Reply to S/o outsourcing cleaning as a relationship fix

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
The conflict is that you are both hungry, but neither of you wants to prepare food.  
You could solve it by your method of talking and talking about why each of you don’t want to cook, why the other person should cook, and eventually come to a resolution.  
Or, you could solve it my way, and just order takeout.

Both ways solve the proble

[b]The other thing you can do is create a conflict where there isn’t one and insist that everyone needs to have a meal prepared at home every day, so either he can cook half the time, or you can do it all of the time and resent the hell out of him.  [/b] Frankly, this is the path I see a lot of women take.  [/quote]

I guess the way I see it is that a house has to be cleaned (much like you have to eat). A husband saying, I know the house has to be cleaned but I'm not going to clean it so it's your problem to deal with, and the wife then having to be the one to either (1) clean it or (2) hire a maid I think is crap. The husband saying, I know the house has to be cleaned and I don't want to clean it so either (1) you can clean it or (2) we can hire a maid is not a problem. Because then the wife can decide what she wants to do. But it seems like in many of the posts (and not all in this thread, so it's not fair of me to assume that you've read those as well), the husband seemed to think that cleaning the house was a problem that was entirely the wife's. I guess in my mind there is no conflict if both parties agree that they will support the other's choice regarding the house. We have a maid so I've never felt like there is conflict in our relationship about cleaning, but perhaps I misinterpreted what the poster was saying. [/quote]

Does the couple in your example have separate finances?  I don’t really see the difference between “hire a maid,” and “we can hire a maid.”  
I guess that the difference is in what happens when your housekeeper is on vacation or if she quits, but i have never seen a post where people are complaining that their spouse isn’t helping when the housekeeper is out of town.  
Most posts are women getting this tunnel that *they* have to do everything (because their mothers did), and not widening their view enough to see other possible solutions.  .   [/quote]

DP, and one who really agrees with the overarching point made above of how you can frame these problems in ways that harm your marriage and ways that help your marriage. I really agreed with that and think its true. But PP is also making a good point, which is when the decision making/mental load falls entirely on the woman.

A lot of what happens in these type of situations isn't an actual conscious decision. It isn't a DH saying "I don't want to clean a bathroom ever" and a wife saying "I also don't want to clean bathrooms" and then having to 'fix' that conflict. What happens is that the DH just doesn't do it, and the DW brings it up and he will clean it for a couple weeks and then she's in the position where she's the one who has to bring it up. And she's the one who has to suggest hiring the cleaning service. And then she's the one who has to find the cleaning service. And she's the one who has to pay the cleaning service. And that all adds up in its own way, and since the decision making on whether and who and how to pay all falls on her, then it feels more like she is making a choice about whether to do more work herself (via cleaning) or whether to spend the family's money (cleaning lady). The DH is not an active presence here (not always of course).

When you want to order food you say, 'hey I don't want to cook, do you want to or should we order' and he says 'we should order' and she says, 'ok what do you want' and there is a back and forth there. They ARE solving that problem together in a way that does not happen for 'chores' as that is a much larger and more complicated umbrella.

Both partners need to meet in the middle. The mental load partner needs to be ok with letting things go, and the along for the ride partner needs to intentionally make choices that make them more involved in the family.

After we had our second kid, I was really struggling with keeping up, and my husband one day, unprompted, was like, "I'm going to take over the laundry permanently." He saw that I was struggling, he identified a large chore that I particularly struggled with and that he didn't mind doing, and he took it over ENTIRELY. He does my laundry too. He orders replacement tide pods. He manages the folding and distribution part. He owns the entirety of that chore. I didn't have to assign it to him. And that taking a proactive step I think strengthened our marriage like 10 times over. It set a tone from that day forward that he was paying attention. And while I still carry most of the mental load, he is always trying not to be someone I am also having to manage, he takes kids to doctors appointments, he remembers to pick up milk, he remembers to bring in extra clothes/diapers to daycare when they are due. And so yes, on my end, I don't get mad at him when he drops a ball here and there, because on his end, on the whole, he is actively (and effectively) trying and helping all the time. [/quote]

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