Hire a housekeeper.
Enjoy your husband for who he is, not what you want him to be.
I think this is the problem- him not doing them on your schedule may be entirely his way of asserting his own independence. Sort of a “Well, I’ll get them done, but how I choose, on my own schedule.” Which almost certainly doesn’t fit into your concept of how and when things should be done.
It’s both of your house, not your house, and not his house. So you have to reach a certain understanding on how stuff like chores will be done, and it’s likely that both of you will have to give in and compromise quite a bit, and neither will be entirely satisfied, which is kind of what you’re looking for on these kinds of compromises.
One thing to explore is just HOW he got assigned those tasks. Did he volunteer, or reach a compromise, or are they all entirely within the context of “Honey Do” items, or the things you decided he should be doing? I know that the fastest way to provoke the “I’m doing that how and when I damn well please” reaction in me is for my wife to unilaterally decide that some task is MY chore and try and tell me how and when to do it. She’s not my mom, nor my boss, so I usually resent the notion that it’s something she gets to decide in the least bit. I’m old enough and married long enough to know that the right response isn’t to just ignore her and do it how I see fit, but it’s still very important to check that sort of behavior and negotiate at that point.
Another thing to consider is that the two of you may have entirely different opinions and perceptions about the necessity of certain chores. For example, to me, my wife is unrealistically cranky and demanding about sweeping the floors in the kitchen and vacuuming. To her, I seem like I don’t give a shit and am willing to live in squalor. Turns out that the biggest difference is that I habitually wear shoes, and she habitually goes barefoot in the house. So amounts of dust and tiny crud that I literally don’t notice because I can’t see it, are immediately and very obvious to her. In that case, it’s more a matter of perception. I kind of pointed out to her that since it’s her that is so bothered by it, maybe she should be in charge of the sweeping because it takes visible crud before I’ll think about it. I took up the countertop wiping as a chore in exchange for not having to sweep.
I think the biggest issue is that you’re looking at this wholly one-sided. You’re thinking “He doesn’t respect or love me because he doesn’t do this stuff I feel is important” when he doesn’t even see it that way at all, and may be somewhat surprised to hear it put like that. He probably doesn’t think of most of those things as important, or worth that level of emotional investment. Getting all wound up over whether or not the floors are mopped every Tuesday seems absurd and like a petty way to exert control over him, from his perspective. From yours, you’re probably taking his refusal/reluctance to mop as an indication of disrespect and not valuing your marriage, when that’s not at all what he thinks of it as.
Husband marry thinking their wife will never change. Wives marry thinking their husbands will.
Thanks for posting that link, manson1972. I hope Maastricht reads it repeatedly.
Maastricht, pushing your husband into psychotherapy due to your inability to live and let live and your propensity to nag might, to use your mechanic analogy, move the two of you closer to scrapping the car that will not work.
The validity or reasonableness of the OP’s expectations are not really the issue.
Maastricht, you are essentially grappling with the same question again. “How do I persuade my husband to go to counseling?” is functionally no different from “how do I persuade my husband to act differently toward me?” All you can do is ask, and then decide how you want to react to his answer. You can’t push him into a particular response.
I don’t think it’s helpful to view the relationship in terms of who has or should change more. The deeper problem is that you two are not communicating, and you are withdrawing from each other. That can be deadly to intimacy, and you can find yourself at a point where you lose interest in trying to re-establish it. Forget for now the housework. Have you and he had a conversation about how you are drifting apart?
Joint counseling is to fix the relationship, and not one or the other person. Ideally, it’s not about apportioning blame or assigning chores. It’s about learning to communicate and getting to a point where both partners can trust that the other person has their best interests at heart. It sounds like you two need that.
If he won’t go, then I recommend that you get counseling by yourself. You’re not going to “fix” anything by yourself; that’s the wrong expectation. Therapy will help you figure out what you are willing to accept in this relationship, how you are going to react to things that you will not accept, and how to communicate your views to him. That’s all that anyone can ever do in a relationship, after all.
This is because he is your husband, not your employee.
Forcing someone to go into therapy pretty much just doesn’t work. I tried it with a former girlfriend, and she decided that the therapist was just for me and completely ignored whole swathes of things that the therapist said she needed to change (not little stuff, things like ‘you need to get a job and stop bugging Pantastic to do your job searches for you’). After we split, she made comments to people about how the therapist had said that our only problem was my communication skills, which is absolutely not what the therapist said. I think that if you don’t have buy-in from the husband, he’s not going to get much out of therapy.
