Dear Wives: It’s Not Petty To Expect Your Husband To Complete Household Chores
Why do I think there is something wrong with me for being mad about this rather than that there is something wrong with him for not doing his fucking share?
But. But…but…but. It’s a single load of laundry. I should let it go. I shouldn’t be mad about something so small. So trivial.
I once read somewhere, in a book about how to be happily married, that it’s detrimental to a couple’s happiness if one of them is an “accountant” — if one keeps score of who does more. It’s bad to do that. Keeping score means you’re petty. It means you’re ungrateful. It means you’re destroying your marriage. Your job, as a loving wife, is to accept whatever his contribution is because he’s trying, and also make sure you have sex with him because men get grumpy if they don’t get enough sex. “Physical touch” is every man’s love language, come on ladies, DO YOUR PART. DON’T BE A SLACKER.
I would bet my retirement account that the one who said we shouldn’t keep score was a man. A lazy man who wasn’t doing his fucking share, and knew it, and didn’t want anyone to keep a written record. He put this stupid little nugget of “advice” in a fucking book, and everyone, including women, including lots of psychologists, nodded their robot heads in creepy Handmaid’s Tale unison like “OMG YES, IT IS SO PETTY TO NOTICE WHEN YOU’RE THE ONE DOING MOST OF THE WORK.”
To be clear, my husband isn’t lazy. He wants to help. He truly, honestly, with every fiber of his being (and because he likes having sex with me), wants to do his share. He is a good man, for sure the top 5% of husbands, and I love him and appreciate his efforts, I really, really do. The amount he does around the house is all the more impressive because he was raised in an environment where they had nannies and full-time housekeepers and men didn’t have to lift a finger. He has come so far. But sometimes his “help” looks a lot like flipping channels while I do the bulk of the work, and then wandering away when some invisible switch in his head alerts him he’s hit his “helping out” quota.
Still, though, the laundry thing, my anger over it, isn’t really about my husband. It’s about me and all the reasons why I’ve been too afraid to call him out on not doing his share. After I fumed impotently for several hours, I realized I should have done exactly what he did — walked away when I felt I’d done my share, or better yet, not touched a single sock. I was putting off actual moneymaking work in order to help him with a chore he is perfectly capable of doing 100% independently. If he had been working on his laptop, I wouldn’t have expected him to stop and help me fold clothes. That would be ridiculous. I would recognize he was working and had deadlines to meet, and I would do the laundry myself. And he sure wouldn’t snap his laptop shut and hop up to help either — let’s be clear about that.
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