There is a common problem one hears about frequently where a wife feels overwhelmed by the upkeep of the home and tells her husband this, and he asks what he can do to help, and this just overwhelms her more. (A similar problem applies in many other situations and what I say here can, mutatis mutandis¹, work there too.)

“Just tell me what I can do to help” is a very practical suggestion. People who are used to running things have routines and habits that they’re used to, and ways of doing things that they have developed, none of which will be obvious from the outside. Moreover, which things will be most helpful and require the least explanation are also quite non-obvious from the outside. Even worse, many tasks are often inter-related in extraordinarily non-obvious ways. A person who just charges in and starts doing things often causes more problems than they fix.

But.

It’s actually a lot of work to figure out how to adapt a job to someone else and figure out how best to explain it to them. This is why general offers of help often backfire. Until the person can do the work of offloading one of the tasks, they now have all the tasks to do that they had before, plus one additional task of doing the work of offloading it. And, on top of the added work of another task, there’s now the stress of realizing that help is not readily available. Until the offer had been made and the person thought about how to try to take advantage of it, they were probably under the comforting illusion that all they had to do was ask for help and things would get better. Now that this comforting illusion has been dispelled, they are looking at the burden of their situation in an unvarnished way and its full weight hits them.

Unfortunately, it is tempting to a person in this situation who is not clear-sighted to blame the person who offered help for this extra stress. In fact, there is a notorious response to this stressful situation where the wife says something to the effect of, “if you really loved me you’d know what to do without asking.” This is both incorrect and can easily damage the relationship, but it’s said by someone who is young and tired and has never been on the opposite side of this before. It’s expressing a real problem, though the expression is wrong and potentially toxic. However that goes, the good news is that there is a practical solution to this problem.

The husband begins by picking some time he can devote to cleaning. (This works with other things, too, but cleaning is a convenient example.) Let’s say he can set aside twenty minutes. He then looks around and picks something to clean that looks like it should take about fifteen minutes (things always take longer than they seem like they will). Then he should go to his wife and say:

I’ve got fifteen minutes to do some cleaning, and I was thinking of cleaning this thing. Is there something I should clean instead that would be a better use of that time?

This packs a lot of things into a few words, so let’s unpack it:

1. It demonstrates proactive good will. Merely knowing that someone is thinking about you when you aren’t talking to them makes one feel supported and cared for.
2. This can be accepted with no effort, so it doesn’t add to the wife’s workload.
3. This serves as a sanity check, so if there’s some incredibly non-obvious reason this shouldn’t be done, this lets the wife stop it before any damage is done. This has longer-term implications of not needing to worry about future help, too.
4. If the wife does consider alternative uses of the time, it gives a bounded sense of the amount of effort available right now, which drastically lowers the search space of the alternatives to consider, reducing the cognitive load.
5. It shows consideration to the wife’s preferences, making her feel valued (as she in fact is).
6. If the wife does pick an alternative in preference, this gives useful information about her thought process so the husband can be more in tune in the future, improving things for both of them.
7. By presenting the actual assessment of the time it will take, while having a reserve of time available but unstated, it communicates what the husband is thinking while providing a cushion against surprises. Leaving a job off in the middle when one extra minute would finish it feels almost like an insult, while being able to go a little longer than one expected feels like care. Thus the husband is both clearly communicating and also doing his best to make the whole thing positive even if unexpected things happen. (note: hard cut-offs do happen and are fine if they’re communicated ahead of time. “I’ve got to be in a meeting at 1pm, but I thought I could clean the table before then” is fine to leave off in the middle of because of the framing, expectation management, and communication of the constraints ahead of time.)

Longer Term

It does need to be noted that this is dealing with acute support where there are no long-term changes in the domestic arrangement being sought. That’s actually very frequently the case, even when it’s talked about differently, because reallocating who performs some domestic chore involves reallocating who is in charge of that domestic chore. A husband and wife are partners, not servants, so neither gets to unilaterally set the standards the other’s chores have to meet. However, whoever is doing the chore can unilaterally set the standard higher than the agreed upon minimum. For this reason, chores almost always end up getting done by whoever cares more about the standard to which they are done. (Or, more colloquially, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.)

For this reason, if there is a long-term reallocation in the balance of domestic labor that is being sought, it is absolutely crucial that this come with a thorough discussion of the standard to which that work needs to be done, and this must be done with an open understanding that the minimum standards are a compromise between partners. Many people do not examine their assumptions, and of particular relevance many people just assume that everyone shares their same standards. A person to whom it matters greatly that each coat is on the proper hook often has trouble, at first, believing that another person might literally get no psychological benefit from it because they never remember where the coats are spatially and only ever look at the coats to identify which is theirs. It takes people time and patience to realize that human beings genuinely are different and so living together requires compromise and adaptation, and maybe it’s best if the person who gets a psychological reward from the coats always being on the same hooks—and who also finds it zero work to remember which hook which coat goes on—should be the one to hang the coats up.

It’s also the case that sometimes the standards need to be negotiated up, and sometimes the standards need to be negotiated down. Sometimes one partner didn’t consider all of the implications of something and should raise their standards. Sometimes one partner is worrying too much and needs to exert self-control to force themselves to relax. There are no universals here except that good communication ahead of time solves a lot more problems than it causes.

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1. With things changed that should be changed/Once the necessary changes have been made. ↩︎