A question on marriages / partnerships with one sole breadwinner

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been binge watching Everybody Loves Raymond, and there’s something about the dynamic between Deb and Ray that bugs me. For context: Ray is the sole breadwinner and Deb is a stay at home mom. At the point in the series where I am (late season 6) the kids are in school.

Deb often gripes at Raymond for not “helping out more” around the house. I assume she means housekeeping and laundry and what have you.

Is it not custom in these situations (assuming it’s consensual and what they both want) that the stay at home partner is responsible for the housekeeping (apart from things like maintenance or repairs they don’t feel capable of doing)? Particularly when the kids are in school?*

Mrs. H and I are both DINKs, so we don’t have experience in this situation. For what it’s worth, she disagrees with me on this. She thinks the breadwinning partner should kick in with the housework, while I think having the stay at home partner be responsible for the housework seems a reasonable split.

*I get that “helping out around the house” could also include parenting, and yes, both parents need to do their share.

2

In my experience, there is no such thing a “a reasonable split.” The differences in time, effort, stress, schedules, and responsibilities just make any attempt to allocate roles doomed to dissatisfaction.

The only alternative is to commit to “this is what I’ll do” and then be flexible when your partner needs a break.

3

This is the way =)

4

“Men work from sun to sun; a woman’s work is never done.”

An old aphorism, but given that there is a lot of truth to it, bringing home the financial resources doesn’t absolve any spouse, regardless of gender, from helping out around the house.

If there are children involved, BOTH parents should be doing active parenting.

5

I’ve been the sole breadwinner for all of our marriage (with a few minor exceptions). My wife certainly does more of the household chores than I do, but I do feel that I should contribute (and I do).

6

“The husband comes home from work and will do nothing else to help around the house, to the wife’s irritation” is a longstanding sitcom trope, with some basis in reality (though every couple is obviously different).

And Everybody Loves Raymond is not a documentary, nor should any of the characters in it be seen as good models for real-life relationships.

7

I wouldn’t know because my wife doesn’t clean jack shit.

She does do our children’s laundry but the way she acts you would think she’s handling Plutonium or something.

Maybe it’s just me, there is no way doing housework is harder than a full time job, particularly one that is demanding in terms of hours or physical labor. It’s just not. I (a man) do all manner of housework. Vacuuming. Cleaning toilets and bathrooms. Dishes. Laundry. Changing lightbulbs (including the ones on the high ceiling where I need to bring in the heavy aluminum painters ladder). Maintaining our in-ground swimming pool. Driving the kids to and from activities. Also maintaining my full time corporate job.

And honestly I would do MORE because our place is a pigsty for the sole reason my wife fights me when I try to straighten it up. Sloppy wife, sloppy life and all that.

So honestly, unless you live in a 10 bedroom mansion, what is so hard about cleaning a typical home that they would need to spend 40 hours a week doing it?

8

Really all I can offer is my experience watching my mother back in ye olde days.

My father was on the road a lot, so he wasn’t available to do much more than take care of the lawn on weekends. Maybe if he had a 9-5 job and was home every evening things would have been different.

But everything that didn’t involve earning money was up to my mother. She ran the house as a CEO. She paid all the bills and budgeted for the month. She made the doctor’s appointments for my sisters and me, attended the parent-teacher conferences, did the car pools to and from school and field trips. She kept all the records organized for doing our taxes. It took up most of her time, every day.

Sure, she had more flexibility than if she had a paid job. She might let up on the cleaning for a week, or spend an evening paying bills instead of doing it during the day, but overall, she was occupied all day.

9

I work a demanding, full time job. Well over 45 hours a week in the office, plus frequent evening and weekend work. My wife billed 60 hours last year, which includes travel time.

She does most of the cleaning, vacuuming, mopping, dusting, etc., and a lot of gardening. That’s vegetable and flower gardening. A TON of vegetable and flower gardening. She does the laundry except for my clothes.

I do most of the “elaborate” cooking (anything that involves multiple steps, bowls etc) including baking bread (we rarely buy bread, rolls, croissants, etc). I clean up the kitchen after cooking.

I also clean the bathrooms, mow the lawn and trim shrubbery and any major brush clearing, cutting and clearing deadfalls.

