When I was 20, I moved in with my then boyfriend, and his two buddies. It was a three bedroom apartment, one guy had left and we took his room. So the two (three) buddies had been in this apartment over a year when one moved out and I, the only woman, moved in with my bf.

Three men in this apartment and me, all aged 20-25. Two whom had lived there definitely over a year, maybe even two. The kitchen was full of unpacked boxes, and crap just everywhere. They had a path from the back (main) door, through the kitchen and into the living room. Like a worked out path in a hoarder house. The living room was slightly better, but covered in fast food litter, soda/beer bottles, pot head ashtrays… And I will not describe the bathroom. It was disgusting.

I spent my first week cleaning. Days of cleaning. I went through the boxes, asked everyone what they wanted to keep, motivated them to take what they want and find a better spot for it, threw out what they didnt want. I put away the dishes and found homes for the stuff I could clearly tell their mom’s gave them to make house, and used set things out nice. I cleaned the living room and the bathroom.

Now, I had to mop. I had to do the dishes. These guys here, had a portable dishwasher they were using. They told me the kitchen sink was broken for the last 9months. We had a slumlord, so no help there. I said, I’m going to look at this sink and see whats wrong. We cant live without a kitchen sink. Well, maybe they could, but I couldn’t. So,

I clean out the cabinets under the sink, moldy cleaning bottles, molded cardboard, wet plastic bags. Disgusting work. Get it cleaned out and get to looking at the plumbing. There are multiple rags, now molded, tied around one pipe. I start to pull them off. They just disintegrate as I pull them off. Gross, so gross but I do it. Clean it up, and look at the pipe.

Y’all. Three men in this house, and all I do is see the pipe is out of its fitting. I push the pipe into its fitting and tighten the screw thing thats around it. Sink fixed. There was no leak, the pipe was just out of its fitting. 9 months with no kitchen sink, and minus the cleaning time, it took me less than a minute to fix it. I will never forget that day.

After that, the guys treated me like a mom and would clean up slightly better after themselves, but I did all the cleaning. I do miss cooking them food, they always loved it when I cooked for them, and just those compliments alone were enough for me. But that fucking sink will go down in my own history forever, and I gave them shit for it at least a month.

I remember a few weeks later, one of the girlfriends came over, “oh I was going to clean up, it looks so nice now”. She didn’t live there, why should this dudes girl have to clean an apartment she doesn’t live? I have absolutely gone to a boyfriend’s apartment who has male roommates and like, cleaned the bathroom just so I could use it looking crazy cleaning the bathroom 8pm on a Saturday night hang sesh. So I get it, but like … Anyway

My son cleans his own bathroom now, so he can’t say he doesnt know how. Also if you always put the toilet seat lid completely down everytime, everyone has to lift it the same, and everyone has to put it back down again just the same, and you don’t get shit particles on your toothbrush when you flush, swirling that shit into the air. Everyone should close the lid completely after use, it’s fair and hygenic.

Even men who sincerely believe themselves to be feminists (as in, equality) never do their share of house chores and shopping. But they always believe that they do.

Every man I’ve ever lived with has been a slob. They say you should just stop doing chores and let your partner get upset when things don’t get done - that only works if you have a partner who isn’t perfectly content to live in a slimy dumpster. One thought I was a germaphobe because I once watched him drop chicken on the floor and throw it back into the pot of already cooked food and wasn’t OK with it.

I live with my mom now and we have a similar comfort level when it comes to tidiness and sanitation. We keep things generally picked up and take care of the truly important things like dishes and toilets, but neither of us enjoys cleaning so we’re both willing to put up with a lot of dustiness and unvacuumed carpets. We share work pretty evenly.

No kids in our house. I HATE vacuuming so he does that. He hates cleaning the bathroom so I do that. We both hate mowing the lawn so we pay someone. He does the garbage I do the recycle. We’re pretty 50/50 on dishes and food.

Well, I have a lot to say about this (someone needs to turn my verbose mode off, ugh).

The phrase “to each according to their need, from each according to their ability” seems to be an implicit organizing principle in my relationship, whoever is best situated to do a task most easily is most likely to do it.

However, this creates some unfairness.

Just because of the way my brain is, I have a harder time planning ahead, being reliable to a schedule, and maintaining a level of executive functioning on par with my spouse’s. Especially historically I suffered from what I now realize were fairly bad levels of depression and anxiety, which put too much burden on my partner, who is extremely hard-working, reliable, and capable.

