This comes as a surprise to no woman on earth and is exactly the reason I will not ever get married. I don't want all the baggage that comes with being a "wife".

When I first got married, I did all the housework during the day when my husband was at work (I'm a grad student, so I was home a lot during the day). That got old really quickly-- especially because he didn't even notice that I was doing it all! Now I clean when he's around and we end up cleaning together. Or when I cook, he does the dishes. It's so easy to just take it all on yourself, though. I have to conciously stop myself from doing it all.

Wife means Wash, Iron, Fuck, Etc.

I had heard that married women do more housework than single women, and that married men do less than single men, but the stats on cohabitators is surprising. My boyfriend and I have been living in sin for three years now and we've distributed the chores pretty equally. We even have separate laundry baskets. Bank accounts, too. I don't think those things would change if we got married, but I'm not interested in finding out for sure.

Hell to the yes, DarthVelma!

That's why I'll never get married. What should be a union truly separates the couple, all for the sake of what marriage is "supposed" to be. Why would I want that?

I am a cohabitator, and my guy probably does more housework than I do. He definitely does more child care. (I work more hours)

I wonder if the cause and effect are reversed, though.

Liberal, egalitarian, hippie feminist types are far more likely to cohabitate than conservative traditionalists are.

Therefore, perhaps married women do not do more housework BECAUSE they are married - but rather, they are married because they are more traditional.

Yay for living in sin!

That's a very good point, Anne. I had similar thoughts after I kept reading about how couples who live together before marriage have a higher divorce rate than those who don't. No one ever seemed to follow up with a "why," so I figured it had more to do with personal politics in general than cohabitation in particular.

There are several reasons I am probably going to die alone.

1) I would rather eat dirt than become pregnant...I'm 5'3 and I need the whole shitty experience of pregnancy(as I see it...no offense to those of you who enjoyed pregnancy, more power to you) like I need a hole in the head. I care about kids, I want to work with kids as a career and will probably be making $50,000 or less annually, yadda yadda yadda. Like kids, honestly think I'd go nuts trying to raise a happy, healthy, well-adjusted child. I'll soothe my cravings (if they come up) with two cats.

The problem is, even if I decided to have kids, I'd adopt.

The type of guy I can imagine marrying is the type of guy who would probably want kids, and ones that had his genes. Maybe if we can work it out so that HE'S the one that has to f*cking get pregnant and go through childbirth...

2) I can't imagine living with another person whose around to see me at my worst (esp. one that I'd want to impress most of the time--as I'd consider my long-term BF/hubby--at least in the beginning) and yes, another person (or persons--again with the kids!) that I'd have to clean up after. I've gotten enough of that with being the only female child.

I've been married for about 3 years- we lived together first and I cleaned more then. That got old. So I stopped housework altogether! It's a balancing act. I think when we first got married I did feel like I had some pressure to be more 'wifely' but I got to the point where I was fed up and said, you know, this isn't who I am. If the house is a mess, so what. If you don't want things to be messy, you clean them.
At this point, I am in grad school and working (and raising two kids) so the housework isn't even close to on my radar- that's all him for now!

as far as 'traditional' people being the ones to get married- on a personal level I have to disagree with that.

I'm a progressive, egalitarian, hippie (sort of), rad fem and I'm married. We work hard to maintain an equitable division of domestic labor. And when I say work hard, I mean work hard. We have to stop, reassess, and talk about it probably at least once a month. I am usually the one who instigates the talk (since I am usually the one who feels like she is doing more than half of the chores). This gets tiresome, but it's usually worthwhile and I feel like we're growing as a couple in a positive direction.

But I wouldn't have married somebody that wasn't open to that kind of growth, and we lived together for some years before getting married so the post-marital issues were neither new nor surprising to either of us. I think that no matter what, if you are in a hetero relationship (or a same-sex relationship that embraces on diametrical gender roles), you are going to have to do some hard work around equality in the household. We all come into our relationships with baggage, and we are all products of the patriarchy.

"Therefore, perhaps married women do not do more housework BECAUSE they are married - but rather, they are married because they are more traditional."

Good point. I think the stats are also affected by the fact that a lot of cohabitators just might not be married YET, and are younger with less money, more roommates, and more erratic schedules. For instance I live with my boyfriend and a roommate, and we all go to college at different times and have crappy jobs with odd hours. So housework kinda gets done by whoever has free time at a given moment.

I've only been married a little over a year, so the data is definitely new, but I my husband may actually do a little more housework than I do at the moment. He's a graduate student, I work full time. We usually split the cooking or cook together, but he often does the dishes and other minor cleaning during the week, and then we both do a much more intensive cleaning on the weekend.

That will probably change, though, as our situation changes. And given how dynamic lives in general are -- married or not -- I think that it definitely is a balancing act that, as Ottermatic points out, you're almost constantly aware of and having to reassess as things change. But I think it's normal, even healthy to check in periodically to make sure that both parties feel that the divison of labor is equitable -- for so long there's been the *assumption* that men go to work and women clean the house and raise babies.

The cohabitation stats are a little surprising, though -- and I think it may be the result of some circular thinking wrt marriage and who does it: people who are more traditional tend to marry more often and fulfill traditional gender roles, but I think there's also the expectation that if you choose to get married, you must be more traditional, so there's pressure to act that way.