We share the fall and spring cleanup. She probably does more. A little raking and debris clearing every day, rather than me trying to do four or five hours on the weekend.

She does a ton of volunteer work, including maintenance of traffic islands, school gardens, etc. As part of a town beautification committee. She also teaches yoga, Chinese, English, and meditation as a volunteer.

My life is more hectic and scheduled. Her time is more flexible, but she’s not lounging about eating bonbons by any stretch of the imagination.

10

“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

11

Wait, are you me? Maybe someone should report me as your sock?

I think the divide is that I do everything more than my wife. Win bread, wrangle the kid, feed the dog, cook, and (probably) housework. Last time I said something like that on here (I think it was here) I got yelled at by some of the other posters claiming I was wrong. Respectfully, you don’t live here; you don’t know.

I do think much of modern housework is not a full time job. One of the days I worked from home this week, I also did five loads of laundry. Really not a big deal at all.

Taking care of children is a full time job; even more so when they’re small. During those years my wife was doing lots of work while I was out of the house. As for division of labor at that time, we came to the agreement that when I came home she at least let me take my shoes off and pee before handing me the baby.

12

My wife’s job is actually more demanding in terms of hours and travel. And she spends a lot more time micromanaging the kids homework. But other than that, yeah, there definitely is a bias where people assume we men never do any housework

13

My parents were old fashioned, and up until my younger brother entered elementary school, my mother was a stay-at-home mom. My father did nothing to help.

Then she went back to work part time and my father still did nothing. Later she started working full time and my father still did nothing.

Many Japanese couples still have the husband as the sole breadwinner or the wife has a low paying part time job but manages the household with no help.

My wife’s job is more demanding both for time and mental energy, so I do pretty much all the cooking and most of the cleaning, laundry and such.

A lot of Japanese women act like this is the most amazing thing they’ve ever seen, despite the fact that cooking and cleaning is so much less stressful than my previous job.

14

If your spouse does “jack shit” and you put up with it, I gotta ask: is that situation, which on the face of it is totally unacceptable, 100% the spouse’s fault?

It could be that it is. But it certainly raises some questions - Is your spouse depressed? Do they have a physical ailment that makes completing physical work significantly harder than it would be for a young, healthy person? Have you sought out marriage counseling to address the resentment you obviously feel? Do you have children who require a special amount of care due to a physical, emotional, or neurological variance?

You sound bitter and unhappy. That can’t be good for you, your spouse, or any children you have.

QFT. I don’t think anyone should jump on another poster because they express exasperation at how the division of labor goes at home.

But I don’t think we should necessarily assume that all paid jobs are harder than keeping a home together, either.

When I first moved to Egypt, with a little boy who was neuro-atypical and getting a lot of s**t from his new school, no way for me to drive or speak the local language, and a husband who was hard at work a paid job that supported the family, I cried All. Fucking. Day. Long. The khamsin meant I simply couldn’t ever, ever get our home clean, even though I spent the whole day on my hands and knees cleaning the floor.

Not saying every family is like that. But … yeah, respectfully, we don’t know what goes on in other homes. We shouldn’t assume that the breadwinner is always the noble one. It could be that the stay-at-home housecleaner/cook/child-rearer/what-have-you is working just as damn hard, or harder, or is facing exceptional challenges. Maybe their spouse belittles them and defeats them, encourages them beyond measure - we don’t know.

Assumptions suck, regardless of gender or paid/unpaid work status.

15

Many housekeeping jobs are physically demanding, like scrubbing a bathtub. Others are emotionally demanding, like dealing with children. Some are neither of those things[1], like taking 6 minutes to unload the dishwasher. My job is not physically demanding, rarely emotionally demanding, and on good days intellectually demanding (which can be its own kind of tiring).

Most all of those things are going on here. I don’t want to make it sound like all doom and gloom; I’ll make overly long posts in a praise your partner thread, too.

What you went through with a child in a different country sounds absolutely exhausting and the feelings of being trapped must have been overwhelming. From the other spouse’s point of view there can be lots of feelings of helplessness and guilt. I’m not trying to suggest an equivalence, really don’t want to slide into “not all men,” but[2]…

Seeing your partner suffer like that, and not being able to help is hard, too. I had no choice but to go to work, and try my best to help with the kid when I was home.

