My partner and I just moved into our first apartment together. He is 31, and he has never lived alone before. He lived with his parents. I’m afraid that I’ll have to mother him and do all the household work, even though he comes [home] from work before me and has more free time, since he’s a teacher and basically free all summer. How do I get him to help with work around the flat without nagging him, and how can we avoid becoming just roommates?
Eleanor says: Here’s some good news: you didn’t say he’s already not doing his share. You said you’re afraid that might happen. It’s good to be alive to the difference between a fear of an outcome and evidence of that outcome – in relationships, fears can become expectations altogether too easily.
One question is how to manage the domestic load. I think you just have to be totally matter of fact about this. “This is the list of stuff that needs to happen, how should we divide it up?” It’ll be crucial not to do that in a way that feels like he’s the student and you’re the teacher. Maybe, because he’s been living with his parents, he doesn’t know housework stuff already – but if so the fact that he doesn’t know this stuff should not be treated as a personality trait by either of you. Not knowing things about household work should feel as trivial as not knowing where a certain train station is: he learns it, and from then on he knows it. Try to tell him these things in exactly the same way you’d tell a friend whose competence you were confident of. Each of you has to act like he’s equal to the task.
It might also help that you’re both newcomers to this new space together, and he didn’t move into what is already your space. Look for ways to keep that early equality going. Don’t become the one who knows where we keep the such-and-such or start taking care of household things while he’s out. Be cheerily comfortable announcing what housework “we’re” going to do (“let’s straighten the place up before we go to dinner”) so that gets established now while it’s still fun and honeymooney and doesn’t feel like a big, sour change later on.
Another (in some ways bigger) question is how to manage the relationship around the housework. He might have all kinds of insecurities or self-consciousness about never having lived alone, and there’s a way for him to learn this stuff that feels like it’s between equals. If you don’t want to mother him, ultimately a big part of that is just not mothering him.
If he doesn’t do his share, I think a good rule in cohabiting relationships is to really have the conversation if you’re going to have it, and really not have the conversation if you’re not. Don’t drip-feed stuff in hinted suggestions. Say “it’s bothering me that I don’t think we do the same amount of housework” and leave with concrete ideas of who does what and how regularly, not just an abstract commitment to doing more. What’ll make you feel like a nag is if you try to dodge the unpleasant-feeling conversation but also try to communicate the need for change in other ways; a sentence here, an “it was a joke” there.
If it comes to it, you can point out that issues of housework are also issues of sexual chemistry because nobody wants to have sex with someone they feel like they’re parenting.
But try to give him time to mess up before you decide he has.
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