[Lifestyle] ‘I own multiple vacuum cleaners – he litters indoors’: what happened when four writers swapped chores with their partners?

[BirSaNN]

Every household has its own unique division of labour, but one person often thinks they do the lion’s share. Would switching roles reveal the truth?

Tim Dowling, Joe Stone, Zoe Williams and Coco Khan
Sat 7 Jan 2023 11.00 GMT
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Tim Dowling, swaps with his wife, Sophie
I expected my wife to have a lot to say about the swap. I did not expect her to refuse outright.

“No,” she says. “You’ll ruin the house.”

“It’s only for a fortnight,” I say.

“Anyway, you don’t have any chores.” This, to be fair, is what I expected her to say.

“Of course I do,” I say.

“So you would do everything I do, and I would take the bins out twice.”

“If that’s what you think, why are you turning down this sweet deal?”

“I’m just not doing it,” she says.

“Also, you’d have to mow the lawn,” I say.

“It’s too wet to mow the lawn,” she says.

“You’re getting the hang of my end already,” I say.

Tactically, it seemed wise to pretend this conversation had not taken place. The strategy worked, but I found my wife had accepted the terms only a few days later when I overhead her talking to someone on the phone.

“He’s making me do this stupid thing where we swap chores,” she said. “Exactly – so I’ll be doing nothing.”

The truth is, I do all the things my wife does, just nowhere near as often. I make about a quarter of the supermarket trips. I mop the kitchen floor, but generally only on the occasion of some catastrophic spill I don’t want anyone else to find out about – once a month, say.

There is no question that I am remiss, but the idea that I’m inept – that I have no idea how the washing machine works, for example – is a fiction. A fiction my wife insists on perpetuating.

“Now turn the dial to delicate,” she says.

“I know,” I say.

“No, you don’t,” she says. “You’ve never washed a jumper in your life.”

“That’s a lie,” I say. “Why isn’t it coming on?”

On the first afternoon I go to the supermarket, and when I return my shopping is critiqued as if I’m training for a future exam.

“No fennel?” my wife says, pulling things from the bags.

“There wasn’t any today,” I say.

“Fennel was on the list,” she says.

“I can only buy things they have.”

The laundry regime is a little more full-time than I had anticipated: I lug a basket of dirty clothes downstairs to find the dryer and the washing machine still full. Working quickly in the cramped space – where the two machines are stacked one atop the other – I pull the clean clothes from the dryer, transfer the wet clothes from one drum to the other and load the dirty clothes into the washing machine. I am not just mastering the system, I think. I am the system.

When I’m done I start both cycles, and fold my arms in satisfaction. So far, so efficient, except the clean clothes are somehow missing – the basket at my feet is empty. I’m still not sure what happened.

On Friday I have to go to the supermarket again – again! – and once more, the results are criticised
For several years my wife and I have adhered to an arrangement with regard to meals: I always make dinner, and she always makes lunch. Although I would maintain this is not an equal division of labour – dinner is cooked, where lunch is merely collated. It is satisfactory to all parties so we decide not to mess with that bit of the system.

But I’ll tell you what: cooking supper for four people, then having to clear it all up, every night, is a hugely rich source of resentment. To find the kitchen dirty again in the morning is an occasion for rage.

Tuesday night is bin night: rubbish, food scraps, garden waste. In our swapped roles it falls to me to back the car out of the drive and then wait while my wife struggles with three overflowing bins in a cold rain, in the full glare of my headlights. It is tremendously satisfying, or it would be if I could be certain none of the neighbours was watching.

On Friday I have to go to the supermarket again – again! – and once more, the results are criticised.

“Where are my Quavers?” my wife says.

“They were out of Quavers,” I say, “and the apples you like.”

“Not very good at this, are you?” she says.

“Your issue is with the global supply chain, not with me.”

Towards the middle of the second week, faced with a large pile of clean clothes, I find myself holding a single orange sock when it hits me: I participate in the system in the sense that I am available to move things forward – to wash up a sink full of dishes, or escort some laundry through one leg of its journey – but I have almost never been in sole charge of the domestic machine. Consequently, I have no idea whose sock this is.

When my wife initially refused to participate in the experiment, this is exactly what she feared: that I would wreck the system; that there would never be any fennel, or Quavers. Clothes would get washed twice for no reason, and jumpers would be destroyed. This didn’t quite happen – things more or less functioned – but then I only had two weeks.

In closing, I think it’s only fair to point out that she didn’t mow the lawn, even once.

Joe Stone, swaps with his boyfriend, Peter

I’m the second to admit that I am not an easy person to live with; the first is my boyfriend, Peter. It took us 10 years to move in together and I sometimes get the impression that he considers this premature.

While we’re compatible in many ways, we are domestically opposed. By that I mean: I am someone who owns multiple vacuum cleaners, and he is someone who litters indoors. You might imagine that the absence of gendered roles in a same-sex relationship would result in an equal division of domestic labour – but as anyone who’s set foot in G-A-Y bar can attest, gay utopias rarely live up to their promise. In our house, I am responsible for: dusting, vacuuming, mopping, cleaning the kitchen, bathroom, oven and windows, most of the laundry, all of the admin and anything which requires confrontation. If I’m feeling particularly resentful, I undertake these chores while performing This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush, or loudly complaining about him on the phone while he’s within earshot. He cooks us three or four meals a week and does the washing-up when I give strong indications that he has wronged me in some way. I also once forced him to break into our neighbour’s garden (between tenancies) and saw down a tree which was blocking my light.

You’re probably thinking that I sound like a very sweet person who is being horribly taken advantage of. I should mention that I have quite stringent standards when it comes to housework, and have discouraged Peter from doing tasks which I believe him to be unqualified for (I banned him from doing laundry after he put a duvet cover on the washing line without pegs, and I had to retrieve it from a flower bed). I’m a big believer in “indoor” and “outdoor” clothes, and won’t get into bed unless I’ve had a shower first. Last summer Peter lost his tent on the way to a festival, and slept outside for three nights.

link: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jan/07/what-happened-when-four-writers-swapped-chores-with-their-partners