this relationship) literally only clean out the fridge when there is no room to put anything else in it, and I don't think I've ever, like, washed it. And I don't caaaaaaare.

On the other hand, the dustbunnies at his place (cat fur and long beard hairs) make me crazy. But it's not my house, so I'm not going to clean it or even comment on it.
posted by fiercecupcake at 11:43 AM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


The Venn Diagram of men who don't pull their weight and bemoan a dead bedroom is a circle.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 12:22 PM on May 8, 2019 [21 favorites]


All I know is that if we look at the system of marriage, it was never meant to be equal was it?

Of course not! Women were property (and we're still handed over from father to husband like some kinda virgin-prezzie on our wedding day), and then "helpmates" (see emotional-labour do-er), and but always baby-ovens and sex-bots/slaves/sleeves/partners (depending on our willingness to comply to greater or lesser degree).

This is why I believe we need to throw the marriage institution itself out: the institution should be set on fire and buried and the earth salted. We don't need it. It's bad for women. Trying to leave is often dangerous to women. And despite the fact that most women risk violence and danger to leave, they still initiate the lions' share of divorces. And most women say they'd never do it again.

Clearly this government-sanctioned contract engenders a relationship in which men get to "work on" their "problems" forever.... forever.... while we make expectations lower and our souls smaller (deep shudder). No thanks. DTMFA Dump the Marriage Fucking Already.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 12:39 PM on May 8, 2019 [17 favorites]


So in the forecasting business we do this thing called "reference class forecasting". What you do is determine from a historical set of reference projects how much optimism bias you need to apply to your forecasts to get to the most likely cost and time. I think many men could do with de-biasing their views of what % of the work they do. I typically aim for a perceived 60% of the work done by me, as I think that probably takes me to a "real" 50:50. I imagine once we have children I'll have to bump that up and aim for "feels like" 70% to hit parity.

I think the idea of the person doing the thing setting the standards isn't quite there. I think the person accountable for a thing being done (to a mutually agreed standard) is in charge of how it is done which is not the same. This is because being accountable for something is almost as exhausting as actually having to do it - that is why randomly pitching in with a task is not *that* helpful and certainly conveys no moral right to determine how it is done. The person accountable has a system and if you want to work within the system that's fine, if you want to run the system then you have to own the system and you have to accept the accountability.

Crucially though there still has to be an agreement on standards, not on the how but on the what. So I do almost all our laundry, my wife will do it if and when I ask her to help out but it's my job to own. That also means that if we run out of washing powder or what have you, that's a management failure on my part, regardless of who last used it. Also, if she runs out of clean clothes, that's a failure on my part because the agreed standard for the system is that this does not happen.

The accountability is the crucial element because that is cognitive load. If I "did" the laundry 100% of the time but she was the one worrying about whether everyone had clean clothes for tomorrow, then it would still be her job.

So what is a fair breakdown when one parent is the sole breadwinner? Should the household/child care duties still be split 50%? I would think that if one parent is staying home, then they should take care of the vast majority of the household maintenance and childcare duties, even when the breadwinner is home.

There is a massive difference between the amount of work and stress involved in this scenario with very young children and older children.

If one partner is staying home with really young kids, they are "on the clock" the whole time, even while they're doing other things like cleaning they have to watch the kids. So they genuinely have worked the entire time that the breadwinner isn't there - I work a high stress job but I can assure you that my boss does not follow me into the toilet. So when the breadwinner comes home, both partners have worked the whole day and probably the one staying home has had more stress.

Once the kids are at primary school, especially when they're old enough to walk to school by themselves, the amount of stress and constant work goes down and there is at least a few hours of break. At this point, most parents will start working again at least part time, if they don't then I think it is reasonable to expect that they will do the majority of the household stuff. To be honest though, this is largely theoretical as I literally don't know a single person in my generation where that is the case. In most couples, the stay at home parent goes back to work and extra income is used to pay for cleaners, meal prep etc. as while there is a genuine balance in giving up income vs the joy of spending time with your children, cleaning is just boring.
posted by atrazine at 1:08 PM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]


I typically aim for a perceived 60% of the work done by me, as I think that probably takes me to a "real" 50:50. I imagine once we have children I'll have to bump that up and aim for "feels like" 70% to hit parity.

