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.
no subject
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.