A problem faced by anyone who lives together, even simply as roommates, is that people are very conscious of the housework that they themselves do, but not nearly so conscious of the housework that other people do. This is often exacerbated in marriages because males and females frequently have variations in their priorities of what they notice. But even without sexual differences, there is a natural tendency of human beings to take advantage of a division of labor to reduce mental strain by not noticing the things that we’re not responsible for. Unfortunately, that often has the side effect of meaning that we don’t appreciate the housework of the people we live with, and it can even lead to incorrectly feeling taken advantage of by incorrectly believing we’ve done a significantly disproportionate share of the work.

A common solution to this problem is complaining. This tends to be as ineffective as complaining normally is unless it happens within the context of a marriage, where it is usually less effective than complaining normally is. While “opposites attract” is an overly reductive cliche, it is true that people instinctively look for a spouse who will complement rather than duplicate them, and so divisions of labor within a marriage tend to split along these complementary lines. But the very thing that makes the people complementary here tends to make it harder for them to notice the thing that comes more easily to their spouse; in general one finds it more comfortable doing a task where one effortlessly notices its parameters.

There is a much better solution, though it only functions within a specific general attitude to life: generosity rather than entitlement. If your attitude is, “people should do what they should and I shouldn’t have to be grateful to them for fulfilling their responsibilities,” I’ve got nothing to offer you, except perhaps my sympathy because that sounds like a miserable way to live. Focusing on the minimum one is required to do rarely leads to happiness. That said, I’m no man’s master and it’s not my goal to tell anyone else how to run their life.

In the happy alternative, dear reader, that you are open to the idea of being grateful for good things done for you, even where people have an obligation to do them, then there is a fairly easy solution to the problem of unrecognized housework: when you do it, tell the other person about it. The trick is in how you tell them.

Let us suppose that you have an arrangement with your housemate that you will clean the dishes and they will sweep the floors. Suppose that this afternoon they swept the floors. This makes the house you live in more pleasant to be in, so it is a benefit to you. That is, your housemate recently made your life a little better. It’s nice to live with people who put themselves to inconvenience in order to make your life better, isn’t it? Yes, of course there were other benefits, too. Do other people benefiting reduce the benefit you received in any way? Of course not. The whole world could be 1000 times happier to live in for everyone in it, and the benefit you received of living in a cleaner house would not be diminished in any way, and so you are completely free to be grateful for this benefit without regard to who else might have benefited from it. And the proper reaction to receiving a benefit is gratitude; gratitude is really nothing more than the recognition of having received a benefit from someone.

Now, let us suppose that your housemate cleaned the floor while you were out of the house, and let us suppose you’re not in the habit of examining the floors so you didn’t notice. You were preoccupied with some thought, so your feet not stepping on uncomfortable crumbs manifested not as a surprise at how clean the floor was, but as your thoughts being uninterrupted. This is practical, but it’s not entirely ideal, because you received a benefit for which you have failed to be grateful. That’s not a big deal, but all else being equal, it would be better for things to have gone perfectly, wouldn’t it? So imagine that, after your housemate warmly greeted your return, they cheerfully added, in a voice much like one giving somebody a small birthday present, “by the way, I swept the floors earlier.”

This small, cheerful communication said in a way that clearly doesn’t require anything of you has now given you two benefits:

1. It lets you know that you received a benefit and the person who did it understood the benefit to you and intended it; another human being in the world wants you to be happy
2. You are now equipped with the knowledge to be grateful in a situation where you should be.

In this spirit, your housemate cheerfully giving you this information would make your day a little better, wouldn’t it? You would now have two benefits, both of which you’re aware of, rather than just one which you were unaware of. So, all things considered, it would be nice if they were in the habit of doing that, wouldn’t it?

Here’s the thing: all of that applies in reverse, too. And while you can’t—or at least shouldn’t—form habits for other people, you certainly can for yourself. Any time you do some housework, it only takes a tiny bit of extra effort to think about how the people who live in the house (or apartment) will benefit. And at some time it would be convenient for your housemate, it takes equally little effort to cheerfully tell them that things are that little bit better now. If you have trouble focusing on the benefit, this is one of those cases where the passive voice can be helpful. You don’t need to say “I did the dishes,” though there’s nothing in the world wrong with that. Go ahead and say, “the dishes are clean.”