I've been thinking about this lately. I think one big source of bias is that you know about all the work you do, but only some of the work your partner does.
posted by madcaptenor at 1:30 PM on May 8, 2019 [12 favorites]


You both have to put in 100%. This is true across all partnerships (even starting a new business), but especially when kids are involved. No one is 50% someone's parent. You are or you aren't.
posted by domo at 2:34 PM on May 8, 2019 [2 favorites]


Lyn Never and Secret Sparrow - I appreciate the comments, but it seems to focus on my characterization as "vast majority" instead of the sentence following identifying that a 65-35 split or 80-20 split might be fair. If one parent is out of the house 10-12 of the 16 hours a day the child is awake, aren't we de facto arguing for the same thing?
posted by Basement at 2:54 PM on May 8, 2019


Man, lots of gatekeeping in this thread. I know many men that help out at home and hold a full-time job. I also know men who don't have a job and do lots around the house.

I also know lots of women who help out at home and hold a full-time job. I also know women who don't have a ho and do lots around the house.

Different relationships work in different ways. Do you make each other happy is the only really important question. And having gratitude towards your partner surely can't be a bad thing?

Now, I suppose the facts are that, on the whole, women still do more of the housework than men, but that's changing and moving towards a more equitable situation. I suggest we celebrate that rather than argue what the correct ratio is for every relationship in the world.
posted by Phreesh at 2:57 PM on May 8, 2019


Ugh there’s no number or algorithm or ratio that’s going to make this easy or standardized. I feel like this is a race to the lowest bar? (Woah mixed metaphors)

My living conditions (and those of my non existent children) is directly tied to my mental and emotional health and so totally coded in my fibres now.. A living partner will either get that and the “value” of that (ugh - like some kind of economy), or they won’t. Like, I’m not dithering anymore. It’s 2019.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 3:21 PM on May 8, 2019 [8 favorites]


Man, lots of gatekeeping in this thread.

No. You don't get to co-opt language used to describe inequality in order to shut down people discussing the ways inequality effects them. Not only is this a wildly inaccurate characterization of what is going on in this thread, it's a cheap rhetorical move that isn't worthy of the discussion here.

Now, I suppose the facts are that, on the whole, women still do more of the housework than men

So you don't disagree that the inequality exists. You recognize that there is a problem, and that women's personal lives are suffering for it...

that's changing and moving towards a more equitable situation

But you think that the best way to keep it changing and moving towards a more equitable situation is to ... stop talking about it? To stop asking for better?

I suggest we celebrate that rather than argue what the correct ratio is for every relationship in the world.

Because if we pretend to be happy and grateful whenever men clear an extremely low bar.... that will raise the bar higher...?

I suggest you reflect on why you find the discussion so uncomfortable even though you agree that the problem we're discussing is real.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:27 PM on May 8, 2019 [57 favorites]


If one parent is out of the house 10-12 of the 16 hours a day the child is awake, aren't we de facto arguing for the same thing?

Plenty of people other than those you've named have disagreed with you, so, I'll limit it to: what do you imagine stay at home parents do within those 12 (possibly, optimistic etc) hours and why do you think it warrants them being responsible for housework outwith those times?
posted by threetwentytwo at 3:29 PM on May 8, 2019 [7 favorites]


So what is a fair breakdown when one parent is the sole breadwinner? Should the household/child care duties still be split 50%? I would think that if one parent is staying home, then they should take care of the vast majority of the household maintenance and childcare duties, even when the breadwinner is home.

See, this pretty much encapsulates so much of the problem. Would you expect a nanny/caregiver to devote all of their "off the clock" time to housework and their husbands not to have to contribute, just because their daytime paid job is childcare?

No, right? (As a side note, when I had a nanny, and my husband and I each had a commute, we ended up paying her overtime because her hours were considerably over 44 hours a week - i.e. 50+ hours.)

So why on God's green Earth other than 'misogyny' and 'cultural programming' would you assume that a family where the adults have decided that one person works outside the home and the other cares for their children during the day, it logically follows that the wife is responsible for all the housework and all the childcare even when the other parent is home? Like where does that even come from?

It comes from both an assumption that the person getting paid works harder, and that for some reason, doing the housework and the childcare is some kind of privilege and not simply an allocation of family labour and a joint priority.

Why is the mom on childcare and housework on weekends if it’s a shared parenting and partnership responsibility? Because she has a uterus? Because her work during the week wasn’t “real work” because it did not come with a salary? I would really, really think about where this thinking comes from.

