Fair is always fair if you talk openly and regularly with your co-habitants. 27 years ago, I started sharing platonically with a long term friend. We both had partners and love interests elsewhere. After about two years, we had lived together so easily that, things evolved and two bedrooms became one (the other a kickass walk in robe!). Nearly 25 years later, we have now built our own home together and it is glorious.
Chore levels and responsibilities have varied greatly over this time but that has been due to our outside work commitments varying too. It aint always perfect but we both try to stay aware and keep talking. I'm WFH now and physically compromised. My dearest has currently taken on more chores but I can make more income, so that's our current deal. She supported me financially while building our house, and now I can support her financially while she chases her goals. We'll keep re-assessing as we go. It has worked so far...
Yeah I spent this whole thing going "ok now that you earn more money, use some of it to pay somebody to clean your house up to your standards." But my husband and I have always followed our parents' method of never relying on my income for anything beyond stuff I would be doing if I were unemployed; the rest goes into savings or retirement.
Which is good idea for most people. But if you're both working a lot and fighting over chores, it's better to spend some money to ease the burden instead of spending mord on a divorce.
Interesting and nuanced post. I do think the amount of money someone brings in should be taken into account, since that does mean they are contributing more with their work time.
When I lived with a girlfriend and we both hated doing dishes, we'd hire someone from craiglist to come do our dishes. This service definitely exists, many people do it, and it doesn't require a live-in housekeeper.
The flip side of that is, in this modern gig economy, someone with a spare 10 hours a week or so definitely has the option to pick up work gigs of various types off craigslist, find a second job, start a business, or do something to convert that time into money.
As you say, it's a very individual thing, and if two people are both working full-time and making a decent amount of money, and need time to recover, I can understand the argument for them working an equal number of household hours (and hiring someone to do whatever household jobs remain undone). But I can also understand the viewpoint that the higher-income earner is contributing more financially, likely has at least as much stress as a nurse and needs to wind down as much as the nurse, and should be given at least some credit for his/her contributions.
I think girlfriend and wife are different though. With a girlfriend, the assumption is the money you earn are YOURS. You are separate individuals. Individuals’ are not really obligated to one another in the same way. You are living for yourself primarily and only secondly for the collective. So any time or money you contribute is an opportunity cost for YOU. If you put in $500 extra to pay her rent that’s $500 you’re not putting in savings. But as husband and wife theoretically (and I’m aware some spouses don’t split this way) are one financial unit. That’s when I think it should be a communistic system. You get out what you need, and put in what you can. Which means the dollar value of your work should matter less than say, effort and need.
Thanks for this article. I do so frequently see people making claims like "but the woman has absurdly high standards for cleanliness! you don't have to wash the outsides of windows!"
Sure, women might have *higher* standards of cleanliness on average, but there's plenty of people in relationships with men where their standard of cleanliness is laundry all over the floor, dishes piled up in the sink or left all over the house, and random wrappers and pieces of trash left lying around on the floor, and literally every level surface in the house is covered with miscellaneous junk, to the point that you have to clear a space for your coffee cup if you want to sit down and watch TV. The people complaining are not all women who want the outside of the windows washed. And then men will just not clean until it gets that bad, which forces the woman to do it because no one else is going to do it.
The standards thing really annoys me. You're right about how absurdly, unbelievably low some men's are and how completely normal most of these women's are. That's why I kept reiterating how not-crazy mine are! God, it took me three years to dust the ceiling fan lol.
I basically agree with you, but I also think a lot of women would benefit from having a bit more compassion for their male partners and taking a collaborative mindset to solving chore inequality. Instead I see so many women saying things like "I should never have to ask" and acting like their particular standards are obvious and correct, not up for negotiation at all, and the only reason her husband isn't meeting them is because he's lazy. It's a more condescending and adversarial mindset and immediately puts the husband in a defensive mindset. Women complain about feeling like they have to parent their husbands, but I think in many cases they put themselves in that position with their non-collaborate attitudes. If you want equality in your relationship, that means you don't get to be the queen of the home who decrees exactly how it should be managed with no negotiation.
(But also, granted, there are definitely some husbands who really are inconsiderate slobs no matter what his wife does.)
