Happy Sexy Love How to bulletproof relationships with happy, sexy love
Hadley Finch intro: Find out what couples really fight
about when they fight so much about chores in a
WashingtonPost.com guest post written by Rachel Kurzius
While the 2006 rom-com “The Break-Up” wasn’t
particularly beloved by critics, it has one scene
that belongs in a museum. In it, Jennifer
Aniston’s character asks her boyfriend, played by
Vince Vaughn, to help her do the dishes after a
dinner party. He demurs. After she outlines all of
the housework she did that day, in addition to her
full-time job, he begrudgingly agrees to join her
at the sink. But neither of them are happy about
it.
“I want you to want to do the dishes,” she says.
“Why would I want to do dishes?” he replies, a
seemingly logical question that utterly misses the
point.
Couples fighting about chores is exceedingly
common, relationship and family therapists say, and
frequently comes up in sessions, especially at the
beginning of counseling. An imbalance in housework
between married men and women is well documented,
even when they earn similar amounts of money. When
it comes to running a home, today’s couples are
reckoning with old gender norms, childhood baggage
and the pressures of modern parenting (plus the
age-old issue of well-meaning outsiders opining).
Between all that and the logistical necessity of
clean dishes and clean clothes, conflict over
household labor can torpedo an entire relationship.
But, for the most part, it isn’t really about the
laundry or the cleanliness of the floors or
whatever the chore du jour is.
“It feels a lot safer to say ‘You didn’t take
out the trash’ than ‘I’m feeling unseen’ or
‘I’m feeling rejected, abandoned, hurt.’
Whatever it might be, that’s incredibly
vulnerable,” says Channing Harris, a marriage and
family therapist with Ethredge Counseling Group in
Charleston, South Carolina. And you might not even
be fully aware which emotion is behind your trash
tirade.
Five mental health care professionals spoke to The
Washington Post about what they’ve observed in
hundreds of sessions and what they’ve tried to
impart to the couples who come to them for help.
Equal isn’t always fair
What fairness actually looks like depends on the
couple. For some people, it might look as close to
a 50/50 split as they can get. Towanda Jackson, a
psychotherapist in D.C., says sometimes couples
become hung up on the idea of a perfectly equal
division of labor.
“Because it’s not a business relationship,
it’s not ever going to be 50/50,” she says. In
a dual-income household, partners might have
different work demands, like varying hours. Jackson
works with military families, where one member’s
job might require the couple to move frequently.
The question couples have to ask is, “How do we
manage to maintain a household when these factors
are present?” she says.
LaNail Plummer, the CEO of Onyx Therapy Group in
D.C. and the department chair of counseling at
Trinity Washington University, observes that
couples aren’t always doling out responsibilities
based on the amount of time available to each
individual, though, which can lead to issues.
“Some couples are still quite traditional, even
in [the D.C.] area, where people tend to be a bit
more liberal in that the person who makes the most
money should be doing less chores in the house,”
she says. She adds that this can create issues
especially in heterosexual couples, due to the
gender wage gap. She recommends that couples
consider the amount of energy and time it takes to
do a job, rather than the dollar amount they’re
paid for it, when dividing up chores.
There’s no one right answer as long as both
parties feel reasonably good about it and can help
the other one out if need be.
Play to your strengths
When apportioning domestic labor, among the biggest
questions is which tasks go to whom. Jackson always
brings this up when she works with couples during
premarital counseling. “We talk about what they
feel their strengths are, and that helps a lot
because there are some who have preferences,” she
says. If one person enjoys cooking or doesn’t
mind doing the laundry, then they can take on those
tasks. Or, if someone simply cannot stand trash
duty, the other can handle garbage night. That way,
fewer chores are absolute drudgery.
(This is also a good time to get everyone on the
same page about what it actually means to “do”
that chore. Does cleaning the floors mean sweeping
them with a broom, or does it also require mopping?
Must one clean the dishes right after eating?
Spelling out those expectations can help couples
avoid accusations of laziness, ineptitude or
shirking duties.)
Keep talking
Just because you agreed to take on cooking
doesn’t mean you’re stuck with the task
forever. Relationships ought to allow for
flexibility. Plummer says that, at minimum, couples
need to touch base seasonally about the way
they’re handling chores. “Each season of our
life, we are experiencing something different. And
when it comes to household responsibility, we see
changes, too,” she says. For example, who will
shovel the sidewalks in winter? Maybe the summer
requires less cooking but more laundry.
Jackson advises weekly chats to go over schedules
and day-to-day responsibilities that might emerge.
If couples don’t carve out that time, they might
never discuss them, leading to disappointment and
fights. “What you’re doing is probably,
you’re filling up a trash bin that is eventually
going to overflow with issues that could have been
avoided, that could have been addressed properly,
but you just didn’t make time to do it,” she
says.
