Nope, your cite does NOT support your claim that all women do more housework than all men. Like I said, it shows that ON AVERAGE women do more housework than men, but does not show that it is true in all cases, because it isn’t. Your claim is that she must be doing more housework than him because she is female and he is male, but that’s not what any of your cites say. They do say that there’s a good chance that it’s true, but not that it’s universally true. You can dismiss my example if you like, but even a single counterexample is enough to disprove a claim of ‘all X’.
I’m not really sure why you’re making snarky comments like ‘if your fingers are broken’ when the cite you gave supports what I said and you appear to lack a very basic understanding of logic and statistics, you should probably save the snark for a time when you’re actually correct about something. Is it just that the article you cited doesn’t come right out and state that it’s talking about a trend or repeatedly mention that it’s numbers are averages that’s confusing you?
This thread really hit home with me. 30 years ago my wife dragged me to a counselor for the same issues you seem to be dealing with. When the counselor made some suggestions to my wife my wife turned on her and told her I was the one that needed the counseling not her. She suggested separate counseling with once a month joint.
On my first solo counseling session the counselor told me that she felt their was little hope my wife would change and that she had serious issues such as borderline personality disorder. ( she had been seeing my wife for months). We got divorced and I lived happily ever after. 30 years later she is still struggling with the same issues.
It is quite honestly amazing how many heterosexual marriages have this same dynamic. Whether it’s socialization or nature, it’s phenomenally repetitive.
My wife and I are not yet even within shouting distance of needing counselling (I say yet, 'cause, hey, I can’t predict the future) but if you asked me my one irritation with her it’s that she only wants tasks done only in the fashion she’s used to doing them and she makes a huge deal out of trivial issues.
Early in our relationship my gf critiqued the way I was performing a task/chore.
I stopped what I was doing and apologized profusely, explaining that if I had known that the specifics were so important to her I’d have never undertaken the task, and from that point on I’d allow her to do it.
She thought a moment and apologized. Later she asked me to point out if she ever acted like a dick again. For me, passive/aggressive type behavior seems to sometimes be appropriate.
I am honestly not sure why it is. She is very critical, and I am not (this applies, incidentally, to our kids, too.) As the song lyric goes, I do the rolling, she does the detail.
To a point yes, you can. In my brother and his wife’s case, who cared more, not about children, but about putting a career in the back burner to be the children’s primary caretaker, was a big factor in his spending a couple of years not working outside the home. He was doing a ton of work in their second home and, once that was finished, took a long-distance Masters in Education (he’s got his new job at our former HS waiting for him next schoolyear), both while being the Kidlets’ “primary parent” but without trying to add a job on top.
Dividing their own housework by “who has highest standards” was one of the brightest ideas of their marriage, too. And eventually SiL had to learn to let go of some of those standards: if the food is to everybody’s liking and doesn’t trigger anybody’s allergies, and if she’s the only one who’d like it to be pretty, that’s a good time to invoke democracy and decide that “3:1, pretty is unimportant”.
Very common, and the gender roles aren’t fixed either. I am jealous of couples who don’t face this, but the divorce rate would be even higher if this was breaking up marriages. I notice this gets to be a problem with that category of people who are bothered by little things, OCD light behavior. A woman once told me that little things bother her all the time, and that in itself bothers her.
The solution is simple, discovered by spouses for generations, just give up. You can’t have everything your way, learn to live with it.
See, I think it sounds like you were the one acting like a dick in this instance (I hate passive-aggressive behaviour, though, so YMMV). I don’t see anything wrong with going ‘Hey, it really makes a difference to me to have this thing done in this way, do you mind doing it?’
My husband hates when the buttons of the duvet cover are at the end near our faces. I don’t give a damn either way, but rather than going ‘Oooooo I’m so sorry, I’ll never make the bed again!! You can do it allll your way!!!’ and expecting him to apologise, I just make sure I put the buttons at the foot of the bed. He’s not being a dick for wanting it done that way; he just likes it. And I like making him happy.
It does break up marriages – a lot of marriages. Men seeking my assistance in getting separated and/or divorced frequently complain of nagging and petty hostility, which led to emotional distancing to the point that eventually they found themselves in a more or less loveless marriage with an annoying spouse.