Maybe this means you set up a chore chart instead of relying on the husband to "just notice" when things "need" to be done. Maybe this means splitting who does which chores differently. Maybe you talk it out with an open mind and realize that you actually would be ok relaxing your standards in a couple areas. Maybe this means you have to accept *how* your husband does a particular chore may not be the way you would do it, but that's ok.
Yes, he should just know that the dishes need doing and the rubbish needs taking out. Who does he think would do those things if he lived alone, the Bachelor Fairy?
Some things need to be on a rota. I have a rota myself for weekly and more than weekly chores. But the day to day should be obvious to anyone!
I agree with you in an exasperated sort of way, but I've started to accept that a lot of times, it's a matter of things just not bothering them nearly as much. I try to remember my own frame of mind when I was a much messier person, and that kind of thing just legitimately didn't occur to me half the time. I just didn't see it, like it was entirely unimportant background noise. I don't even know how you really change that.
If he lived alone, he would do them - when and how he wants to. Saying "it should be obvious!" is just a cop-out to avoid being assertive and taking responsibility for your preferences.
(I am excluding from this the people who live in perpetual squalor - I think there are often psychological issues at play there beyond the normal variation of preferences).
The kind of people who live in a neat and tidy way when singlethem turn into slobs who "can't see" whatever mess are so obviously disingenuous and manipulative that I was not considering them at all in any of these conversations about hypothetical normal people
Not what I meant. I meant that people have different standards, different amounts of time and mess before they feel compelled to clean. When E_III_R expects other people to "Just know", what she's in effect saying is "he should do things to my standards and on my timeline without me having to ask, explain, or negotiate". That is not a reasonable position.
There’s a lot more to “the dishes need doing” though. “When” and “how” need asking. When I was in college and had more dishes than I could use in one meal, I usually left it. I mean there was no real urgency. A bit gross sure but there is zero reason to do it unless I actually ran out. I’ve never left it so long I got bugs or mold. But my mom definitely thought I was a slob and it would drive her crazy when I left dishes in the sink. Even when I didn’t live with her. The fact that her kid was such a slob genuinely embarrassed her. But I lived by myself and could honestly afford to do dishes everyday or every other day. It never became a health hazard. Just unsightly. Now that I have a family of 5, I do the dishes after every meal without fail for a myriad of reasons.
"He naturally wasn't terribly interested in increasing his workload at home, and he adjusted his standards accordingly, and our standards sure didn't match."
I'm being generous here, but also, who would be? In this kind of situation, you either do more work, or you lower your standards. Those are the choices
My wife and I both work full time and she out-earns me by $70k or so. She often works long hours whereas I work a standard 40 hours.
We probably split chores 70/30, because she’s a mess and I’m tidy, but if she told me “I earn 70% of our household’s income so you have to do 70% of the chores”, I would be pissed.
If one partner earns more, but that additional money isn’t contributing to an improvement in lifestyle, what is the purpose of that additional work? Is it transactionally worth it for the less-earning individual to do more household labor if there’s no benefit to their partner working a higher wage job or more hours?
It’s one thing to balance chores a certain way because somebody has more time to do so, that’s practically. It’s another thing to artificially bolster a power imbalance via earnings.
If one partner works part-time and the other full, it makes sense to me to divvy up chores differently.
Also, everyone is different and some people will be happy with imbalanced amounts of household labor. I’m naturally tidy, so an additional 10-15 minutes a day of passively picking things up isn’t even noticeable to me.
I mean, I think this is just you having begged the question:
>Here’s the problem: it doesn’t matter how much money you make. Other things matter more. Your time, for example. Your time is valuable and your time is important. And it’s important to remember that the compensation you receive for the time you spend at work has nothing whatsoever to do with how much free time you should be able to enjoy outside of work.
This is it's own particular ethic about time and work.
Your contribution in a relationship is the value you generate for the other person. That is to say, how much value they recognize in what you do. Not all actions are equally efficient in generating value per unit time, and many chores even as time increases exponentially have marginal gains in value.
What women are trying to do is basically view relationships based on what they value, they want to put in time to make the house a certain way, see that value, then have their partner put in an equal amount of time creating an equal amount of value for them. It is a very myopic and self-centered way to view the relationship. Viewing this in terms of equal time is basically the labor theory of value as applied to chores.
