Apparently, I’m the only one in my house who can:
Use doorknobs.
Pick up a spoon.
Drive a car.
Brush my own teeth.
Play guitar.
Type.
The list is nearly endless, mostly due to the fact that I’m the only one in my house who has thumbs and stands taller than 14 inches.
I’m the only one in my house who can do anything at all. My darling Marcie tells me what to do, when to do it, and how she wants it done. I sometimes tell her if she wants something done and knows how to do it, she should just do it and leave me alone. Somehow, though, I always end up doing whatever it is she wants done.
In my house, it’s my unofficial duty to clean the bathroom before parties, though people claim that my definition of clean, while far better than the condition the bathroom tends to be in before I clean it, doesn’t tend to dine at the same table as everyone ELSE’S definition of clean.
I also do the dishes fairly often and have been known to grab all the dirty towels I could find just so I could run something through the washing machine (What? It’s fun!)
Other than that, I’m the only one who stress-tests my desk by stacking large piles of stuff on it (at th is moment, I am looking at a Minimag flashlight, resting on top of a set of pictures, on top of an alarm clock, on top of three or four comic books, on top of some scraps of paper, on top of a bag of coffee (only halfway to the desk yet), on top of some old newspapers, on top of a baseball cap, on top of uhm… I can’t see anything below that, but it’s got a good two inches to go, and I don’t feel like disturbing that pile. :D)
You like being single, don’t you? Cause if you don’t, you’d better get used to it!
I used to have to listen to the wife complain about how I don’t help clean the house (well, I work half way round the world which means I’m gone half the time which mean out of the three of us who live there only 1/6th of the dirt is actually mine). She usually does this after I’ve just vacuumed the house and cleaned the bathrooms, etc. No, I do a very good job and I do it very quickly because I hate cleaning. One thing I refuse to do is pick up after her slobbish 17 year old son. I figure he is old enough to pick up after himself. I’m not his slave. If she chooses to pick up after him that is her business, not mine. Don’t bitch at me, bitch at him. If he doesn’t like it show him the door. It amazes me how I can find greasy hand prints on the walls when I could live in a house for years and the only marks you’d see from me would be my footprints in the carpet, let alone having hands dirty enough to leave prints on the walls…Who the hell goes around touching walls in the first place? :dubious:
That’s funny. I didn’t know my husband posted on this board.
I know for a fact my husband thinks the laundry is done by fairies. I’m off on Mondays and Tuesdays and that’s when I usually do the wash. I have a load in the washer and dryer right now, as a matter of fact. He drops his dirty clothes on the floor (sometimes he manages to get it to the hamper), and it disappears, and then reappears every few days in his closet and his drawers, clean and smelling April-fresh. Just like magic!
A couple of years ago I started getting the housework under control. Every once in a while I ask my husband, “Doesn’t the bedroom look nice with no dirty clothes on the floor?” He just looks somewhat startled, as though it hadn’t occurred to him that there were no dirty clothes on the floor, and that this might be a desirable state for the bedroom to be in.
He just, fundamentally, doesn’t get it.
He didn’t care when every dish in the house was dirty and piled up on the counter. When he needed a dish, he just washed the one he needed and went on with life. When he put on his last pair of clean underwear, he went through the dirty laundry (on the floor, natch) to find all the underwear and washed it. Ditto socks. Ditto T-shirts. Seriously, his loads of laundry always contained only one type of clothing. He thinks that a heap in in a laundry basket is the optimal way to store clean clothes. I’ve played the game of Poor Yoorick’s wife, waiting to see how bad the toilet had to get before he’d clean it, and I was literally gagging when I finally broke down and did it.
So, I clean the house for myself, because I want a clean house to live in. Nagging him to do something is effective for that one thing, that time, if at all, and creates so much anger and frustration in both of us that if it’s at all possible for me to do things myself, that’s the easier way to handle it. I have accepted that I’m not going to make him into an equal partner in housework. He is missing some crucial part of his brain that groks it.
The only change I have wrought in him is convincing him that I care. One time I suggested that maybe both of us should set aside fifteen minutes a night for housework and he actually laughed in my face. In other ways he is a very respectful and sensitive husband. The only explanation I can piece together is that he completely misread my tone, and, as I mentioned before, he just does not get the concept that a disorderly, dirty house is something to be concerned about. It’s not that he thinks, “Pod would sure be happy if I cleaned this mess up, but screw her,” it’s that he never registers that the mess as an unpleasant thing. He finds my feelings about housework as incomprehsible as I find his. Unfortunately I broke down and bawled my eyes out twice, something I almost never do, before he finally grasped that I am really serious when I say that having a dirty house drags me down, upsets me, and makes me feel like a failure as a woman.
I fully admit that, in this respect, I am being a dumb girl. He should just thank his lucky stars that I am not dumb and girly very often, which is why he gets blindsided when I am. It’s not rational, I can’t control it, and if every once in a great while I ask him to help with the housework, he should be a fucking man and suck it up, or else, yes, I’m going to fucking bawl about it. I’m going to sob and wail inconsolably and he’s going to have to hold me awkwardly and apologize over and over again and not know what to say or do until I’m done bawling.
It’s not that he’s impossible to live with. There are many little things that he does to keep the house neater because I’ve asked him to. (I honestly can’t figure out the pattern; he uses his beard trimmer over the wastebasket because I asked him once not to get his beard-hairs all over the sink, but putting his empty cereal boxes in the recycling evades him.) He does the dishes because, ironically enough, I don’t clean them thoroughly enough for him. He complains that he always finds things stuck to bowls and forks when I do it. So he does them almost every night, under thread of me doing an inferior job of it in the morning. He always takes the garbage and recycling down to the curb, which I greatly appreciate. And at least he does have shame, and will cheerfully contribute to panic-cleaning to make the house presentable for guests.
And he never, ever complains about how dirty the house, which is worth much more than you might think. To be perfectly honest, this is probably the reason that I am willing to do the vast majority of the housework without his help. 
Buy toilet paper.
My (male) roommates replace the empty roll just fine, but woe be unto me if I don’t check the supply from time to time. This is mostly my fault though–my mother is one of those “buy TP and Kleenex and toothpaste and soap every time it’s on sale regardless of whether we have eleventy billion rolls of TP/boxes of Kleenex/tubes of toothpaste in the hall closet”. She’d often say “Do you need X? I have extra, take some!” We literally did not have to buy TP for at least a year thanks to my mom. She’s somewhat toned down her hoarding of essentials though. But I think roomies think we have a Magical TP Fairy that visits and have forgotten it can be purchased.
They do take turns with the trash though, which is my most hated chore. I recognize that I have a lower threshold for “ew dirty” than they, so I clean to my standards and don’t expect them to live up to mine.
Leaffan, I too am the only one in my home skilled at toilet bowl cleaning. I fear they’d be content to take a dump into what would surely be the black hole of Calcutta if I didn’t clean it myself.