Now obviously there is a shift over children’s lives in terms of where the labour is and what it is. With kids that are not in school, that is a full time job, plus. With kids in school there might be different trade offs - a mom who is volunteering is contributing not just to the school but to the family's networking/information sharing/etc., but you might decide that actually just getting the yardwork done is more important to the family to have weekends clear.

But these are still decisions about labour. Not assumptions about roles miraculously making the work disappear.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:32 PM on May 8, 2019 [38 favorites]


why is there so much focus on winning bread. all one has to do to win bread is to enter a number of bread sweepstakes. how much time and effort can this really take. meanwhile the real workers are the bread BAKERS. where is the support for the bakers. i don't care about your scratch-off bread tickets.
posted by poffin boffin at 4:58 PM on May 8, 2019 [18 favorites]


why is there so much focus on winning bread.

*knocks on crust of the Ryellennium Crouton* I won this hunk of junk in a game of sabacc & ever since I've been flying it through the galaxy while my wife -- who is an actual general organizing a huge resistance effort -- does all our laundry
posted by taquito sunrise at 5:10 PM on May 8, 2019 [12 favorites]


Now, I suppose the facts are that, on the whole, women still do more of the housework than men

This is about the understatement of the year, so it might behoove you to adjust your supposition by looking into more of the facts, many to be found among all the gatekeeping in the thread—you seem to have noticed that but not the actual substance of this discussion? I wonder why?
posted by sallybrown at 5:48 PM on May 8, 2019 [22 favorites]


I know of one couple where the stay-at-home mom spends more time planning her son's 2-year birthday party (which is way more elaborate and involved than her peers) than she does washing dishes after meals (Secret Sparrow's comment about dirty plates comes to mind, although thankfully the deluge of ants hasn't happened yet), with the dad having to pick up the slack once he gets home from work after 8pm. The argument that the dad should actually be washing those dishes because he cares more about that aspect (while the mom cares more about the birthday party) and to yield a more equitable distribution of household responsibilities doesn't seem fair in this context.

Also, I found I couldn't let this go.

If the dishes are getting cleaned up once a day (every night) then I don't think ants are a big issue. I can understand how it feels to come home at 8pm with dirty dishes around, probably because that's been almost all my working life as the lady of the house (*cough), but that's just one chore.

The elaborate birthday party, I'm going to assume, happens once a year as with the general population but you chose to highlight it as an example of this mom's crazy priorities. You pretty much nailed again right here the way that women's stay-at-home-labour is never enough, but paid employment is always enough. Do you think that the man you are giving as an example, the dishes-washing man, ever gets home at 8pm because he has spent too much time playing with an elaborate Power Point template, or romancing a client that didn't pan out, or even, gasp, maybe spent a bit too much time "debriefing" with his team rather than getting his reports done?

I don't know, who am I to judge this outstanding lawyer/executive/sales guy/landscaper...no one. His boss does presumably, but of course, his boss may not know he spent 4 hours going down a PowerPoint Perfection Hole, because he stayed until 8pm and made up the time on those reports, or gave them to an underling, or cancelled a nonsense meeting. And yet, the SAHM who goes down a Perfectionist Birthday Hole once a year, she is here standing for all those women who just don't get the dishes done, damn them all the hell.

I could write about this birthday hole, how your kid is the biter in the playgroup or a mom made a comment about perhaps your dishes, so now you have this one opportunity to create a great birthday party, to show that you love your child, you appreciate his 2 year old pooping and peeing friends and their moms, that you are In The Tribe, because being In The Tribe means that when you are about to lose your fucking shit because your toddler threw a toy at your nose for the 10th time, you can call the tribe and say "can we meet at the park" and they will come distract your kid before you accidentally kinda smack him for it. And later, you know, The Tribe will tell you which kindergarten teacher's class to switch your kid out of and will call you when the kids, 14, are caught drinking in the bushes down the street.

Not only that, but The Tribe will invite your son to their birthday parties and he will have friends, and perhaps you were bullied in school and so you really kind of want your child to have some friends, things you didn't have in grade 3 and you got dog poop on your shoe and the whole class laughed and no friend came to help wipe it on the grass.

