I know why us guys have to ask you where our stuff is, you can’t leave it where we left it.
And really how hard can it be to say “honey, would you like a drink as I happen to be right here in the kitchen”
And speaking of tracking devices, how the hell can you tell where Ive been and with who from this wedding band? 
Notes to self:
[ul]
[li]If you simply must put your foot in your mouth, don’t step in shit first.[/li][li]Nice people don’t disparrage their SOs in public.[/li][li]Smart people don’t do it when they might be watching.[/li][li]Decent people talk their gripes over before airing them in public.[/li][/ul]
Looks like I’m batting 1.000 today.
I think a salient point here is that most housework-type chores must be done on a daily or near-daily basis. You only have to mow the lawn once a week, and oil changes every few months, but food preparation and cleanup must be done at least once a day. They must be constantly kept up with, or everyone goes hungry and lives in a sty. Same for laundry – it’s an ongoing need. The flaking paint on the house trim can be let go with no great consequences, but without semi-weekly laundry loads, we become socially unacceptable. Child care isn’t an issue in our house, but dads are parents too, and kids need their attention daily as well as Mom’s; dads who sit in front of the tube and grouse because the kids are drowning out Monday Night Football don’t score many points in my book.
stofsky, if you’re doing the things you say to contribute to the housekeeping, then I agree – your wife doesn’t have much of a beef. But I think we’re mostly discussing the neanderthals who sit on the couch grunting all week, then do yard work on Saturday mornings and think they’re being put upon.
Oh stop it, you all have me cracking up… it is hard for me to be in a bitchy mood when I am laughing over these posts !!
Lee- your post made me laugh so hard - I will have to use that response -
now if only I can get that song out of my head now…
"she’s got the whole world, in her cunt… she’s got the whole world… LOL
Maeg
I personally suggest a bunch of flowers delivered to work with a card that says “I’M SORRY!!!” on it, followed by a nice dinner out (buy her a nice new dress to wear), followed by the admission that you LIVE to clean up cat puke and dirty dishes. You pray she’ll be around to dirty up MORE dishes for you to clean up.
That’s just my suggestion 
Oh, and Merry- try not to be TOO hard on him. It was just a boneheaded thing to say. Sometimes SO’s are like that. Let him eat crow and get over it
Zette
I love your suggestions! Are you taking notes, MR? <wink>
And don’t worry, I do appreciate him, even though I’m “not as bad as your husbands sound…”
Stofsky:
The reason housework counts for so much is that it is ENDLESS. When you have finished mowing the lawn, it is done, for at least a week. Things like dishes and laundry and picking up go on forever, especially if you have kids. Both my husband and I could be cleaning and tidying every moment of the day around our place and at the end of it there would still be one more sippy cup in the sink.
My husband is pretty good about all this. The only complaint I have is that he would cheerfully starve to death if I didn’t give him food. We had to live apart for about six months once and, I swear, he ate nothing but cereal and canned soup the whole time. He refuses to eat lunch if I don’t put it in a bag for him myself.
Oh well, I know it could be much, much worse.
Can you email my wife with this information? I, as most men, would attempt to declaw the cat with my eyelashes for a bonus blowjob!
Believe me, it gets worse after the sippy cup stage. Wait until homework gets spread around–and we’ve got a girl, so even at 5 1/2 there are 2 or 3 clothing changes in a day. But I wish I’d paid more attention in physics (which I sucked at) so I could make a comparison of ergs (the unit of work, not the sound I make while doing it) between mowing the lawn and doing dishes. Or a calorie count, maybe. Hell, a week’s worth of dishes, burnt pasta and sauce every night, can’t be the same amount of burned fat as mowing a 1600 square foot lawn in 102 degree, 95% relative humidity weather. But does the amount of actual work/energy expended count? Or are we doing this on an “equal time” basis. Because, if so, I get to spend as much time as I want in the bathroom, stinking it up and reading the paper, as I want, because…well…equal time.
And I get to use her razor and dull it up. Just thought I’d throw that one in.
Is this true? Do most men freak out over those kinds of things? I guess I just got lucky to not have a feminophobic husband.
Don’t bother brushing up your physics, because I can tell you that time is the important thing. Also timing. Sure, it’s unpleasant pushing that lawnmower around, but if you get to spend the rest of the afternoon in front of the TV with a cold one or two, you soon forget about that. What grinds people down is always being the one on call, especially at the end of a hard day. So mowing the lawn might be physically harder than washing dishes every night, but, psychologically it’s probably easier.
