Dear Harriette: Couple Reaches Impasse Regarding Housekeeper

[lilysea]

DEAR HARRIETTE: I am about to get married, and my fiancé and I have come to an impasse over something that I don’t think is such a big deal. I grew up in a household where everybody had chores, but we also had a housekeeper who came once a week to do heavy cleaning. It was so helpful having Mrs. Lancaster with us. She became part of the family. I want the same thing for my new home. Of course, both of us should do chores, but I believe having extra help will ensure we keep everything organized and clean. My husband thinks this is excessive and a waste of money. He grew up in a household where no extra help was ever there. They couldn’t afford it. We can. Plus, I work 80 hours a week usually. I need the help. How can I get my fiancé to see that? -- Clean Up, Rochester, New York

DEAR CLEAN UP: This is one of many value-driven conversations you must have with your fiancé to determine whether the two of you can compromise when needed to build your life together. While it may sound clichéd, it is the little things in a marriage that help to make your bond stronger or erode it entirely.

Since your husband-to-be does not see the need for a housekeeper, a compromise might be to have someone come in once a month in the beginning. Suggest this as an acknowledgment that you know he doesn’t see eye to eye with you on this point but that you know you need help in order to keep your home in the manner you believe appropriate.

Comments

[lilysea]

I want to know, if the male fiancé doesn't want to hire help, is he genuinely prepared to do 50% or more of the household labour? Including the labour of ***noticing*** and planning what needs to be done, rather than waiting to be told to vacuum or mop or do laundry?

Hiring weekly or fortnightly help seems quite reasonable given that LW "works 80 hours a week usually."

What are male fiancé's objections?

That they can't afford it?

That the cleaner won't be receiving a fair wage and adequate conditions eg sick leave, holiday leave? There are a growing number of firms which do provide this.

For example, "Church-backed cleaning firm to give staff London living wage and guaranteed hours" https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/oct/06/new-cleaning-firm-to-give-staff-london-living-wage-and-guaranteed-hours

In the USA, Hand in Hand is "a national network of employers of nannies, housecleaners and home attendants working for dignified and respectful working conditions that benefit the employer and worker alike", and they're affiliated with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an organisation that advocates for better pay and better working conditions for domestic workers. http://domesticemployers.org/

That he thinks his partner should magically be able to do everything while working 80 hours a week?

[jadelennox]

I actually have massive objections to having cleaners in the house as well. I tried it, briefly, when I first became disabled, but I have overwhelming gut level, instinctive distaste about class issues. This despite the fact that I know there is nothing dishonorable about cleaning, and the fact that Miss Manners has a lecture about how Americans have to get over the class issues around certain parts of perfectly honorable paid labor, and despite the fact that when I was growing up we often had regular cleaner, when we could afford it. I just can't get over it. it makes me more uncomfortable to be in a house with cleaners than to be in a house with dirt, and I hate dark.

It may well be that this is a living incompatibility the two of them might not be able to work around.

[cereta]

I do know what you mean, although I don't know if mine is a class issue or just guilt over watching someone work while I sit...which is probably class-related (my family was a very strange mix of genteel not-exactly-poverty-but-had-financial-setbacks on one side and blue collar on the other). I have hired people to come clean my house, and even had others give me a cleaning as a gift, but I'm always a little anxious about it.

[angelofthenorth]

For this couple though, given it sounds like they both work, the cleaner could come while he's not there.

My mother was a cleaner, and if it wasn't for people employing her we wouldn't have survived.

[ellen_fremedon]

If the issue is having strangers in the house, even that might not work. I am always a little on edge when my apartment management has to have repair people or inspectors in when I'm gone; I think I'd have the same issue with cleaners.

[jadelennox]

Oh, I totally get that! In fact, there was one point in my childhood I remember that lasted several years when my family could no longer afford to pay our regular cleaner, but we kept bringing her in because my mother knew enough about her financial situation to know that she really couldn't afford to lose a client. It's seriously not rational; I am fully in support of people making a living, and I support the Justice for Janitors campaigns and all the movements to improve working conditions and wages for people in custodial and cleaning jobs.

It's all visceral cringing shame on my part, not anything I've ever managed to reason with. I have almost equivalent problems when I'm in an office and the custodial staff comes to empty my trash – although oddly not when I'm interacting with custodial staff in any other position such as cleaning the bathroom or mopping the floors. I think it's some weird puritan work ethic thing where anybody doing a job for me I feel like I should be doing myself, even though most of these things I can't do myself anymore, fills me with overwhelming horror.

the cleaner coming well he's not there might be workable for them. Alternately, he might be willing to take on the lion's share of the labor.

[kutsuwamushi]

That's fair.

In this situation, though, keeping you emotionally comfortable by not hiring cleaners would have a pretty steep cost: It would force a woman working the equivalent of two full-time jobs to do more housework than she feels she can keep up with. That's not trivial. She's working insane hours and I think the fact that she's a woman and housework is "expected" of her makes her need for support seem less important than it is.

