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Any tips to avoid 'keeping score' when it comes to living with others? I understand it's an unhealthy mindset to have, but I can't help but feel that I pull more of the weight in my current living situation.
We've tried sitting down and formalizing who does what - but then the chores don't get done in a timely fashion and it drives me crazy, so I do them anyway.
Both of us work full time and have busy lives, so I understand that things slip through the cracks. But over time it does wear on me. How have y'all figured out how to deal/live with a situation where you don't feel the housekeeping is equitable?
I feel like I should’ve specified this is a long term partner hah. Thanks for giving a measured response, I was surprised by the level of ‘just find different people’ in the comments.
Yes! This makes a huge difference! Are you considering children at some point? That makes a huge difference too.
In a long term relationship, it's possible this isn't the most useful way of looking at things. It might be useful to consider other perspectives, or at least specify what exactly "the chores" entail, and what exactly is bothering you about pushing them off, and whether there's an area of homemaking comparative advantage for your partner, even when thinking about the problem more generally.
It's easy to fall into a hole of dishes, floors, bathrooms. Dishes, floors, laundry, bathrooms. This can be crazy making for some people.
We have cats, some chickens and may get a pig. I know that no matter how dirty our house gets, or how stressed he is, my husband will definitely remember to do important things to keep them alive, even if they were my idea and I kind of forced them on him, and I tend to forget about them. If he went on a trip and I forgot to look after them, he would be very angry, and rightly so, they might die or something. But in general, he's the person who makes sure they're alright, because he simply is, and if he was feeling very stressed about that, we'd probably be better off not having them.
He is also fire keeper. He likes fires and cares about them in a way I do not. When he does not make a fire, our house is heated by a gas furnace, because I will definitely not make one.
Meanwhile, we also have a baby. We both know without discussing it that I will get up in the middle of the night with the baby. If she's going through something and I have to get up three times, I'll do that. If I have to get up five times, I'll get up five times. This is completely independent of the state of the rest of the house. There are valid reasons why it traditionally makes sense for women to stay home with babies and young children, and this is true even though I don't care that much for babies in general. This is my specific baby, and I probably won't give up or get mad at it even on two hours of sleep. Due to circumstances, husband is currently stuck with more childcare responsibilities than I am. It's terrible. We both hate it. It will be solved when we get different jobs, or when the children go into preschool. Maybe when both things happen.
There's a difference between things that should be solved internally -- by talking things through, making lists, assigning tasks, and so on, and things that should be externally -- by getting different jobs, getting rid of pets, getting rid of dishes, changing heat sources, getting a washing machine, hiring someone to deep clean the bathrooms, stuff like that.
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It partly depends on how committed you are to your roommate.
I am usually the messier person in this situation, and did not like having neater housemates. They would get upset with my slovenliness, and I would get upset about them being judgy and uptight. They thought I was free riding, I thought they were making unnecessary work for themselves. One older woman was especially terrible to live with, because she didn't realize that her preferences were preferences, and thought that my other roommate and I were simply bad people for having messier living standards. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/she-divorced-me-i-left-dishes-by-the-sink_b_9055288
The solution was to eventually marry someone about as messy as myself. We now clean up (not very thoroughly) about once a week, and feel better about ourselves afterwards. In the meantime, we have a baby and a toddler, so things get very dirty. If we ever have money, we will first clean up what we ourselves notice, and then hire someone else to come in and clean the things we do not notice, which is a lot.
Other reasonably stable situations have included living in households with a full time homemaker in them, in foreign exchange and English teaching situations. I was still messier than them, they still ended up doing way more housework than me, but they seemed to consider that their actual job, and not something to get resentful over.
Something to consider when having these conversation is that having to maintain higher cleanliness standards they prefer wears both on you and on the other party, but the other party might feel ashamed to admit their actual preferences, leading them to promise to do things and then not actually do them. Maybe they say they will scrub the bathroom once a week, but to them that means a bit of spraying and a couple of wipes, and to you it means some kind of deep clean. When bringing this up, try to remember that it is likely that what they are doing represents their actual preference. They are cleaning until they are comfortable with the situation, and a bit more than they want to make you more comfortable. They may not have an intuition for what will or won't bother you.
