Redistributing Household Labor: A Practical Guide
Six mental shifts for a more equal partnership.
Note: The recording from our last book club on Invisible Women is included at the end of this post.
Our next book club will meet in January and we will be discussing I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression by Terrence Real. Join us by becoming a paid subscriber:
I’ll be answering a reader-submitted question today. If you would like to submit a question for me to answer in a later article, you can do so here:
Continuing on our discussions of decentering men this month, I thought I would take a crack at this reader-submitted question today:
“I’m loving the de-centering men conversation, but I’m still stuck on the how. How do I do that? For context, I’ve been married for two decades. We solidified an unequal division of labor before I even knew what patriarchy meant. Now I feel stuck. I do love my husband and I don’t want a divorce, but I do want my husband to do more around the house and to support me. But all I can think of when thinking how to do this is to just keep asking, asking, asking and then him not really doing anything until I blow up at him. I don’t know if it’s worth it. And then either way it is still centering him and his feelings! If I don’t get his help, then I’m doing it all myself, but then if I do, I have to keep asking and putting up with his defensiveness and grumpiness. It feels lose / lose. And he’s centered either way. I don’t know. Any advice you have on equalizing the labor in the home, I’m all ears.”
I spent all week thinking about this question. I have a lot of thoughts, but I do not feel comfortable giving any across-the-board advice.
Every woman is in such a different situation—some are in a position where sticking up for herself could become a safety issue, others are fully comfortable standing up for themselves, but still the inequality persists.
I can’t talk to every woman, but I can talk to a former version of myself who wanted a more equal marriage, but struggled to see a path to get there. I can offer what mindsets have helped and what mindsets haven’t.
So I’ll be doing that.
When you said, “We solidified an unequal division of labor before I even knew what patriarchy meant.”
I feel that.
When I got married, I was dead-set on winning an invisible best Mormon wife trophy in my head. As you might imagine, the best Mormon wife contest does not have self-prioritization on its list of requirements. Or considerations.
Just the opposite. Self-centering is on the naughty list. To be considered a good Mormon wife requires a lot of self sacrifice. Lots of flowers for self-erasure. Not a lot of flowers for boundary setting and prioritizing your desires.
When we left the church, I had to do a lot of work to try to mentally crumble the patriarchal hierarchy in my head.
In my marriage, that resulted in transitioning from me doing the vast majority of domestic labor myself to now him cooking three nights a week, me cooking three nights a week, him going grocery shopping every other week, me going grocery shopping ever other week, him doing a load of dishes a day, me doing a load of dishes a day, etc. We haven’t arrived. We’re a work in progress for sure, but we have been successful in changing our dynamic and challenging the script we were handed from our parents and society.
In trying to equalize a marriage, here are six mindset shifts that have helped me: