ok not my usual blogging subject but this article on chores and how they get shared out or not in relationships between men and women threw up no surprises. every survey i've ever seen always shows up that men do not pull their weight or take responsibility in household chores (cooking, laundry, cleaning, picking kids up etc…) and that's in relationships where both partners work – of course there are plenty of exceptions. why? i have no idea! though this article describes a common pattern of not taking responsibility for the man but of festering anger and not communicating about it on the side of the woman doing the bulk of the chores. i see this played out quite often… there are three pages of comments on the article already which are also worth a read.
i'm not even going to to attempt to hang my dirty washing out in public – you can ask jen about that! but read the article and talk about it with your partner. if you are not in a relationship phew – you can avoid all this – but you just have to do everything!
I find things like doing the washing up can be quite meditative, and a good way to loose yourself for a few moments by focusing on the task at hand.
You’ll laugh at this, but Ray Mears did a program on the Canadian settlers and how the work of umm.. “settling” was quite meditative and spiritual. They used to sing various songs as they went, and one of the tunes was played on the program. I find my self humming it to get into the right frame of mind.
Bom bom bom bom bom….
btw – the post title doesn’t mean i am angry! i realise that in facebook and twitter the post comes up as ‘jonny is… angry’… i am still my usual laid back self 🙂
feel free to be angry if you want to !
I am single and loooovvve doing housework…but as I have a back problem am not able to do it…so rather than getting angry at having to do it all I get andgry at having to pay others to do what I love doing! This life is full of contradictions!!
I wonder if gay couples are better at sharing the chores than straight couples. Is this purely due to them having the same gender roles or is there anything they could teach us?
I feel a bit sheepish reading all this…Phil didn’t know how to operate the washing machine until 2000 (by which time we’d been married 19 years) when I flitted off to the continent for 6 weeks and left him with the kids. A short ‘training course’ later he took over the washing and has done it since. I would do it but he usually gets there before me. He regularly trundles off to the supermarket on Sunday when I am at church, having planned the week’s menus and written a list. His mobile is top of the school emergency list for my youngest daughter. Trouble is, he is so busy eating up these chores, the general state of repair of the house could be better…suppose I’ll have to get handy with power tools. 🙂