Say you have two households. Each one has 2+ people living in it.
Household A has everybody working. Time spent outside work is scarce.
Household B has at least one person that neither works nor goes to school.
I have observed the majority of B households have a problem where the nonworking person isn’t pulling their weight. Maybe they make some half hearted effort , or virtually nothing at all. Then the other working members of the household have to make up the slack, building up resentment because in addition to spending all day at work they have to do stuff the layabout had all day to take care of.
With household A, since everybody works, it tends to be less extreme of a problem. The expectation of household tasks is split more evenly since one person doesn’t necessarily have way more time to take care of it then another.
This issue comes up when one person becomes unemployed, decided to be a stay at home parent, or other situations. For example, one roommate can’t pay her share of the rent because of money problems. She offers to make up the difference by doing all the housework. But she eventually doesn’t hold up her end of the deal- even if she is ambitiously looking for another job, she will be home for far more hours than her roommates. She has time, so much time it often isn’t managed nearly as well as her peers. So even though she had promised all these things in lieu of rent, she is unlikely to make good on them.
Which is why when I rented out rooms in my house, I’d always refuse things offered in lieu of rent. It’s never going to be worth the monthly $650 I could be getting from a gainfully employed renter.
Have you observed this trend too? Now I’m not calling unemployed people lazy per se, just that when one person in a household has a lot more disposable time they are less likely to manage it effectively. The expectations for how they spend that time will be different vs the person working 50 hours a week, which often leads to feelings of resentment about who is doing ‘more’ around the house.
From personal experience, when our second child was born, my wife stayed home for a year and a half caring for the kid and the household. And Jesus Christ, but did she ever pull her weight.
Granted, she ALSO was enrolled in evening classes, but even if she hadn’t been, she was doing plenty.
When I was a kid, my mom was stay-at-home, while my dad was a med student/resident. A child isn’t the most accurate observer, but it sure as hell looked to me as though she had her hands busy.
When my wife and I were both working and raising kids and sharing the housework we had problems because of different styles of cleaning. I would never let things get as messy as she did, but when I cleaned I would never clean anything all the way. She would let things devolve into what I considered total chaos, then clean to what I considered a ridiculous degree, (really, who polishes towel bars?) while I would start cleaning before things got that bad, but as soon as things were sanitary and workable call it good enough. We ended up dividing it so that I would hit the high spots frequently and she would do a periodic deep clean.
The drunk hetero life partners who lived next door were like this. One typically spent all day on the couch, complaining of a bad back, and made her roomie do everything. Sometimes she’d actually find a job for a while but get drunk around Thanksgiving and find a reason to quit.
The roomie wouldn’t dare complain about the layabout so she found reasons to complain about me instead. I wish she had come to our door just once while my back was out so I could answer it on all fours: “You think I’m down here for fun? I’m in pain dammit!”
Maybe stay at home parents are a bad example of this since obviously they are busy taking care of a child. If there isn’t a kid to take care of, are they still pulling their weight in that situation?
Students I consider the equivalent of a job, same with stuff done at home pertaining to a job or school.
I’ve lived in this situation a few times, and yeah…the person who stays home seems to do little more than turn on the TV set. (If that. Sometimes the TV just stays on.)
You and LHoD have already addressed the stay-at-home parent thing, but I’m still gonna chime in there and say that in the SAHP situation I’ve actually observed much more stress and resentment when the SAHP went back into the conventional workforce… because then the SAHP realized she was pulling a lot more weight than the working parent. At least one of the cases I’ve seen of this led to divorce.
Or you have a situation where the SAHP’s spouse decides that SAHP is really just a live-in babysitter, and comes and goes as s/he pleases with no regard as to what SAHP might want. Seen that more than once. :mad:
I do know of a poly household with 3 adults where two of them are not employed, nor do they go to school, but they are both in their 50s and are also on disability, one of them with MS. They do what they can, and the third able-bodied partner does more of the “heavy lifting”.
I have seen that when people don’t have a schedule, they don’t get anything done. They mentally think “I’ve got time for that, so I’ll postpone.” And they never do it. That’s why they say if you need something done, give it to a busy person. I am a busy person, and I even have schedules for having fun. Not strict ones or anything, but I need to space out my time when I can. But I haven’t really seen this too much with parents of new kids. That kid is going to make you have a schedule, and it probably won’t be one you like!