Actually, what makes something hard is a matter of individual taste. Some people hate to cook–I find it enjoyable. I hate to do paperwork, but my husband doesn’t mind (or at least doesn’t mind as much.)
Y’know, this is not indigenous only to male/female couples.
I do all the cooking and cleaning in the house. I am also the only one with the power to accumulate groceries. Truly an amazing power.
Last night, for the very first time, I did not have dinner ready for my boyfriend(soon to be husband) when he got home because I had been cleaning the house and didn’t get to it.
He rooted through the refrigerator to get ideas of what to cook. I still had to come up with an idea for him. Then he cooked for the very first time ever in our relationship. He’s a mediocre cook with delusions of palatability. Bleh.
Better that I cook than starve or be poisoned.
It doesn’t. But for a lot of us, outdoor stuff doesn’t apply. For example, we live in a townhouse. We have a yard the size of a postage stamp. We’ve lived here a year and a half. My husband has weed-whacked it about 3 times. Most of the time there are weeds higher than your knees, with dog poops scattered around underneath. Before this, we lived in an apartment… no yard. Before that, it was a house in Arizona that had a dirt yard. No maintenance. My point is just… don’t assume that all these guys have massive yard duties they’re taking care of.
But we’re talking division of labor, not emotional comfort. And I hate mowing the lawn more than my wife hates doing the dishes. And, my back doesn’t let me forget about that lawn very soon. My point is, equality in a working couple being equal, the fact that I spend the morning in the heat mowing the lawn should count for X amount of inside work. If I get the lawn done while she’s at the gym on Saturday morning, then I get to watch the Carolina game while she’s picking up the living room.
Hell, even considering time, 15 or 20 minutes of dishes every night comes about equal to the lawn time. And dishes are done in air-conditioning.
Zette, you just gave me my new sig!
As for lawn mowing, we once got a warning letter from our HOA telling us to cut it. It had this hilarious statement: “Your grass has been classified as ‘long.’” Ooh, is that a technical term?
Doesn’t apply to those without yards. If you don’t have to mow, do the fucking laundry. I’m speaking to those husbands/SOs who do spend hours making the outside of the house look good, often at the prodding of “The roses look like shit,” or, “Are you ever going to trim the azaleas?” Then they return to the air-conditioned world of domesticity, wash the grass clippings off in the shower, and hear, “What am I supposed to do with these socks you left on the floor?” or “The living room needs to be vacuumed,” or “Get your own fucking beer.”
Bad sexist joke, but appropriate: How many men does it take to open a beer?
None. It should be opened when she brings it to you.
(I got hit for telling my wife that one. I retrieve and open my own alcoholic beverages, thank you.)
Hey I’m off this weekend. Need any chores done? Need the house painted? please…
Yup, they sure do freak out. At least my BF does. He has only the vaguest notion of how my systems work (he has no sisters & went to an all-boys school), so it’s comically easy to freak him out about that stuff. I could tell him that my uterus has a tracking device & he’d probably believe me. :rolleyes:
& stofsky, if mowing the lawn makes your back hurt so much, why don’t you get a new lawn mower (or get the blades sharpened on the one you have)?
Stofsky:
I don’t see any problem with the gym/game deal you describe. The friction comes when one person gets time to themselves and the other person doesn’t. The classic case is when Dad works hard all day but gets to relax all evening and also when he gets his chores done on the weekend, but Mom never gets to relax. If your wife is making it to the gym, she’s probably doing fine.
Another source of problems, though, can be the nature of the work. A lot of the complaints I hear come from the fact that husbands are making extra work, rather than being a source of support. If you do dishes and laundry while your partner does other work, you feel supported. If you have to pick up his dirty clothes where he flung them before they can be washed and wash up all the glasses and plates left from his afternoon snack before you can even get to the dinner dishes, you feel like the maid.
(And don’t give me any stuff about different standards of cleanliness here. We’re grownups.)
Anyway, there are a lot of ways people can work this out to their satisfaction. I think the main point the OP was trying to make is that occasional favors, like ironing a shirt or getting someone a drink, should be just that–favors. They shouldn’t be an expected part of one person’s duties.
Well, it’s the exact opposite in my house. Yes, I will admit it, compared to my BF, I am a lazy slacker. He does the dishes, the laundry, makes the bed, looks for elusive lost items. On the other hand, I’m usually swamped with school work. Though, when I do do something unexpected (Wash ALL of the laundry, not just a load, or clean the kitchen) I don’t really get anything for it, other than the satisfaction of doing something.