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

[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.

[minoanmiss]

Yeah, but the children's homework? The kids in general? There's hiring someone but there's also the emotional investment. If he's offering a nanny for her to supervise while what she wants is to know that he also knows who their children's teachers are and has gone through the math homework with them at least once a week, it'snot necessarily a problem that can be solved only with money.

[malkingrey]

The application of money can't solve all the deeper problems, true.  (And I can see that there's more than one deeper problem going there, including the question of whether the household income is further divided into "her money" and "his money", or all goes into a common pot, and whether there's an assumption, buried or not, that the person bringing in the larger amount gets a stronger vote.)

But applying money to the surface problems can certainly take some of the pressure off.