And then you know you are going overboard with the handmade loot bags and the hand piped royal icing coated cookies, the ones that made more dishes, but this is one of the only times you can justify making things look nice, being creative, your brain is on fire coming up with more and more ideas, fueled perhaps by dreams of the Tribe and also genuine love of your child, the future unbullied, you hope, but if so, at least he will know his mother really shows up for him with a great party...but also burning, burning like tinder because you stay home all day and you do not get a performance review, a bonus, a "good job" from a colleague you respect, metrics, commissions, contracts signed, bug reports squashed...what you get is peed on, poop in your hair, screaming, reading Goodnight Moon another goddamn time and all of that has made you feel like ash but here, for whatever Pinterest reason, suddenly you have a chance to make something feel NICE and people might say WHAT A GREAT PARTY and then...then you will know that your mothering is okay.

For ten minutes.

Except that some jerk is like "why do you have to go to all these lengths for a kid's birthday party?"
posted by warriorqueen at 6:27 PM on May 8, 2019 [84 favorites]


Look, it's not just that taking care of a home is multiple full time jobs (nanny, chef, financial manager, cleaner, etc.). It's also the fact that women are expected to do both the organizing, scheduling, planning, etc., and all of the physical labor.

Think about your job. Think about the vast majority of jobs, especially the kinds of office jobs many of these men are going to. Think about roles in a company. There are people who plan, and organize, and strategize, and make sure everything runs smoothly and on time (i.e. managers). Then there are people who actually carry out the tasks that need to get done--the grunt work, if you will. Women are being asked to do both jobs at once. Very, very few people have jobs where they are responsible for both managing their entire company and doing every task down to the most menial. Freelancers, I suppose, but they can set their own hours and generally specialize--nobody has to make an entire short film from scratch, they do the music or the art or the effects and someone else pulls it together. Women have to be good at everything, and they have to manage it all on their own.

I am the sole breadwinner in my relationship. My partner and I are both gender-??? but let's say "raised with female expectations." The way we make things work is I do 95% of the executive functioning work, and they do 95% of the physical labor. I plan, make lists, organize, schedule, prioritize, and I tell my partner what needs to get done and when to do it. It is, to their report, so much less exhausting to do all of the housework when you don't have to think about it: someone just tells you what to do and you do it (you know, like in most jobs?). They don't have to worry about keeping track of grocery lists or appointments, or planning laundry so that we'll have appropriate work clothes for x days, or making sure we have the ingredients for dinner, or figuring out Christmas and birthday gifts, or remembering our agenda for the day. I take care of all of that. In return, they do the cleaning and cooking and driving and furniture assembling and pet care. Anything that requires standing up and walking around, they are willing to do.

There's a number of reasons why this works so well for us. I'm chronically ill and they have ADHD, so we're both playing to our strengths/avoiding our weaknesses. They also enjoy cleaning and cooking (I don't), while I actually enjoy planning and organizing and list making (they hate it). It's probably also more efficient because we don't have to juggle and interweave multiple systems--my to-do list doesn't have to integrate with theirs (they don't have one) and I don't have to worry about messing up their dishwashing system (I don't wash dishes unless I need one specific thing that's dirty). We also each thank each other constantly, and we're not afraid to seek out validation when we need it--if they did some dishes on their own and I haven't noticed, they'll say, "I did some dishes today!" and I'll respond, "Oh, cool, thanks hun!" I'm also willing to use the money I make to make their job easier: eating out when they're not up to making something, buying paper plates to reduce the number of dishes that need to be washed, etc. The stuff they do makes my job easier, so why shouldn't I give some of that back to them?

Now, we're not perfect at it. They also have some health problems, and I'm easily distracted and forgetful, so our apartment is definitely not immaculate. But we're never resentful over it. In terms of our relationship, we both feel like the balance is perfect (occasionally, one of us gets anxious that we aren't doing enough for the other, and we talk about it, and the other person is always like, "holy shit no, my life would fall apart without all the stuff you do for me"), though we each wish we could step up a little in our own domains. I'm not saying this would work for every relationship, but I am saying that I think it illustrates how much of the exhaustion women experience comes from having play the role of both manager and physical laborer at the same time. If you expect her to do the vast majority of the housework, you should do the vast majority of household management. Or vice versa. Or a 50-50 split, but it has to include all the executive functioning as well.