BEING married does not create the issue- WHO you marry creates the issue. My partner and I co-habitated before getting married, and we split housework pretty equally. Partner also has more childcare responsibilities time-wise due to our working schedules.

In my life, there is NO BAGGAGE that comes with being a wife that isn't already brought to the table by family and upbringing and the lives we lead before we were married. Period. Pejorative acronyms for "wife" and a declaration that becoming one is somehow anti-feminist or irrational does nothing to further the position of women in society and their roles therein. Let's not create an "us against them" mentality within our own gender.
That said, co-habitation rocks the house and I will definitely tell my children to co-habitate before getting married, if that is the path they want to take. You learn about your significant other that way, and the expectations that will come when you're married. A guy who doesn't pick up the apartment won't turn into a husband who picks up the house.

I have a theory that women tend to be more action-oriented when it comes to cleaning then men are, and in some relationships, men take advantage of that. Hell, if my partner were to clean up the whole house before I came home and didn't talk to me / expect me to pitch in, I would NEVER CLEAN AGAIN. As it is, I, like Emily mentioned, have to stop myself from doing all the housework because I'm not patient enough to have the conversation about the dishes and my partner could care less if the sink is overflowing. I've learned to let the overflow go, and eventually they will get done.

I've been married for nine years and housework has (thankfully) never been a problem for us. I think there are two reasons for this 1) we both had one parent who did all the housework when we were growing up (my mom, his dad) and 2) we came to an agreement on housework and kids before we got married. Though there are times when one of us has to pick up the slack for the other (he's on call at work, I've got finals, one of us is sick), we have managed to divide everything in a way that is fair and sets a good example for our kids.

Could this be because couples shaking up are disproportionately likely to be young and the women refuse to put up with this crap.

I'm with ottermatic. I married young-ish (at 24--13 years ago) and it's been a balance we need to negotiate and re-negotiate with our changing lives. Right now things are pretty egalitarian in terms of cooking, cleaning, laundry and other housework, but I know that I have a larger workload in terms of finances, and the family calendar. I have the more demanding and higher-paying job and we're in the process of hiring a housecleaner to alleviate some of these issues--not the perfect solution in the grand scheme of the world, but it is part of making my career and family life satisfying.

I hate to scare women, but having kids was the big changer in the home arrangements. Being the gestator and feeder of the children really tipped the workload to my side, I did a lot more then because I had the physical demands of babies to contend with and it was easier for me to do other tasks because I was at home.

For me, the biggest issues for feminism are in the private sphere of heterosexual relationships where I think things have changed very little, even with hippie feminist types, especially after they have children and regardless of whether they're married or not.

I don't know what it is that makes this happen but I think it is more than just one's politics. I got married (eloped actually) because I decided I was better protected under Canadian law married than cohabitating and it was a strategic legal decision more than a romantic one since we had be cohabiting for a few years already.

I'm married, and we've definitely fallen in to the trap of traditional gender roles. I work, but he has the more demanding career. I end up doing more housework. The work he does around the house tends to be the more traditionally male activities (fixing things, taking out the garbage, maintaining the cars.)

I think part of it is efficiency. Growing up as a girl, I learned domestic skills, he learned mechanics. We married later, so we both had to learn to do some of everything. But I'm still way more efficient at putting together a meal, and he's way more efficient at fixing the broken dishwasher.

We also had a child from the beginning of our relationship. (I was a single mom.) Once children are introduced, the total workload increases so much that it's much easier to do what is the most efficient.

Perhaps, if we'd had more time as a childless or cohabitating couple, we would have divided things up more equally. But with all taking care of a child, efficiency has been our rule.

However, we are aware of this, and we are trying to raise our boys to be good at everything. They cook with me and work on the car with dad, help me with the laundry and mow the lawn. We go out of our way to show them fathers who cook and women mechanics.

My husband and I lived together for 3 years before we got married and have been married for 2. This has definitely not been my experience.

But then again, I made sure to not get married to an asshole ;)

Bizarre.

It's hard to tell without seeing the data, but it sounds like this is a comparative/cross-sectional study, rather than a longitudinal one. It compares married hetero couples to unmarried, cohabitating hetero couples. It does not compare the division of labor of unmarried, cohabitating hetero couples to the division of labor those same couples may or may not re-negotiate several years down the line after marriage.

So Stephanie Coontz's conclusion that "Even the most untraditional couple will fall into it after marriage, unless they are very conscious of it. They judge themselves against this centuries-old standard of what a wife does, which they didn't have to do when they were just living together." Is not warranted by the study. It's just as posible (or, judging by my observations, more probable) that Annethropology's hypothesis is right--couples who cohabitate without marriage are less traditional than couples who marry, and therefore less likely to fall into tradiional division-of-labor patterns.

It would be very interesting indeed to learn whether individual cohabitating couples' divisions of labor grow less equitable after marriage, but it doesn't look like this study was set up to answer that question. That handwringing is premature.

