It’s no secret that women do more housework than men. Shamefully, women spend 20+ hours on average doing housework per week, while men do just five, according to the most recent study by UCL. And one woman on Reddit has taken things into her own hands by devising an ingenious way to show her partner just how much she does for him.
‘Year ago, when I just moved in with my then-boyfriend (now fiancé) he was terrible at picking up after himself,’ she wrote online. ‘He was a self-admitted mama’s boy and went directly from his parents’ house to our shared home.
‘Barely three weeks in, I was fed up. So, when I told him that I was tired of picking up after him and acting as his maid he hit me with: “that’s not true, we both clean up equally.” After a bit of back and forth, he said: “Well, if you don’t believe me then let’s split the house, you take care of your half and I take care of mine.”
‘I took that literally,’ the woman, who very much accepted the challenge, wrote. ‘I got painter’s tape. Divided every single room in half (including the kitchen counter, the inside of the fridge, the bathroom counter…) Also, he was cocky and suggested two months, I shortened it to one.’
Inevitably, her fiancé’s side of the house quickly fell into disrepair. ‘Not even a week in [and] his half looked like a pigsty,’ she said. ‘He had no more food – because I stopped grocery shopping and cooking for him.
‘The only exception I made was cleaning the toilet and the shower,’ she continued. ‘Because I was not about to use a filthy bathroom to make a point.’ Very solid decision.
And (hallelujah) after the one-month experiment, the woman’s fiancé seriously saw the light: ‘He bought me flowers and chocolate, apologised for his behaviour and started learning how to be an adult,’ she praised. ‘We are eight years into this relationship, and he is an amazing man, we are about to get married.’ So, all’s well that ends well… For this woman anyway.
This plan is ingenious and very visibly demonstrated the housework inequality in this couple’s household. But, from the UCL research mentioned previously, it’s clear she is just one woman among millions who are grafting harder than their partner at hoovering the house, scrubbing the toilet and buying the food. In 2022, that’s unacceptable.
From straight-up denial to weaponised incompetence (acting so useless that they don’t have to do the work at all), many men still see their small contributions to domestic chores like cleaning and childcare to be ‘helping’ rather than simply pulling their weight in the house in which they live - and that needs to change.
READ MORE: When Men Do Housework It's Not 'Helping' - It's Pulling Their Weight