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A recent Guardian opinion piece about the gendering of holiday chores has me thinking a lot about dysfunctional patterns of labor in heterosexual partnerships.
It’s a tale that feels as old as time: even in households in which both partners hold full-time employment, women not only perform a disproportionate amount of household labor, including childcare, but they also maintain a higher mental load than their male partners—for example, a running mental checklist of appointments, to-do lists, shopping lists, and so on. It’s easy to see how many women might feel like they’re running on fumes, especially around eventful holidays, and how this could eventually precede among some women a greater desire to scale back their jobs or turn down opportunities for more work responsibility.
But who, exactly, holds the responsibility for this disparity? One gets the sense that many men don’t even think of several of the items that end up on their partner’s mental checklist. Does it make sense to assume that they demand an unfair distribution of household tasks that are not even on their radar? This is likely little comfort, though, to the women who feel that there is a collection of tasks that make a household or holiday run smoothly, and if they don’t do them, who will?
The tentative conclusion that I’ve arrived at after careful observation of my own and friends’ heterosexual partnerships is that women have higher standards related to managing a household than men. There are, of course, exceptions to this and every rule. Generally speaking, though, women seem to exhibit a greater preference than men for a clean and comfortable home, decent but efficient meals, presentable children, having a surplus of household supplies, keeping an organized calendar, and having an awareness of the daily hassles that might emerge before they occur. And it’s these standards that seem to prompt many women—while observing a partner sloppily load the dishwasher, soil an entire set of pots and pans while making spaghetti, or take several months to book a doctor's appointment—to throw up their hands and shout (or think) an exasperated: “Just let me do it!”
And while we’d love to think that our partners recognize how all of our obsessive fussing and tending improves their lives, they seem utterly unaffected when left to their own devices.
What’s it all good for? Casting a cloud over any nice gesture, for one thing. Imagine my panic upon waking up on Christmas morning and finding a surprise New Year’s weekend getaway planned by my partner under the tree. My first question: Did he remember to book a dog sitter? Then: Did he schedule the trip to account for work schedules and doctor appointments? It’s these questions that turn a thoughtful gesture into a stress-fest and teach my partner to doubt his ability to competently plan and execute something meant to make my life better.
Communicating preferences and the value that one attaches to certain tasks (and why) can go a long way when both partners are committed to making life easier for one another and maintaining peaceful cohabitation. If partners can agree on which tasks directly support the most important family objectives, from there they can create an equitable arrangement for the completion of those tasks.
But beyond tasks with a mutually perceived high degree of importance, it’s going to be difficult to get one partner to suddenly care a lot about something they currently don’t care at all about. Perhaps the other partner can be convinced to care somewhat less?
For me, caring less means easing up on some of my standards. It means I’ll need to slowly release my death grip on tasks that I’ve been so sure I know how to do better than my partner. It means trusting that my partner will anticipate problems and that if he doesn’t, he’ll learn from that experience. It means that when I’m ruminating my way through my what-to-worry-about list, I’ll need to stop and ask myself, “What’s the worst thing that will happen if this doesn’t get done today or this week, or if it isn’t done the way I want it done?”
If everyone is alive, unmaimed, and fed at the end of the day but the floors don’t get cleaned, is this an outcome I can live with? I think I’ve just stumbled upon my New Year’s resolution.
