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• Monday, March 10, 2008 02:32 PM

  any display of excellence is hot

  Sure, could be housework. Thoughtfulness. Manliness. Tenderness. Nerdiness. Anything, really. Do it really well, and it's hot.

  So, as far as the women vs men sniping, I'm have to confess I'm actually kinda on the fence. My husband and I have the exact same job with the same boss, same pay, we commute together so we work the same hours. I think he would agree that I do most of the housework. My mother is a total neatnik dictator, and I grew up resenting her arbitrarily high standards of cleanliness. So I don't feel that I should impose my lower, but still relatively arbitrary standard of cleanliness on my husband. So I do most of the housework, and for the most part I don't mind too much. But I still can't help but get a tiny bit resentful sometimes when I have to remind him to do the small number of chores that are unequivocally his (mostly, taking out the trash). Or when he's relaxing and I'm scrubbing the toilet or cleaning up dinner.

  A lot of times, it's not even doing the tasks that gets to me; it's feeling responsible for them. I know that if I ask him to do something he will, cheerfully even. But there I am imposing my arbitrary standards, again. And it would just be so nice if there were a few things that I just did not have to worry about happening, that I knew would be taken care of without my intervention.

  I gotta tell you guys, though, there are still plenty of men out there who expect their wives to cook and keep a spotless house whether or not they work outside the home. (I'm on a housekeeping mailing list, and the emails there prove it unequivocally.) Housework parity remains a real problem. My marriage is very happy; the housework is really just a quibble. But people get divorced over floor-mopping.

  —sclatter Read sclatter's other letters
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