I thinking, with out knowing the dynamics of this house, if she can’t get up to run that dishwasher or throw a load of towels in, she’s probably not gonna get up to go to therapy.
Just thinkin’
Like a handshake, couples therapy takes two people willing.
If it’s a mutual decision and both parties can make things work, go for it! OTOH, if you have the kind of partner who feels that the money their make is “their” money, not “our” money, or treats the non-working partner like a live-in babysitter, etc. that’s indicative of other issues.
As I read through the posts here, I’m surprised to find that practically no one (I’ve read many posts, though perhaps not all of them) hires a housekeeper or at least a cleaning lady. A cleaning lady and a dishwasher really help strengthen a marriage and reduce stress for everyone involved. I don’t know how much you pay for a cleaning lady in the U.S., but especially when the kids are young, help around the house is worth its weight in gold and gives parents time for themselves and the kids.
I’m not sure that’s relevant to the question posed by the OP. If the couple can afford help, and that’s what they want, absolutely they should go for it. Chances are you are helping a third party who needs work/honest income, so yeah, why not?
My partner and I sure did. Most of my adult life has been as a well-paid expat in developing countries (married to an even better-paid partner), and so my family unit has almost always had help. Per my earlier post about the difficulty I had handling household chores in Egypt, once I was better able to negotiate language and cultural issues, I found a job of my own, and we did have someone in Cairo, a refugee from Ethiopia, to help us.
But that’s because the world is so horribly inequitable; it says nothing about the intrinsic issues involved in balancing household chores. Not everyone can afford a housekeeper, nor should they have to in order to create an equitable partnership.
At more affluent times in my marriage we did sometimes employ a cleaning lady. Rather, my husband employed one to help us out during a period when we were both fully employed and making good money. However, during times when that was not the case, when one of us was unemployed, or when we were on government benefits, that was not possible.
You have to be at a fairly high level of affluence in the US to be able to hire household help like that.
Other options (and I’ve used some of them) include “outsourcing” certain household tasks. For example: drop off laundry services. Drop it off on my way to work and pick it up on the way home. Grocery delivery services. Hiring someone to mow the lawn or shovel snow. And so on. But doing that has a cost and not everyone can afford it.
I bet many of us who’ve posted have or had domestic help at some point.
But IMO that’s out of scope for the OP, who seemed to want a convo about the division of labor in a pure [two adult one job no help] scenario.
We / I never had kids, but have had housecleaners since way back when. Routine daily tidying and putting away was/is all on us/me. I’ve always said “You can’t clean through/around clutter or disarray.” But actual cleaning? Somebody else does all that here and nearly always has.
I kind of think therapy is bullshit. We can discuss in another thread if you like. I don’t want to derail this one.
What I mean is if someone doesn’t want to do something, you really can’t make them do it. Maybe a sole breadwinner has more leverage in that they control all the finances. But if my wife is having panic attacks at the thought of the slightest thought of anyone straightening up the house, to me that sounds like a mental health issue that she needs to address. I mean I can hypothesis why she is like that, but that is a longer discussion for a different thread.
I’ll just summarize by quoting what I say to my dad when he suggests “discussing it”. I manage portfolios of multi-million dollar projects for a living where I have to negotiate detailed vendor contracts and tasks and due dates and deliverables with highly technical subject matter experts up to C-level executives. If figuring out the how and who of basic housekeeping was simply a matter of “discussing it” I think I could manage that.
To be honest, most of our household chores have sort of naturally falling into assigned roles based on interest and ability. But there is this unresolved gap where my wife has some sort of reaction to anyone moving the piles of clutter.
Yup. We’ve hired a cleaning lady who comes every other week for most of our marriage, and honestly, it probably saved the marriage. I was writing about how we split the remaining stuff.
I would love to hire a cleaner, but Mrs. H won’t hear of it. All discussion of it is off the table. Period.
…Because she doesn’t want a stranger to see our “dirty” house. That’s like not hiring an electrician because you don’t want a stranger to see your frayed wires.
That’s a pretty common psychological barrier. I’ve had a few friends ‘tidy before the cleaner comes’ because a certain level of mess is fine, but not normal chaos.
But it should be noted that housekeepers et al are much more expensive in the United States than in most of the world. In my pricey area $75/hr/person not counting tips is an absolute minimum and I’ve paid considerably more (to a firm that markets itself as providing better healthcare and living wages to its employees). I’ve only used cleaners for a very occasional deep clean for an appraisal or moving out of a rental or some such. But my reasonably financially secure but not income-rich parents, bowing to the inevitable in their 80’s, had to negotiate a monthly service from a firm that usually only does weekly. The cost was otherwise just a little too much for comfort.
Once the mortgage is paid off in ‘27 I’d lobby for a once a week or less house cleaner. Mainly to vacuum and mop all the floors, chase down cobwebs and to clean / sanitize the two bathrooms.
