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agonyaunt2022-09-28 11:40 am
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2022-09-28 11:40 am
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Care & Feeding: My Wife is a Total Slob...
... And Her Justification for the Mess Is Absurd
Dear Care and Feeding,
My wife and I (together for 5 years, married 3) are expecting our first child, a daughter, in February. My wife is incredibly beautiful, talented, sexy, intellectual, fiercely loyal, basically perfect except…she’s a HUGE slob. We often joke that she’s a “slut” in the original sense of the word, i.e. a bad and lazy housekeeper. If I don’t want to live with grimy bathrooms, a sink full of dishes, and tumbleweeds of cat hair blowing everywhere, I have to clean, which I don’t mind doing, if that’s the price of being with her. I was single for over a decade before we met and had all but despaired of falling in love or having a family.
The only thing that irritates me is when she justifies herself by claiming she’s fighting back against centuries of unfair domestic expectations of women, or that being a female “art monster” (a creative artist who neglects everything except their work) makes her rare and special. Her parents are a doctor (dad) and lawyer (mom) and she grew up with nannies and cleaning ladies. I grew up with a hard-working single mom and got used to pitching in from an early age. She’s entitled to her own choices, but I hope I’m not being out of line by NOT wanting her teaching our daughter that it’s cool and feminist to be a slob. How can I instill basic housekeeping skills in our kids, without getting into a verbal war about the historic imbalance of household responsibilities?
— The Art Monster’s Male Maid
Dear Male Maid,
I don’t think that rejecting all domestic work is an inherently feminist choice, but I do know that the reality for women is that “having it all” often also means “doing it all.” Even when both partners work, in heterosexual couples, women in the relationship are more likely to have primary responsibility for doing the laundry, cleaning the house, and preparing meals. Your wife may legitimately feel that she has to choose between her own creative work and the domestic work it takes to keep a home running. She also may simply lack the required skills.
Whatever the case, she’s made it clear she’s not interested in learning them, so it’s really up to you to decide how to move forward. An equitable division of labor is ideal for most, but that balance is unique to every couple, depending on careers, children, finances, etc.
As someone who made it to my late 30s before I even learned how to cook a grilled cheese, I do think it’s important for children of both genders to learn the skills they’ll need to take care of themselves and their homes as adults. But can’t you be the person to instill those lessons in your kids? After all, there are lots of families where one partner does the bulk of the domestic tasks, and when that partner is a woman, I rarely hear any outcry about who will teach the children. Or might you hire a housekeeper, if you have the resources? This is obviously a pretty privileged option, but when it’s feasible, paying someone a fair wage can be a lot easier than fighting about it in perpetuity.
And if you haven’t, I also think you need to have a serious conversation about expectations around the division of labor when it comes to childcare and the work of parenting. The workload at home is about to increase exponentially, and if you can’t agree on the best way to manage it, you’ll likely end up resenting each other, which would be worse for your future child than a sink full of dishes.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My wife and I (together for 5 years, married 3) are expecting our first child, a daughter, in February. My wife is incredibly beautiful, talented, sexy, intellectual, fiercely loyal, basically perfect except…she’s a HUGE slob. We often joke that she’s a “slut” in the original sense of the word, i.e. a bad and lazy housekeeper. If I don’t want to live with grimy bathrooms, a sink full of dishes, and tumbleweeds of cat hair blowing everywhere, I have to clean, which I don’t mind doing, if that’s the price of being with her. I was single for over a decade before we met and had all but despaired of falling in love or having a family.
The only thing that irritates me is when she justifies herself by claiming she’s fighting back against centuries of unfair domestic expectations of women, or that being a female “art monster” (a creative artist who neglects everything except their work) makes her rare and special. Her parents are a doctor (dad) and lawyer (mom) and she grew up with nannies and cleaning ladies. I grew up with a hard-working single mom and got used to pitching in from an early age. She’s entitled to her own choices, but I hope I’m not being out of line by NOT wanting her teaching our daughter that it’s cool and feminist to be a slob. How can I instill basic housekeeping skills in our kids, without getting into a verbal war about the historic imbalance of household responsibilities?