It’s worth noting that this is actually a lot more important than getting credit. It’s important to make sure that your housemate knows about what you’re doing so that they feel like they’re part of a human community which is taking care of them. Them being aware of the work that others do which benefits them actually makes them feel safe and valued.

There is a strange but fundamental tension in human relationships—it is bad to brag but also bad to hide the good that one does for people. Jesus rather famously gave two contradictory commands:

• When you give alms, don’t let the left hand know what the right is doing
• Do not put your light under a bushel-basket

They’re not actually that hard to reconcile if you pay attention to the stuff around it; about giving alms Jesus said to not blow a trumpet before you. That is, don’t attract the attention of people who don’t need to know. But if you give food to a hungry man, you do need to make sure he knows he has the food, otherwise he can’t eat it.

When you live with a person, part of your duty is to make them feel like they’re part of a functioning human community which values them. If they’re unaware of the work you do to take care of the household, you may be doing your housework but you’re failing in your responsibility to make them feel cared for. And the thing is, you can’t do that through alternatives. A person won’t feel cared for if they feel like they’re the only one doing anything to keep the house from falling apart but you occasionally give them a cordless drill. Not everything is interchangeable; a child won’t feel fed if you don’t give them food but brush their hair three times a day, even if they have long hair and it takes longer to brush their hair than it would take to make a sandwich.

When housework goes unrecognized, the solution is to be more generous. But as in so many things, be generous about things that people actually need, not about what’s merely convenient to give.

Addendum: Navigating An Existing Relationship

Many people consider this problem because they are already in it, and in that case there is a little that needs to be said about how to transition to this approach because there can be some pitfalls. That said, the single most important thing to any successful transition is consistency: the glory and the shame of the human race is that we can get used to anything. Just as flowing water wears down rocks, consistent behavior will eventually wear down the hardest-nosed skepticism.

That said, it can speed things up quite a bit to adapt one’s words to the circumstances. The most common failure mode is that things have degenerated into a transactional relationship where both people feel that they put in far more than the other person. In that context, they’re primed to take any mention of things the other person does as a drop in the bucket being presented as if it’s a full bucket—that is, they’re likely to expect any mention of what you did as meaning that this one thing balances out everything they’ve done. There are two main things to do in order to speed up them accepting your words in the spirit in which they’re intended.

The first thing is to minimize the time and attention spent on telling them. One of the most effective ways to do this is to sandwich it between an introduction and a practical question. For example, “Man, it was a long day today. But I did manage to get the floors swept. Any ideas where we should eat for dinner?” By pre-empting them thanking you with a practical question to answer, you negate the impression that you’re telling them in order to be thanked. Them thanking you puts greater emphasis on what you did, because of the extra time spent; that being in excess of the time spent talking about what they did is what tends to lead to thinking that this is meant to balance everything out.

The other big thing is to make a point of showing gratitude for what they did when they tell you about it. If your housemate tells you that they swept the floor and your response is cheerful thanks or cheerful praise, they will naturally assume that when you tell them about what you did, it’s in the same spirit. The worst thing to do is to bring up housework that you did as if it’s a counter-argument. That will confirm their worst suspicions. It is workable, though probably best to avoid in the beginning, to genuinely thank or praise them, then mention a bit of housework you did, as long as you can make it sound like it’s a team accomplishment and the team is celebrating its shared victories. But as I said, try to avoid that in the beginning. There’s plenty of time to mention what you did, and putting a little space between it and the celebration of what they did is almost always the safer policy.

If you can manage to notice housework that they did before they mention it, thanking them for it before they say anything about it will be an especially powerful framing tool for when you later bring up what you did. And the good news, here, is that not only do you not need to do this for everything, that’s actually a bad idea. People don’t like to feel like they’re being watched, because that means that the one watching will notice the moment they’re imperfect. Occasionally noticing and volunteering thanks is the ideal cadence (in this fallen world) because it communicates that there is both appreciation and slack, and we all need people to cut us slack from time to time.