Men are simply not obligated to give a shit about how you spend your time. If your husband suddenly decided that he should dust every surface of your house every day, would you suddenly feel obligated to do more other housework? Probably not. Same with women fluffing the pillows, washing everything on a much shorter schedule, .etc.
The problem with fair play is rather than asking women to introspect about this incredibly broken theory of value, fair play indulges them in it, since it is written by someone who takes this perspective and fails to understand alternatives. Household chores are broken out into small chunks that take up lots of visual space, akin to someone making cards for "paying for groceries", "paying for kids' college", "having health insurance for the two of us", .etc for earning more. It does this while ostensibly being about fairness, when really it is mostly about trying to cheat the ref and slip in a pretty questionable set of assumptions.
If I had to hack Fair Play, I would make it based around rating each card on how much you value it, and then the game is about optimizing/thinking about the chore distribution from the other person's perspective.
“If your husband suddenly decided that he should dust every surface of your house every day, would you suddenly feel obligated to do more other housework?”
Many women would, subconsciously thinking “If he is working then I must do so too”. This can lead to various frustrations, especially if not communicated
I think you are downplaying the impact of paying someone to clean/having a dishwasher. When we first moved to NYC, my guy and I had neither of these things and we had a ton of conflict about housekeeping issues -- we are both equally messy, but I especially start to get stressed out when my space is a disaster. Our second apartment had a dishwasher and I'm not exaggerating when I say it reduced this stress by half, or maybe more. In our third apartment we started hiring somebody to come every two weeks (plus we had another dishwasher), and from her first deep clean on, our standard of living fundamentally improved.
This was 8 years ago and we basically haven't fought, or thought, about housekeeping during that time. We don't have kids and only have one small dog, so we are not playing on hard mode here. But it is so much easier to maintain than to achieve cleanliness. I totally get that not everyone can afford outside help, but if there is money, money really can be exchanged for time, and in my opinion it is totally worth it.
Fair is always fair if you talk openly and regularly with your co-habitants. 27 years ago, I started sharing platonically with a long term friend. We both had partners and love interests elsewhere. After about two years, we had lived together so easily that, things evolved and two bedrooms became one (the other a kickass walk in robe!). Nearly 25 years later, we have now built our own home together and it is glorious.
Chore levels and responsibilities have varied greatly over this time but that has been due to our outside work commitments varying too. It aint always perfect but we both try to stay aware and keep talking. I'm WFH now and physically compromised. My dearest has currently taken on more chores but I can make more income, so that's our current deal. She supported me financially while building our house, and now I can support her financially while she chases her goals. We'll keep re-assessing as we go. It has worked so far...
I like the way you write!
Thanks, David 😄
The way to use opportunity cost is that as you make more money, you should consider using it to outsource or automate the tasks you both hate.
Yeah I spent this whole thing going "ok now that you earn more money, use some of it to pay somebody to clean your house up to your standards." But my husband and I have always followed our parents' method of never relying on my income for anything beyond stuff I would be doing if I were unemployed; the rest goes into savings or retirement.
Which is good idea for most people. But if you're both working a lot and fighting over chores, it's better to spend some money to ease the burden instead of spending mord on a divorce.
Yes, exactly.
Interesting and nuanced post. I do think the amount of money someone brings in should be taken into account, since that does mean they are contributing more with their work time.
When I lived with a girlfriend and we both hated doing dishes, we'd hire someone from craiglist to come do our dishes. This service definitely exists, many people do it, and it doesn't require a live-in housekeeper.
The flip side of that is, in this modern gig economy, someone with a spare 10 hours a week or so definitely has the option to pick up work gigs of various types off craigslist, find a second job, start a business, or do something to convert that time into money.
As you say, it's a very individual thing, and if two people are both working full-time and making a decent amount of money, and need time to recover, I can understand the argument for them working an equal number of household hours (and hiring someone to do whatever household jobs remain undone). But I can also understand the viewpoint that the higher-income earner is contributing more financially, likely has at least as much stress as a nurse and needs to wind down as much as the nurse, and should be given at least some credit for his/her contributions.
