Think about it in a different way. In my house, vacuuming the rug is my responsibility. I do it Saturday. Any other day of the week, I have no vacuuming to do. On the day I must do it, once it’s done, it’s done, and I’m relieved of that duty for another week.
I do the white clothes, because 90% of them are mine. When I see a few dirty pieces of clothing in the basket, I don’t think that I have more laundry to do, I think I don’t have laundry to do. You see, by my way of thinking, as long as we both have enough clothes to wear tomorrow, there’s no need to do laundry today.
Apply this basic idea to other chores, and you make your life much easier. If we have enough dishes for tommorrow, and there’s room in the dishwasher, we don’t need to run it today. If you don’t have a dishwasher, leave the dishes in the sink and do them every second or third day. They won’t explode in the meantime.
Doing this reduces your housework to only one big chore a day. Dishes today, laundry tomorrow, vacuumining the next day.
As to forgetting how to do housework, I think it may simply be a matter of differing priorities. My last girlfriend before Mrs. Six made exactly the same claim; that I never helped out with the housework, and she had to do everything.
This simply wasn’t true. We simply had different time table for doing the housework. When living alone, I vacuumed the house once a week, did the dishes, about once every three to four days, and did laundrey whenever I ran out of clean clothes, which was about every 10 days. Dusting I did about twice a month, mopping and throughly cleaning the kitchen or bathrooms once a month.
She thought that the carpets should be vacuumed every day, the dishes done after every meal, and the laundry washed twice a week. Dusting, mopping, and cleaning kitchen/bathrooms should be done once a week.
You can, I trust, see the problem. Given the difference in how often we did things, she ended up doing all of the housework, because it never went undone long enought to reach the point where I thought it needed to be done.
Now before you jump in and say I should have compromised, I tried. We agreed to split the chores, with me doing the vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning the bathrooms, and half the cooking. But she refused to allow me to do my chores on my schedule. If I didn’t do them at the times she would have done them if they were her chores, she did them anyway.
It didn’t matter what the chores were. We tried having the laundry be my chore. As I said, my feeling is that if we have clothes for tomorrow, the laundrey doesn’t need to be done. Yet she would start dropping hints after three or four days:
“The colored hamper’s getting full.”
“Yes it is.”
“Are you going to be doing the laundrey soon?”
“Do you have clothes for the rest of the week?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point.”
“Sure it is. Tell me when you need somtheing that’s dirty, and I’ll do the wash”
At this point, she would wash the clothes herself. She had this weird thing about having the clothes lying crumpled together in the hamper for more than a few days was somehow harmful to them.
Cooking went the same way. When it was my turn to cook, she wouldn’t relax in the living room while I made dinner, she’d follow me into the kitchen and watch to make sure I did things “right”, often taking over before I was half finished.
I was willing to compromise and do half the housework. She wasn’t willing to compromise and let me do it my way, in my time. I didn’t insist that she use my schedule, she shouldn’t have insisted that I use hers.
To hear her tell it, I became a slob who never did any housework the moment she moved in. That she was unwilling to let me do the housework doesn’t enter the equation in her mind.
With Mrs. Six and I, the housework was split when she is working or going to school, and, lo and behold, my chores get done on a regular schedule. The floors get vacuumed, kitchen and bathrooms cleaned, furniture dusted, and whites washed. And the house is always presentable.