My husband and I have gone back and forth on the housework issue. At first, he was terrible. His apartment before we moved in together was spotless, and he honestly expected our place to be that way without him doing any work. He would tell me that he didn't have any idea how to work a dishwasher, which especially frosted me because this was the first place I'd ever lived with one and I had to figure out. Since I was in school and home more hours than him, he actually told me that I should do more of the housework. When I asked if that meant he should pay more of the bills, he got pissed. We got into so many fights because I wouldn't clean "enough", and he wouldn't clean at all. At one point, when I was tight on money we made an arrangement where I'd do all the housework and he'd pay all the bills. That lasted all of about 2 weeks before he decided I wasn't doing a good enough job and called off the arrangement. So we went back to splitting the bills and fighting over me not cleaning enough and him not cleaning at all. Finally, I snapped. I had taken on a new job and I didn't have much free time, so I stopped cleaning altogether. Seriously. Well, I did my own laundry and made my own meals. When all the dishes were dirty, I'd wash whatever I needed for a meal, and then put them back by the overflowing sink. It worked. After a couple weeks, I came home and the dishwasher was running (guess it wasn't that hard to figure out after all).

I wish I could say things have been great since then. They're certainly better, but they've been up and down. It's really hard to strike an equal balance. I would have to say that the best time (in terms of fights and having a clean apartment) was last year after he quit his job to start an internet business. We agreed that since he wouldn't be making any money during that time, he'd do all the housework and I'd pay the bills. Because of the arrangement he couldn't complain at me for not doing anything, and because I have a higher tolerance for mess than he does I never complained, and the apartment was always clean. It was great. But his business didn't take off and things were getting too expensive for me, so he went back to work after about 6 months. Now we're trying to divide housework evenly, and it's hard, and we still fight. Just last night he was complaining at me because he was doing to dishes (my chore now) because I had let them pile up. His equivalent chore is the cat boxes - which actually I did last. I wish I made a lot more money so I could just go back to paying him to do housework so I wouldn't have to hear anymore how I do a terrible job at it. Maybe that wouldn't be fair either, because it would just be the breadwinner/housewife model with reversed genders, but I'm really not sure how to do fair, especially when two people have different ideas about what clean looks like, like we do.

I'm married and we don't "work" at equally dividing the labor. I live with my husband because I love and respect him and he feels the same towards me. He would never expect me to do anything because of my gender. If he felt otherwise, he wouldn't be the guy that I love and who has been my best friend for over a decade.
In our house, chores, work, and childcare are divided pretty evenly. We pick up the slack for one another when things are rough (illness, my bed-ridden pregnancy, business trips, finals). There are some things that he's better at or doesn't mind doing (electronics, lawn mowing, food prep., washing dishes, scrubbing toilets) and their are thing that i do better or don't mind doing (laundry, weeding/watering the garden, cooking, detail cleaning the house).
Since the begining, we have shared child care evenly. At some points, he spends more time working than helping with the kid (and pets) and at other times it makes more sense for him to be the primary caregiver. I wouldn't have become a parent with a guy who didn't want to be deeply involved in the day to day care of his own kids. My guy is a wonderful and loving dad.
We go over bills together, so that we both know what's up with our joint bank account.
And we both make sure that the other has time to pursue individual interests.
People are always impressed with my husband. He finds it both odd and annoying that he gets so much applause for doing nothing more than what I do.
The headline assumes that NO man will ever hold is weight around the house. I think that attitude lets guys off the hook. And it also doesn't take into account the guys out there, like my husband, who are already responsible and considorate parnters. If you marry a sexist, selfish guy, you can't expect a very equal, happy marriage. But if you marry or shack up with a great partner, things can be very nice indeed!
Oh! And I DESPISE doing the dishes. Happily for me, I've only had to do the dishes about 3 times in 2007 because that's my husband's job, not mine! Ha!

I married a Nice Guy who is turning more pro-fem as both of us learn more about feminism and the row to hoe, so to speak, and how that gets expressed in our relationship.
In our cohabitating years when we were both students, I did most of the housework. In our married years when he's had a job and I'm in grad school, I've done most of the housework.
What we think of as housework is different, though--I think about baseboards and dust and mopping. He thinks about dishes and laundry. It took a couple of years, but now we have a system where he does all the dishes and laundry, and cooking on weekends, and I do all the other upkeep, plus cooking during the week. It's not exactly equitable but it works for us and is fair enough to keep me from bitching about it all the time.

Sorry about the quote marks around work in my first sentance. That was a different sentance before my sloppy editing. It sounds condescending as it is. That was NOT my intention!

Hmm.
Since my partner and I moved in together, this has been something we've had to work on a lot. He is very forthright about demanding that we divide housework equally, as am I, but it still seems to break apart in a way that leaves me with more work. Most of the time it's not that he won't do his share, but that he's not doing it the way I want or as quickly as I want, so I wind up doing it and then he gets upset that I did. So, that's totally my fault. Yet I still do it and still wind up frustrated in the end. I think I need to take advice from some of the previous commentors who said that you just have to learn to let things pile up in order to share the responsibility. If you expect everything to be done to your standard (assuming you're the one with higher standards) you'are going to end up doing it yourself.

I do think that marriage comes with greater inherent pressure for domestic conformity. People pressure you to adapt to a traditional wife identity. As said before, we're not married, but my mother still thinks it's weird that I don't do his laundry.