I think girlfriend and wife are different though. With a girlfriend, the assumption is the money you earn are YOURS. You are separate individuals. Individuals’ are not really obligated to one another in the same way. You are living for yourself primarily and only secondly for the collective. So any time or money you contribute is an opportunity cost for YOU. If you put in $500 extra to pay her rent that’s $500 you’re not putting in savings. But as husband and wife theoretically (and I’m aware some spouses don’t split this way) are one financial unit. That’s when I think it should be a communistic system. You get out what you need, and put in what you can. Which means the dollar value of your work should matter less than say, effort and need.
Thanks for this article. I do so frequently see people making claims like "but the woman has absurdly high standards for cleanliness! you don't have to wash the outsides of windows!"
Sure, women might have *higher* standards of cleanliness on average, but there's plenty of people in relationships with men where their standard of cleanliness is laundry all over the floor, dishes piled up in the sink or left all over the house, and random wrappers and pieces of trash left lying around on the floor, and literally every level surface in the house is covered with miscellaneous junk, to the point that you have to clear a space for your coffee cup if you want to sit down and watch TV. The people complaining are not all women who want the outside of the windows washed. And then men will just not clean until it gets that bad, which forces the woman to do it because no one else is going to do it.
The standards thing really annoys me. You're right about how absurdly, unbelievably low some men's are and how completely normal most of these women's are. That's why I kept reiterating how not-crazy mine are! God, it took me three years to dust the ceiling fan lol.
I basically agree with you, but I also think a lot of women would benefit from having a bit more compassion for their male partners and taking a collaborative mindset to solving chore inequality. Instead I see so many women saying things like "I should never have to ask" and acting like their particular standards are obvious and correct, not up for negotiation at all, and the only reason her husband isn't meeting them is because he's lazy. It's a more condescending and adversarial mindset and immediately puts the husband in a defensive mindset. Women complain about feeling like they have to parent their husbands, but I think in many cases they put themselves in that position with their non-collaborate attitudes. If you want equality in your relationship, that means you don't get to be the queen of the home who decrees exactly how it should be managed with no negotiation.
(But also, granted, there are definitely some husbands who really are inconsiderate slobs no matter what his wife does.)
Maybe this means you set up a chore chart instead of relying on the husband to "just notice" when things "need" to be done. Maybe this means splitting who does which chores differently. Maybe you talk it out with an open mind and realize that you actually would be ok relaxing your standards in a couple areas. Maybe this means you have to accept *how* your husband does a particular chore may not be the way you would do it, but that's ok.
Yes, he should just know that the dishes need doing and the rubbish needs taking out. Who does he think would do those things if he lived alone, the Bachelor Fairy?
Some things need to be on a rota. I have a rota myself for weekly and more than weekly chores. But the day to day should be obvious to anyone!
I agree with you in an exasperated sort of way, but I've started to accept that a lot of times, it's a matter of things just not bothering them nearly as much. I try to remember my own frame of mind when I was a much messier person, and that kind of thing just legitimately didn't occur to me half the time. I just didn't see it, like it was entirely unimportant background noise. I don't even know how you really change that.
If he lived alone, he would do them - when and how he wants to. Saying "it should be obvious!" is just a cop-out to avoid being assertive and taking responsibility for your preferences.
(I am excluding from this the people who live in perpetual squalor - I think there are often psychological issues at play there beyond the normal variation of preferences).
The kind of people who live in a neat and tidy way when singlethem turn into slobs who "can't see" whatever mess are so obviously disingenuous and manipulative that I was not considering them at all in any of these conversations about hypothetical normal people
Not what I meant. I meant that people have different standards, different amounts of time and mess before they feel compelled to clean. When E_III_R expects other people to "Just know", what she's in effect saying is "he should do things to my standards and on my timeline without me having to ask, explain, or negotiate". That is not a reasonable position.
There’s a lot more to “the dishes need doing” though. “When” and “how” need asking. When I was in college and had more dishes than I could use in one meal, I usually left it. I mean there was no real urgency. A bit gross sure but there is zero reason to do it unless I actually ran out. I’ve never left it so long I got bugs or mold. But my mom definitely thought I was a slob and it would drive her crazy when I left dishes in the sink. Even when I didn’t live with her. The fact that her kid was such a slob genuinely embarrassed her. But I lived by myself and could honestly afford to do dishes everyday or every other day. It never became a health hazard. Just unsightly. Now that I have a family of 5, I do the dishes after every meal without fail for a myriad of reasons.
