I love my wife. She is easily the best thing that has happened to me and I feel very lucky considering she once told her friends that she would never date me. We dated six years before we got married and I figured that all of the major issues that would impact our relationship had been dealt with by then. I see you shaking your head. Yeah I was wrong on that one.

What amazed me the most was that the one thing that was so very challenging those first couple of years of marriage was the division of labor at home. We lived in a small two-bedroom apartment so there was no upkeep or yard work to do, but we did have the normal issue of food preparation, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, vacuuming, folding the laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning the bathroom, etc. Now I certainly didn’t take the approach that this was women’s work, but we did have a little problem figuring out who would do what and how often. We both had our own ways of doing things and neither of us really wanted to change.

So we would negotiate what we would do and how often. We would try that for a few weeks and generally it would fall apart and for another couple of weeks we would be disgruntled and then come up with a new solution. We continued to refine this division of labor and tried to fix whatever didn’t work before. Mostly it was a case of unfulfilled expectations but of course the tricky part was that we never told each other what our expectations were. Hard to please someone when you have no idea what they want.

So over the period of a few months we finally reached balance in our home life where we each pulled our own weight, the apartment was kept up, and marital harmony ensued. But it was certainly a struggle as we both grappled with our new identity as husband and wife along with the expectations we had about our married life. It has been many years since we had those issues, but I remember it vividly as it felt like the first real challenge we had to face.

I’m reminded of a sermon a pastor preached one day. He was talking about how a newly married couple had agreed to a 50/50 split of all the household duties. So when the sink was full of dirty dishes, the husband washed half of them. Later the wife saw the pile of dishes and washed half of them. More dishes came and the husband again cleaned half. The couple never was able to wash all the dishes because each only did half of the remaining amount. It also indicated what he called a “ledger” mentality; where one half would only do as much work as the other half and no more. Frustration is the only result of this kind of action.

Instead, act selflessly when it comes to housework. I can tell you from experience that the peace and harmony that is reflected back from your spouse balances out any of the extra work that you end up doing.