Of all these studies, the general conclusion always seems to be that married women do the most housework, cohabitating women do the second-most, and single women do the least. For me, this hasn't been the case. I've always lived with messy roomates who didn't prioritize things the same as me, so I've always been the leading cleaner.

I'm agreeing with AnneThropologist (nice handle!) here:

Liberal, egalitarian, hippie feminist types are far more likely to cohabitate than conservative traditionalists are.

Therefore, perhaps married women do not do more housework BECAUSE they are married - but rather, they are married because they are more traditional.

And yes, I had this very experience, which is one big reason why my marriage is on the verge of breaking up. We're both sloppy, but he's a lot worse than I am, and everybody (especially and worst of all his family) seems to blame the mess on me. If he were better with the traditional masculine relationship gestures (bringing flowers, earning most of the money without complaint) it would help mitigate the situation (it would be far from my ideal, but it would be one way I could justify staying), but right now it's like I've got the worst of both worlds: the homemaking duties of Donna Reed and an "egalitarian", i.e. mostly romance-free, love life.

I agree with AnneThropology and kmg...although I don't necessarily doubt that the same couple might divide tasks differently before and after marrying or that the act of marrying itself might make some contribution, I have my doubts. For example, I don't have my own stats to back this up, but if married couples are more likely to have children than cohabiting couples, and if having children makes it more statistically likely that one parent will be home while the other has paid employment outside the home, and if a stay-at-home parent is more likely to do more of the housework, and if this person is more likely than not to be the wife...it isn't unreasonable to think that this might skew the numbers a bit. Now, some of these couples may decide that mom will stay home with the kids because of tradition (maybe quite a few), but that's not necessarily the case...it might just make sense in their particular circumstances.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't really believe that we can look at these numbers and conclude that "something just happens" when people go from cohabitation to being married, and that we suddenly feel an urge to live up to gender roles when the marriage license is filed. If the study had taken into account parental status and/or out-of-home employment differences (say, compared cohabiting couples in which both people WOH to married couples in which both spouses WOH), that might have made it a more reliable measure of the effect of marriage itself.

Merle, my stomach turned as I read your comment. I really mean this as no offense to you, but you could do better.

And I'm sorry to hear about your predicament, florafloraflora. That's sad. :(

I have been married for nearly 8 years, lived with my husband for about a year before that. We've lived in 3 countries during that time, have had 3 children and our domestic and professional duties continuously change. At present, I do nearly 100% of the domestic stuff and he does nearly 100% of the money earner stuff. He works/commutes about 13 hours a day. He is naturally a tidier person than I am, actually gets nervous and starts cleaning when he gets home if it's a mess (did I mention we have 3 kids?) These things change as needed. I can't work legally in this country, so I'm home all day. It's not the division of labor either one of us want because it's incredibly unfair to both of us and not a very financially stable place to be. But I'm starting to wonder if it isn't a better idea to just figure out how to make it work here (I receive my permanent residency within the next month) rather than moving back to the US. But that's a whole other issue!

I also think it's unfair to say that women who choose marriage over "shacking up" are more "traditional" in their values. Like we lose our feminist membership cards when we say "I do." There are a myriad of reasons for getting married that may or may not make sense to others, but that work for those of use who decided to get married (and were legally allowed to, again, a whole other issue.) Choosing to live with your romantic partner and not get married doesn't make you more of a feminist either, and choosing to marry your romantic partner doesn't make you "traditional" and un-feminist.

Sigh. I guess I just get frustrated because if anyone were to look at my life right now, without taking into consideration anything other than the amount of housework I do compared to my husband, they could jump to all sorts of erroneous conclusions about who I am, what I believe and what my relationship with my husband is like.

And people wonder why I just asked my mother what she thought of "bastard grandchildren"...

I'm getting married next weekend, thanks for horrifying me before hand :P

I'll let you know if he stops doing the housework after next Saturday.

Just one more reason why my life is NOT normal at all. We lived together 6 years before getting married (8 years this past May). He's totally the house cleaner and rags on me to do my fair share. I love him!!

I tell all young women, it's not just the institution, it's who you enter into it with.

It's not a perfect marriage, but far from what is traditional or typical.

My stats: seven years of marriage and a year of cohabitation.

We've got it split evenly. We started a thing where we only clean when both of us are around, so that we put in equal time. If one of us does something while the other person's out, the other person is obliged to do something later.

This usually happens with the laundry or dishes. I'll start a load before work, and he'll put away.

It works for us.

"it's not just the institution, it's who you enter into it with."

That's just so true!

One of the reasons I love my man so much is he just is not one of those people who hasn't questioned his social conditioning and come to his own conclusions regarding his gender role and himself as a person.

Does this study control for hours worked outside the home? That could well be cause for the difference. Are women who are "shacking up" more likely to be working full time than married women? If a woman is working less outside the home, then it's reasonable for her to assume more household duties.

My personal experience with my ex is that he did no more nor less housework when we were living together than when we married. He always did some, but not much, and when he did occasionally do a sinkload of dishes, he considered it proof of what a wonderful husband he was and expected a gold star. Reason #312 why he's my EX-husband.

(The man with whom I happily now shack up has no such issues, and if anything, I think he does a little more than I do.)

I'd be interested in seeing how the numbers divvy up when it's same sex couples. Does nayone know if a study like that's been done?