— The Art Monster’s Male Maid
Dear Male Maid,
I don’t think that rejecting all domestic work is an inherently feminist choice, but I do know that the reality for women is that “having it all” often also means “doing it all.” Even when both partners work, in heterosexual couples, women in the relationship are more likely to have primary responsibility for doing the laundry, cleaning the house, and preparing meals. Your wife may legitimately feel that she has to choose between her own creative work and the domestic work it takes to keep a home running. She also may simply lack the required skills.
Whatever the case, she’s made it clear she’s not interested in learning them, so it’s really up to you to decide how to move forward. An equitable division of labor is ideal for most, but that balance is unique to every couple, depending on careers, children, finances, etc.
As someone who made it to my late 30s before I even learned how to cook a grilled cheese, I do think it’s important for children of both genders to learn the skills they’ll need to take care of themselves and their homes as adults. But can’t you be the person to instill those lessons in your kids? After all, there are lots of families where one partner does the bulk of the domestic tasks, and when that partner is a woman, I rarely hear any outcry about who will teach the children. Or might you hire a housekeeper, if you have the resources? This is obviously a pretty privileged option, but when it’s feasible, paying someone a fair wage can be a lot easier than fighting about it in perpetuity.
And if you haven’t, I also think you need to have a serious conversation about expectations around the division of labor when it comes to childcare and the work of parenting. The workload at home is about to increase exponentially, and if you can’t agree on the best way to manage it, you’ll likely end up resenting each other, which would be worse for your future child than a sink full of dishes.
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Ahaha, the feminist argument against housework. OMG this is beautiful. Especially coming from a rich girl. Ahahahah. *wipes eyes*
LW, I completely agree with you. If I were your wife's friend I'd advise her to pay for a housekeeper. I'd try to frame it as supporting a hardworking businessperson to make it sound sociopolitically positive, since she likes that frosting on her laziness cake. I think it would be fair for her to pay as her contribution to household upkeep, but you may have to compromise and pay for a housekeeper yourself.
I wish you all the luck with your beautiful tempestuous entitled as heck Art Monster, and yeah, getting across to your kid that feminism is not a "get out of chores" card is going to be a complex process, but I think it will be rewarding in the end.
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a) housework is morally neutral. Mess doesn't mean you're a bad person, but it can make it hard to find things, and make your life harder and/or more stressful. Also if dust gets too bad it can aggravate asthma
b) assuming that there are no health issues like pain, fatigue, Depression, ADHD getting in the way, both partners should do 50% of the housework unless otherwise negotiated.
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So LW does 100% of the traditional (cleaning, etc.) housework. Is there anything Mom does 100% of? If not, is there anything related to household responsibilities that Mom could do 100% of? Then when the kid complains, "Why do I have to do housework when Mom doesn't?" LW could say, "Well, you and I do all the housework, but Mom does 100% of [thing]." Sure, that's not the real justification for Mom doing no cleaning, but it could help underline to the kid that everyone has to contribute to the running of the household.
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1. I'm not impressed with the wife's reasoning. If you want to do less of something because your ancestresses were force to do more of it, you do it in your own space, which you don't share with anyone.
2. The husband says he's fine with that, but he's not really fine with that.
3. This is going to get worse when there's a baby. I would hope that before conceiving this baby, the LW made sure his wife doesn't include all childrearing tasks in the category of "unfair domestic expectations of women" -- but then I would have hoped that they'd agree on the other stuff before being together for five years and living in the same house, and apparently they didn't.
4. The phrasing of "teaching our daughter that it’s cool and feminist to be a slob" is too vague and too judgmental to be helpful when raising a child. The real question is: do I want to teach my kid that it's not OK to live in squalor? To think you're too good for certain tasks and leave them to your partner? To be a bad teammate in life? To expect to live at a certain level of comfort while doing nothing to contribute to that comfort?
(But of course you can't phrase any of that in a way that doesn't indict the wife's selfishness.)
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I do agree with the general concept that she should take some of the responsibility for the household not being disgusting, and that this is something they need to negotiate between them. But I think that negotiation can't happen unless LW admits that he IS resentful and bitter and framing her as a bad lazy terrible person, and drops the judgy bullshit to actually discuss the tasks with a practical, "what would make this possible to do" approach. To quote Miles Vorkosigan, "don't raise the pressure; lower the wall."
We don't get the wife's perspective here, but I definitely feel like she's on the defensive against his judgement, refusing to engage seriously because she feels attacked. If he stops attacking, maybe she'll stop defending, and they can model something other than this petty sniping bullshit for their kid.
