How not to turn into your boyfriend’s mother
Agreeing how you want to organise your household should be something that you do before you move in together
I’m shocked by the number of articles and stories that I read where women complain about how much housework they do and how little their partners contribute.
Why, oh why are we still accepting this unfair division of labour?
To stop myself from turning into my boyfriend’s mother, or, more accurately, his servant, I had to take action.
My boyfriend and I had been in a relationship for a year when we decided to move in together. It was a big step for us, as neither of us had lived with a romantic partner before. We found a beautiful apartment with a stunning view of the mountains that had two bathrooms and two bedrooms — but was still affordable.
We were so tired of living in our respective shared houses with cramped living spaces that always had to be negotiated for. The first few weeks after moving in were like walking on air. We were both so excited to be together full-time and to have our own space and our own things the way we liked them.
Right from the first day that we moved in together, we set some ground rules. Whoever cooked didn’t have to do the washing up. Whoever cooked the night before, didn’t have to cook the next night. Whoever was the messier person (my boyfriend) had to be the one to sleep on the side away from the door so that the other (me) didn’t have to look at the pile of clothes in a heap on the floor all the time.
After a few months, we took it a bit further and decided to organise a cleaning routine. It sounds tediously boring (and it is), but it works for us.
Our cleaning routine:
We clean together for one hour a week. We alternate who does the bathrooms and who does the kitchen each time. One person hoovers and the other mops. We play music and “speed clean” as fast as we can — whatever doesn’t get done in that hour gets left until the next week. It means that there is no nagging on my part and the labour is equally divided- we set the time, do it together, and stop at the end of the hour. We definitely won’t be winning any competitions for the cleanest apartment, but it’s respectable enough.
We alternate who does the shopping and washing. I do slightly more on a daily basis around the house (e.g I like to sweep the kitchen at the end of every day, but that’s just my preference), but my boyfriend does the bigger DIY jobs, so that labour also equals out over the month.
One step further:
But it wasn’t setting a routine that stopped me from turning into my boyfriend’s mother/servant. I had to go a step further. I had to train myself NOT to pick up after him, or to tell him to pick up after himself. There were so many times where I was tempted to wash the dishes because he hadn’t done it yet, to pick up his shoes from where he’d left them in the middle of the floor, or to remind him it was his turn to take out the rubbish. But I resisted. I kept my mouth shut and distracted myself with something else.
Eventually, he notices these things and rectifies them himself. He just does it on a different timescale than me. It might take him a few days to notice that all of his clothes are in a pile on the floor, or that there are no clean dishes left. It means that I’ve had to adjust to a slightly less tidy and organised house than I’d ideally like to live in, but then, who says that I should be the one to dictate how tidy the house has to be all of the time? The space belongs to both of us after all. For me, that is preferable to nagging him all of the time to pull his weight.
As we set out our plans at the beginning of moving in together and adjust them every now and then accordingly, it isn’t something that we have to waste our time arguing about.
Instead, we can enjoy our time together, and our apartment.