I end up doing most of the chores partially out of gender relations inertia that the both of us are still trying to unlearn. For example, I'm trying to relay to him that reminding him to do a chore is still, ultimately, me taking responsibility for seeing that it gets done.

Fortunately, his mother was a feminist, and that makes it a little easier.

That, and he cooks, which I hate to do. Huzzah!

I wonder if the study thought to account for whether or not the couples had children living at home. In my experience, that's the number one reason that previously egalitarian couples revert to "traditional" gender roles around the house.

My wife is more frugal that I am, so I think the biggest fight I've had with my wife on housework is the degree to which we pay someone else to do it.

There are just many more things in life that seem more important to me, so I have always insisted on having a cleaning agency clean once a week. Same with mowing the lawn. We hire a neighbor kid to do it. When we are not working, I want to enjoy that time to the best of our ability.

Her parents still give her grief on hiring out for cleaning and lawn care/landscaping. I've never really understood this.

Cooking is pretty much split. We both like to cook, and we do a fair share of takeout. With our 9 month son, I take the morning responsibilities, and my wife handles the evening responsibilities.

This for the most part leaves laundry and some other items. We're both professionals, so most of the laundry is at the dry cleaners, but I am pretty protective of doing my portion of the laundry, as I like it a certain way.

The biggest discrepancy is with the finances. My wife handles all of our accounts and bill paying. I really don't do any of it. She could take me to the cleaners if she desired.

We are both pretty much neat freaks, so day to day pick up and dishes isn't really a problem. If we didn't have the means to pay for outside help, I'm not really sure if it would be an issue or not.

I think all in all, if you are dedicated to each other, the issue will resolve itself if both spouses are up front with each other. You have to be honest and discuss the issue. I can't though in a million years see how it would tip the scale in not getting married. If it is an issue, then it is probably the wrong person, not the institution itself.

Congrats, mara jade! May you live happily ever after in equitable-division-of-household-labor bliss! ;)

I'm going to have to agree with KMG from above. Correlation is not causation.

It is much more likely that people who cohabitate are more likely to equally divide the labor than people who marry. There could also be a generational effect of older generations who lean towards traditional marriages.

Without comparing individual couples before and after marriage the conclusion that marriage causes a change in couple's housework behaviors is invalid.

When I was growing up, my dad did a huge portion of the daily housework. He did 100% of the cleaning, most of the daily childcare routines (after infancy), plus all of the traditionally manly stuff like lawn care. The kids (8 of us) pitched in a lot on chores. My mom did the shopping, driving, childbearing, and nursing!

But even with the example of my parents, I have curious urges to do traditionally feminine housecare things to take care of my boyfriends. For example, my new beaux's apartment is a horrible mess. I have to fight off the urge to wash his dishes, just for the principle of it! And I get a huge kick out of cooking for him.

I wouldn't find those urges worrying, except for that I'm not sure yet that he's the type to reciprocate 100%...

I've been married more than a year now and I definitely agree with others that it hugely matters who you marry and it takes persistent work to balance the domestic responsibilities (or any other issues). My husband and I have split up chores evenly according to the tasks we least mind doing. He cooks, I do dishes, he vacuums, I dust/neaten, and then we both do laundry (begrudgingly because we both hate it). I have a lower tolerance for messes and dirt, so we've had some arguments over me "expecting" him to have completed tasks. I don’t think it has anything to do with me being female or being the “wife.� We found a good solution: he has suggested I just ask him (nicely) to do the task and then he does it within a day or two. I initially felt bad asking him to do things, but I don’t think there are many couples (hetero or same-sex) that have the exact same expectations for household duties, so someone may have to initiate things. When kids come into the picture things will probably change, but I know I'm with a partner who wants to divide things equitably and we are good at working out our conflicts.

Steph, kids change a lot of things. I always thought that I did about 40% of the housework, and when my spouse was pregnant the second time, she went on bedrest. From then through convalescence, I did 100%; and I discovered 1) that I had been doing about 40%; and 2) that the difference between 40% and all of it is HUGE. I still do less, because I work full time and my spouse no longer does, but I've found that how much of the labor I do is less of a problem than how much I am responsible for without oversight. The things I do without her even noticing or having to think about are worth a lot more than the things I do when she reminds me they need done, in terms of her stress level. I'm trying to get better at that.

One place where we've achieved a level of equality I'm happy with is childcare. Since my wife does not handle sleep deprivation well, I've always been the go-to parent at night. Late night, wee hours, all my problem. Sick toddler needs minding? Calls for me. Someone sleeps in Saturday? Unless I'm ill, she sleeps in. Even with out oldest, where she breastfed, I put him on my side of the bed, listened to his breathing, and when he needed a feed, I hauled him out, placed him, and burped him when he was done. All she had to do was get him to latch, and she said she barely regained consciousness to do that. So, while she's at home two days a week with the brood, at least in the direct childcare area, we've worked it out so that the grief I deal with is fairly apportioned with the grief she deals with.

I'm still working on the housework.

