I was with a group of women the other day and we were talking about our household duties. Some of us are stay-at-home moms, and some of us work and then come home to do our housecleaning etc…All of us have a spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend at home. And every one of the women I talked to agreed on one point.
We would rather do it all than have it done “wrong”.
A couple of us stated that we love it when our spouse helps with certain tasks ….. but stay away from other tasks entirely! We would rather do it ourselves than watch our partner do it and go back to “fix it”.
Now experts say that wives and mothers need to loosen up. That it isn’t the “wrong” way but just a different way than we would have done it. The women that I talked to would disagree. Key examples that kept coming up were the dishwasher and the laundry. Laundry was a bit of a picky point….we didn’t like how our spouse folded the laundry or that he/she didn’t take it out of the washing machine fast enough so it would still be warm when it was folded etc….which is pretty minor when you think of it and maybe most of us need to let that go. Some of us had a problem with the fact that if we fold it neatly ourselves our partner would just shove it in their drawers in a ball anyway. (That last one makes me mad too).
The dishwasher woes seemed more concrete. Especially for the women with husbands. The husbands all seem to be keen on helping fill the dishwasher above other household tasks. After talking to the group I found that they also all seem to be keen on jamming it as full as possible, even if it means slightly stacking things or tipping things on their sides. Then, when it was done washing and the husbands were at work, the wives would go and empty the dishwasher and find that – surprise! – dishes that are snug up against each other don’t get clean. So they would end up rinsing and running the dishwasher again, or scraping and hand-washing those dishes. Which adds to the workload. The husbands seem to ignore or get mad when offered constructive criticism….or straight up criticism. So….many of the women I talked to had “given up” (as they put it) and had banned their hubbies from filling the dishwasher…and whatever other tasks he “helped” with. Instead they said they were “saving themselves time” by just doing it themselves.
Now. Husbands/Spouses/Partners out there: Are you offended? Or are you shaking your head in agreement that this is so true? Or …. Is this all a part of a world wide evil plan to get out of household tasks?
White Picket Fences? 