If you had asked me at 17 what traits made someone “boyfriend material” it would have been a very short list, probably stopping at “has a car”. By 20 it had expanded to “has a job”.
Before I set off as the first in my family to attend university, my combined grandmothers stood in the kitchen to give me key life advice. “If you marry rich you won’t have to work or go to university,” said one wisely. “But the university is where she’ll meet the rich men,” said my other granny even more wiselyer.
However, now that I am 30 I have come to a key realisation. I don’t want a man to make all the money. I want him to make dinner. And put a wash on. And hang it out before it gets smelly in the machine.
I have a job. I can make my own money. I pay my share of the bills, the rent and the good biscuits from M&S. I have always expected to be an equal financial partner in a relationship by working outside the home
I have a job. I can make my own money. I pay my share of the bills, the rent and the good biscuits from M&S. I have always expected to be an equal financial partner in a relationship by working outside the home.
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So I expect an equal contribution from a partner to work inside the home. A second pair of hands on the thousands of decisions, repetitive tasks and “you wash, I’ll dry” negotiations that happen when two lives merge under the same roof.
The traditional split of one person doing all the inside bits while the other mows the lawn/checks the car oil/fannies about in the back shed isn’t going to cut it, either. For one simple reason: these outside tasks don’t have to be done every day. These are “big weekend jobs”. Not the tasks that are spirit-crushing in their regularity. Things like clearing hair from plugholes, ironing, sheet changing, cat-hair vacuuming and bog scrubbing. And the boss-level chore of investigating “Why does the fridge smell like that?”
In both my dual hometowns of Sydney and Dublin, two incomes are usually required to get a mortgage large enough to satisfy the demands of average house prices. Even if some couples want to have one partner go to work and one stay at home to do all the "bits", it just isn't possible for many.
But are the "bits" evenly distributed? Even if both partners are working from home, are they both working in the home? Data from the pandemic says no, and although I wanted to keep this from becoming a "gendered" issue, peer-reviewed research won't let me. Studies show that amid the public-health crisis women picked up more of the slack around the house, taking over more cleaning, cooking and childcare than their male partners. One study concluded that this lowered the productivity of female scientists during a global pandemic. I know, I know, I know, "not all men" dump domestic workloads on women. But judging from the research a bloody lot of them do.
Let it be known I am very fond of men. I even have one in my house. But they seem to get away with being excused from basic household duties that even the most half-arsed flatmate wouldn’t be. “I always end up doing the bathroom because Conor wouldn’t have a clue and won’t do a proper job,” one woman once told me. Conor is a chemical engineer. I’m sure he can work out which cleaning product is going to get soap scum off the shower door.
Another friend claimed she was “just too much of a control freak” to let her partner clean. It turned out “control freak” actually just meant wanting a job done to completion.
In the golden days of blokedom, to be a catch, you just had to have a job that could support a family, bathe semi-regularly and maybe play sport. But those days are gone
I was once accused of this too because I asked an ex to redo the load of washing he put on. He had hung it out on a balcony over a busy road and forgot about it for a week, and the bed sheets consequently stank of exhaust fumes. “You just have higher standards than me,” he said in response. I wish I hadn’t paid my half of the rent and when questioned replied with, “You just have higher standards.”
The term weaponised incompetence is all over TikTok this week, leading to heavy debate about whether men “can’t see dirt” or “choose not to”. My question: why do they do either? My guess is many men don’t see any reason to be good at cleaning. In the golden days of blokedom, to be a catch, you just had to have a job that could support a family, bathe semi-regularly and maybe play sport. But those days are gone, and if women are expected to contribute financially the same expectation is placed on men domestically. Maybe we need to send an all-recipient email letting men know that the key performance indicators of being a good partner/boyfriend/husband have changed.
To me, cleaning before I have to ask says, “Your time is as important as mine. You are another human being, not just a taskdoer. I wanted to give you some valuable mental space back.” Then I feel seen and respected as an equal. This is a non-negotiable for a good relationship with me.
A few years ago I asked one of the “marry rich” grannies why she didn’t remarry in the decades after my grandfather died. Her response was simple: “I don’t want to pick up men’s jocks off the floor ever again.”