I've been on both sides of this fence. Cohabited for 4 yrs, was married for 4 yrs to the biggest mistake of my life. I was both the primary breadwinner and the one with primary responsibility for the house, dogs, kid, cleaning, etc. - even when he was unemployed. He was a master of passive aggression and would screw up any domestic chore I insisted he do (shrink laundry, burn meals, bounce checks for bills, overfeed the dogs, forget to feed the baby and so forth).

We fought over these things daily - yes, daily - and never resolved the problem. I divorced him (for this and many other good reasons) at long last and probably added twenty years to my life by removing this source of daily frustration and anger. I'd encourage anyone to whom this situation feels familiar to learn from my mistake, sooner rather than later, and get the hell out of a situation that is unlikely to improve with time.

I married my second husband without living together first (geographic circumstances didn't permit it, but I don't think it would have made a difference anyway). I am currently the at-home one raising the kids (my choice) and he works outside the home to support us. While it is true that the majority of domestic chores fall to me, I believe we have an equitable division of labor *overall.* Moreover, my husband is competent at laundry, cooking, child care, etc. and pitches in when he is at home in the evenings and on weekends. Most importantly, he will do so WITHOUT BEING ASKED because he understands what needs to be done for our home to function.

He also understands that just being at home with small children is a demanding full-time job (harder, IMHO, than the 13 years I spent practicing law) and does not expect me to magically put the kids into suspended animation so that I can also keep the house pristine. It's not, these days, but that's OK because we have other priorities.

We have never had a fight over chores in four years of marriage because neither of us feels taken advantage of. I understand how draining his full-time job outside the home is. He understands how draining my full-time gig in the home is. We help each other out in any way we can because we empathize with one another. And as the kids get older and become capable of handling their own chores, we will share the work of running a household with our boys and our girl alike. Neither of us thinks that it is cute for anyone to be incompetent at life's basic skills.

I completely agree with whoever it was who said "It's not just the institution, it's who you enter into it with."

Someone else mentioned being taught domestic skills as a kid, whereas her male partner wasn't. I had an ex who didn't know how to cook even the most simple foods, and I would be sincerely surprised if he'd ever washed a dish in his life. He wasn't taught any of that stuff, while his younger sister was. It's always struck me as incredibly odd. Who doesn't teach their child basic skills like cooking and cleaning that s/he will need to survive?! I said as much to him, and the relationship ended not long after (couldn't be happier about THAT fact).

Thankfully my husband's parents are (mostly) sane and although they definitely have their sexist moments (such as suggesting he ask my dad for permission to marry me...gag), they still taught him how to cook and do housework. So far we haven't had any difficulty with dividing the housework evenly, and I think that's largely due to the way he was taught to cook and clean for himself.

"I wonder if the cause and effect are reversed, though.

"Liberal, egalitarian, hippie feminist types are far more likely to cohabitate than conservative traditionalists are.

"Therefore, perhaps married women do not do more housework BECAUSE they are married - but rather, they are married because they are more traditional."

Yeah, there's that lurking variable. Ultraconservative couples seem both less likely to live with male partners without marriage and less likely to split chores 50/50, less likely (in some traditions) to divorce, etc.

"I also think it's unfair to say that women who choose marriage over 'shacking up' are more 'traditional' in their values."

So true. It would be more accurate to say that women who are more "traditional" in their values tend to choose marriage over "shacking up," and thus probably make up a higher % of the people getting married than a % of the people "shacking up" (no matter how untraditional the rest of the people getting married are).

As tending to do B does not mean all B-doers are As, after all. ;)

"Who doesn't teach their child basic skills like cooking and cleaning that s/he will need to survive?!"

Someone assuming that the child will always have someone else to do it (mom then dorm dining hall staff then wife and/or servant)? I've even heard of someone raising her daughter this way (basically, study study study study study study study study get rich and hire a maid).

I'm not married, but didn't start living with him until we had been together for more than 5 years. He lived with his parents for that time and I swear to you, the only housework he had ever done involved assembling electrical dodads and programming the computer. It was a total shock to him when he realised that dishes need to be washed, that the bath actually had to be cleaned ("but it gets wet and soapy every day! why does it need be cleaned?"), that dust accumulates after about a week ("where did it all come from?") and that the sheets need to be changed regularly. I couldn't fathom it, and I should state that I'm renowned for being incredibly gross with the not cleaning just generally.

For ages I blamed his mother and the patriarchy and thought I'd shacked up with a closet arsehole and was angry and sad and thought we might have to break up over the housework. Then I realised that he didn't actually expect me to do it all - the problem for him was being confronted with the fact that anything had to be done in the first place, because at his parents' house it had all been done without him actually realising. He was miserable at the fact that all of these things he never knew needed to be done were in fact a part of every day life, and he had to come to terms with the fact that he was going to have to do this for the rest of his life. I had sympathy for that, because I had the same frustrating realisation when I first moved out of home. As I said, I'm gross about cleaning too.

Now, I still probably initiate most of the cleaning, but he pitches in once he's had a nudge. Which I think is as much about personality as anything else. We're both notoriously lazy and messy, which doesn't help.

"Who doesn't teach their child basic skills like cooking and cleaning that s/he will need to survive?!"