In the end, I’m pretty Marxist about it, and don’t aim to divide housework evenly or equitably, but rather from each according to their ability. My abilities to both deal with drudgery and convince someone to pay me money exceed my wife’s abilities, so I take on many (but by no means all) of both those types of things.

  1. I’m not trying to be ableist, I realize different people will view the same job differently ↩︎

  2. the flashing light I’m going to do just what I said I don’t want to ↩︎

16

I’m kinda demanding how I like my house to be cleaned.
I worked hard for many years to get it where I could do it all alone with dribs and drabs of kid labor. (Often harder to keep them on task than doing it myself).

Then they all left home. And my house practically ran itself with occasional big clean days.
Of course I cannot do it anymore.
I can’t be here alone either. Husband stays gone hunting or fishing probably 200 days a years.
So all kids are (almost all) home again. My Son lives close but he and family eat dinner here and are often here through out the day. Home base. I guess.
So it’s major daily housework, yard work and cooking everyday again.
The kids do it all. I barely keep my personal space picked up.

I’m a slug. :expressionless_face:

17

Modern housework/cleaning is not a 40 hour a week job. A hundred years ago it required more physical effort, and fifty years before that many if not most of the labor-saving devices we currently enjoy didn’t exist. Our cultural norms (some of which are eroding) were set in the past and haven’t always caught up with the current day.

That said - some of the SAHS (“spouses” because not all of them have had kids, and not all of them were women) that I’ve known didn’t just clean house. They also (usually) ran the household budget, paid bills, ran business-hour errands, cooked (sometimes that was split between partners), couponed the heck out of the groceries, did a fair amount of fixing things themselves, some of them did extensive gardening then canning, and basically did a lot more than just clean house.

And some of them also had kids to raise.

So… some stay-at-home spouses do put in 40 hours a week or more into the household.

Some of them were so efficient they added a side gig to all of the above.

But clearly not everyone functions at that level.

18

YOU have some significant physical obstacles to keeping up with your past self.

My late husband was born with a disability but was clever at finding ways to cope. Lived on his own for quite a few years before we met, as did I, so we both knew what was involved with running a house.

As he aged he became less physically able to do certain things. There came a time when he was no longer earning money. But what he could do he did, even as he fought increasing depression about his situation. Scrubbing a toilet isn’t that much effort physically until at some point it becomes that for someone, but he took care of it until about four months before his death. Took care of the vehicle maintenance. Created our household budget and did a better job than I did when that was my task. From the outside I’m sure the split in tasks didn’t look even, but it wasn’t about what others thought. Since he’s been gone it’s all been on me and wow, I appreciated all over again what he did.

19

My mom was a widow with four kids. She worked full time, did all of the housework until we were old enough to help, and she managed to be a loving and attentive mom. My father died when she was pregnant with the fourth. She intended to remarry so we would have a father, but she eventually realized that would probably be more work than being married.

There was no parental conflict at home, but it also meant I didn’t have model to follow when I started a household, other than Danny Thomas, Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave It To Beaver.

I think it’s much harder for two adults to cooperate successfully than for one to do it all.

20

Depends on the home; but my mother (SAHM) did a shitload more than just cleaning a nine room plus three baths house. She did everything involved with feeding multiple people multiple times a day, from planning meals through shopping, cooking (most things from scratch), and cleanup, with some help in the latter two from whatever children were at home and in the right age range at the time. She did all the work when we had guests staying at the house. She cared for multiple cats and dogs, including much of the time three large longhaired dogs who needed a great deal of brushing. She handled most correspondence and most scheduling and making appointments and budgeting. She dealt with laundry, repaired clothes, occasionally made clothes, shopped for replacements. She did nearly all the childcare. For a while she also did some gardening; and I know other people doing this job who do most of the work of growing and preserving most of the family’s fruits and vegetables.

My father took out the trash (which my mother had collected), and arranged for, though mostly didn’t do himself, house and car repairs and getting the lawn mowed; and worked on some outdoor plantings.

My father also worked very long hours, and was often called out at night and on weekends. They were both working a lot more than 40 hours a week.

I think it depends on the particular family. I also think that anyone whose job really is only 40 hours a week ought to be doing some of the housework, unless their physical condition prevents it. And that they should recognize that there’s more to running a household than just running the vacuum.