we struggle with this. lately we have taken to formally reserving 2 equal blocks of time within a weekend, during each of which one person is supposed to perform tasks off a previously agreed-upon list, and the other person is supposed to stay out of the apartment (we have learned that both of us occupying the tiny space while it is being cleaned does not work well). and i seriously think that part of our problem with housework just-not-getting-done is that on some level neither of us identifies as part of the housework-doing group, and thus each of us is expecting her wife to take care of things.
Have you tried chorewars? You could follow their default guideline, defining the value of a task by the time it takes, or you could use a formal or informal bidding process to assign higher value to tasks you both try to get out of. Or maybe randomly-generated treasure.
We used to try to split all chores evenly, or do them together: She would wash dishes and I would dry; she would clear sticks and rake the lawn and I would mow; we would have a house-wide cleaning spasm and both clean our bathrooms at the same time. This worked... poorly; everything got procrastinated until it was intolerable, and we both felt put-upon
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With my first marriage, we tried for a sort of "person who minds doing this less does it" model, that really in my mind failed because it became a "person who minds it more if it doesn't get done does it" model, with in this case the male person having been raised in a less stringent household where he didn't have to fold laundry or do dishes or clean floors or (ever) dust, and was also never asked to paint walls or weed gardens, etc
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a "person who minds it more if it doesn't get done does it" model
Yeah, that's definitely a hazard. I'm most often that person around here -- or more accurately, I'm more likely to *notice* that something needs to be done. And boy, do I get sick of being the one who cleans the "company" bathroom!
"Who minds it less does it" works great for us where it works at all, but there needs to be a secondary system in place for the chores it doesn't catch. We're still working on that.
Before the Fibro got really bad, we generally did a 1 cooks, 2 cleans, 1 does laundry 2 folds it, 1&2 clean as they can sort of thing. Nowadays it's more of Mate doing the cleaning (dishes, laundry, kidmess) and I do the other (cook (when I can, sometimes he does it) folding, trying to keep the kids from killing each other)
It wasn't so much a societal model, as we did what we could, if one preferred something they did it, if the other HATED something, then they didn't do it...
oh we are DEFINITELY bringing in someone outside the household to do the chores...but we currently need to be able to clean enough so that a cleaning service can keep it clean since we are the only ones who can get it clean.
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and i seriously think that part of our problem with housework just-not-getting-done is that on some level neither of us identifies as part of the housework-doing group, and thus each of us is expecting her wife to take care of things.
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Yeah, that's definitely a hazard. I'm most often that person around here -- or more accurately, I'm more likely to *notice* that something needs to be done. And boy, do I get sick of being the one who cleans the "company" bathroom!
"Who minds it less does it" works great for us where it works at all, but there needs to be a secondary system in place for the chores it doesn't catch. We're still working on that.
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Before the Fibro got really bad, we generally did a 1 cooks, 2 cleans, 1 does laundry 2 folds it, 1&2 clean as they can sort of thing. Nowadays it's more of Mate doing the cleaning (dishes, laundry, kidmess) and I do the other (cook (when I can, sometimes he does it) folding, trying to keep the kids from killing each other)
It wasn't so much a societal model, as we did what we could, if one preferred something they did it, if the other HATED something, then they didn't do it...
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That, right there, is probably the single most important issue of any chore-management plan.
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