As I've mentioned like, once a week on here, my parents didn't teach my brother. I just fought the urge to type "my mom" rather than "my parents," which itself is sexist since we did have TWO parents to teach us stuff. But my mom doled out the chores, and they all went to me. 1.) Cause I'm a girl and 2.) Cause I'm older.
I'm determined not to have an older girl/younger boy pair of children because it was handled so poorly by my mom (and her sister, who treated my cousin - also an eldest girl - as a live-in babysitter for her youngest brother).
Anyway, my mom will laugh about how inept my brother is at basic life skills, but comforts herself by saying he'll find a woman to do it for him.

arleeshar-

my boyfriend was/is THE SAME EXACT WAY!!

Showers need to be cleaned?

How do you change a sheet?

What is this DUST you speak of?

Laundry fairies don't remove dirty clothes from the floor while we're out for the day?

ok, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was close. Now, he does the laundry and most of the dishes, etc., which is nice, but sucks right now, because he's been away for a month...so things are getting kind of bad and I'm a natural slob.

Arleeshar, I sympathize with your (him). Having grown up, first with household help, then with my mom as a full-time homemaker, it took a long, long time for me to accept that I'd have to spend such a huge percentage of my time as an adult on tasks I mostly hate. I still haven't quite gotten over it, and it's been years since I moved out on my own.

I guess the difference in my relationship is that I learned to suck it up because I'm in a girl, so I felt guilty about slacking on housework, while my husband for whatever reason (and I think it's because he's a guy) still feels he should be exempt.

I think there's something to be said also about how we see ourselves perceived.
I know that personally, I will feel judged negatively if people come over and our house is messy. Even though it's just as much his house (and mess) as it is mine, there's an expectation that women are responsible for household maintenance. I am a self-identified feminist, and yet I still feel like the burden falls on me to make sure the house is "ship-shape" especially for guests...

For me, marriage didn't change anything (lived together 3 years, married for 7 years), but having a child definitely did. Since I'm at home and he's at work, I do all housework/cooking etc. He occasionally gives me a hug and says he appreciates it. I'd rather he did the dishes occasionally or something.

I have to say I do do more housework than my husband for the simple reason that he has to work longer hours than I do most of the time. In return he pays for more joint stuff (like our cleaner). He also did all the housework when I had an incredibly busy month at work recently. I don't think it is automatically a bad thing for one person to do more than the other, as long as there is give and take. I made the decision to do a career which left me more time to myself, and he made the decision for a career which gave him more money - so we are each contributing what we have surplus amounts of at the moment. I have to say however, this only works up to a point - no way are there going to be any kids when he works his current hours!

FWIW...I made the comment about being taught domestic chores as a child, while my husband was taught other things. He lived on his own for 20 years, and is certainly capable of taking care of himself. I'm just better at it. I can also change a tire on my car, but he can do it in half the time. Ideally, we know he should cook sometimes while I change the tire, but frankly, with two kids to take care of, we'd rather get it done and move on to something else.

Hopefully our boys will be able to do both...

I've been married for 5 years and my husband still does most of the housework. It's starting to change now that he's working a new job with very long hours and I'm getting the "nesting" instinct (in which I run around the house screaming "Do you understand we cannot have paper on the floor with a BAYBEE IN THE HOUSE?"), but he still does most of the laundry and definitely always cleans the bathrooms.

So as same-sex couples are allowed to marry, gay men will start living in squalor while we gals will begin channeling June Cleaver? OK, OK, I know that's not how to interpret this. It does beg the question, though, of how same-sex couples negotiate household issues. I know some work has been done on this--see, for example, the papers of Dr. Abbie Goldberg, whom I profiled last week: http://www.mombian.com/2007/08/23/from-the-ivory-tower-to-the-family-room/

I think if we're really going to understand gender and household roles, same-sex couples provide an interesting point of comparison. While there's some evidence that household tasks are shared more equally between partners, this is not always the case. When it's not, it's not an issue of gender, of course, but of variations in career, childcare roles, and personal choice. It would also be interesting to see if the children of same-sex parents, when grown, approach household roles in a less traditionally gendered way.

“OK, OK, I know that's not how to interpret this. It does beg the question, though, of how same-sex couples negotiate household issues.�
I’ve met/know of same-sex couples were one partner takes on the “female� role, s/he cooks, cleans , keeps the house, and the other takes on the “male� role. I find it quite depressing actually.

I am currently co-habitating and I have not found the housework equally distributed. I think that it depends on who you are living with and not on whether you are married or not.

Unfortunately, I almost always end up doing the housework even though my partner claims that he will do it because he doesn't do his jobs in the amount of time I would like. For instance, he will let all of the dishes get dirty before he feels the need to wash them and won't do laundry until he runs out of underwear. I find this very frustrating, especially as a feminist. We fight about it a lot but haven't really come to any resolution. It usually ends with him promising to do better and not actually doing anything or he accuses me of being overly picky and bitchy.

I'm glad that most people seem to have a more equal arrangement.

Any tips for solving this problem?

Zrusilla: Wife means Wash, Iron, Fuck, Etc.

HA HA HA! You nailed it!

Before my husband and I got married and we were living together, we split everything down the middle. After we got married I stopped working in the traditional sense and pursued my acting career, which gave me more time at home during the day while I did shows at night. By the time we had our first child, I was doing everything, except acting. Three years later that included all of the child-rearing.

