Filed under: Storage & Cleaning, Storage & Organization, Cleaning
If washing the dishes and folding the laundry is a one-person-job in your house, here's how to get your spouse to start on the household chores.There's nothing that can take the fire out of a new (or old) relationship quicker than fighting over who's going to clean what, who hasn't cleaned what or who didn't clean what to the other person's standards. To keep the peace in your relationships at home, we consulted a few experts -- as well as a few of our most clever gal pals -- to help solve your biggest family cleaning problems.
Photo: Getty Images
Household Chore #1: Your spouse won't do the laundry.
Passive Aggressive Solution: Start wearing granny panties.
Proactive Solution: Stop doing it.
If you really want to send your partner the message that your family produces more dirty laundry than you can handle on your own, just start wearing the oldest, holiest underwear you have. If you'd rather not do that to yourself, Paul Hahn, a marriage and family therapist in Lawrence, Kansas, suggests a much more direct approach: throw in the dirty towel and simply stop doing your partner's laundry.
"My mother used to say 'I'm not your maid,' in the middle of cleaning my room. I always had to choke back the words, 'You look like my maid,'" Hahn says. If you don't want to play the role of your partner's (or your child's) launder, you just have to stop -- a completely fair action if you've already had a conversation about it. "That might mean they don't have a clean shirt for that important meeting at work, but that would be their consequence for not pulling their load," says Hahn. "At the very least, that should get them to the negotiation table."
Household Chore #2: You fight over who does dishes.
Passive Aggressive Solution: Do them, but not well.
Proactive Solution: Divide and conquer.
Being a terrible dishwasher is quite possibly the easiest, sleaziest way to get out of regular dish-washing duty. Though my boyfriend and I have reached some common ground when it comes to sudsing up our dishes, we still have our issues. When I complain that he takes dirty dishes out of the sink instead of simply washing them, he counters with: "Well, you don't like the way I do dishes." He's right, and he knows I'd rather do them myself than redo them.
Erin Bradley, author of Every Rose Has Its Thorn: The Rock 'n' Roll Field Guide to Guys, suggests a more balanced approach. "My fiance does the dishes. We're talking 100% of the time. However, I do make it easier on him by handling the grossest part of the process in advance: rinsing, sorting, and stacking. I do this after every meal, snack, you name it. That way, the dishes can pile up all week. When there's no disgusting food residue on them, they're no longer a daunting prospect."
If he's still not sold on the dishes idea, maybe you could get him to take them on in exchange for you cleaning the kitty litter and the toilet, or two chores he hates just as much. "Figure out what you like/don't like and divide along those lines," Bradley says. "Does that mean that you have to love doing the kitty litter? No, but chances are you hate taking out the trash even more. You sacrifice one for the privilege of not having to do the other."
Household Chore #3: Your partner leaves the bathroom sink/vanity a mess.
Passive Aggressive Solution: Be grosser than he is.
Proactive Solution: Get over it (or get some toys).
The truth is, your boyfriend probably doesn't even notice when he makes a mess of beard stubble and toothpaste on the bathroom sink or counter. But I'm willing to bet he'd notice your mess of bang trimmings, boxes of tampons (unused), pile of cotton balls and cotton swabs (used) and tubes of Monistat (er, half used) -- if you're willing to let it all hang out for a week or so.
According to Bradley, a better way to deal with it is to just get over it and and wipe down the bathroom sink when you need to. "Just accept that there will be toothpaste bits and shaving stubble. Why? Because people live there, silly. It's not a showroom," she says. "Trying to eradicate evidence of human occupation on a daily basis is boring and a waste of good time you could be watching a DVR. Give it a once-a-week scrub-down and get on with it."
If you really can't get over it, invest in this microphone-shaped sponge that might give him a reason other than cleaning to pick it up. Put on some classic rock, lock him in the bathroom and let him know that in between Guns 'n Roses numbers, he could take a few minutes to wipe down the sink.
Household Chore #4: Your partner won't take out the trash.
Passive Aggressive Solution: Play a damsel in distress.
Proactive Solution: Stop acting like your parents (seriously!).
Photo: Getty Images
But the trash issue almost ruined Hahn's relationship, because when his wife was growing up, her mother would take the full trash bag out of the can, tie it up and set it on the floor. As soon as that was done, her father would pop right up and take it outside. "My wife told me a couple of years ago that she worried we weren't going to make it because when she put the trash on the floor I didn't do anything. That sounded like crazy talk to me, but that was her normal."
Hahn says that in some families, there may be unspoken expectations regarding gender roles, no matter how liberal and modern people might fancy themselves today. "It really does a couple good to have nice, long talks about their families of origin. We do carry a lot of the old generation into our wiring when we get married."
Household Chore #5: Your partner won't put things away.
Passive Aggressive Solution: Hold the items hostage.
Proactive Solution: Get rid of decorative "containers."
Does your partner have a hard time putting things away? If so, you might try hiding them so he'll think twice before leaving his favorite lighter on the coffee table, or his favorite coffee mug in the bathroom. My boyfriend's mom recently told me the story of how she used to collect and then auction of her kids' belongings if they left them around the house -- especially shoes they left by the door. "I'd gather them up in a big trash bag and hide them, and after they asked me if I'd seen them enough times, I'd bring everything out and auction it off... for chores or money," she says. (While the shoe-hostage situation didn't necessarily make a lasting impression on her son, I'm starting to think he's due for round 2.)
Nancy Heller, a professional organizer and owner of Goodbye Clutter in Manhattan, New York, suggests living more defensively. "My husband is a pack rat and I can't stand it," she says. "When I leave a bowl or a dish or a tray or anything around, he feels it's his job to fill it up and so he does. All of a sudden it's filled with his lighter collection -- he doesn't even smoke! -- change, loose keys, broken buttons. So I've just eliminated those magnets for him."
In addition to eliminating second homes for wayward items, Heller suggests designating a place (one that closes, like a drawer) for your partner's unwanted crap.
Household Chore #6 through 6,000: Everything else.
Passive Aggressive Solution: Threaten to throw money at it.
Proactive Solution: Throw money at it.
If none of these solutions work, you can always threaten to spend you and your partner's hard-earned money so someone else can do the household chores.
"If you hate cleaning and are never going to regularly do it, we need to figure out how it's going to get done, because living in filth is not an option for me," my friend Christine wrote in an email to her boyfriend Andy. "Do you want to pay someone else to do it? Do you want to pay me to do your chores? Do you want to divide the work in a new way? Please help me figure out how to address these things. They aren't going to go away unless I go away."
That threat came about a year ago. And she says now everything is fine. "Andy had some sort of epiphany or something and now he truly enjoys a clean house and he actually cleans more than I do," Christine says. "So, I think the hard part was to get him to really want a clean home -- to make that a priority."
Though Andy eventually came around to the idea of cleaning (and cleanliness), many couples will find that hiring someone else to do the chores is a great way to make sure everything gets done around the house. Whether or not to pay a person or service to clean your house really comes down to your own personal values, says Hahn. "The only reason I clean my own house is because I can't afford to pay someone else to do it. Some people may consider paying someone else to do it a poor use of money, but I look at it as cleaning my own house is a poor use of my time. If I had the money to pay someone, that's what I'd do."
For tips on tackling your own cleaning problems, check out Your Biggest Cleaning Problems: Solved!