House of Eratosthenes

“What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment,” said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled “Equality in the Home”.

The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising, the researcher said.

“One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,” he said.

The figures clearly show that “the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” he went on.

So there is a correlation.

Well actually, I do have some experience with this, and it was in the context of an actual marriage. Which ended. Very quickly. And my experience backs up the reverse-correlation they did manage to find: Me “helping out with the housework,” and her finding it unsatisfactory (looking in to the bathroom and muttering “what did you do?”) were chapters tucked into a far broader narrative: The useless clueless husband would take his place somewhere midpoint in a snaky, twisty, dizzyingly-long ~~Congo~~ Conga line of persons, places, businesses & things conspiring to make her life miserable and give her “migraines.”

I think a lot of guys have been there. “What did you do?” followed by yet another disgusted, sad, raspy sigh, followed by “nevermind, I’ll just do it”…um, yeah…you can feel your zest for taking on life and eagerly confronting its challenges, getting sucked right out of your body, like a too-thin milkshake being sucked up a straw. As for the ungrateful ~~bitc~~ bride, I’m sure her feeling of disgust was, and is, quite genuine. Just a bad situation all around.

I don’t wish to pick on the gals here, but this condition within modern wives is not exactly as rare as ice cubes in the Sahara. And not as cherished either. It resembles the sand in that setting, both in abundance and in consequential value.

Point is: The help-with-the-housework thing is not having the desired effect, because it is, in itself, an effect and not a cause. It’s a spurious relationship. These are women who should be alone. They never wanted to be married in the first place, because they never wanted a relationship with a real live grown man in the first place. They wanted a pet, or a stuffed animal. That’s their maturity level.

Oh yeah, and I’m sure the guys have some culpability in this too. My experience is with females and I can’t contribute an informed opinion outside of that, so if a female blogger with a more eventful marriage history wants to write that one up, she should consider herself welcome to do so.

I’m not sure I’m qualified on this one. I was married for 37 years. For the last part of it, I worked and my husband did the housework and cooking. He enjoyed cooking (and I’m sure he didn’t enjoy the housework part. I don’t think anyone does.) Most of the other women I told about this thought it sounded great.
I do the cooking, housework and also work in my current relationship. Yeah, there are times I wish he’d pick up after himself. I don’t have that perfectionist streak, so I don’t care how the housework is done. Someone needs to do the work. Women seem to be more annoyed by messy surroundings than men. If a guy is so clueless that he can’t lift a finger to help out around the house, he’s likely going to be clueless about other things too. Ya gotta pay attention to the relationship or it falls apart.
- teripittman | 09/28/2012 @ 15:10
…dizzyingly-long Congo line…

That would be congA line, Grasshopper.

— Resident Picker o’ Nits
- bpenni | 09/29/2012 @ 08:20
Dang. I suppose me takin’ out the trash, doin’ the yard work, vacuuming, cooking three times a week, and doin’ other miscellaneous household engineering tasks for 23 years was what went wrong. My Bad.
- bpenni | 09/29/2012 @ 08:22
Aw, right you are. You don’t make friends with salad, you don’t make friends with salad…
- mkfreeberg | 09/29/2012 @ 08:30
RE the “what happened” thing. I’ve maintained for a very long time that all of the problems with women can be summed up in two words: They’re people. Given that, recall what Lincoln said, he found that people are generally about as happy as they make up their minds to be. So those guys who are supposed to be ‘fessing up to bad husbands because they’ve found they can’t satisfy their wives anywhere, in anything, in the bedroom, outside the bedroom, at social events, when cleaning the house…well…ya know, women are people and a lot of people have made up their minds to be dissatisfied and unhappy.
- mkfreeberg | 09/29/2012 @ 10:44

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Sharing the Housework Makes Divorce More LikelyFriday, September 28th, 2012

Sharing the Housework Makes Divorce More Likely
Friday, September 28th, 2012