Mimi Spencer: Fancy splitting the housework 50/50 with men? Ladies, prepare to live in a pit!


By Mimi Spencer



Mimi Spencer

I’m off to Moscow on a business trip. Before  
 I head for Heathrow, I put on a load of washing,
descale the kettle, eject some ancient yoghurt from the fridge and hang up the six hoodies that are carpeting the floor of my son’s bedroom.

I have a quick swish around the bath with a sponge. I flick away a cobweb from the ceiling, put a hockey stick out ready for Tuesday and scribble a note saying what’s for supper from now till then.

Just time for a Hoover of the hall, a swipe of lippy and off I go. My husband went away on business the other day. Packed his pants, hugged the dog and shut the door, returning only because he’d forgotten his wallet.

Different breeds, you see. Which is why I hold out little hope for the idea expressed in a new book that’s doing the rounds.

In Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have It All By Sharing It All, US authors Sharon Meers, a former executive at Goldman Sachs, and Joanna Strober, who works in private equity, propose that men and women should share household chores equally, in the interests not just of equity and family unity, but because men will benefit from feeling more embedded in the running of the home.

Nice idea. I love the thought of leaning into business, as Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg puts it, and leaning out of the tumble dryer, the shopping trolley and the recycling bins. But in practice?

In my experience, most husbands – through nature, nurture or just a knack of knowing when to shut up and play dumb – simply don’t have the razor-eyed zeal required to run a house. At least not one I’d want to live in.

My friend Cath, by way of example, once left a set of freshly laundered pillowcases on the bottom stair of her house and waited to see how long it would take her husband to carry them upstairs to the sheets cupboard just outside his office. She waited. And waited. Days went by. Weeks.
After a month, she pointed to the pillowcases.

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’

‘The pillowcases?’

‘What about them?’

‘Could you have taken them upstairs? They’ve been there for four weeks!’

‘Oh,’ says husband, ‘I thought they were there for a reason.’ I think she might have stamped by accident on his toe.

According to Great Expectations, a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, eight out of ten married women still do significantly more housework than their husbands. Clearly, there’s a historical imperative here, but there’s a psychology too.

In truth, women tend to care more about how things look and smell; plenty of men simply don’t see the fluff on the stairs, the ring around the bath, the fur in the kettle. Take my friend Marnie. Her husband also works from home, and likes to drink coffee as he works.

But he’d simply leave his mugs wherever, on bookshelves, on his desk, by the front door, until someone else retrieved them. So one day, Marnie stopped retrieving. Instead, she took a marker pen and wrote that day’s date on the bottom of the cup.

After six weeks, the husband came into the kitchen and said, with genuine surprise, ‘Marnie! There are no mugs!’ ‘Ah, but there are,’ replied Marnie, taking him on a tour of the house, and showing him the dates which stretched back into the middle distance (apparently the house looked like a Tracey Emin installation by that point).

And bingo! For ten entire days, Marnie’s husband washed his own mugs and then… Well, then, he plum forgot and reverted to type. Another mate of mine reckons that the only way to achieve a true 50:50 split and live in harmony is not for men to care more, but for women to care less.

According to her theory – which may well be the next hit book about relationships, perhaps with its very own intro by Sandberg – we simply need to get used to living in a bit of a pit, with no fresh milk when we need it, no loo roll, no clean mugs, no pressed pillowcases, just loads of larks and laughs and lots of seeing how many 50 pences you can balance on your nose. When you put it that way, it’s a provocative idea. I definitely reckon I could do it. For at least a week.






 

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