After many attempts at renegotiation, we are now getting a divorce and he gets to feed himself, wash his own clothes and scrub his own damn toilet.

It sneaks up on you and if you do not practice Constant Vigilance, being married can turn you into a "wife" in every negative sense of the word.

this is something i'm worried about because i'm moving in with my boyfriend this weekend! and he's a slob!

i'm admittedly anal retentive about a neat house. that's been my excuse for doing most of the cleaning while co-habiting with roommates. just like everyone said - they don't do it fast enough or well enough. i hated when my mom would do that to me, by the way. clean my room at 7 am and then complain that she does everything around the house. gimme a chance, lady!

i vow to be conscious about the distribution of housework.

I gotta say, this one is a stumper for me. As a life-long feminist who is married to a man who self-identifies as feminist (YAY!), we both agree on the equal split of the labor from an *intellectual* standpoint.

From a practical one? It's a lot more of a struggle. Don't get me wrong -- he helps, a lot. My mom's favorite joke is that if it wasn't for my husband cooking all of our meals, I'd starve (not so, but the takeout places in my neighborhood would probably see a HUGE up-tick in their sales), and he's really good about the dishes and the laundry and all that.

But when it comes to the nasty, nitty-gritty hardcore housecleaning stuff like scrubbing toilets and vacuuming and swiffering the cat hair off the tile (HIS cat!), it's either do it myself, fight about it, or wait for it to get so disgusting that it'll occur to him to do it on his own (considering I once watched him go THREE MONTHS without cleaning his toilet in his old apartment, that's hella disgusting). I try to look at it as each of us doing what we can do, but sometimes I'd gladly take a turn dumping the pasta into the boiling water for him changing the sheets without me asking for once. I've mentioned it to him, and he says "Sure," and then instantly forgets (natch).

Anyone have any advice?

I agree with what many others have been saying. Dividing up household chores is a constant negotiation.
Lately my husband and I have decided to put on a timer for a half hour every evening and clean until it goes off. I feel like we are doing equal amounts now and I always know that I'll have time left to relax afterwards. We were both getting fed up with the way things were before. I was doing most of the housework and spending a lot of time getting angry at him for not doing his share. It was a problem both when we were cohabiting and after we got married.
With our new plan for divying up chores I feel so relieved. So far so good.

princesspajamas -

neon-colored post-it notes to the point of obnoxiousness, and preferably in places that will get in his way (computer keyboard, tv remote, tv screen, favorite items in the refrigerator, etc). I guarantee that he will hate it, but it sure gets the point across, and I doubt he'll keep "forgetting".

The other thing that works, and you may want to try it first, is if you ask him to do something, put a time limit on it, like "would you please change the sheets sometime before we go to bed tonight?" I'm equally good as him at weaseling out of open ended chore requests...so if it can be interpreted as "maybe sometime next week," that's usually what I will take it to mean.

"I'm glad that most people seem to have a more equal arrangement.

Any tips for solving this problem?"

A) Hire a house cleaner? Yes, I'm being serious.

B) Assign specific tasks and create a checklist for both of you on the fridge. That worked pretty well with my ex-gf, since I am not cleanly at all and she was (relatively speaking).

Oh, and

C) set specific cleaning times (e.g., Wed 7pm and Sat 11am are always cleaning time, and we do it together).

D) Put stuff away when you stop using it, instead of leaving it somewhere else to be put away during some other task.

This won't solve all the housecleaning issues, but once I started doing this I found myself spending less time tidying up clutter. :)

"neon-colored post-it notes to the point of obnoxiousness, and preferably in places that will get in his way (computer keyboard, tv remote, tv screen, favorite items in the refrigerator, etc). I guarantee that he will hate it, but it sure gets the point across, and I doubt he'll keep 'forgetting'."

I've heard of something like that being done to get kids to clean up, except the parents didn't write the notes from their own points of view. For example, a note over the bathroom sink saying "hairs in my drain give me a pain!"

I favour a fair and equal distribution of the work needed to be done in a relationship. I am however not so sure that this survey gives the whole picture. Another survey referred to by Slate earlier this year also considered the amount of work done outside the house and found that men and women in developed countries work approximately an equal number of hours per day. Where I live men actually worked a small amount of hours more than men. In third world countries women tended to work more than men. This survey shows that more women than men does more homework - the flip side is that men does more work than women outside the home. If both partners work an equally amount of hours outside the home the housework should be evenly divided between them. But if one partner work more hours outside the home than the other then in my opinion it is fair that the partner at home does more of the housework. The solution to the discrepancy in this survey is not to nag on men to do more nor to co-habitate instead of marry, but rather to get more women to work outside the home.

There is a fascinating, early 20th Century (!)precedent for new forms in sexual relations.

A Bolshevik named Alexandra Kollontai wrote of the "Winged Eros." Roughly put, both men and women should shun marriage -- so bourgeois! The natural way is to freely have sex with whomever they fancy. She became head of the Zhentodel, the Soviet women's affairs agency. Under Stalin, Zhentodel closed, and a return to more traditional gender relations.

On a personal note, I've had many friends who've been called "whores" -- a sad by-product of family values. My husband and I have agreed we may sleep with whom we choose, but to keep mum about it. I'm not so modern I wouldn't be jealous.

For more on Kollantai, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai