I (23F) recently moved in with my boyfriend (27M). I mentioned to him a couple times that one of my major concerns about moving in with someone, especially a guy, is gendered disparities in housework, and later parenting - I tend to already be someone who overwhelms myself by taking on more than my fair share, and add in the well-documented tendency for women in relationships with men to become defacto household managers, it makes me very nervous. He seemed and seems like he wants to do the right thing here, but I don't think he really understands what I'm talking about. (Also relevant: I have a very independent relationship from my parents, so I have been responsible for myself for a long time; he has a much healthier relationship with his parents, which is obviously great, but does mean he's used to getting more help than me, which also contributes to this dynamic.)
I am wondering if anyone else has dealt with explaining concepts like invisible labor, the mental load, etc and what the simplest solution is? Right now I'm thinking of having him read the Lyz Lenz article, It Took Divorce to Make My Marriage Equal, and maybe excerpts of All the Rage or Fed Up!.
I can see that he's trying to address my fears and concerns, but his default is different than mine and I'd like to get us to a foundation of BOTH of us carrying the mental load of household management, and when we see a task that needs to be done doing it ourselves on sight, as opposed to the direction we're headed in, which is me becoming the household manager/nag who either does everything myself or reminds him to do it. It's just hard to explain what a mental load is to someone who seems to have never carried one. (E.g. I handled all the moving tasks, which I was willing to do because it was urgent and having one person in charge was simpler, but it did surprise me several times that I knew so much more about moving than he did when he's older than me; I eventually realized that's because his parents have always helped manage his moves, and now I'm doing it, and I don't want that to be the pattern for... everything.)
I have a list of household chores that I do every 1-2 weeks that we're going to split down the middle, but it seems like he's not tracking his share and the ones we're doing ad hoc - laundry, dishwashing - are falling to me. What I want to do is help him get in the same mindset, so he understands why this is important to me and can take that on proactively, rather than getting more in the weeds of helping him find a reminder/tracking app, litigating the ad hoc chores more specifically, etc. Everything I've read says it's a snowball effect, it's best to start the foundation of equality from day one, etc because if you start taking on the bulk of housework when it's "no big deal," a few extra hours a week, a decade in suddenly you're the only one who knows the name of your kids doctor and is tracking all household appointments. Unfortunately all of the books I've read make that recommendation after getting to that decade-in point, so they don't have very good recs on HOW to start strong from the beginning.
TLDR: How to explain concepts like invisible labor and mental load to my boyfriend, and redirect our relationship so we're BOTH household managers?
Submitted August 31, 2021 at 07:19AM by emmgr2 https://ift.tt/3jvD3EK
No comments:
Post a Comment