Husband frustrated by irritable wife?

[conuly]

DEAR NATALIE: My wife has a busy life and a hectic work schedule. We have two small children and she works full-time as a lawyer. I am also a lawyer, but she always seems to have more to do than me. Whenever we are home from work, there’s homework to do, dinner to make and clothes to put away. I keep telling her it’ll get done, but then she becomes exasperated with me. “Who’s going to do it?” she says. I have offered to get a cleaning service or a part-time nanny to help her, but she says that there are better things to spend money on. At the end of the day, she’s exhausted and really irritable toward me. I want to do something to make her feel better, like a vacation, but I’m worried she will say that we don’t have time for it. What can I do to make her happier? I don’t want this to hurt our relationship. -- FRUSTRATED HUSBAND

DEAR FRUSTRATED HUSBAND: I want you to look up the term “emotional labor.” I want you to study what you just wrote to me. Reflect. Recognize your role in all of this. Your wife is doing the same job as you, but when she comes home, her role as house manager kicks in and your work appears done. She has every right to be irritable and exasperated — she feels like everything at home is falling on her shoulders. Instead of offering to hire a cleaning service, fold the laundry when you see it in the dryer. (You do know where your dryer is, right?) Instead of asking what you can do to “help,” take a proactive role as a partner: See what needs to be done and just do it. Also, don’t expect a pat on the back for doing dishes, vacuuming, getting the kids ready for bed or cooking a meal. Show that you care instead of asking her why she’s stressed. A vacation is only a band-aid. Equity should be in the home as well as the workplace. The real work begins when you show up for your household like you do at your job. Both of you will be less stressed when you share the load.

https://www.uexpress.com/ask-natalie/2020/2/19/husband-forgot-your-40th-birthday-and

Comments

[conuly]

1. I have no idea who came up with the headline for this.

2. When his wife leaves his lazy ass, he's going to say he has no idea why.

[rosefox]

Truly the worst headline.

[starfleetbrat]

"I have offered to get a cleaning service or a part-time nanny to help her"

to help her.

There's the problem, right there.

[conuly]

I know!

(Also, he offered with whose money, exactly? Because it does seem to me that he's offering to spend their shared household money, which is not so generous.)

[neotoma]

“Who’s going to do it?”

Not him, apparently.

Good advice from Natalie, but there's even odds he won't take it.

[ashbet]

As Captain Awkward says, sometimes the cheapest way to pay for something is with money.

While I agree with all of you that “to help HER” is bad framing, and the husband SHOULD make changes, I also think that if they can afford it, getting a cleaning service or childcare or cooking assistance might make a material difference in everyone’s exhaustion and irritability.

His wife is coming home and working the “second shift” — taking over some of that burden by outsourcing, AND by the husband taking over some of those tasks, is a good way to ease stress on the marriage and its inhabitants.

(Obviously, this advice only works for people who can afford it, but two lawyers have a decent likelihood of being able to do so.)

[sara]

Yeah, but who's going to have to hire and supervise the help? I'll bet he won't be doing it. It's very difficult to hire people to do household tasks and it's so rarely an actual time saver.

[lannamichaels]

Husband: We both do the same day job.

Husband: My wife does a lot of stuff at home.

Husband: I'm not sure why?

Husband: It'll work itself out.

Wife: I'M. THE ONE. WORKING. IT OUT.

Husband: It's a deep mystery.


Does this guy actually think the wife is just taking on jobs that don't need done? That if the wife didn't take care of the kids, wash their clothes, feed them, force them to do homework, that, what, the kids will step up? I hope they don't have girls; if so, he might just assume a 4 year old will do things that his adult ass can't be bothered to.

Offering to hire a nanny is interesting to me, because it means he realizes this is a job. He just hasn't made the connection that this is a job he should be doing. The wife's staring at her husband, saying "if not me, who?" and husband's like "idk, we could pay someone?"

I'd say the wife is the one who needs a vacation, maybe then it will illuminate matters, but I'm reminded of this McSweeny's piece.

[cynthia1960]

That McSweeney's piece is priceless.

[cimorene]

I say she should divorce him now to save time and then hire a maid service if necessary.

[cereta]

I keep telling her it’ll get done, but then she becomes exasperated with me. “Who’s going to do it?” she says.

