Hello lovely ladies of FDS. Dear Prudence had a spectacular answer to a household division of labor dilemma with a LVM: https://slate.com/transcripts/c3IxVFVhTDZXOXdCUUNNWENEb1UwdWJMQ1NNVG4xSHZicWtxWGRkQ1pEbz0=

Here is the full question from the podcast transcript with minor editing for conciseness and clarity:

>Dear Prudence, I make meals. Breakfast, weekend lunches and nightly dinners for my family. One partner and one child. My partner is not a cook, so he normally does the dishes, but he’s horrible at it. We have great soap, scrubs and hot water, but he refuses to use much soap or hot water. He insists that soap is a scam and doesn’t do much. Perhaps he didn’t pay attention in high school chemistry. The results almost always is dishes with food caked all over them, drying on the rack. We have a dishwasher and I’ve encouraged him to use it instead. To me, that seems like a win win, but he refuses and continues to poorly wash dishes by hand. This bothers me for quite a few reason. Bugs ants have been attracted to our dish drying rack in the past. Contagious diseases, old food, mold, growing on dishes, etc. I’ve tried to gently talk with him, but he says that I’m criticizing him. He’s right. I’m critical of dirty dishes and I feel like for good reason. The result ends up being that he refuses to touch the dishes at all for weeks at a time, and I end up with double duty. Any thoughts on how to approach this with him? I can’t keep doing it all. I already do the rest of the cleaning, the laundry and the grocery shopping. I’m starting to feel like I have two children and not a partner and one child. I’m seriously tired of it.

Here are selected excerpts from the host and guest:

>I agree that you are right to be caught. I think one of the things that’s hard about a situation like this is it’s such a blow to your own dignity to try to like, "oh, let me scheme of ways to explain to my adult husband that soap works so that I can can like to use the dishwasher that you have." Yeah. It is so easy to use a dishwasher. I couldn’t agree with you more that what you want from his home is completely reasonable. Absolutely. And yet finding yourself in the position of having to beg him and like come up with like "here’s a pamphlet I wrote for you about the importance of soap "...again, just like an insult to your dignity. So from my perspective, if I would, I would spend less time trying to impress upon him the importance of soap. Like he knows that soap works. He sees that he leaves food up. You know what I mean? Like your husband can. He is capable of noticing these things. He is doing this on purpose. And I think it’s good to move forward with that as you’re sort of operating principle. He knows what he’s doing. He’s not misinformed about soap. He’s doing a bad job on purpose because he wants to not do it. And I need to figure out how I want to live my own life under those conditions.

>....You could chop an onion my man if you can physically wash a dish. You can do some sort of cooking....I also noticed that like he has positioned himself as not a cook, as if that’s something you’re just born with, like being a Sagittarius. Like that’s Kenny. He’s not allowed in the kitchen classics and doesn’t go. Yeah. Whenever he tries to walk through the kitchen door there is a blinding flash of light and he is thrown backwards 50 feet. Yeah. This is awful. And again, just like an insult to your dignity and your personhood. He is behaving like a child to get out of doing, you know, something that would take him 20 minutes if he just did a good job.

>So I I just mostly want you to feel like the answer is not very patiently explaining to him over and over again how much this would mean to you, how important it would be, how much easier would make your day. How not that difficult it is to squeeze a little more soap on the dishes like he knows that.

>...Yeah, I like the idea of trying to say like, OK, if you can’t do the dishes, take over the grocery shopping. My guess is he will respond to that by either saying no more doing a very, very bad job of grocery shopping. So give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, which I’m guessing it won’t. I think then the question is like, do I want to cook for him? And I know that it might feel like I don’t want to get involved in a sort of back and forth of like, fine, you don’t get my food. But I actually think it’s also really reasonable to just say, like, "look, this is really frustrating. I’m giving up on trying to get you to change this year. But I also don’t feel met or recognized or respected in our division of labor at home. And so I’m going to put you on feeding yourself duty."

....

>...That that kind of escalation obviously is not what you want in the sense of like you want your partner to listen when you say like this happens every day. "It would require relatively little energy for you to fix and it makes me feel really disrespected." Ideally a partner would say "thank you for letting me know, I do respect you." I understand that like the acts of self-replication are always a little difficult. No one has a great time washing dishes. We all do it because that’s how you have stuff to put food on. If his whole thing is going to be, "I will purposely do a shitty job at things so that you have to clean up after me and stop asking me to do them," stop doing things for them.

>... And if he’s like dragging his feet and like, "oh, now you’re supervising me." Like if you say you’re doing the dishes badly, ladies. "But you’re criticizing me" It’s just like, "yeah, you’re not above criticism, man."

>...if you try these other things, these other attempts and he continues to act like this is "beneath him" and something that you should "just get over".. This is like every day. This is all the chores in your home. If he’s this shitty about it, it’s really worth hating. And you’re sure of your life? Yeah, it’s really worth saying "I actually want a partner who is a partner at home. And this has been going on for years and years and it’s not getting better. And this affects how I see our relationship."

>And again, if that doesn’t move the needle, either you are not making a mountain out of a molehill or being like, you know, I don’t wanna be to like topical, but like we’re kind of in the middle of like trying to deal with a pandemic here. And the idea of somebody being like "washing dishes, that’s for chumps."

>"Soap doesn’t work." So this game like that worries me in terms of health also. And it’s just again, it is beneath your dignity to try to explain to someone why it’s not good to leave food all over your dishes until they get moldy. It is self-evidently bad. ...I do wonder how much help this husband is with the kid.

>...And even if somebody is like kind of forgetful about the dishes, it’s not too much to have a partner where if you say, "hey, you’ve been really slacking in the dish department lately, would you help out?" Who would say, "oh, yeah. Thank you for letting me know."

/endquotes

"Soap doesn't work!!" 🤯 part of me is shocked, but part of me remembers other ridiculous statements made by LVM/NVM as an excuse to avoid cleaning after themselves. Disgusting.

Ladies, your dignity comes first!!