But there are also times when you really need to
stop talking. Let’s say you skipped the check in,
and now you find yourself about to explode at your
partner about unloading the dishwasher. You can
still avoid a blow up. “If it seems that tempers
are coming up, not necessarily between you but
within you, then voice that,” says John Karabees,
a counselor at Deeply Well in Charleston, South
Carolina. “Say, ‘I’m getting worked up here,
give me a moment.’ Take a point to breathe. …
Allow that spike of emotion to pass so that you can
reengage in the conversation.” That way, you can
avoid an escalation where you’re feeding one
another’s anger.
This (hopefully) shall pass
Some phases of coupledom are particularly
vulnerable to chore-related disputes. Marina
Kovarsky, a psychotherapist in Boston, sees it most
acutely among partners in the middle of raising
kids — in large part because there are simply so
many tasks associated with child rearing, adding
more domestic work to the pile and lessening the
time folks have to perform it.
Karabees says chores can also become a bigger issue
for couples during moments of transition, including
moving in together, getting married, births,
deaths, divorces and changes in employment. When
“there’s a shift in the family, then that would
require a shift in responsibility as well,” he
says.
You might have to think about your early years
As therapists are wont to do, many noted that our
childhoods play a large role in shaping our
expectations for these chores and the role we
expect our partners to play in the household.
“That’s my model as a wife or a partner,”
Jackson says. “I’m probably going to exhibit
some of those behaviors or have similar
expectations.”
Some people look at the homes they were raised as
blueprints of what they’re trying to avoid in
their own lives and partnerships, Kovarsky notes.
For example, if you grew up watching one parent
take on all the responsibilities, you might strive
for a different kind of relationship or even feel
worried that you’re becoming that parent.
Couples have to learn how to meld these different
perspectives. “We each learn this dance when
we’re growing up and then when we separate from
our family and we partner with someone else,
we’re bringing two vastly different
choreographies together,” Harris says.
“There’s a little bit of a learning curve
there. And then eventually we find, you know, your
own dance.”
But when the song changes, the couple needs to
change their footwork to match. And there can be
struggles there. “What ends up happening is they
get stuck and there’s a lack of flexibility and
openness to hearing the other person wanting a
change,” says Karabees, who also uses the dance
metaphor. “If one person really doesn’t want to
change the way things are going, it becomes
incredibly uncomfortable for the other person.”
Red flags
Even if it’s possible to sidestep most arguments
over chores with two emotionally mature adults,
well, couples aren’t necessarily comprised of two
emotionally mature adults. Over time, therapists
have observed some red flags that make them
question whether the duo will be able to solve
their disagreements.
For Kovarsky, it’s entitlement. A person that
comes into the session with the “fundamental
belief” that their partner needs to cater to them
in some way and refuses to empathize with anything
their partner says to the contrary. “There has to
be a willingness to acknowledge that we have blind
spots or we have areas of emotional reactivity and
to basically be willing to look at those,” she
says. “Because without that, it’s very
difficult to shift anything.”
It’s not always a death knell for a relationship,
though. People can change, especially if they want
to do the work. Harris says sometimes couples’
work stalls when someone lacks the personal insight
to be able to share their feelings. “If you
don’t know, it’s hard to then communicate that
to someone else,” says Harris, who will suggest
individual work before couples counseling. “I
usually kind of describe it as, ‘Let’s give you
the foundation to really succeed here because my
hopes are never to put you in a situation where you
don’t have the tools or skills, and it’s really
not your fault no one ever gave them to you.’”
Don’t believe everything you hear (or see or
read)
Jackson has seen people allow forces beyond their
partnership to have outsize influence on splitting
up chores, especially when that person doesn’t
support the couple. “It’s not a good sign,”
she says. In-laws. Friends. Podcast hosts.
There’s an endless wave of opinions that partners
need to learn how to surf, or at least avoid
drowning in. (Tons of sitcom plots depend on a
member of a couple listening to a confident yet
clueless pal’s advice about their division of
labor — it’s funnier to watch on TV than it is
to experience firsthand.)
It’s not just other people. Kovarsky says that
the overall expectations for families have gotten
out of hand. “What we all are trying to do, which
is show up in ways that we’re expected to show up
in our careers and show up in ways contemporary
parenting requires us to show up, almost can’t be
done right. Something’s going to give — either
your health or the health of the relationship,”
she says. “It’s just, it’s kind of too much.
But people have this notion that somebody
somewhere, often on Instagram, has this figured it out.”
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Will you use this news to improve your relationship?
Hadley Finch
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with love experts at happysexyloveinromanticrelationships.com.
