We Fought About...

This couple is sharing all of their fights on Twitter. And it is brilliant. There are lots of reasons why, but I think my favorite is that it is so easy to relate to. All the things they fight about sound silly when they are boiled down to one sentence:

"Alan's phone died and he came home late."
"I didn't cc Claire on an email."
"Alan sent me an article that put Prince in a bad light."

But seriously, how many of us have had fights like this? And how many of them spiraled out of control into a vortex of off-topic nonsense? I think I'm a going to start a rule about boiling arguments down to 180 characters before anymore discussion is allowed. It's so crisp and clear, and then we can actually deal with the issue.

My husband and I have been fighting a lot lately about division of labor. Namely, that we are bad at it.

"Emily doesn't ask for help when she needs it"
"Chad doesn't even see the giant pile of dirty clothes until Emily trips on it"
"Emily doesn't read labels in the store. All of the shower products are wrong."
"Chad never EVER helps with the shopping"

There's plenty of articles out there about the "second shift" that women work - i.e. what I call homekeeping. It's quite true in our household, and it's not because my husband doesn't want to share the load. The fact of the matter is that I have/make more time for homekeeping. Maybe because I like it, maybe because I care, maybe because I am a woman. Who knows?

Here is Chad's Work-Life balance. Most of the time, he is sleeping or at school. He doesn't have a lot of time to spend on chores.

Here is my work-life balance. I do almost all of the chores, and I spend about 20% of my time doing them. This includes cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, mending clothes, taking out the trash, pretty much everything. But as you can see, I usually only work around 50 hours a week, I sleep more than Chad, and I have time to work out. And I STILL kick the crap out of him when it comes to down-time.

It doesn't seem quite so unfair when you look at it graphically. However, it seems very unfair when I'm scrubbing toilets and trying to pre-package 10 lunches every weekend. Or when Chad asks innocently: "hmmm... did you follow the recipe exactly for this dinner that you just prepared for me?"

The good news is, once Chad graduates and starts making an income again, we will probably hire a cleaning service to take care of the heavy lifting.  However, something tells me that my need to have an "ready to entertain" house will leave the brunt of what's left on me.

So who else out there feels like they always lose trash jenga, chore chicken or whatever you want to call it?  Is anyone successfully using chore wheels? Has anyone's relationship actually ended  over these kinds of issues?