by Sandra Lowen

Created on: September 20, 2009   Last Updated: September 23, 2009

IS SHARING HOUSEWORK BETWEEN HUSBAND AND WIFE A KEY TO SUCCESSFUL MARRIAGE?

It must not be. If it were, my marriage would have broken up long ago.

My aunt who raised me tried for at least a decade to drum into my brain: If you don't learn how to cook and clean no man is going to stay married to you! She labored alone over bucket and broom to serve her husband until I was old enough to earn my share of dishpan hands and charwoman's knee. No man could be worth all this, I thought, and vowed my husband would work just as hard as I did on keeping our domicile clean.

Then I met the man of my dreams. I used to take off early from work to scour and scrub in anticipation of his arrival, and it must have paid off, I thought, because he asked me to marry him. But before all the rice was out of our hair, I lit into him about leaving his briefs in figure 8s on the bathroom floor and the paint from his latest art project pooling on the dining table. He'd straighten up, but I felt his resentment.

Efforts at a Solution

I didn't have time to clean; didn't want to, when the creative juices were bubbling. Nor did he, when he felt the urge to create. We'd kick things into corners or under furniture or into storage boxes that we vowed we'd deal with 'someday'

One night we sat down and talked about our mutual hatred of housework and how we could get around to it before we drowned in a sea of half-read books, crochet endeavors, un-discarded supermarket flyers and writing projects. It seemed logical that we would share tasks, so we set up a couple of tentative plans: I can't dust because of allergies, so he would. He had more free time than I did, so he would shop and cook. I was the one with the more tempered sense of order, so I'd neaten and straighten.

Nothing worked.

He'd get too busy to dust, so I'd do it, wind up sneezing. His food was delicious, but somehow whatever he made always looked gray, so I'd cook whenever guests came. And the man could not resist a sale. He'd come home with twenty cans of tuna, because they were on special, and there were always vegetables going bad in the fridge, because we couldn't juice them or eat them fast enough for the volume he bought. And as soon as I neatened, he'd start looking for something really important that he'd tossed on the sofa three days ago 'for just a couple of minutes', and in a trice the place would be wrecked again.

His Mom to the Rescue

Desperate, I went to my mother-in-law, whose happy marriage and spotless home I'd always

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