There are lots of ways to sink a marriage. Nagging is one of them.
Rather pointedly not. She’s a horror fan; a major part of our commitment to each other was rewatching “The Thing” together for the first time. I think we invest more in Hallowe’en displays than some people spend on their cars. Watching thunderstorms is a favourite activity.
Again, it’s a minor thing; she’s not OCD about this, but it is a little dynamic in our relationship and it’s one I see played out in a LOT of relationships. It’s amazingly common, and often a much more serious problem than in our case. I would be curious as to why that is, since I honestly do not know. Absent really well, statistically valid evidence, it may be horseshit, I’m not sure; it’s just my anecdotal impression but it is a remarkably persistent one.
But getting the duvet facing the way he likes includes almost zero extra effort on your part. Whereas vacuuming daily instead of weekly, or emptying the trashcans on a set schedule instead of “when they’re full”, and plenty of other jobs can require substantial extra effort to do them the way the other person wants it. In that case, why shouldn’t that extra effort become subject to negotiation?
Well, it worked for us, and the passive/aggressive thing has worked other times for me.
We initially were unsure if I could move in with her at all. I hate unannounced visitors, and her aunt lives nearby and used to drop by unannounced all the time. She did not want to tell her aunt that she had to call before visiting.
What I ended up doing was talking to auntie and explaining that I walked around nekid all the time (I do) and that she shouldn’t be offended if she walked in and I was unclothed.
She is pretty old-fashioned, she even blushed talking about nudity. But she hasn’t dropped in without calling and I’ve lived here about ten years now.
I wonder how much of these kinds of conflicts can be predicted based on temperaments going into marriage. Or do they just emerge over time, after certain factors are introduced that for whatever reason, cause a couple to no longer see eye-to-eye? Right now, me and my husband are pretty tolerant and “low-strung” when it comes to household tasks (we do have a cleaner who comes every 2 weeks though), but I guess that could always change with time as new demands present themselves.
This is one of those threads that I’m hesitant to contribute advice, not just because there doesn’t seem to be enough information to really judge whether the OP is being fair to her husband, but also because some of this may boil down to differences in temperament. How realistic is it to expect her husband to constantly work against his natural grain, just to satisfy the OP? Conversely, how realistic is for the OP to expect to work against her natural grain and accept that her husband will not do what she’d prefer?
If the OP goes to therapy and yet this hasn’t successfully kept her from pining for change in her husband, then why does the OP think therapy will be effective in getting her husband’s reactions to change?
I think housekeeping standards are really tied into class identity, and the burden to meet those expectations–and the penalty if you don’t–falls more heavily on women. I’m embarrassed if my house doesn’t meet the standards I think it should, even if no one sees it. If someone does see it, I’m humiliated. I don’t think my husband has near this emotional reaction. And whether or not it’s fair, it’s the woman that other people will judge for being a poor housekeeper, not the man.
This is what makes the “whoever cares more should do more” seem unfair. I mean, obviously there is a point where someone is just indulging their own extreme preferences, but if you’re working to maintain a standard in part because your mother-in-law and mother will judge you if you don’t, it seems unfair to be told that you should be the one to do the work because you are the one who “cares”. And even if mother and mother-in-law are both abstract threats, the conditioning lingers.
Ok, I’m sure that’s true. I just meant the petty disagreements over chores and the like. If it turns into hostility and incessant nagging I can see that in itself as a much bigger problem. I guess some people just shouldn’t be married to each other, you don’t need to agree on everything to have a good marriage, just be able to find compromises and live with something less than your own concept of perfection.
I don’t claim any expertise here, I was just agreeing with RickJay’s view. My wife and I have had a tumultuous marriage, we’re the opposites attract kind of couple. But over the years we worked through each problem, we’re coming up on 38 years and still together, so I can say that’s it’s possible for different types of peoples to form a lasting marriage.
Off the subject, I’ve known some couples who seem to agree on everything, share all the same priorities, etc. They are some of the dullest people I’ve ever met. I say ‘seem to agree’ because who knows what goes on behind closed doors. I guess you get to peek behind the curtain a lot more than the rest of us.