My partner (female) works about 14 hours a week and then plays Candy Crush the rest of the time.
I work 100+ hours a week to make ends meet.
When I asked her to pick up hours to help out a bit, her response was she cleaned and did laundry.
Plus, she thinks I am completely loaded because I come home with cash everyday ( I own a retail store)
It creates a TON of stress on me to make sure not only are the household bills met but I keep my company afloat and prosperous.
This is a really good point. When we have routines, it is easier to get things done. When you have less time, things take on more urgency because you have less windows of time to get it done. Put it off today, you may not have time to finish it tomorrow.
If we had all day to sit around, a lot of those things become less of a priority.
In a way, the unemployed roomate is under her own pressure- She’s going to have to do a lot more to justify her time, and will probably be expected to do things the other roommates don’t have time for.
I think the OP has the tail wagging the dog. A person isn’t going to do no housework because they don’t have an outside job. The real situation is that a person who is fundamentally lazy won’t do work in or out of the house.
Which means you can have a person who doesn’t have a outside job but is doing their full share of the housework - as long as the reason for them not having a outside job isn’t laziness.
Very good post, Little Nemo.
I can think of other cases where the person in the house isn’t pulling a lot, but they amount to mental issues (not necessarily illness). For example, my maternal grandmother has always been unable to sit still for more than a few minutes unless she had a very specific reason to do so (such as “sewing a dress that must be ready on X date”) and spent an inordinate amount of time being paranoid about what the rest of the household was doing. Was she pulling as much weight as someone who could manage her daughters without sitting on their shoulders, and who was better able to focus on a task? No, but it’s not as if she woke up and said “I think I’ll spend the whole day fretting and zooming around”.
While I’m sure this sucks for you as the financial provider I think you might be missing something here. Do you ever have to clean anything when you come home? When is the last time you cooked a meal? When the dryer breaks do you have to take a day off work so the repair guy can come fix it? If you are cooking, cleaning, and otherwise helping to run the household on top of your work schedule that is a problem, but I find that a lot of people assume someone at home does nothing all day because they can see from their netflix queue that 9 episodes of Friends got watched today without considering that all of the stuff that needs to be done to run a household (cooking, cleaning, shopping, paying bills, etc.) gets done without them contributing a moment of their time to it. If you don’t have to focus on anything in your day to day life except work then your partner is contributing to your job by taking care of everything else so you can put in 100 hour weeks, almost like if you hired an assistant.
Not a stay-at-home spouse, but lemme just say that if it weren’t for Netflix and Fringe, none of the laundry would be done or folded or put away, and the house in general would be a lot dirtier than it is (which is not pristine itself). Apparently I need background noise while I do household chores!
What I have observed is that when you are talking about family-based households (instead of renter-oriented ones), the person doing all the complaining that “they do everything” is only giving their side of the story. It is never that clear-cut.
The other thing I observed is that if a person is really sitting home doing nothing, they probably have a mental or physical health issue. I have never met a normal, healthy person who did not meaningfully contribute to a household/family. That said, the mental issues are often situational. Some people become depressed and/or anxious when there are no clear expectations or structure (like SAHMs, or 20-somethings whose parents let them live at home without contributing). Most of the “do-nothings” had the problem resolve when they got out of the bad situation and/or the bad relationship.
I (kind of) live in a household “B”. I work 50-60 hours a week at a new career and my SO hasn’t worked in over 2 years. I’ve mentioned a number of times that she needs to find a new job, but it keeps being delayed due to one volunteer project after another.
And before it’s asked, while she does keep up with some (even the majority) of the household chores, I…
… Wash, dry, iron and put away all my clothes (and take specific items to the dry cleaners)
… Cook all my meals
… Do all outside and “typically male” household items that need doing (car repairs, mowing the lawn, carpet shampooing (she doesn’t have the strength to pull the shampooer, etc)
… Make the bed every morning
… Buy my own food at the grocery store
… And of course I help out by un/loading the dishwasher at times, make my daughter’s bed, vacuum, etc at various times.
What she does do is walk. A lot. Like, 10-20 miles a day. Her daily goal is 40,000 steps (she has a Fitbit thing), which comes to at least 15 miles. I’m told that much of this is done with her walking around the house, but that’s crap - the house is 1,450 sf in size.