I have so much sympathy for being in this situation, and it is where therapy can help. Of course not therapy for you, for you therapy probably is bullshit. In my experience, you might feel better after being able to complain to someone, but that doesn’t do anything to fix the situation.
ETA: the relevance to the OP
This the type of thing where there is a breakdown in division of labor. There are certain households tasks that one partner is forbidden from doing (in this case cleanup up the other’s clutter), and yet the other partner won’t do. This really has nothing to do with stay at home status.
When we had a cleaning service we ran around before she came to clean up for the cleaning lady. Not dusting or vacuuming but moving stuff that was sitting around to its proper place so it didn’t get stored someplace where we couldn’t find it.
Not to debate the merits of therapy, but do you think that a neutral therapist suggesting she needs help might work better than you doing it?
We tidy before the cleaner comes so the cleaner can get at the surface to clean them. It’s not their job to put things away (and they don’t; if there’s a pair of pants in the middle of the bedroom floor they leave it there.) It’s their job to vacuum the accessable rugs, clean the floors, clean the counters, clean the toilets and other bathroom surfaces, and dust the knickknacks. They do a great job. But they do a much better job if we tidy up before they arrive.
We briefly hired a cleaner who thought that tidying was part of her job. She quit after a couple of weeks. That was good, because she also threw away a lot of our stuff. She would leave a plastic bag of all the stuff she was throwing away, and it always contained a few children’s toys, or parts of children’s toys, maybe 50¢ of lose change, …
My first wife was a teacher when I met her and she continued doing that until she was pregnant with our first (after about a year). To my dismay, she never showed any interest in going back to work, so on a military salary our kids grew up wearing hand-me-downs and eating a lot of hamburger helper. I did most of the cooking when I wasn’t deployed and she did laundry and such. She finally did a bit of part-time work after about 20 years of that, but when I got out of the Navy, we only had about $20K in the bank, most of which was from my mother’s estate. I felt zero guilt about her doing the house chores and yes, I did resent her refusal to bring in a paycheck.
Probably, but I don’t happen to have one just wandering around my home giving out advice.
That would be Alice, the house maid. (see Brady Bunch)
That was the primary issue that ended my marriage. We started out on very much the same page, both working full time but explicitly planning to both work 1/2 to 3/4 time when kids arrived so we could share both home and financial responsibilities. When kids did arrive I was making much more money so we agreed that at least while they were very young she would stay home. In retrospect that was probably an error, because once out of the labor force she became extremely reluctant to get back in, feeling unqualified. She eventually agreed to go to work, but only if I put her through a Masters program. Two years later with Masters in hand, she decided that she really wasn’t interested in the career she’d prepared for.
So we split up.
I did recognize that she was shit-scared, but I wasn’t a big enough person to just suck it up and keep grinding away at my corporate executive gravy train. She subsequently got it together and became an excellent teacher (I did too) and we’re cooperative grandparents now, but I’m certainly much happier outside the bonds of that marriage.
I don’t know if there is anything customary in those situations, because there are so many different situations. When my kids were young, we were in a sort of time warp - the kids went to school in a different neighborhood because of child care issues and although I grew up in that neighborhood, I was very different from the people who stayed. Almost every one of their classmate’s families had a SAHM who did all the housekeeping and childcare except for some maintenance and repairs, Their husbands did not do anything household or kid related except maybe coaching a team or something similar. They wouldn’t so much as change a diaper. But these people were in a situation where they couldn’t live their preferred lifestyle on one income and if the women worked, they would spend nearly their whole paycheck on childcare- so the husbands either had a seond job or worked so much overtime that it amounted to a second job.
Fast forward to now - the families I know with a SAHM don’t split the housework exactly evenly. It’s more like SAHP does everything while the other parent is working but they split things when that parent is not working - the SAHP isn’t cooking and cleaning up and sweeping the floor and changing diapers and transporting kids evenings and weekends while the other parent relaxes.
I think that perhaps that’s because you don’t have kids - because I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect one person to do all the housework in a household with kids , even if they don’t have a paid job. I’m not even talking about the childcare parts- but kids create other work. You can’t spend 30 or 40 hours a week doing housework with kids and not have to sweep and mop floors or cook or wash dishes nights and weekends. No one ( well , almost no one) is going to leave the milk the kid spilled at dinner sitting there until 9 am or leave the Friday dinner dishes unwashed until Monday morning. Which means SAHP has no time they are “off-duty”. Then add in the actual childcare , like baths and the type of work that doesn’t even exist without children such as helping with school projects and homework that can’t be completed between arriving home from school and starting to prepare dinner.
Speaking as someone who has both enjoyed having my husband be a SAHD, and also shared childcare, and also been both working without kids, life was never easier than when he was a SAHD, and did all the “making sure the household keeps running” stuff. He took the car for oil changes and paid all the bills and did all the grocery shopping. Yes, i did some dishes and washed some laundry. Life was easy.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the full-time parent to also do all the housework. That expectation in the 50s led to the feminist revolution, as frustrated, bored, and overworked women rebelled.