“I earn more so I get to tell you what to do” is NOT a good attitude towards anyone with whom you want to maintain a long-term relationship. There was a good period of time early in our marriage when the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan earned a lot more than I did. And she never took this attitude. Not once.
As of now, I earn five or six times more than she does, and the kids are out of the house. This does not mean I get to tell her how to keep house, or call her to account if I don’t think she is doing enough.
I guess what I am saying is that a marriage is a partnership of equals no matter who earns what.
“I want to be able to do fun stuff with Jr. and you on the weekends” is a perfectly valid request. “You have to clean more so I can do fun stuff with you and Jr. on the weekends” is not. IYSWIM.
To be fair, I’ve seen it go the other way, too: “You’re so much better at all this grown up stuff than me, you make all the decisions and take on all the responsibility”. This has short term appeal: “Hey, I get to play video games!” and “Hey, I get my way!” but long term regrets: “I hate being treated like a child!” and “I hate having to bear all the responsibility”.
What happens in the future has nothing to do with today. Currently he has a lot more time than you and needs to take care of most of the house chores. Working up to 60 hours a week at a job means you just can’t do this. It will burn you out. I take it he is healthy and not physically incapable of doing this.
No doubt you are right in some cases, but ick. I cannot see myself maintaining a relationship with someone who thought of me, or who I thought of, in such infantile terms. I need a partner, not a dependent.
I think there is merit in the idea that the husband in the OP is thinking of this as more or less a vacation. The OP might want to ask him.
Early in our marriage tLaTMS and I sat down and wrote out a list of who was responsible for what around the house. You have to be flexible, of course, but at least we always had a baseline for expectations.
Come to think of it, we should re-negotiate now that the kids are away.
This is how I see it, too. Were my husband and I in the same boat, I’d expect him to be responsible for the house while I was out. That doesn’t mean he’d have to do all the cleaning and cooking, but I always figured that housekeeping is a full-time job. If you don’t have a job or school at all outside the home, there’s a full-time job waiting for you at home. However, job searching makes it a little trickier - I think that job searching in and of itself can be a full-time job that’d probably take precedence over the house.
Either way, I agree with those who have said that you really need to sit down with him and discuss your mutual expectations, abilities and wants. This is something my husband and I struggle with on a daily basis, only we both have full-time jobs. He now also has part-time contract work, so it makes it a bit more cut and dried, though.
I would cut this guy some slack if he were actively looking for a job, or hitting the books in anticipation of getting into college in January. But he’s watching movies and screwing around on the Internet.
In my book, that is completely unacceptable situation when the other spouse is busting her ass 50 hours a week to bring home the bacon. He’s already getting a free pass because the child is at daycare all day, there is no excuse for being so shiftless.
Personally, I’m not one quick to anger, but I’d be pretty ticked off if this were the case. If the SO doesn’t understand how to clean an apartment, he needs to get his ass down to the library, read a book on housekeeping, and get to it; otherwise the Internet bill will suddenly be far down the priority list of things the breadwinner needs to pay for.
That’s probably an overreaction, and it would probably be smarter to listen to those who take a more reasoned approach to the issue. But the situation is nonsense and need not be tolerated.
Our situation is similar to yours, tessaract, except I work part-time and there are no kids (just two pain-in-the-ass cats). My husband works full-time at a job with a fairly long commute (nearly an hour both ways). I do everything for house, finances, and yard. We each look after our own cars. I spend waaaaay too much time on the Dope here, but the work gets done first. Well, I make sure the work all gets done, interspersed with Doping. Jim comes home to a hot meal every night of the week (we tend to eat out on weekends) and I make his lunch for the next day. His evenings and weekends are free for whatever he wants to do. I do the cleaning during the week so I’m free to go have fun with him, too.
If your husband had the child at home all the time, that would be one thing. Having him at daycare means he has plenty of time to get the house shit done, and he should be doing it.
I see it most often in couples that got together when they were very young. Having someone “in charge” seems to make more sense at that age. Also, what happens is that one person is marginally more competent at life than the other person, and so takes over more or most of the “life” stuff (making budgeting decisions, paying bills, dealing with vendors , negotiating insurance companies, setting standards for housework, etc.) and so gets better and better at it. Early on, the less competent person is just happy not to have to leave their comfort zone (and at 18 or 20, having someone else do this doesn’t seem infantilizing, it seems like delegating) and the other person loves feeling competent and in control. Over time, the “parent” becomes increasingly skilled just through practice and experience, and the “child” seems increasingly incompetent by comparison, to the point that they seem unable to handle the day-to-day stuff. It’s at this point that the “parent” partner begins to resent the less competent person but at the same time can’t bring themselves to trust them because they seem so incompetent. The “child” feels angry, but also intimidated because they don’t even understand what the other person does, so it seems mysterious and hopeless.
