There’s nothing wrong with a list. In fact it can be extremely salubrious. But the point of the list is not who does how much of X chore, it’s how much you value X chore. I don’t care if the house gets vacuumed every day. My wife doesn’t care if the taxes get done exactly right and we get audited and thrown in prison because of income she didn’t see fit to report. These are value-weighted and risk-weighted converstations that will have to have been had by persons in your house before the equitable division of labor can be established.
It should have been a tip-off when she volunteered to handle “Bank Account Management” and “Legal.”
This list sounds like a way to show your husband that he isn’t doing his fair share and give you ammunition to prove to him that this is the case. Relationships should not be tit for tat- this way lies madness. A truly good relationship divides responsibility and adjusts as life ebbs and flows. You will never have an honest to goodness 50/50 split, but the relationships that work shift duties as needed and keep their lives comfortable.
I’d really like links to lists, please.
Who wouldn’t love to play on a team where the only other team member requires a pre-ordained list of duties or else they won’t pull their weight?
Hello, my younger son. I had no idea you were a member of the Dope.
I don’t think there are the kind of lists you want, pre-made.
I’ve never seen a simple cleaning chore list with weights and values, let alone a minutiae-of-life list scorecard.
eta - Life isn’t fair, remember?
Maastricht, could you use the lists that both saje and chefguy posted as a jumping off point? I may be wrong but I don’t ever recall seeing a list as you describe online, not even on Flylady.
I’m afraid you’re right, kiz. I read the book The Chore Wars, and even that one or the accompanying gamifying site doesn’t have lists.
This is a shot in the dark, but if you search for reddit threads on household chores, people might have shared lists with weightings in the comments. I haven’t read those threads specifically but in the financial threads, people often share their home-made tools.
I think you may still have to modify them based on your own situation, since some things are just going to vary by household.
LOL, I didn’t know my husband was a member of the Dope either!
The thing I’ve found about lists is that it lays the groundwork for a potential battleground.
For example, I do a lot more housework than my husband does, but if I need a few things done (say, go to store pick up these items, make dinner, vacuum the living room and stairs), I need to give SO a list because otherwise he won’t remember. A permanent list isn’t going to stick with him, and what I need done changes from week to week, so he gets a new list every time.
Does he always complete everything? No. Do I get angry at that? I used to. Now I pick my battles because not everything is life-or-death.
You can’t win. You won’t even able to get a stalemate.
You are doing the chore of making the list, to make him do chores. You’ve already lost.
Figure out a better solution, this way lies madness.
I don’t know a better solution. I’ve got four options, and they are all awful, impossible, or both.
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Divorce. I’ve told him I’m unhappy and overworked and he just hopes for my skies to clear. And I can’t force him to move out and it probaby wouldn’t improve the situation anyway, for either of us.
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Stop making a problem of it and just do most of it. He does electronics and his fair share of child-rearing. And he cooks occasionally. I do EVERYthing else.
Comfort myself with the thought that he probably does other things I don’t notice., ( but we can’t talk about that without a list). Trying to tell myself that a spouse can love and yet somehow that that love doesn’t need to materialize as pulling his weight. Telling myself that yes, I do have enough energy to keep this up for the rest of my life. I don’t.
3 Talk about it. We do, occasionally. Maybe once in a forthnight. It does clear the air. The clear feeling seldom lasts more then a day. Results with regard to the actual chore division is spotty at best.
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Stop caring about my chores. I can’t. I do care.
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Running away, alone, with my belongings tied in a red kerchief dangling on a stick over my shoulder, skipping over a sandy road, against a setting sun, and starting over somewhere else under a different name.
If he’s cooperative, I’d start with taking a few big things that drive you crazy and him taking over all responsibility for them. For example, my husband does all laundry. Yes, he wasn’t great at it at first and ruined some stuff, but now he is awesome at it. Likewise with running the dishwasher. It let me totally stop thinking about a couple of things, and him having ownership of them rather than doing them under my supervision like he’s not a functional adult has avoided conflict about it.
If he doesn’t think it’s fair, then you can go down the accounting rabbit-hole, but if he really does think it’s a problem and wants to do better, it will help.
If he doesn’t want to cooperate and is really okay with you doing the lion’s share of the work, no list is going to help.
Well, if you look at my list (and Chefguy’s - I do most of what’s on his list too) you’ll see that I do pretty much everything. I keep US running.
On the good side, my husband doesn’t expect dinner on the table, and he’s perfectly ok with me saying “you’re on your own tonight” when I’m worn out. He doesn’t cook for both of us, but he’ll wrangle a can of soup if I ask him to.
Usually if I ask him to do something and give him a deadline and a measure of its importance, he’ll do it. He’s good about pet care when told what I need and when, not so good about trash out.