Also, as a caveat: we have no children. The calculus would completely change if we did. I work with 12-year-olds for 1.5 hours every week as part of my job. It is absolutely the most exhausting part of my week. I love these kids, but I do literally, the same exact work for young adults (I run a social skills intervention, and it's almost word-for-word the same content), and it is infinitely less exhausting. Can you imagine having to do your current job while watching a kid? Multiple kids? Kids are a second job altogether. If you think your wife should be able to do all the housework while watching kids, then bring your kids to work and see what happens.
posted by brook horse at 6:27 PM on May 8, 2019 [20 favorites]


I suggest we celebrate that rather than argue

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass

what the correct ratio is for every relationship in the world.

The only person arguing in terms of ratios is someone who apparently thinks that you can solve social issues like you solve equations - just plug in the right numbers! - and is also arguing in favor of the status quo where men don't have to do domestic labor because they're out of the house earning money all day. So I don't know what you're talking about, here.
posted by soundguy99 at 9:26 PM on May 8, 2019 [5 favorites]


I appreciate the comments, but it seems to focus on my characterization as "vast majority" instead of the sentence following identifying that a 65-35 split or 80-20 split might be fair. If one parent is out of the house 10-12 of the 16 hours a day the child is awake, aren't we de facto arguing for the same thing?

People aren't focusing on the suggestion that a work-in-the-home parent will wind up doing the vast majority of the household maintenance and childcare overall, they're focusing on the fact that what you wrote suggests that they should also be doing the vast majority done during the hours that both adults are home: "if one parent is staying home, then they should take care of the vast majority of the household maintenance and childcare duties, even when the breadwinner is home".

If that isn't what you intended to say then you expressed yourself poorly.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 9:59 PM on May 8, 2019 [11 favorites]


Now, I suppose the facts are that, on the whole, women still do more of the housework than men, but that's changing and moving towards a more equitable situation. I suggest we celebrate that rather than argue what the correct ratio is for every relationship in the world.

It is 2019. Women got the vote in the UK (where I live) more than 100 years ago. Women were burning their bras fifty years ago. My husband and I both have full time jobs out of the house yet you think a situation where he does less of the work in the home is something I should be grateful for in general and that I should be specifically grateful to him because he does the washing up after I cooked the dinner he and I both ate. I do not have the words to convey my fury.

As it happens my husband is pretty good and I'm confident I'm happier with him in my life and my household than not, but it's not hard to look around and see that I'm unusually lucky there. He does I think do a 50% share of the housework and is more inclined to like things tidy than me (I don't really care about tidy although I do care about clean). Since the emotional labour thread he's been much better about recognising the social elements of the work I do for both of us (it's still me that plans ~2/3 of our date-type activities and joint social life but at least when I point this out he gets it). I've read the thread and I mostly have been grateful that while neither of us is perfect we have a decent balance (and also grateful that we don't have kids).

However the laundry. Oh my god the laundry. In 11 years of marriage I don't think he has once changed our bedsheets. He did try to put them back on recently and had to call me to help him because he couldn't put the duvet cover back on (despite being 9 inches taller than me and therefore having much longer arms). We have marker pen writing on the washing machine because otherwise he can't get the detergent and conditioner in the right drawers. I have had to repeatedly ban him from washing my clothes because he damages them by not doing it right and then is hurt that I'm not grateful he damaged my clothes. He is an intelligent man. He could understand this shit if he put his mind to it. But it doesn't matter to him because he can get away with cotton T shirts and khakis 99% of the time and he doesn't seem interested in understanding that my work wardrobe (expected of me as a professional woman, not expected of him as a man working in IT) is much more delicate.

Again, overall I'm lucky. He cares about me and my happiness and keeping our household pleasant and running smoothly so he wants to contribute to our household, he doesn't want to freeload off me doing as little as he can get away with. He's got better about emotional labour (actually we both have) because he took the time to read the discussion on metafilter and came away with a better understanding of the why it mattered and has tried harder since. I hope some of the male mefites who are content to get away with less than their share of the work will also read this discussion and have a similar response, so I do think it's important we discuss it rather than celebrate that it's not as bad as it used to be. It won't get better if we don't discuss it.
posted by *becca* at 2:34 AM on May 9, 2019 [14 favorites]


Related, probably: After men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer kids

After paternity leave was instituted, surveys of Spanish men ages 21 to 40 showed they desired fewer children than before. Farré and González think that spending more time with their children—or the prospect of having to do so—may have made men more acutely aware of the effort and costs associated with childrearing, and, as the researchers put it, “shifted their preferences from child quantity to quality.”