Oh, God, this is SUCH a sore point for me. I've been dealing with people like this my whole life. I seriously had to fight to get through to my spouse that the dishes weren't just magically getting done; I was doing them two days after the "tomorrow" he'd said he'd do them. It wasn't intentional. His parents were compulsive dish-washers (seriously, never put down a half-empty glass in their house; it will be washed before you get back from the bathroom). Don't get me wrong: he's gotten a lot better. But it took work. LW needs a clue-by-four.

[resonant]

"It'll get done."

There's always an invisible person (usually a woman) hidden in the passive voice.

I used to have a boss who would promise people big, time-consuming project that I would have to carry out for him. "It always gets done," he'd say 'soothingly,' and I would say, "By me! It always gets done BY ME!"

[lemonsharks]

Husband, here is your answer:

She wants you to do it.

Forever.

Without being asked and without expectation of being thanked.

[tielan]

Truth.

[watersword]

Prison for murdering this husband sounds like it would be nice and restful. (I am not actually advocating homicide as a solution to domestic, or any, problems.)

[sporky_rat]

But it does sound so restful and simple.

(I can daydream occasionally, right?)

[conuly]

All she has to do is show this letter as evidence in court and I'm sure she'll be let off with a warning.

[minoanmiss]

Dear LW:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/she-divorced-me-i-left-dishes-by-the-sink_b_9055288

Read the above article. Then fold some goddamn laundry and do the damn dishes. (Or if you won't, hire a cleaning service, which you pay for from your entertainment budget or other funds that will not impinge on your wife's funds, and which you supervise.)

[rosefox]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa that HuffPost piece is giving me hives

And this is important: Telling a man something that doesn’t make sense to him once, or a million times, doesn’t make him “know” something. Right or wrong, he would never feel hurt if the same situation were reversed so he doesn’t think his wife SHOULD hurt.

THIS IS EMPATHY

YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT EMPATHY

THERE'S A WORD FOR IT

IT ISN'T GENDERED

YOU SHOULDN'T NEED THE THREAT OF DIVORCE HANGING OVER YOU TO MAKE YOU CARE HOW YOUR PARTNER FEELS

*Wilhelm scream*

[purlewe]

whoa... I hadn't seen this article before (and I kinda keep up on these) and.. whoa.
that one will stick with me awhile.

[ioplokon]

I feel like this is not so much 'emotional labor' as the 'mental load' of running the house. To me it's useful to keep these concepts distinct. This is why studies show that couples who divide household work by task, rather than alternate, have a more equal division of labor between partners. It's not just the nature of the work (and like... Cleaning isn't emotional labor?), it's also that this situation makes one partner the task manager.

This is why I think 'just do it' is bad advice. The wife still has to check what is or isn't done. My opinion is that couples who are serious about sharing the load should take the time to sit down, list the recurring household tasks (and the time they take), and then divide them as seems fair (and decide if there are any they want to alternate on - eg cooking and dishes might change, but one person never does both). Then everyone knows what they should be doing - and the husband understands why his wife seems so busy!

[cynthia1960]

Useful distinction, thanks.

[lavendertook]

How can you help? Take out a really good life insurance policy and drop dead, you poor excuse for a human being. I have no doubt the world will be better for it.

That is the only advice he deserves. To think otherwise is to be complicit with human slavery.

[katiedid717]

I've been mulling over this since I read it yesterday, because I apparently have a different reaction to this than everyone else.

I come from a family where the women are all Planners - it's just what we do. We need to have a Plan to function, this Plan has about 837 steps and spans 15 days into the future. If I'm having friends over Sunday, I will start freaking out on Tuesday about all of the things I need to do on Saturday. I get ahead of myself and start to panic, thinking that I'm falling behind because I haven't done the final run of the vacuum yet. My mother and two of my sisters are the same way.

My father is much better at staying in the present. When my mom starts stressing on December 15 about everything she needs to do on Christmas Eve, he says "Relax - it will all get done." This doesn't mean that he thinks it's magically going to happen; it means that after 37 years he knows how my mother thinks and knows that she needs to be reminded to stay in the present every once in a while.