I’ve finally absorbed that he just doesn’t/can’t care about the things that I care about. He tries to avoid my real triggers, but I decided it was more of a headache waiting for him to learn to make the bed (as a for instance) than either doing it myself or asking him to do it. I’ve also had to let go a bit about some things that bug me but aren’t the end of the world if they don’t get done/are allowed to happen.
For instance, I contemplated getting a housekeeper once or twice a month (or more even) because I love a scrubbed house, but there are only so many hours in the day and there are things I’d rather be doing than scrubbing floors. In thinking about it, I also decided that there were things I could do with that money that were also more important than a sparkling floor. I don’t live in filth, but it’s not the spit polished house of my dreams either. Eh, I haven’t regretted it yet.
You probably don’t want another “kid” to care for, but you may have to treat him a bit like a teenager and give him things to do to take a load off of you. As frustrating as that can be, I think in the end it might be less stressful than listing who does what and hoping that he adheres to his part of the list.
Good luck, this shit’s hard…
You’re in a very difficult situation. I’m sympathetic but not optimistic.
IMO the least bad way to deliver a much-needed wakeup call is for you to determine how much work needs to be offloaded from you for you to have the quality of life you need. That’s need, not want.
Then hire that work out. Tell him in plain language that those expenditures are no more optional than the rent or mortgage. You will leave before you’ll put those back in your life. If that crimps the family budget, the solution is to bring those tasks back in-house, but with him doing them because you are already full.
Be prepared for the worst-case outcome: him inviting you to either leave over this, or you suck it up and do the extra work anyhow because he makes life very difficult over the money spent on what to him seems pure waste and luxury.
There absolutely are people who’d be content to live in a pigsty. In their mind 99% of effort spent cleaning is useless waste of time that could be better spent staring at a TV from a broken-down couch. If your husband is that guy, your choices are simple: be his maid for life for your own cleanliness’ sake, or leave him.
I’m sorry to put it in harsh terms, but those are the facts *if *he’s a hard case.
He may well not be that hard. Only you know him well enough to say. Nobody here does.
I wish you the best; nobody deserves the situation you find yourself in.
There’s no-one who can assign points except the two of you because some chores are personally worse than others. I don’t enjoy, but don’t mind scrubbing the toilet, say, but hate doing dishes or dealing with laundry out of the drier (fold it? hang it up? just leave it in the drier until it’s needed?). So I’d assign like 10 “this job sucks” points to dealing with clean laundry, but 2 “this job sucks” points to cleaning the toilet and maybe 5 points to rinse the dishes and load the dishwasher. I suspect I’m in the minority here.
I think this one-sided list is going to turn into a disaster. Whenever anyone compiles a list, ‘somehow’ it ends up that they’re doing the vast majority of the work and the other person is slacking - but a closer look at the list reveals that they’re ignoring stuff that the other person does, or differences in time available. I had an ex- who insisted that she did so much around the house, but when she finally left I ended up having to do less housework overall - fewer dishes generated, no complicated laundry, easier meal planning, could put spray cleaner and brush in each bathroom, only my own stuff left out, and so on.
Also, be careful counting ‘points’ for stuff that’s useless. I had a partner once who was obsessive about mopping the floors, she would mop them down at least once a week, and often right before company was coming over (which interfered with me being able to cook dinner or take a shower). They only actually need to be mopped maybe once every month or two, regular sweeping takes care of dust and leaves. She also wanted to do a big project of clearing some bushes in the backyard, and would count that as yardwork (though I don’t see it ever finishing) - which left me with all of the mowing, trimming bushes, sweeping porch, cleaning spiderwebs, and so on. I definitely did not feel like she should get ‘points’ for either of these things, since I’d rather her put dishes in the dishwasher or do her complicated laundry.
@Fenris:
You might be in the minority on those specific choices, but each of us has our own ranking from most to least onerous. So we’re each a minority of one.
You’re spot on the big issue though. Only the two contenders can value the tasks.
@everyone:
But what they really need in that ideal world where everyone is diligent and generous, and nobody was selfish or lazy (and where I had a pony that shit large gold bars daily) is for each person to give each task a cost: how onerous is it to them, and a benefit to them: how good is to have the task done versus ignored. The net value of any task is benefit minus cost.
I think the problem the OP and others similarly situated are having is not so much a disagreement about how costly each task is, but how beneficial they are.
Overall they’d probably agree pretty closely on each task’s cost. Certainly within half or double each other’s assessment. But …
I would bet out of a list of 100 common relevant household tasks the husband would assign negative benefit to most, and negative net value to darn near all whereas the OP would assign positive benefit to all and positive net value to almost all.
You (any you) are not gonna fix that disconnect with a to-do list and a friendly reminder. Especially not if you’re trying to change a joint behavior pattern that’s already got years of habit behind it.
ETA: Which is exactly what Pantastic just related while I was typing.