At the same time, women started showing preferences for slightly larger families—perhaps a sign that having more children seemed more desirable with a slightly more equitable balance of labor at home

posted by cendawanita at 7:34 AM on May 9, 2019 [24 favorites]


I know of one couple where the stay-at-home mom spends more time planning her son's 2-year birthday party (which is way more elaborate and involved than her peers) than she does washing dishes after meal, with the dad having to pick up the slack once he gets home from work after 8pm.

Doesn't this just perfectly support the points being repeatedly made here though?
The man feels the woman's obligation to the household duties even comes over his own child. He geneuienly believes that having to wash his own dishes in his own home for just a few days a year while she redistributes that labor to planning a birthday party, is "picking up her slack".
Is he really thinking like, "sorry kid no party this year your mom didn't do the chores on time," or is he just pissed that she didn't plan him his own party this year because she somehow got the impression that having the dishes all done by 8pm was more important to him?
posted by OnefortheLast at 8:53 AM on May 9, 2019 [20 favorites]


Mod note: Folks, please refresh and stop responding to deleted comments. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 9:04 AM on May 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


Is it easier to be a single mother with no husband at home at all?

There's a thriving community of single parents by choice who have done these mental calculations and decided, yes, it is. My home workload is easier to deal with than most two parent families because I have absolutely no resentment and do not have to negotiate the balance of duties. Yes, it does require a certain level of income, and there is some risk - one salary, no backup. But that's minor in comparison.
posted by valeries at 9:47 AM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


than she does washing dishes after meal, with the dad having to pick up the slack once he gets home from work after 8pm.

It’s also worth noting here that the dad isn’t saying “the dishes never get done”, he’s saying “they’re not done by the time I come home, so I don’t get to come home to a sparkling clean house”. Does he actually have to clean the dishes, or was the mom planning to get them after the kid was asleep?
posted by corb at 9:48 AM on May 9, 2019 [7 favorites]


"pick up the slack" i can't respond to this without getting permabanned for inciting a riot so just imagine that on your own
posted by poffin boffin at 10:05 AM on May 9, 2019 [28 favorites]


I've been mostly listening in this thread and it's hard. Guys? Please listen to women. This shit has been fucked up in so many ways for far too long.

Here's another couple of logs for the outrage bonfire.

I don't talk about my stepdad here or much of anywhere basically ever because he was a chronically abusive, fragile, toxic and likely narcissistic asshole. You can throw darts at this thread and the EL megathread and doc and just about everywhere a dart lands will describe something accurate about this shitiness.

But on top of all of that, one of the really depressing things I learned later after he and my mom finally separated was this:

He made her buy all of our birthday and Christmas presents - including the ones that labeled as being from him. As in do the shopping, the sourcing, the purchasing and wrapping, everything. Not with house money, not with his money - but entirely with her money, be it her minuscule allowance or extremely limited income from writing, art and other at home industries. And it wasn't just presents, a lot of this was extended to stuff like school supplies and clothes, even any form of food that wasn't the cheapest garbage or just plain old rice and beans. (Meanwhile, his 2nd or 3rd job is at a restaurant and he's bringing home huge, meaty entrees, pastries and other leftovers and eating them in front of us wtf.

When I learned this it was like getting punched in the face, which, eh, was also a thing.

But suddenly, so many things made a lot more sense.

Like him sitting there all smug on Christmas and accepting thanks in a way that, in hindsight, tells me it was the first time he saw the gift, too because he didn't even knew what was under the wrapping. And so he'd roleplay and hollowly accept these, I don't know, symbols or simulcra of what real family relationships looked like instead of the fucked up shit he was doing, and basically just throwing them away. And my mom sitting there kind of wincing.

Or why my mom was so broke all the time despite constantly hustling work, or why she was always so stressed about money despite the fact my stepdad was working like 3 jobs, we had affordable rent and he sure bought himself a lot of toys, and, in hindsight, had plenty of money to secretly blow on drugs and alcohol even while keeping up the weekly appearances of a Mormon.

Yeah, there's a few reasons why I left home long before I was an adult.

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by loquacious at 10:33 AM on May 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


Is it easier to be a single mother with no husband at home at all?

Single mom of 4 here and unequivocally, yes.

