Help! My Boyfriend Just Revealed How He Thought Household Chores Got Done. I Have No Words.
Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here.
My boyfriend and I (we’re both men) are both in our late 20s. We started dating in our last year of university and moved in together about a year after. He’s very good at those in-demand tech and number-focused computer skills, so he already had good employment lined up before graduation. I struggled to find full-time work in my field, and worked part-time while doing the household cleaning, cooking, shopping, etc. His work pays well but demands a lot of his time. I like to cook and enjoy making my space homey; he’s more of a pizza and floor guy. It’s just the two of us, so everything worked out well.
This summer, I finally got the full-time job I’ve always wanted, and predictably, I have much less time for the house.
Dinners got less complicated, laundry sat out for longer without being done, etc. My boyfriend was completely baffled by this, because he thought household chores worked as they do in a video game. Put dirty clothes in the machine, and they get clean in minutes. Stick ingredients in the oven, and a whole lasagne comes out. At first, I thought he was pulling my leg, but no, he really, really honestly believed that everything is instant because we have “technology and stuff” (I kind of understand, because he lived with his parents in university before moving in with me, and I’m sure his mom did everything).
He understands now that the house isn’t a video game, and he does his share when he remembers to, so that’s not the problem. The problem is me. I keep getting this voice in the back of my mind going, “How can you be so dumb? Wow, he was dumb. He was really dumb.” I’m reminded every time I cook or do a chore. How do I get over this? I don’t want to leave him, so don’t suggest it. I just want to silence that mean-spirited inner voice.
—Leveling Up My Patience Stat
Dear Leveling Up My Patience Stat,
If your boyfriend is so good with technology, he should understand that you can use the internet to look up information about anything in the world, how it works, and how long it takes. He chose not to because he didn’t want to. I do think you should replace the “Wow, he was dumb” inner voice, but I also have to suggest that you replace it with one that says, “Wow, he didn’t care.”
By the way, that’s worse. It suggests a certain level of laziness about his own home, and especially about paying attention to your experience. “I like to cook and make things homey” may be cute now, but “We both work, and I’m in charge of food and cleaning and anything else that he’s not passionate about or claims not to understand except when he remembers to pitch in” is going to get old fast. The mean-spirited thoughts you can’t shake are your instincts and inner wisdom telling you that life with this guy could be a battle.
But you insist that you don’t want to leave him, so you’re going to do something to change the way you think about him, which could involve giving him opportunities to show you that he can and will dedicate brain power to things that don’t appear on the screen in front of him. What about doing a household project (Peel and stick wallpaper? Building some Ikea furniture? Making a series of fun recipes as a team?) together so that you’re actually experiencing the same reality once in a while. And you can talk explicitly about how each of your upbringings shaped the way you operate in a relationship and team up to create a vision of what might need to change for the life you’d like to have together. Maybe there’s some sort of couple’s game that provides questions designed to encourage opening up about your daily lives and inner worlds (the Fair Play Deck may at least get you talking about the division of labor in your home). That might get him into the habit of being interested in how the things that don’t fall into his jurisdiction happen—and more importantly, what your routine is like in the moments when you’re not together. I’m reaching a little here, but so are you when you ask how to eliminate a negative thought that exists for a clear reason.
I turned 30 this year. I’m a big fan of celebrating my birthday. At my 29th birthday, people started talking about the last year of my 20s, and I told them I had planned to do a big year of events all leading up to a huge party on my 30th birthday and a trip the week after. I thought it was fortuitous that my birthday was on a Saturday this year, so I planned on going big. One of my cousins asked about my birthday plans at Christmas and I told everybody about them. Well, on New Year’s Eve, my cousin got engaged. They decided they wanted to get married by the end of the year and guess what date they picked?