Small example: if I need to call a doctors office for something, it might take me weeks to do it and it was exhausting and difficult for me to do (both initiating the task was difficult, but also handling the anxiety of talking on the phone was overwhelming). I would have to work up to such a task, and then I would need a recovery period after.

So I basically constantly feel like I’m not doing enough, esp. relative to my extremely industrious and capable spouse.

My depression and anxiety are much better now, so I’m more likely to finish a task like calling someone within a week rather than sitting on it for a week or longer, and I have much less anxiety during the call. I even pro-actively pick up social tasks like making a phone call sometimes to lighten my spouse’s plate, which is something I rarely ever did before.

A lot of the time we end up competing to do tasks, e.g. I constantly have to fight my partner to be able to drive if we’re going somewhere together (she tries to monopolize that labor).

Because I do all the cooking, my partner is also very aggressive about doing the dishes to compensate, which makes me feel bad, because I think it’s not fair (doing dishes is dull labor, cooking is often fun - they’re not equal). So I try to sneak a few dishes in, and try to wash as many dishes from my cooking before she can get to them, as a way to pull my weight there (even though she would prefer I don’t do any of the dishwashing).

With laundry she always initiates washing clothes, because I wouldn’t do laundry more than once a week, but she initiates laundry three to four times a week, so it’s harder for me to ever initiate doing the laundry (and even if we were on the same page about doing loads once a week, I tend to struggle to initiate tasks like that anyway, so there would probably be inequality there just because I’m more flaky, essentially).

So to compensate, I try to be proactive and sneak down to swap loads and fold the clothes to help out, but it never really balances out the labor, e.g. the cognitive labor she does keeping track and initiating so many of the tasks isn’t made up for by my inconsistent and minor contributions.

It’s the same story with cleaning - she initiates cleaning more, and I try to make up for the inequality by doing some of the harder cleaning (like scrubbing the shower or bath, sweeping and mopping the dirty kitchen floors, etc.).

So we try to be egalitarian in our household work, but I don’t think it works out perfectly.

I don’t know this sub so I hope it’s ok for a man to respond. When I first got married I think my wife definitely did most of the chores. But when I retired and she kept working, I did most of the chores. Then she retired and I still do most of the chores.

But I have to admit I do most of the messing up. So it could be a reluctance to clean up after me. Although I’m not sure that true with for instance vacuuming, which I do.

An additional note though is that, is it fair to only consider chores in the division of labor? I mean I do all car and household repairs (and I’d like to point out we have three cars all over 20 years old so that’s a lot of repairs). I’m also the only one who washes the cars. When the house gets painted, inside or out, that’s 100% me.

I do most of the cooking and virtually all of the dishes. She does a ton of laundry. As a man, I only feel the need to do laundry when I’m running out of my plentiful underwear. She does laundry, I don’t know, in her sleep even. I vacuum, she picks up around the house. Etc.

I can see that it would be a real problem if it’s very one-sided, but I think you also have to look at the big picture. Just my $0.02.

We split fairly according to who is able to do something at the moment. We have some chores one of us will standardly do daily, and some we do together.

It was a bit difficult to figure out who prefers what and who’s better at what, but we’ve figured it out and it works well now.

Before cohabitation I always have a conversation about our living together social contract. What are you willing to take responsibility for?

The last relationship I was in started out with a partner who split things evenly and turned into learned helplessness on his part. It was awful. He did nothing at the end.

The guy I’m with now comes from a relationship where his partner did nothing. We occasionally discuss who should do what, and then get mad at each other because the other person wants to take on too much.

Many years ago I was withy ex and he was “one of the good ones”. Really nice man, and a good person. But he just did NOT do his fair share of things. His dad did nothing and mum did it all, so although he denied it, he expected the same.

He had to be screamed at repeatedly to do anything. He’d forget tasks because he made no effort whatsoever to try to remember them, and would NEVER put it right when he forgot. I would often literally sob and plead, saying how hurtful it was that he saw me as a servant. He just wouldn’t do it.

I’ve never been able to fathom how so many men just sit and watch their partners doing it all. I just can’t fathom treating a partner like that.

I do majority of chores because I have significantly less time in office than my poor SO. SO did same for me when I had 2 hr commutes (one way) so I won’t complain.

There has never been a situation where I haven’t been the one who does all the chores.

So I’m dating a woman now who I live with and I thought, “Now I’ll finally get an equal distribution of household labor.” Lol nope. But everything else in our relationship is great other than that.

lol. Yeah they weren’t. I did literally everything… Did