A lot of men who still idealize the 1950's model housewife/mother have never bothered to ask any of those women how they managed to do it. If they did, they'd find that they managed that ideal presentation by and through neglect.
Firstly of themselves, they all consumed massive amounts of otc pharmaceuticals now reserved for adhd treatment, otherwise known as amphetamines.
Then the children. Kids who weren't of school age spent all day every day alone in cribs, play pens or prams outside. They were not picked up, held, played with, or otherwise interacted with or cared for other than scheduled feedings and changings. They certainty didnt get to run around the house, have books read to them, "help" mom, go to play groups or have any fun. Sometimes the mother would sing to them or recite memorized nursery rhymes from the other from as she did her work.
But ultimately, they accomplished their outter illusion of ideal by neglecting their families.
Is that really what men want when they come home to a clean house?
posted by OnefortheLast at 11:01 AM on May 9, 2019 [12 favorites]


The leisure time gap between men and women with children exists, even when you do not separate out women who stay at home. Staying at home with the children is not leisure time.

Note also that women value the leisure time they get more, but it's not as relaxing. That's because a lot of leisure time isn't, actually: The statistics include time spent on social responsibilities like party planning, which I'm sure many women would not classify as leisure. And on top of that, it's difficult to get uninterrupted, relaxing time to yourself when you're still the one given the primary responsibility for the children and the house. You are still monitoring and intervening. There's a reason women taking long bubblebaths while sipping on a glass of wine is a trope - it's because physically barricading yourself behind the bathroom door is often the only way to get away from that role.

Like, here is a simple example: Most days, my roommate is the one that feeds the cats and I'm the one that cleans the litterbox. I'm fine with this. But can I trust him to make sure the cats are fed? No. In the morning, he sometimes has an early meeting and rushes out, leaving it to me. In the evening, he sometimes falls asleep before he gets to it.

Meanwhile, if I don't clean the litterbox, it just doesn't get cleaned.

It only takes a couple of minutes to feed them. That's not really the problem. The problem is it that if I want to
sleep in and he hasn't fed them, I get woken up by hungry cats. And in the evening, I can't crawl into my bed under my comfy covers and be done with the day until they've been fed. If I want to relax in bed or go to sleep early, I have to feed them early myself, or set an alarm so I will be sure to get up and check that it's been done. It doesn't matter if I'm sick. If I ask him to do it instead, he looks confused, like - why am I asking, he usually does it.

Even though we've developed a system where feeding the cats is "his" job, the buck still stops with me. I'm still the one that makes sure.

And that's just cats, which are an insanely small fraction of the amount of work it takes to be responsible for kids.

Expecting the stay-at-home parent to be responsible for children even when the other parent is at home means that not only will they be spending more hours actively doing childcare, they will also be spending their leisure time being responsible for that childcare getting done, which means it's not leisure time in the same sense that you get.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:44 AM on May 9, 2019 [18 favorites]


OnefortheLast has just reminded me that my parents joke about when they used to leave us in makeshift playpens out of hay bales or a literal stall in the animal shed whilst the farm was busy- which was basically all the time.

No wonder they look baffled when I interact with my kid.
posted by threetwentytwo at 11:50 AM on May 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


A lot of men who still idealize the 1950's model housewife/mother have never bothered to ask any of those women how they managed to do it. If they did, they'd find that they managed that ideal presentation by and through neglect.

This is an excellent point. My mum, a US Baby Boomer, has a lot of memories of begging to use the bathroom at friends' houses because her mother locked them out of the house after school and on weekends, so they would not mess it up and also because "children are meant to be outdoors."
posted by warriorqueen at 11:53 AM on May 9, 2019 [13 favorites]


There's a thriving community of single parents by choice who have done these mental calculations and decided, yes, it is. My home workload is easier to deal with than most two parent families because I have absolutely no resentment and do not have to negotiate the balance of duties. Yes, it does require a certain level of income, and there is some risk - one salary, no backup. But that's minor in comparison.
Basically, this.

Being a lone parent is really really hard but the complete lack of resentment about the difficulty is palpable.

People ask me how I do it and the answer is usually "I have to, it's not a choice" but the truth is I prefer it. There are many things I regret about how and who I was when I was with my ex but none of it is about my life as it is now.

I am insanely lucky to have a job which pays enough and is flexible enough for me to do this but I started work at 4.30 this morning and after posting this I'm off to clean the kitchen, do the washing* and clean the bathroom. I made our dinner with my work laptop in hand and will do it all again tomorrow, the next day and every day for as far ahead as I can see. My "social life" is so non-existent my virginity has grown back, I think I am physically incapable of relaxing and my career is done. Yet it is So. Fucking. Worth. It.

