Both is the answer. You do look hot doing chores. Also chores done is a turn on. It’s like oysters and chocolate, but your house is tidy and it’s not gross.
You should read The Five Love Languages. This is an actual thing. Different people express and receive love differently. “Acts of Kindness” is one of them. My partner loves when i do things, and i know this, so i do it because i know it makes her feel loved. And that’s hot.
I actually just listened to that episode yesterday, that whole show is pretty great (also, the one author’s other podcast - 5-4 (“a podcast about how much the supreme court sucks”) - is consistently amazing), but for anybody out there who doesn’t do podcasts and wants a summary,
tl;dl All the good ideas in it were stolen from other places and the author is a secret fundamentalist who thinks women need to get back in the kitchen and gay people need to get back in the closet. For example, this Q & A article from 2013
Q: “My son has recently told us that he is gay. I’m having a very hard time dealing with it. How can I help him with this and still show love?”
Gary Chapman: Disappointment is a common emotion when a parent hears one of their children indicate that he/she is gay. Men and women are made for each other—it is God’s design. Anything other than that is outside of that primary design of God. Now I’m not going to try explain all the ins and outs of homosexuality, but what I will say is this—we love our children no matter what. Express your disappointment and/or your lack of understanding, but make it clear that you love them and that you will continue to love them no matter what. I would also encourage you to ask your child to do some serious reading and/or talk to a counselor to try to understand him/herself better while continuing to affirm your love.
For the episode on the book, Shamshiri went back to the original ’90s text, which contains, among other debunked gender stereotypes, an assertion in the “Physical Touch” chapter that men want sex all the time, whereas women need emotional connection for intimacy to be satisfying. (Nowhere in Chapman’s books is any attention paid to the romantic dynamics of queer couples—at one point, Shamshiri jokes that such relationships are “like the female orgasm, not discussed or implied.”) In one chapter, a woman tells Chapman that her husband verbally berates her and refuses counseling. Chapman, in the 1992 version, suggests that the husband’s love language is physical touch and counsels the wife to start initiating sex frequently and more aggressively. When she balks because sex with him makes her feel used and unloved, he advises her to draw upon Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in order to gather strength. In the anecdote that appears in later editions, Shamshiri mentions, Chapman simply suggests that the wife be more physically affectionate in general. Although the sexual mandate is less explicit there, the idea that sex is a sacrifice that women must endure in heterosexual marriage persists.
tl;dl All the good ideas in it were stolen from other places and the author is a secret fundamentalist who thinks women need to get back in the kitchen and gay people need to get back in the closet. For example, [this Q & A article from 2013]
I missed this part and was wondering to myself wtf you were on about!
I was hoping someone would bring up love languages! As someone who speaks gift giving and acts of service, when someone does something for me or gives me a truly thoughtful gift for me I adore it. On the other hand if I don’t see those languages spoken, it makes me feel as though I’m not thought about as much as those I love and it can breed resentfulness.
Does she act on your appearance as a more attractive mate when the chores are done? If so, then it doesn’t matter if it’s real or a ruse. Win-win, literally.
It’s a thing. There’s nothing less attractive than having to play parent to an adult who can’t pull their own weight in managing a household.
Can’t recognize that a full trash can needs to go out without being told? Can’t realize dishwashers that are full need to be run without reminding? Can’t find where clothes need to go when they’re clean?
If that workload is falling on one person most of the time, over time it can become a source of resentment.
When both people have full time jobs, it’s like coming home to a second job.
Personally, I’m so busy, and have so much mental load that just one less thing I have to do is a breath of fresh air. Now, if husband thinks to himself hey I have a little spare time, I can totally help AttackBunny out and do one of her chores for her….uh…. Yeah. Super hot. Idk if it’s as much about the actual act of doing the choice, or more likely, the though behind it, but yeah.
It’s an actual thing. When it feels more like you have a teenage son than a partner it’s hard to get turned on by them, even if you weren’t already too exhausted from clearing up after them.
So much this. Working all day is exhausting. So is keeping the house. Having to do both all of the time when you have an able-bodied partner? Gross. No one wants an adult child as a partner.
Men have no idea just how exhausting it is to have to carry all of that weight. Well, some do, I’m sure. I haven’t met any, personally, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.
Having a partner that is an actual partner gives you the room to breathe and relax. And honestly, that is the real turn on.
I’m a man who had to do this. My partner was going through some pretty rough times in grad school, then left school, and had a lot of mental health work to go through. I was trying to be supportive, but we had to have a few conversations where I said that I didn’t find her exactly attractive in the moment because it felt like I was more of a guardian than a partner. It’s gotten a lot better since then, but it can be hard when your partner is going through hard times (or is just lazy, in some cases) and doesn’t see things as you do.
Everyone needs to put in effort. It doesn’t need to be symmetrical (meaning you don’t have to do all the same things), but it should be approximately equal in terms of effort in both the relationship and your living situation
Look, you’re not entirely wrong. But this is a very gendered experience (as in, disproportionately affects women). Of course it happens the other way around, just nowhere near as often. You don’t have to get so fucking defensive about it. This is the world you live in, deal with it.
This isn’t a stereotype, it’s a well-documented sociological phenomenon. Women typically do the majority of unpaid / organizational labor in a household, even when they work full-time outside the home. And part of why this is such a problem is that this work is often not witnessed or acknowledged by their partners, or even dismissed as “unimportant”.
I know it’s yikes. It felt icky to write it out, but I did because its true. It’s well documented that women are far more likely to be “running the house” even when working full time. So many articles, podcasts, and books have been written about it. There’s even a comic floating around the internet. (english.emmaclit.com/2017/…/you-shouldve-asked/)
Because this is a gendered issue. Although men on average do slightly more paid labor, if you count total labor (both paid and domestic) women work more.
This has serious consequences for women’s careers and is a major relationship strain that men may not realize is happening.
Well documented observations are not politics. That’s just fact. How we decide to react to those facts is politics.