(And maybe she *is* neurodivergent and having a really hard time tracking what needs to be done and then actually getting it done, and is defensively declaring her refusal in order to avoid trying and being declared a failure, which is what the "art monster" identification makes me think of. He's preemptively decided that a smart, competent woman like her MUST just be choosing to be lazy and bad, and that sets off so many alarms for me. And even if that's not the issue here, he's still going to get farther by meeting her as an equal rather than passing judgement from his high horse.)
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Maybe she's neuroatypical. That's a possibility I hadn't considered. Except, as I consider it, I think about all the conversations I've seen online where Person A is given a pass for behavior that affects Person B and Person B is advised to suck it up because "Maybe Person A is neuroatypical". I've seen that patternin discussions of everything from chores indeed to sexual assault. I don't know.
But maybe she is neuroatypical. MAybe he came up with the "slut" joke first and her statement that she will feministically not do chores is a counter. We don't know the order of operations, just how he wrote them.
But I look at this, and his description of her wealthy childhood, and I think about how I could never, ever, ever say to anyone I've ever lived with "I'm not doing chores as a feminist statement." What I'd get would be hilarity and a sponge. And I have lived with people I loved dearly but who did things that made my life more difficult, and I did resent them. It probably would have been better for my soul if I didn't, but I'm not sure I could not have. I'm not sure LW can climb over all the mounds of laundry and crusty sinks to purge all resentment from his soul.
Maybe if I knew the wife's side I'd know she has far more weighty reasons for this than having grown up wealthy. But right now we have what we know, even if written by a more or less unreliable narrator. I don't know if this one is all his fault.
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Like. The "slut" joke and the "male maid" signoff are SUCH red flags. The whole tone of the letter is so contemptuous. He's really angry at her, in a really gendered way. (It is, in fact, sexist as fuck for him to constantly throw in her face the idea that she's failing as a woman by not being a good housekeeper! That is the not-very-sub subtext of the slut joke and the maid joke and the comment about the "price of being with her"! Literally none of that would even be in his arsenal if the genders were reversed. She's NOT WRONG that the whole history of feminism and gendered labor is relevant here, even if she's being a jerk about it.)
That doesn't mean she hasn't been behaving badly, or that she hasn't made asshole jokes of her own, or that she's not being a privileged twit about who does the dirty work of the household. But she's not the one who wrote in - and my advice to LW specifically would be "take some accountability for your own hostility and reconsider your approach, before you sabotage your marriage even worse than you already are."
Hopefully they actually do like each other enough to work together on solving the housework problem, if they can get out of the loop of "you suck because you're a slob!" "you suck because you have sexist expectations!"
ETA: personal context - the "lazy slob" thing also does push some personal buttons for me, too, so that's relevant. I'm a disabled and depressed person who does rely on other people to do some "basic" household maintenance stuff, and I have some kneejerk defensiveness when that kind of language gets thrown around, because it's been used against me both directly and indirectly (people talking about what "a decent person" should be able and willing to do re: cleaning often stings pretty badly, because, well. I'm not a decent person, by that reckoning!)
So when LW gets nasty about what a slob his wife is, my immediate reaction is "what's this look like from her side? is she not seeing the dirt, and needs to retrain her eyes? is she seeing it but not acting on it for some reason? what's the reason? what's preventing her from cleaning, and what can be changed to make it easier or more possible?" - basically viewing it as an accessibility issue rather than an issue of bad character. Shame is just not useful here! It doesn't help!
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Yes. This was what disturbed me about it, but which I couldn't quite articulate while running around during the day.
It's a melange. They have a lot of communication difficulties and swallowed anger compressed into a very small time period, and it's rumbling under the surface, with the so-called "jokes" indicating there's an iceberg's worth of Issues under there.
They're going to need to do a LOT of unraveling their communication problems, and soon, otherwise their co-parenting is going to be *extremely* problematic, and not just about cleaning.
Which I realize sounds alarmist, and also doesn't answer his question.
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I really like this book about how cleaning is morally neutral, shame is not useful, and your space exists to serve you, you don't exist to serve your space
How to Keep House While Drowning: A gentle approach to cleaning and organising by KC Davis
https://www.amazon.com.au/How-Keep-House-While-Drowning-ebook/dp/B09KTGVQRH
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I think about all the conversations I've seen online where Person A is given a pass for behavior that affects Person B and Person B is advised to suck it up because "Maybe Person A is neuroatypical".