" I have offered to get a cleaning service or a part-time nanny to help her" - yes, he could mean that he offered to hire someone to help her with "her" household duties. But he could also mean that he offered to hire someone because then she would know that those tasks were assigned and being taken care of on a regular basis and that she wouldn't need to keep them in her running to-do list anymore.

[malkingrey]

I have to say that -- speaking as someone who a) hates housework and b) isn't particularly good at it -- I find myself more in sympathy with LW than not.

There's a lot of stuff we don't know, here. We know that both LW and his (we presume) wife are lawyers, and that she is the higher earner of the two. It could be because she's a hard worker and he's a layabout dilettante who only plays at lawyering; on the other hand, it could be because she's in a highly paid, if highly stressful, field such as corporate law, and he's in a lower-paid one, maybe in the nonprofit or the public sector. In any case, salary size is not necessarily an indicator of virtue. But we do know that they are both bringing in income.

We also don't know what their different standards for adequate housekeeping are. It's possible for one person to be more relaxed than another about such things without the difference meaning that a lapse from the higher standard will plunge the entire home into squalor. Maybe she's a "the dishwasher must be run every day without fail" kind of person and he's a "run the dishwasher when the dishwasher is full" sort of guy; or maybe she's the sort of person who cleans everything compulsively as she goes along and he's the sort who prefers to save the chores up and do them all in a day's worth of concentrated effort once or twice a week.

We don't know any of these things.

We do know that the LW has advanced what is, to me, a perfectly reasonable solution to the surface problem: lay out money (which as a pair of practicing lawyers they would most likely have in a sufficient amount) to pay a professional third party to do the work necessary to bring the home environment up to the wife's standards.

God knows, if I had the spare cash, I would do it in a heartbeat.

But some people get weird about housework, even if they can afford for someone else to do it. I'll admit to not really understanding all of their reasons. Some of them appear to regard paying for household help as an admission of failure on their part -- they should be able to keep the house clean to a 1950's Betty Homemaker level of pristine purity without outside help. Other people, as far as I can tell, regard paying for housekeeping help to be anti-feminist or otherwise ideologically improper in some fashion.

But if what LW's wife really wants is not that the housework get done by someone, but that the housework get done specifically by him . . . good luck to her with that. Every time I read one of these arguments, I flash back to a day some years ago when I was attempting to get one of my offspring to clean up the living room, and in the course of the ensuing vigorous discussion I said, "I don't want you to clean up the living room because I tell you to do it. I want you to clean it up because you want to do it."

And the instant I heard those words come out of my mouth, I realized how stupid that was. Because nobody is ever going to want to do housework. At least somebody who's getting paid to do it is receiving a tangible recompense.

[conuly]

Unless you're suggesting a full-time housekeeper, paying money won't alleviate much of what she complains about: she supervises the homework, she cooks the dinner, she makes sure the laundry is done. Okay, laundry can be done once a week - but dinner and homework are daily. A LOT of household work is daily.

[melannen]

Okay, I have to jump in here to be contrary.

First off, I kind of doubt the husband in question actually wrote this letter. It feels like way too perfect an example of its type - I'm not sure anyone could be self-aware enough to write it without being self-aware enough to know how it paints them, unless it was heavily edited on the way.

Second off - It is absolutely true that it is a huge issue that women do a disproportionate amount of household labor, physical mental and emotional, even when they are working outside the house. And it's absolutely true that a lot of men are taught to let them. But it's also true that a lot of women are taught to take on that "House Manager" job and that if they aren't completely in control of it, it's being done wrong, and have never really learned how to compromise with an equal partner on household decisions.

The Huffpost article has the pullquote "She wanted me to figure out all of the things that need done, and devise my own method of task management. I wish I could remember what seemed so unreasonable to me about that at the time."

But the thing is - in the couples I've known with this dynamic, she manifestly does *not* want him to devise his own method of task management. If she did, she would let him. She wants him to intuit *her* method of task management, and do it exactly the way she does it, without her having to do any management work to arrange this, or compromise at all on methods that work for him. Most of the time, someone who is happy to let their partner devise their own method of task management lets them, rather than doing all the work themselves and then complaining about it.

Very few men will live in absolute squalor if left to manage the household. They just won't necessarily do laundry and home-cook a dinner and micromanage the homework every single night, either.