Honestly, I think that if this is the husband's problem, he needs to either deal with it (ex: by scheduling them to come when he's not home), or do the work of the cleaners himself. He might agree to do the latter--but in this society it's a rare man who'd follow through.

[kutsuwamushi]

I want to know, if the male fiancé doesn't want to hire help, is he genuinely prepared to do 50% or more of the household labour?

I'll go farther: Is he genuinely prepared to do all of the household labour that this housekeeper would do?

The LW works the equivalent of two full-time jobs. It's an extreme situation, even though it's thrown in as a kind of afterthought. As her partner, he needs to support her, even if that means doing more of the household chores than would be "fair" in a less extreme situation. She just can't do it. He needs to either agree to the housecleaner, or do the work that the housecleaner would do.

Women have been supporting their working partners like this for ages--and the same expectation should be applied to him. If she works more hours then it's reasonable for him to do more household chores. The rule isn't, suddenly, "wait, no, anything more than 50% isn't fair" once the person contributing more than 50% is a man.

[cereta]

I had a similar thought around the tiny little sentence, "I need help." My admittedly cynical mind went to the ideas pointed out by xenacryst, but it's also likely that she would need help even if he is carrying 50% of all labor.

I can't remember a time when spouse and I split things 50/50. First I was doing more because he was working insane hours and I had a flexible schedule. Now he does more because I have health challenges that make just working full time difficult. If she's working those kinds of hours, and he's not, he needs to be prepared to pick up the slack. Or agree to the housekeeper.

[shreena]

80 hours a week! If that's 5 days a week and she has an hour in total commuting, she gets 7 hours at home a day, which presumably she needs to use to sleep.

[kaberett]

So we're in a somewhat similar position, in that my partner would prefer to hire a cleaner to cover his share of the housework and I (a) have hilarious trauma around Having Servants In The House especially while I am, (b) spend most of my time at home, and (c) would somehow need to find a cleaner (or agency that supplies cleaners) who reliably did not smoke and did not wear clothes that had been smoked near since last being washed.

The way we sort this compromise out is that I do a disproportionate amount of the emotional labour of keeping track of which in-home jobs need doing, and do as many of them as I can within the limits of disability and achieving acceptable-to-me quality of life, and A deals with the vast majority of jobs that involve Actually Talking To People or min-maxing deals (like utilities, because he actually enjoys that), and if I say "hey, A, xyz need done" he will Do Them -- or tell me that he doesn't have the cope/energy/time right now, but has set himself a reminder/can I please remind him in [specific time interval] if it hasn't happened.

So I think it depends a lot on fiance's reasons for the hard limit (which sounds like "financial anxiety") and what compromises have been suggested by him (like "okay, so I get really anxious about this specific outlay, can you please cover the entire cost of the equivalent of "your half" of the housework and either I'll chip in if my chores get done or I'll take on a disproportionate amount of responsibility for some other bill", e.g.), but if as is suggested by the letter and seems likely what he means is "I would rather we not actually spend any time together ever because you'll be cleaning/you need to change from a job you apparently love that is presumably extremely well-compensated but I can't face having that actual conversation so I'm going to make it about cleaning instead" or similar, then... yeah, that's A Different Kind Of Problem.

[xenacryst]

Excessive and a waste of money. Oh, stop it right there. We've been down this road before, and it never ends well. I'm just wondering if this letter was actually written some time back, lost in a time loop, and the LW then recently wrote this: http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a12063822/emotional-labor-gender-equality/

(Mind you, I'm sympathetic to the class and personal space issues discussed above, but that's not in evidence in this letter.)

[minoanmiss]

This is the comment I wa about to write but your version actually has the article rather than vague mentions of An Article I Read Recently.

[tielan]

Man, reading that article was stressful and I'm not even partnered with a guy.

I'm with the "is he willing to put in 50% of the work - particularly the emotional labour that is done without needing instructions or a pat on the head?" crowd. Admittedly, it has to be negotiated with respect to people who have issues with other people coming into their personal/safe/private places, but...if they can afford it and she doesn't want to, and she's going to end up doing most of the labour (physical and emotional) then SHE GETS THE DAMN SAY.

Also, if it's a psychological thing - if, in his brain, her care of the household (by cleaning) represents her care for him and their family - he may need to deal with his expectations of a 'wife' with counselling.

[moem]

How many hours does the financé work? That piece of information is missing here. It seems patently ridiculous to me if he expects the LW to do the cleaning when they're working for 80 hours a week, so he can either suck it up and have the cleaning done professionally, or suck it up and do it himself.

[shirou]

I don't know how people function without housekeepers. My wife and I both work, I travel a lot, and we have two kids. Without our housekeeping service, our house would be a wreck. The LW's fiance needs to get over himself.