I agree that this is an issue! I think the important distinction here is between "maybe they're ND" as a shut-down, an excuse that ends the conversation (which I agree is bad and a misuse of the language of disability), and making it the opening of a *new* conversation - what's the actual mechanism of the problem here? How can it be addressed in a useful way?
For instance - the refrain that pops up in every discussion of Creepy Guys, where people chime in with "maybe he is bad at social cues because he's neurodivergent". That's not the end of hypothetical dude's responsibility! As an ND person who is by nature shit at social cues, this is an area I've put a lot of work into - and knowing what the problem is helps me figure what kind of work to do. Or another common issue is adult women who figure out they have ADHD and can therefore start trying strategies for how their brain actually works, rather than just thinking they're stupid/lazy/etc.
And in this letter's case, I don't think LW should have to "suck it up" that his wife doesn't clean and is willing to let things get filthy. But I do think that it would be more useful, to him and to her, to reframe in terms of "what is the mechanism of the problem?" rather than assume she's just Bad. Even if she's completely neurotypical and it's a privilege issue - being trained not to "see" dirt because someone else always took care of it is potentially fixable! She could learn new skills! If they can get on the same side and work on it together.
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That makes a lot of sense. Just declaring someone Bad doesn't help figure out how the dishes actually get done.
Also it makes sense that you identify with her, considering your experiences, just like I identified with him, considering mine (I was a scholarship kid at a school for rich children. I ended up pretty unimpressed with the 1%.) One of the interesting things about these tales we read from the advice columns is who identifies with whom and why.
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I went to a public (no-fee) Primary School where some of the kids were quite rich [some of the kids had parents who were bankers and advertising executives], when my family were reliant on food parcels from the church in order to be able to eat. I hear you!
On the other hand, as a Disabled/chronically ill person who just ran my Roomba for the first time today since 3 March 2022 because I was having difficulty picking all the cords, cables, clothes, rubbish etc off the floor due to hip pain when I bend; I have a lot of time for people who can't clean due to pain, fatigue, ADHD, Depression. Too much bending to pick stuff up off the floor = my pain can flare up for a week to the point that I can't sleep due to pain.
I have ZERO time for people who won't clean because "it's below them" or because they think they're too rich/too important.
I really like this book about how cleaning is morally neutral, shame is not useful, and your space exists to serve you, you don't exist to serve your space
How to Keep House While Drowning: A gentle approach to cleaning and organising by KC Davis
https://www.amazon.com.au/How-Keep-House-While-Drowning-ebook/dp/B09KTGVQRH
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It IS something you have to learn how to do, though - and it can be hard and embarrassing to admit, as an adult, "I need to be taught how to do this thing everybody else can do".
Especially when it comes to things like "How OFTEN do I clean the bathroom?" and "Okay, but WHAT PARTS of the room am I supposed to wipe down?" and "Do I have to clean the walls? Do I have to dust the top of the fan? How often do I do these things?" and "Exactly how much time do I need to schedule to declutter the living room?"
"Washing a dish" and "scrubbing a toilet" is easy. All this other stuff is not so easy if you weren't raised doing it, and it's easy to be flip about it, I guess, but....
Listen, I was raised in *literal squalor* after my father died due to a combination of factors. Actually, our house wasn't all that tidy before he died either - both my parents had executive function issues like you would not believe. This is not precisely the same as being raised with two parents and a housecleaning service, but it did make me pretty unable to do basic maintenance of cleaning. I can emergency clean with the best of them, if you don't mind everything being tossed out, because god forbid the plumber comes in and sees the house like this - but cleaning regularly? God. It's not easy! And snotty comments like yours are exactly the sort of shame-inducing thing that make it harder to ask for help, so maybe keep it to yourself.
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It's a skill. It has to be learned. You being a jerk to everybody who didn't learn that skill and finds learning it as an adult to be difficult is not okay, just because you personally think that this woman is "spoiled".
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But I also do stand by my original comment that simple things like washing dishes, which the LW says she doesn't do, are not in fact, difficult to do, even if you have never done them before. I think it's highly unlikely that she can't figure out how to do it.