When I had my first baby and no washing machine, I washed clothes every two weeks, sometimes every three. Sometimes I bought baby clothes because it was easier than washing that week. That wasn't because I thought someone else would wash them if I just held out long enough (I knew for sure that they wouldn't). It was because I was more willing to wear the same shirt three times than sit at the laundromat reading sad texts about the screaming baby. Clean people sometimes don't realize that people really live like this when they aren't around, and make comments like the messier person is just waiting for them to do the housework for them. That probably isn't true.
Anyway, in the long run there are two solutions. Find a housemate with similar preferences, or the neater person takes on more homemaking duties in exchange for the messier person doing something else instead (usually involving spending more money, but it could involve things like homemade decorations or gardening or something else non-financial to make the living situation more pleasant)
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A one-off action that I would strongly suggest and which shouldn't take much effort to do is to minimise the potential for mess to develop. A sink full of dirty dishes is a lot easier to tackle if you only have 4 dishes available instead of 12. If the bin is always overflowing get a smaller bin. If you have 6 dirty tea towels get rid of half of them. Don't have open shelves brimming with knickknacks.
Beyond hiring a cleaner or living alone there's either conflict with no guarantee of resolution, or accepting a choice between coming to terms with doing the chores or coming to terms with the chores going undone. Right now you're getting the worst outcome by doing the chores while bristling that they're going undone. You can either enforce your expectations or adjust them, whichever path you take you'll have to trade something away.
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And they say mental labor is a women problem (dang, my effortpost on ML has been delayed by 11 month by the war).
Doing the chores anyway is how you end up drawing passive-aggressive cartoons about your situation. Add "managing the chores" to the grand list of chores, so your share of physical labor is lower and you can spend your time haranguing your mate about doing their share.
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Find roommates that have similar cleanliness standards to yours. Additionally, some people have hang-ups about doing work that they see as beneath them, like cleaning, especially if they're doing it for someone else, such as you, the roommate. I don't have this issue whatsoever, but I've known multiple people who do. I don't know of a system that will fix these issues.
Some things are just hard.
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Tidiness is practically immutable beyond a certain age. Your roommates are messier that you are. This likely doesn't bother then. In fact, without you they would be living in filth and fine with it.
I don't think any system of chores and keeping track will do anything except to alienate your roommates. Maybe they will grudgingly do a few extra chores, but it won't solve the root issue: they are not tidy and you are. No system is going to fix this. Notice how everyone here is just spitballing solutions without giving examples of how it worked for them. It doesn't work and will worsen the relationship with your roommates.
So... while we're spitballing, here's my proposed solution. Fix the problem with money. Hire a housekeeper to come in once a week and clean.
Second best solution: Overcome your natural tidiness and just embrace the filth.
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Would the uneven pull of your roommate make more sense if you interpreted it from a conflict theory rather than mistake theory perspective? If it's only a mistake, then as you suggest it should be fixed already, but given it's been wearing on you over time, maybe it's a conflict. That doesn't necessarily mean your roommate is malicious, just that they are wired differently from you, and would rather avoid chores even if that means the place is less clean or efficiently run.
At which point you'll have a choice. Either design a system that allows a judicious outcome even when the two participants are fundamentally in conflict in some aspects, or move as soon as you can in seek of an environment without a conflicting party. Both easier said than done, of course.
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Invert it. Instead of having a schedule or a table of duties or a checklist, have a log of who did what. Leave the doing to the volunteer, and carefully write down everything that actually gets done. Then shame whoever does disproportionately less.
You can spice it up with a pot of money into which everyone pays equally, and which paid out regularly in proportion to who did how much - though that requires a scoring system.
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It's not an unhealthy mindset. Why should it be ? You don't have to be pedantic about it, but the general trend of who is mooching off is really worth noticing.
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