How Do You Handle the Tasks Neither You Nor Your Partner Want to Do?
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This came up in a comment thread on Corporette last week, and I think it’s an interesting question: How do you handle the things that neither you nor your partner want to do? I can see three ways forward:
- Decide the Thing Isn’t Important.
- Decide to Delegate the Thing.
- Decide to Accept a Lowered Standard.
So, for example: We haven’t had a cleaning service on a regular schedule since March 2020. (We tried to reconnect with our old ones after we got vaccinated, but it turned out that they “didn’t see themselves getting vaccinated anytime soon.”) Then we hired a service recommended by a mom friend, and while they did a stunning job cleaning, they “organized” way too much (I still can’t get over the neatly folded pile of new-with-tags clothes to try on, and my husband’s painting clothes.) So we chose not to work with them, and then Delta hit, and now Omicron. Whee.
This is a long way of saying: Our floors haven’t been mopped regularly since March 2020. I don’t want to mop. My husband, as it turns out, also does not want to mop. (We’ve both done it once, and we have a new appreciation for the people who do this on a regular basis!)
So we had a few options here, as noted above:
- Decide it’s not important — it’s not like we’re eating off the floors, riiiight? And we’ve obviously been spot cleaning if there are big messes, as well as sweeping up the dry stuff.
- Delegate it — go through the process of trying out a new cleaning service, yet again (or convince one of our kids to do it).
- Accept a lowered standard — which is what we’ve settled on for the moment by buying a robot mop.
I suppose there are other ways forward — splitting or trading the undesirable task, or agreeing to take sole ownership of Undesirable Task A only if your partner takes sole ownership of Undesirable Task B — but in my marriage I tend to stick with those three responses.
Anyway, I thought it might make an interesting discussion — where has this come up in your partnership, and how did you handle it?
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Stock photo via Stencil.
I need a way to do this because my DH and I both suck at vacation planning… anyone have tips on how to outsource? (travel agent?)
We’ve been more cautious than most people we know about the pandemic, but we brought our cleaners back in May 2020 as soon as our state’s shelter in place order was lifted. It doesn’t seem like a very high risk activity if everyone is masked and you stay in a different room while they’re cleaning (we are normally in the basement, which they don’t enter) and having a cleaning service is really essential for our sanity. You could add additional layers of safety by opening windows or requiring them to be vaccinated (although the latter probably has limited value now), but we didn’t do either. Even my elderly parents with multiple health conditions brought their cleaners back before they were vaccinated.
To answer the question posed, I don’t think there are any tasks we both hate except deep cleaning, which we outsource. Generally I do more emotional/unseen labor (like managing doctor’s appointments, clothes shopping, reading parenting) and he does more physical/visible labor, including cooking dinner most nights we don’t order in, although I definitely do more tidying up because I care more. It aligns with our interests and abilities pretty well.