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If you learned from someone else and you've been doing it a long time, it seems easy, but if you just put someone in front of a sink who's never done it before and say "clean the dishes"??? They are going to be lost. I mean, they can probably figure out "wipe things with soapy rag" but that's not really the same thing as knowing how to clean dishes well. And if you've got executive function issues, every one of those "what is the right way to do this?" decisions that isn't routine for you yet is going to drain your executive function down a little bit farther until you can't anymore. (Double so if you know there is someone watching who will criticize you because it's easy and you're messing it up. My mom still says I'm doing it wrong because I have massive sensory objections to putting my hands in a sink with dirty water with hidden slimy things floating in it.)
That's not an excuse for LW's wife - they have been married long enough that she should have been able to say "please teach me how you do the dishes, show me how to help" and learn his way in just a couple nights, except for like, cast iron - but saying "Washing the dishes is easy even if you've never done it before" helps nothing.
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I got a seriously nasty electric shock from wiping down a lightswitch with a cleaning product (I was wearing rubber gloves and rubber soled shoes, but the cleaning product was conductive).
And just look how many people accidentally make themselves sick by mixing bleach with other cleaning products while cleaning which creates chlorine gas!
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My first reaction was that this was a little too "poor little rich girl" for me. I still remember being five and being handed a brush and a can of Ajax and told to clean the toilet, with a lack of being beaten being my reward if I got it right. I cleaned the toilet. I fortunately didn't get beaten that time. I shudder to think what would have been done to me if I'd said, "I don't know how."
But I don't contain the Universe, and there are probably ways I can't even imagine that people can be at a disadvantage with knowing how to clean things among other knowledge. I don't know if the LW woudl necessarily be an asshole if his wife said, "I actually don't know how to clean a bathroom" -- I'd like to think he'd say, "YES! Let me show you!" But I'm being hopeful there.
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If your wife's political stance is "the idea of housekeeping we were both raised on is a relic of an oppressive definition of (white)(middle-class) femininity aimed at isolating women from the public sphere and creating unachievable classist standards, and it's not a moral failure if the dishes sit in the sink for two days" she's probably right, and it's not her fault if you can't let go of that standard. (It's great that your single mom was able to do it all, but I bet you she didn't have time or energy for any art other than her cleaning and her kids, and she was scrabbling *very hard* to do even that.)
I suspect it leans closer to the second one, if only because unless you married a much younger woman she must have been happily living with her own slobbiness for quite a few years before she met you (And also you don't seem to have any complaints about her *expecting* anything out of you.)
If that's the case, you need to figure out how much of the cleaning you do is stuff that's really necessary for you to be happy (and, of course, have a house that's safe for kids), and how much is just you adhering to a standard you've never really thought about, because you're probably going to end up compromising on some of that with a baby around regardless. And if some of it is just that you enjoy keeping a really nice house, that's what you explain to the kids - "Dad keeps the house because he likes keeping a pretty house and it makes him happy, Mom paints because she likes painting and it makes her happy".
If you and your wife just have really incompatible standards with how clean you like your space to be, you should (if you haven't already) work out some compromises on messes/perfectionism to be kept in private spaces and compromising in shared spaces because you value each other's comfort. That's something you'll definitely have to teach the kids anyway, because every kid needs to learn it, so get started now.
But I wouldn't worry to much about teaching your daughter that it's cool to be a slob. A, because it clearly *is* - you fell in love with her mother, after all, who is super cool - and B, because she will still be getting plenty of messages from outside the family about how girls are supposed to do all the cleaning.
As for imparting housekeeping skills - if you don't hate doing them, and you do them with the kids around, they will pick up on that when they're very young, and will want to help and to learn what you're doing. Let them - give them little ways to "help" as soon as they can show interest, and keep going as they get older. It will become "cool thing we do with Dad and that Mom thanks us for a lot" unless the two of you teach them otherwise, same as in a household where it's Mom doing most of the tasks.
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In my household now, we trade off who cooks and who cleans (both of us like to cook) and interior cleaning is....I won't say evenly divided, because husband cares more about specific standards than I do and also is not chronically plagued with migraine, so he tends to do more, but we do try to thank each other for doing the thing. But I think of the "average" het couple (at least as described in research I've read?) or think of certain of my male relatives and try to picture them even noticing how much work their female partners do, and come up blank.
