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you do more periodic stuff, she does more constant stuff. Therefore you get more visible ‘breaks’ in effort, even if the amount of effort is the same (which it might not be). It may be fair, but it doesn’t feel fair to the person who is doing the endless tasks. Adjusting the expectations, making sure everyone knows what everyone else is actually doing, and more, the appreciation for the constant drag of effort, will help (counseling should be helpful for this).
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Income has nothing to do with housework. Keep it out of the discussion. Income and spending habits are a completely separate issue, which also apparently needs to be addressed. I earn WAY more than epeepunk does (like, more than three times his salary), but that doesn’t mean that my salary lets me off the hook for housework. It doesn’t entitle me to anything. I don’t get to clock out of the rest of the day because I clocked out of work, and I am not buying my husband’s effort at the end of the day. He isn’t the maid, and our money gets used between us as if we earned equal amounts. We did the same back when he earned more than twice MY salary (whee, career changes!).
I’ve just been working out a theory of why so many men I know feel that they are entitled to a break at the end of the day, and why the women feel the can not. It is a multi-part theory (and completely untested so far, but bear with me - and feel free to add your thoughts!). And, just so you know, I’m working on this because in our house, the problem is reversed. I am the one who does ‘lots of stuff’ that isn’t daily housekeeping, and I am the one who doesn’t see the mess as mess, and I am the one who feels resentful or guilty or shamed if I’m asked to put in more time on the dishes or the laundry or the daily grunt-work of keeping the house even generally tidy. So it isn’t just men who feel this way. But I do see it as a real problem, because I can see how much time my husband puts in, when I am not working on something. I thought that maybe if I figured out where the attitude comes from, I’d be better able to solve it. So, here’s my theory so far, I offer it in hopes that it helps you see something more about what is going on in your family:
A) The expectation of entitlement (I did my time, put in the money, now I get to put my feet up for the rest of the night) I beleive comes from old-style wage labor. You put in your time, you don’t get many breaks (if any), you take your money, and then you are done. That’s it, you are done, end, final, no more work, period. The attitude got passed on somehow, even if you aren’t doing that kind of labor any more, and you have more breaks than those guys did.
Women, however, seem to work on more of a caring-for-livestock (farming) model - no matter how tired you are, or how many hours you have worked today, nobody gets a rest until the cows are fed, the chickens are in the coop, and the home is prepared for the next day’s work (including cooking, cleaning up, and washing). It doesn’t matter to the woman if she has done her ‘time’ because until the jobs are all done, she can’t stop. Livestock and children (and pets, and even the home itself) do not get shut down when the 5-o’clock whistle blows. You can’t just feed them, clean them, or even stimulate their little brains ‘tomorrow’ if you are tired of doing so today. They get sick, you lose crops, bad things happen. It can’t slide, it can’t wait, and if you are sick, tired, or bored silly, well, too bad. You don’t get to put your feet up until everything is done. Without a lot of help kicked in from everyone, that point is never reached.
B) The ‘break’ at the end of the day is also a class-awareness issue left over from the 1800’s - men were then (and in some cases still are) concerned with their status, and the status of the family. They aimed for the next level up, and passed on that goal to their sons, and down the line. The media model of the gentleman a century ago was a man in an arm chair, feet up, reading the paper, smoking a cigar or drinking a glass of wine, while someone else does the house work. Well, guess what. Those men had servants. The wife is now filling in for the servants. Hire a maid.
C) Level of respect is also an issue. Men run on respect, as do women. Men get more respect from doing their job well than from running their home life well, in general. And the more respect they get for their work, the harder they work. My brother offered a naval example - in the navy, the lower level staff tends to do their job until their shift is up, and then they are ‘off’ - but the officers and other senior staff do their work in order to get more work to do because that is how they build their reputations, their status, and their respect. There’s some amazement at men who do the home-stuff spectacularly and consistently, but it is more in the ‘wow, that monkey has two heads’ world than in the ‘you had an assignment, you did your assignment, we lauded you for your accomplishment, now we’re giving you more responsibilities’ world.
Women are in transition - we get respect from work, but we also get a lot of pressure to do the home stuff well. When my son gets noticed for being polite, thoughtful, and caring, and self-assured, I get told that I’m a good mom. Nobody mentions the role his dad plays, even those who know that epeepunk quit his job and stayed home for the first year of our son’s life. But you can bet that if I had done that, people would bring it up as a posible reason for my child’s great attitude. Women also get more than their share of the other side of that coin. If the house is a wreck when someone comes over, do they glance at the husband and wonder why he isn’t pulling his share of the housework? I doubt it. So in order to keep from being treated like they’re the slobs (even when it is the husband who is the slob), women do the work that the guy isn’t doing. His actions come down on her head - he doesn’t have to suffer any consequences for being a bum around the house.
Now, going back to my situation. I still get the pressure to be the farm wife and maid. Not from my husband (who is in teh farm-model himself, and doesn’t expect a maid, just a farm wife to match him), but I get it from friends, family, and even myself. I end up mortified about the state of the house, but am still stuck in the ‘but I worked all day and my commute is long and I need a break’ attitude. My husband would mostly just like a house where he can find what he needs when he needs it, and which is free from general mess (I ‘clean’ well, but I don’t ‘neaten’ well). I am stuck between the two positions, and am trying to find a solution that will work. How do I learn to ‘see’ the mess, how do I get over the sense that I’m entitled to take a break for the rest of the night, just because I worked 8 hours and drove 2 hours today (even though epeepunk did nearly the same time, at a more frustrating job)? How do I get over not liking doing the tidying, picking up, laundry, and so forth, and just do it? I do a lot of periodic tasks that my husband doesn’t enjoy. But he does periodic tasks I don’t enjoy, too. And he’s still stuck doing the daily sh*t, because I don’t see it, and I don’t do it unless reminded enough to qualify as nagging (at least I’ve volunteered to be nagged, since I recognize that there is a problem - unfortunately, nagging helps me only a little more than it does most men, and that only because I signed on for it explicitly).
I see some lucky folks where both the parties are in the farm-work mold. Lucky them! I also know couples where both feel entitled - and either they hire help, or one of them gets forced into the other position (often after they have kids).
If counseling works for you, let me know what they said that helped. Maybe I can use it myself (it hasn’t worked for me, yet… even though I can see the problem, I don’t have a solution that sticks for more than a few days at a time).
(Still love me, Dylan?)