How to get through to DH that doing 80% doesn't count?
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Anonymous
But there's a difference between doing things the way you like them (his way/my way) and doing them acceptably. Some chores are divisible, so you each do your own laundry and get to decide how you want it done. Then there are chores that affect the whole family and need to be done to a certain standard: If I choose to make a nutritionally balanced meal that everyone will eat, I can decide to make everything from scratch or I can buy a jar of sauce, microwave a bag of vegetables, etc. Likewise, I don't get to decide that my husband's shortcuts mean his dinner didn't count. But if his way of cleaning up afterwards means he loads the dishwasher and wanders off, that's not cleaning up. The knives need to be washed and put away, the counters need to be clean. The next person who wants to use the kitchen needs to find it in ususable condition. The person who's getting kids dressed in the morning needs clean clothes for the kids, and needs to be able to find them in a logical place, which is to say, paired socks in the sock drawer of the kid whose feet they fit. |
Anonymous
Please provide the official document detailing universally accepted standards of “acceptable” for every household chore. Because if you can’t, you are once again just listing… wait for it… your PREFERENCE. How are so many of you this dense? |
Anonymous
If the way your spouse does things makes your life harder, then it's not a preference. How are YOU this dense? I mean, I guess two utter slobs could find each other and not care, together, about cleanliness or keeping things in working order or whatever. I believe this is the arrangement Gene Weingarten described in a column about his girlfriend, and it's pretty clear that one of the reasons his wife left him was that she got tired of living with his chaos. I'm sure he saw himself as a down-to-earth, carefree mensch who didn't get hung up on the little things. Meanwhile she called the repair guys as needed and made sure the kids were registered for camp. It's wearing. But just to be clear, I prefer that our house is maintained, our children get nutritious meals, get a certain amount of social interaction, have what they need for school, and are more or less clean most of the time. https://www.swistle.com/2009/10/20/hismy-way-vs-rightwrong-way/ |
Anonymous
You're still missing the point. Why can't the knives go in the dishwasher? They can, but you don't want them to. We put our very nice knives into the dishwasher along with our All Clad pots and pans. It's easier and faster and it's fine. Some people would insist on hand washing them. Fine, then they can do that. Why do the counters need to be cleaned every night? You can wipe up individual spills and do a thorough clean on a lesser basis. My house is generally very clean but I don't obsess about having everything done all the time. Sometimes just a swipe where the sauce spilled and a quick run over the crumbs is fine for that night. Sure, clothes need to be clean but can the kids wear something more than once? And plenty of people keep a basket of socks that people can grab from to make a pair. Who cares if a first grader's socks match? You do, to answer your question. I also care, but then I'm the one who pairs the socks up (or I used to, now my kids are in charge of their own laundry and I don't care if their pair their socks up or dump them all in a drawer). How old are your kids? At a very young age their can pair and fold socks. Also, socks aren't like clothes where they maybe fit for a year - they will fit a range of feet, so just buy all your kids the same size white socks. Problem solved. I want my clothes in rainbow order. I like everything folded how Marie Kondo does it. So I do that for my stuff and I did it for my kids' stuff when they were younger. Now they're in charge of their own clothes (this started around 7). I still wash and sort mostly due to stain treatment but then they get a basket of clean clothes and have to put them away by the end of the day. How they handle their drawers is up to them, although they fold them the same way I always did for them. Having a crappy husband would suck, I would hate that. Mine is wonderful but I don't know if part of our happiness is that I don't expect him to do things my way all the time. I take over the things I care about (as does he - if it were up to me we'd have Peacock and HBO and Netflix that I would watch on my iPad and that would be so he is in charge of the cable and internet and electronics). We divvy up the things no one likes (trash, etc.). Some of the posters here just seem so insistent on their "rightness" that they can't see the forest through the trees and are miserable because of it. |
Anonymous
+1000 |
Anonymous
| My husband is like this and I just had to reframe my thinking. He took out the trash but did not put a new bag in the trashcan. That used to frustrate me. Now I’m glad the only task left for me is to pit in the new bag as opposed to both taking the trash out and putting in that new bad. I mean if he is doing 80% of 20% of household tasks, that sucks. But if he is doing 80% of say 70% of household tasks, that’s more than 50% of the total. That may well be where DH and I are if you take out the hard to quantify mental load. I also read something like for couples who each do approximately half, they both tend to feel like they do way more than that. So really think about what all he does. I choose to just be happy with all of the things DH does, even if he isn’t “finishing” a task in my mind. |
Anonymous
| look into ADD, does he lose things and have a poor sense of direction? |
Anonymous
Completely normal with adhd to struggle differently at home vs at work, and misconceptions like PP’s are unfortunately common. Not to mention that if the husband is on stimulants and takes it in the morning, then yes it would work during the workday but wear off by the time he is back at the house. Adding a booster or even a long lasting non stimulant might help. |
Anonymous
| The task shouldn’t be “laundry”. Break it up into smaller tasks and try to do more things simultaneously for motivation (not always realistic of course). He collects the laundry you run it. You fold and he puts away. He clears the dishes, you load the dishwasher. He buys the seed, you water. You are each doing fifty percent but the tasks are broken up so less likely he doesn’t complete. |
Anonymous
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[quote=Anonymous
Why do the counters need to be cleaned every night? You can wipe up individual spills and do a thorough clean on a lesser basis. My house is generally very clean but I don't obsess about having everything done all the time. Sometimes just a swipe where the sauce spilled and a quick run over the crumbs is fine for that night. Do you understand that PP's problem isn't that the counters aren't spit-and-polished every day at sundown. It's that the counters aren't cleaned AT ALL because whoever was in charge of kitchen cleanup didn't think counters are included. To give you the picture, ALL the crumbs and spills are still there. Untouched. You can't seriously be arguing that it's acceptable to leave it like this. |
Anonymous
| ADHD |
Anonymous
Pp, I think you have a level of cleanliness and housework that is beyond what most people have. Wiping up spills and cleaning up crumbs is what I mean by wiping down the counter. I have no idea what this other thing is that you are talking about. In the same vein, sorting clean laundry, putting it in kids rooms, and making sure the kids put it away *is* doing the laundry. The things that you are saying people need to be okay with *are* the things that people are okay with. They are also the things that aren’t done by a lot of men. |