Nothing Says ‘I Love You’ Like Pitching in With Chores

All I want for Valentine’s Day is not to have to cook, clean, grocery-shop, make the bed, do the laundry and scoop the kitty litter, even for one day.

 My husband of 16 years has at least a million wonderful qualities, but he really doesn’t like to pitch in around the house.

Shortly after we got married, I realized he was perfectly happy letting me do absolutely everything we needed to run the house and keep it from turning into a garbage dump. That didn’t quite work for me, though.

So I “assigned” him the laundry. I asked him to do it once a week. Instead, he did it only when he ran completely out of clean clothes—which is about every two weeks or so—even if I had long since scraped the bottom of my ready-to-wear barrel.

That’s a smelly problem at the home of two gym rats like us. Yet he’d let our sweaty workout clothes stink up the joint until he didn’t have any clean ones to wear.

So I reclaimed the laundry for my own weekly to-do list and asked him to take over the grocery shopping. Same story.

Instead of making it a regular weekly routine, he shopped only every now and then. If we ran out of food, he figured it was simple enough to stop by the in the College Park Shopping Center on the way home and pick up something to carry out.

That didn’t work for me, either.

And then I realized that a clean, well-run house isn’t really that important to him—or at least not as important as it is to me. He loves it when it’s clean and when the fridge is full of ingredients and when I can whip up homemade dinners, but when that’s not the case, he’s cool with eating carryout and with ignoring the  tumbleweed-sized globs of cat hair that accumulate in the corners of the staircases.

 So he does what he wants and I do the rest.

 And this Valentine’s Day, what I want is to do nothing for a day and let him to it all.

In my dreams! Yours, too? Don’t give up hope. Here are some ideas might help both husbands and wives get what they want:

• Faced with a dilemma, I always try to figure out what I’m doing to contribute to the problem. When I realized that a clean, orderly home isn’t as high on Husband’s priority list as it is on mine, I had two epiphanies: 1. If it’s really important to me that my house is always clean, then I might as well just clean it and skip the arguing.  Turns out I’m happier having a clean house than I am unhappy that I have to clean it with no help. 2. Spic-n-span isn’t really as important as I thought.  Who really cares if I don’t have time to make the bed in the morning? Nobody sees it except Husband—who definitely doesn’t care—and me.
• Housework causes tension and arguments in most two-adult households, especially when both partners have jobs. A 2007 Pew Research Center survey on marriage revealed that “sharing household chores” ranked higher on a list of marital worries than children! That tells me it’s worth figuring out.
• Several studies I found online conclude that it’s not just my husband who doesn’t care if the house is clean, it’s most men. In fact, like mine, lots of guys feel perfectly relaxed in the middle of a mess, even as their women fret over it.
• A University of Chicago study even found that men feel unappreciated when they do a lot of housework (um, hello!). But others say women feel more appreciated when their men pitch in.
• And the one I like the best: A University of Washington study of men who did housework and child care revealed that those men are happier in their marriages, and have lower heart rates, less stress, better sex lives and better health. I printed that one out and tucked it inside Husband’s Valentine’s Day card.
• This last bit of research is an if-all-else-fails strategy, and it’s one my husband is happily on board with: Author Kathy Fitzgerald Sherman, who wrote A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce, says you can at least help solve the housework tug-of-war by hiring a maid. In fact, she says, it’s worth giving up other things—like the occasional dinner in a restaurant or shopping trip—so you’ll be able to afford to have someone clean for you.

Here’s wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day in a tidy house and someone to keep it that way for you!

Sharon O’Malley is a freelance writer who has lived in College Park for 12 years.