Now, I'm a dude, so it is way way easier for me and I would never want to Internet advise someone to split up their family but seriously, is it better? fuck yeah.


* OK maybe I regret the washing, like seriously I swear she makes extra fucking clothes in her bedroom or some shit. Half of this stuff I'm sure I washed last night
posted by fullerine at 12:03 PM on May 9, 2019 [10 favorites]


A lot of men who still idealize the 1950's model housewife/mother have never bothered to ask any of those women how they managed to do it. If they did, they'd find that they managed that ideal presentation by and through neglect.

The other thing people don't really think about when they think about the 1950s was that the standards of the idealized middle-class household they are thinking of - the one that a lot of men seem to wish for - relied heavily on paid, often exploited, domestic help. So there might be someone that would do a lot of the heavy work of cleaning a house, or babysitters to watch the children after school, or nannies when the children were little. Those multiple jobs that I referenced above had to be performed by multiple people in order to create the standard that people now aspire to with only one person.
posted by corb at 12:47 PM on May 9, 2019 [13 favorites]



Firstly of themselves, they all consumed massive amounts of otc pharmaceuticals now reserved for adhd treatment, otherwise known as amphetamines.

Oh, my god, you’ve just reminded me of a conversation I had with my mother several years ago. We were talking about ‘mother’s little helpers’ (probably in the context of Judy Garland) and she said she tried them once. She got it from her mom. She said she cleaned the whole house but she didn’t like the way it felt so she didn’t take it again. This would have been the late seventies or early eighties. Jesus.
posted by bq at 1:18 PM on May 9, 2019 [10 favorites]


It’s also worth noting here that the dad isn’t saying “the dishes never get done”, he’s saying “they’re not done by the time I come home, so I don’t get to come home to a sparkling clean house”

I keep coming to that initial post about the cosmic injustice of the breadwinner having to ... do dishes! The horror! And I think what I keep tripping over with are the ideas that a "breadwinner's" economic contributions are somehow a get-out-of-housework-free ticket and that a "breadwinner" is owed the pleasure of a pristine re-entry into the home because of how they choose to spend their time benefitting the family unit economically and socially -- yet the person who spends more time there doing things that also benefit the family unit economically and socially is not owed the equal pleasure of being able to decide how to spend her time like a grown-up with agency.
posted by sobell at 2:29 PM on May 9, 2019 [19 favorites]


Aren't "mother's" little helpers Valium, not amphetamines? As a housewife I fully endorse both, but want to make sure we're all using the same terms; it could get awkward at the potluck if we're not sure who signed up for what.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:33 PM on May 9, 2019 [8 favorites]


I just did a google search and found references to the term being used for Valium and amphetamines both.
posted by bq at 2:38 PM on May 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


Technically Miltown, not Valium, but usually understood to be benzos.
posted by fiercecupcake at 2:39 PM on May 9, 2019


"Mother needs something today to calm her down" could work for either, if she has ADHD.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:42 PM on May 9, 2019


Aren't "mother's" little helpers Valium, not amphetamines

The Surprising History of Meth

posted by OnefortheLast at 3:47 PM on May 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


"Bread-winners" are given the same deference as "job-creators", with as little justification. Just because your faffing around is easy to see, doesn't make it more valuable.
posted by harriet vane at 4:22 AM on May 11, 2019 [6 favorites]


Single mothers are stereotyped as harried, lonely, and miserable, too burdened by solitary drudgery to have much of a life.

But not according to a new study, titled “Marital Status and Mothers’ Time Use,” by sociologists Joanna Pepin, Liana Sayer, and Lynne Casper, whose research was funded by the Eunice Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. They looked at data collected on more than 23,000 mothers—married, separated, divorced, widowed, or otherwise unpartnered—between the ages of 18–54 living with children under the age of 13. They calculated the amount of time they spent on “housework, childcare, sleep, and leisure.”

Here is what they found: Single mothers have more free time, spend fewer hours on housework, and sleep more than married mothers.
posted by Lexica at 11:37 AM on May 12, 2019 [12 favorites]


It sounds like it's single mothers who live with another adult who helps with housework and childrearing, though -- and I'd bet that other adult is a woman.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:36 PM on May 12, 2019


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