That's what stuck out to me.
"He naturally wasn't terribly interested in increasing his workload at home, and he adjusted his standards accordingly, and our standards sure didn't match."
I'm being generous here, but also, who would be? In this kind of situation, you either do more work, or you lower your standards. Those are the choices
My wife and I both work full time and she out-earns me by $70k or so. She often works long hours whereas I work a standard 40 hours.
We probably split chores 70/30, because she’s a mess and I’m tidy, but if she told me “I earn 70% of our household’s income so you have to do 70% of the chores”, I would be pissed.
If one partner earns more, but that additional money isn’t contributing to an improvement in lifestyle, what is the purpose of that additional work? Is it transactionally worth it for the less-earning individual to do more household labor if there’s no benefit to their partner working a higher wage job or more hours?
It’s one thing to balance chores a certain way because somebody has more time to do so, that’s practically. It’s another thing to artificially bolster a power imbalance via earnings.
If one partner works part-time and the other full, it makes sense to me to divvy up chores differently.
Also, everyone is different and some people will be happy with imbalanced amounts of household labor. I’m naturally tidy, so an additional 10-15 minutes a day of passively picking things up isn’t even noticeable to me.
I mean, I think this is just you having begged the question:
>Here’s the problem: it doesn’t matter how much money you make. Other things matter more. Your time, for example. Your time is valuable and your time is important. And it’s important to remember that the compensation you receive for the time you spend at work has nothing whatsoever to do with how much free time you should be able to enjoy outside of work.
This is it's own particular ethic about time and work.
Your contribution in a relationship is the value you generate for the other person. That is to say, how much value they recognize in what you do. Not all actions are equally efficient in generating value per unit time, and many chores even as time increases exponentially have marginal gains in value.
What women are trying to do is basically view relationships based on what they value, they want to put in time to make the house a certain way, see that value, then have their partner put in an equal amount of time creating an equal amount of value for them. It is a very myopic and self-centered way to view the relationship. Viewing this in terms of equal time is basically the labor theory of value as applied to chores.
Men are simply not obligated to give a shit about how you spend your time. If your husband suddenly decided that he should dust every surface of your house every day, would you suddenly feel obligated to do more other housework? Probably not. Same with women fluffing the pillows, washing everything on a much shorter schedule, .etc.
The problem with fair play is rather than asking women to introspect about this incredibly broken theory of value, fair play indulges them in it, since it is written by someone who takes this perspective and fails to understand alternatives. Household chores are broken out into small chunks that take up lots of visual space, akin to someone making cards for "paying for groceries", "paying for kids' college", "having health insurance for the two of us", .etc for earning more. It does this while ostensibly being about fairness, when really it is mostly about trying to cheat the ref and slip in a pretty questionable set of assumptions.
If I had to hack Fair Play, I would make it based around rating each card on how much you value it, and then the game is about optimizing/thinking about the chore distribution from the other person's perspective.
“If your husband suddenly decided that he should dust every surface of your house every day, would you suddenly feel obligated to do more other housework?”
Many women would, subconsciously thinking “If he is working then I must do so too”. This can lead to various frustrations, especially if not communicated
I think you are downplaying the impact of paying someone to clean/having a dishwasher. When we first moved to NYC, my guy and I had neither of these things and we had a ton of conflict about housekeeping issues -- we are both equally messy, but I especially start to get stressed out when my space is a disaster. Our second apartment had a dishwasher and I'm not exaggerating when I say it reduced this stress by half, or maybe more. In our third apartment we started hiring somebody to come every two weeks (plus we had another dishwasher), and from her first deep clean on, our standard of living fundamentally improved.
This was 8 years ago and we basically haven't fought, or thought, about housekeeping during that time. We don't have kids and only have one small dog, so we are not playing on hard mode here. But it is so much easier to maintain than to achieve cleanliness. I totally get that not everyone can afford outside help, but if there is money, money really can be exchanged for time, and in my opinion it is totally worth it.