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Phil H's avatar

I don't know if this comment is helpful... Please feel free to delete it if it's not. But as someone on the other side of this conflict, I would like to offer an alternative perspective.

For some husbands at least, the problem is absolutely not how many "cards" we hold, or how much work we do/don't do around the house. The problem is the attitude of the wife, which I think is captured rather nicely in your post. The wife wants us to do some work; but we must do it her way; and if we don't, we are judged very harshly. It's very unpleasant!

The dynamic, from my perspective is this:

(1) My wife would want me to do some bit of housework, e.g. cleaning the floors. But when she says "do," she means do it to her standard, which is different to mine. Importantly, she does not recognise that her standard is a choice. She regards it as simply "correct." (In your post, this is "minimum standard of care.")

(2) If I set a different standard, e.g. cleaning the floors once a week instead of every two days, she judged me to have failed. (In your post, "He'd failed at even that...")

(3) She communicated that attitude to me. This was the part that I had the most trouble with. Everyone thinks negative thoughts about their partner sometimes, but you can choose not to communicate them. She didn't. (You don't mention in your post whether or not you used this kind of negative language.)

As a result, I do no housework at all. This was all very explicit in my relationship. If she was going to say unpleasant things to me when I do housework, then I wasn't going to do it... She explicitly said that she couldn't watch me clean the floor wrong without criticising, so I don't do it. Housework is bullshit, and I think that like me, many men are not willing to do it if we will only be judged harshly for it.

Childcare is not bullshit, and so we just had to fight over the childcare. But with childcare, those fights have meaning, because you're both fighting for something you jointly love, so it's... grounded, I guess? For me, any fight over housework was just insane. (The result is that my spouse did the housework until she got fed up with it, then we hired a maid, and now neither of us do it.)

Anyway the point of my comment is that sometimes the problem is not about how much men do. Rather, it is about whether the wife can fully cede control of some task and accept the outcome.

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Fool’s Errand's avatar

How in the *world* would it *not* factor in that he had to work full time and you didn’t have a job at all? How many kids birthday parties are you throwing where it matches up with that?

Is he supposed to do 100% of the market labor and also 50% of the home labor?

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