Chore Wars Strife Over Division Of Housework Is Common In Today’s Marriages

Mollie should have recognized the signs of impending war, but she was too much in love to notice.

“When we were dating, we’d spend a Sunday cleaning his house together. Do you think he was ever around when it came time to clean my house? Ha, ha, ha!” she says.

And so it came to pass that chore wars erupted in Mollie’s house. Once they began living together, “he” cleaned the bathroom every six months and ran the vacuum once a month, she says.

“I, on the other hand, would pick a chore to do every night, be it laundry, kitchen floors, bathrooms, dusting, etc. because I couldn’t stand to spend six hours doing it on my weekends. Those chores were in addition to working 8-5, grocery shopping, cooking dinner, feeding the dogs, mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, taking out the trash, sweeping the garage, picking up the dog poop. I was going nuts,” says Mollie, who answered The Gazette’s call for chore-war stories, but asked that we change her name “to protect the persecuted.”

Well, Mollie, take heart in the fact that you’re not alone. Domestic strife over the division of housework is common in the marriage-counseling business, says counselor Jerry Orsund of Colorado Springs. Sometimes it’s the key issue; other times it may be a symptom of other larger issues, he says.

“Couples don’t always identify the source of the problem real well,” Orsund says.

Like any element in a relationship, you have to dig a bit to discover what’s behind the conflict. In some households, it may be a power struggle. In others, it may be a standoff between a neat freak and an untidy spouse, or a case of a spouse unwilling or unable to relinquish some tasks. Often, it has to do with the way a couple’s parents handled housework.

“A lot has to do with past roles that we grew up with. We take them into adult life,” Orsund says.

The latter reason played a big role in the chore wars that once raged in the home of accountant Linda Tollefson and her husband, Randy Switser, who has a landscape and outdoor maintenance business.

The skirmishes started about six months into the marriage, after the lovestruck newlyweds were hit by the reality of sharing a household.

It was Randy and his low tolerance for messes that led him to complain about Linda not finding time to pick up or wash clothes. Linda was baffled, but consider Randy’s upbringing: He grew up with a stay-at-home mom who did most of the housework.

“I grew up with four brothers and a working mom. Everybody pitched in,” Tollefson says.

They took their problems to a marriage counselor, but it didn’t take long to figure out what was going on - especially when Randy said he ran out of shirts because Linda did laundry only once a week.

“I remember clearly the counselor literally throwing his note pad in the air and saying ‘Did it ever occur to you that you could buy more shirts or do the laundry yourself?”’ Linda says.

No one doubts that the days of Donna Reed and Harriet Nelson, those quintessential ‘50s moms, are gone. Traditional, gender-based divisions of household labor - mom cooks and cleans, dad brings home the bacon - fell by the wayside as more women entered the workforce.

And it’s true that more men are doing more of the household chores than their predecessors.

When the Gallup Poll first took a reading on the issue in 1949, 62 percent of married couples said the husband did at least some of the work. Last fall, a Gallup Poll on the same issue showed 85 percent of husbands doing some of the housework.

The percentage of men who help out frequently jumped from 19 percent in 1949 to 29 percent in 1997, according to the poll.

It’s that “frequently” thing that seems to raise hackles. Studies show that working women still pick up the bulk of the dirty work - or at least they perceive that they do. In a 1997 Maricopa Research poll, 65 percent of married men say they split household chores equally with their spouses, but only 47 percent of married women saw things that way.

Whether the division-of-labor problem is real or perceived, it inevitably leads to fights that can threaten a marriage unless the warring parties can figure out the terms of a peace treaty.

In the case of the Tollefson-Switser household, the visit to the marriage counselor was an eye-opener and paved the way to a solution. It hadn’t occurred to Randy that he could learn to do his own laundry. Now he does. And starting this year, 11-year-old daughter Mariann will begin doing her own laundry.

They all get together once a week and do a major house cleaning, dividing up the rooms. Nancy does most of the cooking, but Randy pays when they go out to eat. Nancy puts dishes in the dishwasher and Mariann empties it. Randy and Nancy share grocery shopping.

“There is family pride that goes along with a house that gets cleaned together,” says Nancy, who has been married to Switser for 16 years. “Plus it stays clean longer.”

Not every attempt to find a solution will be successful. Remember Mollie, our chore-war veteran? She went on the offensive after threatening to “make mashed potatoes in his mouth” when her husband wouldn’t even do simple chores. She created a job sheet, outlining “his” and “hers” duties in an effort to equalize the load, she says. But she ended up nagging as she tried to get him to pitch in.

“He’d forget,” she says. “He would lose the list (on the refrigerator door). He’d be too tired; he just wanted his martini and to snuggle on the couch.”

She finally resorted to hiring a cleaning service, although it doesn’t do everything.

“A solution is being able to talk it out and not getting into a power struggle,” Orsund said.

Orsund himself has some experience on the chore-wars battlefield.

“I grew up in a family with pretty traditional roles,” says Orsund, whose wife is also a marriage counselor. “I learned pretty fast.”