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(Although it's interesting because when I think about my aunts and uncles, there are certainly a lot of couples where the wife does way, way more of the work than her husband, and the husbands don't always pay attention, but if reminded of the work their wives do, they are generally performatively grateful about it! Maybe it's my grandma's influence - she was born in the 1920s but she was a Youngest Stepdaughter and had strong opinions about treating the people who do your housework well - or maybe it's a regional thing, where the local formulaic response to your wife complaining about housework is to say "And I am very, very grateful to you for doing it and I love you very much", sincerity variable.)
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I genuinely feel like this guy is Big Mad that his wife isn't doing Wife Things ("this is the price of being with her" and "slut" are ringing every alarm bell in my head.)
In my personal case, I have repeatedly offered to find and contract a housecleaning service, paid for either by me alone or as part of the household budget, to resolve the "who cleans and how much" issue. (Husband keeps kicking that to a "later decision", I'm pretty sure because he's got a whole train worth of Calvinist baggage about how you do your own work in all cases regardless of whether the scent of the cleaning products triggers your migraine or you can't stand up today, but that's separate.) There's also that I know how to do the tasks, but they do not give me any sense of satisfaction or pleasure, nor does the difference they make in my environment exceed the cost of doing them (mentally or physically.)
I also genuinely question this guy's definition of "slob," because I am here to tell you that with two cats, the cat hair tumbleweeds accrue in my house within three *days* (I assuredly do not have the spoons to vacuum daily) and that I do dishes once a day or once every other day if I am alone in the house, rather than fully after every meal. By LW's definition, this is "cat hair tumbleweeds everywhere and a sink full of dishes." By mine, it's Tuesday. What's a "grimy" bathroom? Can you actually see dirt, or is it just that she didn't put the anti soap scum spray on the shower?
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LW I wonder if your wife sees you getting happiness out of cleaning the house and therefore thinks they are not chores. Coupled with the fact that someone was paid to do the household chores while she grew up means she hasn't seen them done by someone who wasn't getting paid. She most likely doesn't have an idea of how people fit them into their lives (with work and family commitments) She hasn't seen it modelled and she hasn't been taught how to do even the most basic kinds of chores that some people have been taught from such a young age they don't even remember being taught.
When we went to marriage counseling the person asked us what we argued over. We both said chores. We were scoffed at and told "adults don't fight about chores, stop acting like children" yeah. no. adults totally argue about chores and this idea that when you become an adult you just DO THEM is a fallacy. This inevitably led to my wife putting in our wedding vows that she would do the dishes. (reader, she never did them. she would do them.. once a year? and expect like a round of applause and a cookie. ah well)
Around this time I read a columnist I really liked who said something that made me change my thoughts. Instead of arguing about the dishes.. I would just do them. Bc the time I had spent arguing they could be done already. So I started doing that. I just stopped fighting about the one chore that was the most of our arguments. I did them. At first I was a little angry. But now I just do them and don't think about it. I figure the 10-15 minutes it takes me to do them instead of the hours of stewing and anger is just easier on me and my head and heart.
fast forward to a couple years later. I had been in jury duty and was exhausted. I came home to someone who had been home all day who ordered dinner from me. And I finally said "you are 42 yrs old. you can read directions. You can learn to cook. Starting tomorrow you are going to learn" and with that she started learning about cooking. Not intuitive, not something anyone taught her until I said something. I taught her some basics, she learned to read recipes, she used google, and she asks questions. She also learned how dishes are made. And that dishes aren't just the plate you eat off of but also the pots and pans and knives and cutting boards that help make the meal. Does she cook all the time? no. but now she does see a recipe and says she wants to try something new. She sees when I am going to be late home and says she will make the meal up and not to worry about coming home late and cooking. All of the planning and prep are not my sole job. And now, occasionally, she does the dishes bc she sees how many she made.
I think that LW needs to let go of the anger. And I think probably both of them need to see a therapist that will help them communicate better. I think that modelling housecleaning for your kids and teaching them how to do it is better than making snarking comments in front of them and teaching them how to treat people badly. If you want to raise kids that learn how to do housework you have to teach them. And since you are the only person in the house that thinks you can model that properly then the job is yours. And I am sure your wife does do things around the house that you don't even notice. And I think that it is time you did. (Like there has to be something? paying bills? shopping (clothes, groceries, holiday presents?)) There is a division of labor in your house. but you aren't seeing it. And the things you think aren't chores are probably actually chores.