I’ve seen this pattern really ruin marriages between good people.
Well, I told my boyfriend it was his damned job to fix the toilet, and the toilet ran for a few months, so I did it. So much for traditional gender roles. When he acts up I threaten to tell his dad he made a girl fix a toilet for him.
Sit down and make a list of all the tasks that need to be done around the house on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. Detail how many minutes that those tasks routinely take. Make sure both spouses agree as to how long it takes because this can be a real source of contention.
After you’ve detailed the work, assign ownership to the task, with the notation that the working spouse gets credited for how long he/she spends at work. Similarly, the SAHS gets credited for the amount of time he/she spends transporting junior to/from daycare. Until you use up your credited time, the tasks should fall to him. The exception, of course, are jobs that you cannot equally share (e.g. fixing the car) because one is not adept.
If/when he starts grad school, then you revisit the list, applying his study/school time as credited time.
Okay, I’ve walked to Safeway to buy the Christmas groceries, done four loads of laundry, baked two batches of cookies, taken out the garbage and recycling, taken the bottles back to the depot, fed the pests their lunch, and tidied the kitchen - I’ve got time to read the whole thread now before I get supper started.
Heh - this made me chuckle. After our house was cleaned top to bottom for our Halloween party, I decided to try to keep it that way, and have been doing a weekly cleaning ever since. I asked my husband how he liked the new improved clean house last week, and he said he hadn’t noticed a difference. Sigh. Either I wasn’t doing that bad a job before, or he doesn’t notice stuff like that. Probably a little of both.
Oh yeah? Well, I cleaned our range hood, for the first time since we bought the house in 2007. Range hood filters really need to be cleaned more often than triennially. It had stuff on it that resembled earwax. I didn’t know about cleaning range hoods, since I am pretty clueless around the house.
I’ll tell you the reason for that: You didn’t man up and do what was required of you!
My friend, YOU were at fault. You must have been getting lazy. Here’s what you do: YOU, not your wife, go out to the tree with an axe.
Chop off a branch about a two feet long, and, oh, about a thumb’s thickness.
Swing it around a few times. Hard, and quickly. By this time, nature must surely tell you how to get your wife to behave properly.
I would not expect him to do 100% of the domestic chores that arise after you get home as the need for them arises, insofar as he’d probably kind of like to spend some of that time with you, but you should come home to a clean house with the domestic tasklist all caught up. Dinner should be cooked, more often than 3 times a week. Leftovers do count, though (IMO).
Yep, he won’t have to worry about how to get his wife to behave properly when he’s behind bars for domestic violence. And he might very well not HAVE a wife when he gets out.
A similar thing we’ve done before (I might have learned about it here, actually!) is assign point values to tasks, since all 15-minute tasks are not created equal. Cleaning the cat box, for example, has a higher point value than, say, dusting. We’ve also allowed for the same task to have different point values for different people - I hate vacuuming, so it was worth more points when I did it. We also generally tried not to make the other person do a task they hated!
Oh, and we also accounted for the fact that I (like a lot of women) tend to be the “driver” in terms of what needs to be done around the house, and that I couldn’t turn off that part of my brain. So my list-making and management stuff also had points assigned.
We aren’t that formal with our chores anymore, but it was really useful for a while. We felt like things were usually fair, and neither of us got all the jobs we hated.
Poor motivation, no interest in fun activities and inattention to household chores might be a sign of depression. Just a thought.
Failing that- you need to have a sit down and seriously work out what needs to be done, when is the best time to do it, and who is the best person to do it.
Not a “you need to clean the bathroom”, but “I am so tired when I come home, and there still seems to be so much to do- what do you think we should do about it?” talk.
I’m afraid the Irishhousehold’s solution is a nice Polish lady who comes once a week and blitzes my house. I work 50 hours a week, irishfella works 40 and neither of us want to spend weekends and evenings cleaning. We divide up the cooking, tidying and washing up between us, but knowing that the laundry, vacuuming, dusting and heavy kitchen and bathroom cleaning are going to be done every week by someone else has really improved things between us.
BTW it takes that nice lady 3hrs to clean my 3 bed/2bath house, including at least 1/2 an hour of ironing. If your huband set aside even 45 mins a day for cleaning it would make a massive difference.
Or just one (or two) jobs per day - today is the bathrooms, tomorrow is the kitchen, day after is the floors, etc. And once the chores you’ve decided on for the day are done, it’s guilt-free playtime.
