Part of being married is the “working out of the details”. The house rules. The who-does-what-and-when. Sometimes that negotiation is complicated, sometimes it’s straight-forward, but it’s completely unavoidable unless one wishes for a spouse to lose their mind over the nth time a plate (for example) is left in the sink by the other.
Depending on the chore, negotiations must take into account:
- number of available daylight hours during which one can perform said task
- physical strength required for the task
- who made the mess / dirtied the item / put THAT there
- who has the stronger skill in that particular area
- who can whine louder and longer
- who’s feeling most put-upon at the time
- who has the stronger gag reflex
- and then a bunch of arbitrary stuff that no one knew about prior to discussion
For example, Coffee is awake (and home) from 8-10:30am, Monday to Friday. He works outside the house from 11am-9pm in order to pay our bills and buy us food. He returns home at 9:10pm. We go to bed around midnight.
This means that, at his disposal during the week, Coffee has a total of 5 hours each day to do his ‘chores’ as well as the other things he wants to do with his time (say, read a book). Plus, I demand that he spend time with me.
I, on the other hand, have the entire day and evening in which to do my chores and the other things I want to do with my time (say, read a book). But, as a result of my higher availability, my at-home daily ‘chore’ list is longer and includes the bulk of the day-to-day life stuff. I do the generic stuff that’s reqired to keep a household running while the other spouse is off making the money to pay those bills.
Things only get complicated when the situation shifts. The renegotiations start right around the time that one of us gets snitty (Usually me. I’m much better at being snitty than Coffee.)
We once had a rule that “s/he who cooked did not clean” which basically meant that the person who took responsibility for making the meal did not have to spend an extra hour cleaning up the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and hand-washing anything that required it. This rule served us well when I was working at Maytag, and then later when we were both home and eating together.
Now that I eat all three meals alone during the week, it’s really not enforceable. I’m pretty sure that if I made myself some dinner and then left the pots and pans for Coffee to clean up after he came home, he’d laugh at me rather than start scraping at the hardened crud. So, I make my food, I put my dishes in the machine and then I clean up the kitchen again.
Yesterday, Coffee came home for lunch. I cooked actual food in actual pots and we ate it together before he returned to work again. Is it his job, or mine, to do the dishes from that meal? (Keep in mind that what we ate was not a 12-course meal involving a lot of fancy bowls and plates; I used the rice cooker, a pot for vegetables and a casserole dish for fish.) Keep in mind, also, that there is no requirement that the meal be cleaned up from immediately – it can wait up to 24 hours, per our ‘house rules’.
Tough call.
Judging from the volume of noise someone is making in the kitchen right now, I’m going to guess that he feels it’s my job to do the cleanup.
From the fact that I’m sitting here typing this you can guess that I feel the opposite.
This means we’ll soon be having one of those ‘talks’ that people have when they live together. And a new rule will be made, or an old one agreed to, or something in between the two. This is one of my favourite parts about my husband – his willingness to HAVE these discussions and his willingness to do it sanely and reasonably and without anyone yelling or slamming doors. His agreement that our relationship is a partnership and REQUIRES negotiation from time to time to keep it moving smoothly is pretty fantastic.
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