Chessic Sense is the charmer who posted the threadon who should get the free ticket to the play his wife was in.
If you’re both genuinely happy with the current arrangement, then don’t mess with it. But has your wife explicitly stated that she’s happy with it, or are you assuming she’s happy?
My work-from-home husband and I split the housework along roughly 50/50 lines. There are probably three areas where we take advantage of his work-from-home status:
- if we need something from the shop, he’ll pop out during the day so I don’t have to stop on the drive home
- he’ll run a load of laundry and hang it out during the day
- he’ll make personal calls on behalf of the two of us, because it’s not always easy for me to make personal calls at work. Stuff like booking a restaurant, even if it was my idea, booking the cat sitter if we’re going away for a weekend, etc.
Thanks for alerting us. Yeeeessssss, I remember well. In this linked thread, he claims that making his own dinner and doing his own laundry when his wife works night is “doing her chores for her.”
Chessic, you have consistently shown resentment and contempt for your wife’s work, and those are poison in a relationship. Something needs to change, and basically you are the one that is wrong. Your wife is a person with her own aspirations that have intrinsic value, not a live-in maid who is free to dabble with having her own life as long as it doesn’t inconvenience you.
Hire someone to do the cleaning.
I didn’t read the other thread and he certainly has some hostility toward his wife’s work in this thread, but on face value, I don’t think I’d be very happy with the arrangement he’s got either. I think it’s more respectful to treat the work hours each person contributes on an equal basis rather than valuing the time based on how much income each hour brings in… but there’s an assumption built in that you’re each working to support the household, not that one person gets to keep all their money and the other has to share.
You should be discussing this with your wife, not us. Your best solution is the one that the two of you work out together and are both satisfied with.
Stop treating her as your employee and think of her as an equal partner in the household, regardless of your respective salaries. Your attitude, frankly, is rather condescending.
I dunno - this depends on a lot of things. Are you factoring in the $20 ticket she scammed you out of?
This is the exact situation we’re in now; I make most of the income, but work from home. Wife works full time too, but away from home and for less money.
You’ll find working from home lends itself to doing some things around the house. Take your lunch break and make a sandwich and load or unload the freakin’ dishwasher. Start a load of laundry. Push the vacuum. Every little bit helps, and my wife really appreciates it.
And if your wife is making “her money,” it’s still “your money” because it’s one less expense you have to shell out for. When budgeting before, did you take into consideration all of the shoes you were buying her? Then that should be off the table now, right?
Sounds like Chessic wants more of an equal marriage and less of a father-daughter relationship.
I suggest counselling at this point.
What? Why? I don’t understand why the location of your money has anything to do with who cleans how much of the house.
When I was in college, I shared a house with five roommates. I assure you that none of us pooled our money together in joint accounts, but yet all of us were expected to do our fair share of the cleaning.
Obviously a marriage is a different situation, but I don’t see why pooling your money should suddenly mean that both people are magically responsible for a 50/50 split when they weren’t before.
You seem really disrespectful and dismissive towards your wife in this thread. I’m not saying that’s necessarily the reality, I’m saying that’s how you’re coming across in this thread. The talk of her work being “pocket change” or how she “works strictly for entertainment” (even though she’s earning money and contributing to the household income! This is a bizarre statement to me) is very strange and seems to come from a previous era. It’s particularly weird when paired with your early comments that you don’t think gender should play a role in this discussion, since nothing you’ve posted here would be out of line with how a stereotypical 1950s “a woman’s place is in the home” husband would act.
To address the chore issue: My husband works full-time out of the home. I freelance from home. We have three kids, so I juggle my work responsibilities around child care. Often my husband takes charge of the household and kids in the evening so I can leave the house and go to a coffeeshop to work (we don’t have a home office). I do more of the housecleaning than him because I have more time and am home more often. There are some chores that we’ve negotiated will be his job, and he does those on weekends. He also does most of the yardwork. This is all stuff we’ve discussed together and come to a mutual agreement on. I don’t think there’s any one single template that you can just apply to any similar situation.
For what it’s worth, the relative amounts of money that my husband and I make, or who’s paying for the mortgage vs. who’s paying for discretionary items, has never been a factor in any of these discussions and I find it very strange that someone would think it should. Is the woman you’re living with your wife or your employee?
Translation: “I need to have my own money so I can sock it away and get the heck out of dodge when I’m ready”
Yeah, I wasn’t going to say anything but this scenario had occurred to me as well.
And a job history so she can be employable…
First of all, no I haven’t. That’s just something you’ve consistently read into it. Did you notice that the situation in the OP doesn’t even exist in reality? And did you notice that I’m torn between both sides of the coin? How have you determined that I’m wrong when I haven’t even taken a position yet?
What a bizarre statement. I’m curious how your arrived at this conclusion. It’s mind-blowing how anyone could take a hyptothetical situation where the question is “What would be fair here?” and end up at “counseling.”
That’s precisely my view, too. Where did I suggest otherwise?
My wife isn’t interested in discussing curious hypotheticals of little consequence. That’s what the Dope is for. May I stress one more time that I don’t actually work from home and this isn’t an actual situation involving my actual wife?
The quoted text, below, sure seems to suggest that you don’t really respect her work on an equal footing.
It’s a strangely personal hypothetical that you’re oddly prickly about then.
Suffice to say that the relationship you purport to have with your wife is alien enough to me that any opinion I would have on cleaning duties between a couple of whom one person works at home and the other works part-time elsewhere are not feasible.
Chessic, maybe this would go better if you told us the answer you’re hoping to hear, and then we can repeat it back to you.
I see. Let me clarify that, then. I didn’t mean respect as in “honored.” I meant respect as in “considered.” My question was how one spouse’s contribution to the team effort should be weighed if the work is voluntary, even if honorable, such as working as a candy striper or reading to the blind.
BTW, I just went downstairs and asked my wife what we’d do if I got a job at home. She said “You’d have to do the laundry. I’d still cook and clean the bathroom.” I said “Deal.” Then I told her the Dope says she’s saving up to leave me and we need counseling. We laughed and laughed.
I’m glad?
Well, we answered the hypothetical. Stop picking on the answers as if they’re in response to a reality we are not privy to.