In that situation it's a no-win for the non-management partner: they can do it their way, and be criticized for it, and watch their partner re-do half the work anyway; they can not do it, or only do it as directed, and be criticized for not doing their share; they can put in a ton of effort to the point they *can* do it exactly their partner's way without any input, and still be criticized because the partner can't handle giving up that much control. At that point, "Just tell me what to do and I will, dear" *is* the closest you can come to respecting their needs. (And it's also, of course, a no-win for the partner still doing all the work. But not infrequently it's the other partner who ends up leaving because having no input in how your house is run isn't fun either.)

Maybe I feel this because I know I will always be the person who leaves the dishes by the sink. But that's actually a good example. Because if you're The Person Who Handles The Dishes, putting the dish in the dishwasher instead of on the counter *is* super-simple. If you aren't that person, though - you have to figure out of your partner will judge that the dish has been suitably rinsed, and if you rinse it you have to decide if that means you need to clean the sink after (or do they have a schedule and method for that for that which they've never shared with you?), and will they take it out and re-rinse it anyway? Is this a dish they think needs to be hand-washed even though it says dishwasher safe, and if it is, should you wash it now or will that mess up the other dishes that are soaking in the sink? And are the dishes in the washer clean or dirty? And if they're clean, do you need to empty the dishwasher, or do you need to not empty the dishwasher because they need to sit first? And if they're dirty, is there space for your dish, and is the space you think is enough space space going to turn out to be the wrong space? And if there's no space, should you run the dishwasher? Or are they leaving it on purpose because they're planning to do laundry and want to save the hot water? And if you do run it can you set up up the usual way or were they going to do a special load?

Maybe that sound exaggerated or like it only happens in obviously bad relationships, but it really isn't. And for the Person Who Handles Things, none of those even register because they already just know the current state of the dishes, and just putting one dish away is so simple! But for the other person, by the time you're actually putting ii on the rack it's become a whole thing, you've been completely distracted from whatever you were doing, you've probably gotten irritated about the whole thing, and even odds either you've bothered your partner about it anyway or you're going to decide better to leave the dish where it was in the first place.

It's still a lot less work than being the Household Manager! Not disagreeing there. But for the other partner to "see what needs to be done and just do it" isn't going to fix it, because their partner won't trust them to have the judgement to make those decisions.

Even the "divide up chores" recommended above, while helpful, isn't going to work if she can't let him have full ownership of the chores he does, and do them in the way that works for him, even if it's not to her standards.

So my advice for LW, if he exists, is: Yes, give your wife a vacation. Not a beach trip she has to plan, though. Give her a vacation from household work. Sit down, and tell her you want to respect and understand how much work she does in the house - not just in doing it, but in deciding how it's done - so you want to give her two weeks where she does none of it. Unless a living creature is at imminent risk of physical harm, she isn't allowed to say or do anything at all regarding housework or childcare, and if she does, he gets to tell her to go soak her head until she goes off and relaxes. And he isn't allowed to say anything to her, or ask her to do anything or complain to her either, if he does she gets to tell him to go soak his head while she goes off and relaxes. It probably won't work perfectly, the first time - he'll screw up, and she won't be living in a house that's run exactly how she wants it anymore, and they'll both get frustrated, but he wants her to agree to try if he does.

And at the end of the two weeks, they're going to sit down and talk seriously about how it went and what they learned and how they can use this to change how things work going forward. And anytime she starts getting exasperated with housework, they can do the two weeks again as a reset.

[purlewe]

These are all very good points. And hopefully if something like this happened they could sit down later and talk about it and figure out what really works for them. And hopefully they do.

partly I think it is gender. Also partly I think it is how people are socialized and raised. if you grew up in a household with parents who never let a kid learn how to do things, then they will always feel like they never do it "right" and they will back way off it. (add a small dash of abusive or bad parenting to that and it gets a whole lot worse) then you add socialized gender norms into it. how typically the wife is supposed to be the household manager and have her finger in lots of pies. You could even throw in a dash of how mothers are supposed to be perfect in every aspect and how they get shamed by looking online at all the women who do it all. Add that last bit of a husband, seeing their partner do it all and say "don't worry it all gets done" without acknowledging that their partner is the one doing the work.

it's just hard. super hard. I just wish that when we talked to each other we actually heard what the other person was saying.