And your complaints sound like you’ve got a significant issue to me - it sounds like you’re assigning chores to your husband, and demanding that he do them to an arbitrary standard that you set, then when he doesn’t start nagging him and treating him worse and worse. You’ve done some work on yourself, but apparently you’re still nagging him and mistreating him, and now want him to go to therapy so you don’t have to change anymore. I could easily be wrong, but the way you’ve described your situation leads me to favor his side more than yours.
If you want your partner to attend therapy, have him start with therapy that does not involve YOU, and that does not involve YOUR THERAPIST. If he says “But I have nothing to say to a therapist”, ask him to go to one and say “My partner wants me to go in and do one of those couples therapy things and I’m sort of thinking it’s bullshit but I’m willing to consider it. What the fuck would I be getting myself into?” and see where that conversation goes.
Oh, and encourage him to bitch about you and the relationship, tell him it’s good practice for if and when he agrees to the joint therapy sessions later 
I’m interested in all of the advice given here, but what about couples with kids (I recognize this may not apply to the OP). You can’t divide the childcare up according to who cares more.
Can and do. In many families, there is one partner (in the past, traditionally the woman), who is more invested in the day-to-day activities and well-being of the children – making sure they are fed, dressed, go to bed on time, etc. – who takes on those types of childcare activities. The other parent may still love the children and spend time with them, but may not care equally about taking care of mundane daily activities. As long as the children feel loved by both parents, there’s no reason that one can’t be responsible for child-related chores. Until very recently, that was the typical approach, and it is still typical in some communities.
While I certainly understand all the viewpoints in this thread and think that they’re valid - that a spouse should not be treated like a maid, that the two are not communicating properly, that it’s a matter of perspective, that you can’t expect someone to change…
I still think it’s bullshit that the person who “cares more” should do more. It’s a two person household and one person should not be lounging around letting the other person vacuum and pick up around them. Sure, there should be a discussion about how important certain chores are and why, and don’t expect someone to disinfect the whole kitchen every day, but I couldn’t abide by one person doing everything simply because the other person feels lazy. When does it cross the line into codependency? Where one person refuses to do something because they know that the other person will eventually do it. We have no idea what the real chore situation is for the OP, and it could be that Maastrict is being unreasonable and asking the husband to scrub the toilet every time they go. But we could also have a husband refusing to pick up dozens of single serve chip bags he left in the bedroom because, well, the wife will do it because she’s the one that can’t stand it, right?
Ok, but in those cases there isn’t a dispute, and so there is no cycle of frustration, nagging and distance.
“Everyone does chores to their personal standards” can work for household chores, because if the chores don’t get done it’s not an enormous deal. But you can’t do that with childcare.
I think that is a little different then “You didn’t dust the top of the refrigerator as well as I want it dusted” and then pick a big fight about it.
Read the article at the link I posted. It explains it perfectly.
Except my point was we don’t know how the household chores are playing out. Husband could be a slob depending on the wife to clean up everything around him and getting upset if she asks him to throw away a used tissue. Wife could be annoyed about the dustiness of refrigerator tops. We have no idea.
Or the wife could be a lazy slob who has no or a part time job, rarely does chores, and even though the husband does most of them she complains that he doesn’t do them exactly the way she wants them done. I had a (very much former) partner like that.
That’s true, it could be that. But the OP said “He doesn’t do chores I ask him to do as timely, reliably and well as I would like them to be done”
I would take that as the traditional “You don’t do it like I want it to be done” argument. But maybe not.
Or it could be the standard:
-Hon, can you get the trash out? Tomorrow’s pickup day.
-Sure.
And then only the kitchen trash gets taken out, leaving the bathrooms, laundry room, and office cans overflowing. It also doesn’t get to the curb until 4 hrs after the truck has gone by.
Once or twice things like that are annoying. As a regular diet it can get infuriating.
If that is the case, then I would agree that the husband is in the wrong.
If he’s doing it “wrong” on purpose, so she won’t ask him to do it again, that indicates other issues in the relationship IMHO.
Yes, you can. You take care of your children to the standard you believe they should be taken care of. Clearly, if neither parent has an acceptable standard of childcare, the children are going to suffer neglect, and those couples should not have children in the first place. But if you as a parent believe that your children need a certain standard of care, then it’s up to you to ensure that they get it, not to force your co-parent to provide it. Certainly the ideal is that you make decisions together, and both abide by them. But if you think that each child is responsible for making their bed every morning, or that the children need to eat a hot cooked breakfast every morning, or whatever your standard is, then it’s up to you to provide that level of care, or fall into the same cycle of frustration, nagging and distance.
This is classic passive-aggressive behavior. Washington Post columnist Carolyn Hax discusses this type of relationship interaction here and here.