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

[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.

[melannen]

Yeah. The other thing is that a household does, inarguably, run better if it has a full-time Household Manager, and people who grew up in a house with a full-time Household Manager have trouble figuring out how to run a house without one. Even if both partners are putting good-faith effort into doing equal work, there are a lot of things that don't work as well without one person taking point on the management part (Even if you try to split the management work, somebody has to manage *that*.)

And if they both grew up with a woman doing it full-time, they'll both fall back into that pattern unless they actively try to stop it. The problem is that you can't be a full-time career builder and a full-time household manager and also a full person. You just can't, male or female. So eventually you either have to compromise on how the household is run or compromise on the careers or the whole thing falls down, one way or the other.

[minoanmiss]

Heh, I have known people that manifestly clueless about their own opinions in general, and in specific I have seen this dynamic in partnerships. But you raise a very good point that on the other hand if people want others to share the work they have to be willing to accept others' standards, to a point (there are ways in which someone can 'do housework' that are wilfully terrible and intended to inspire having the task taken from them, but hopefully someone who says they actually want to help will act in good faith and not do these things).