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Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

1 PETER 5:5

 

“I would love to find out how to get my husband to do some work around the house. The problem we have is that he wants to mess up, and then fuss about the house not being together [clean].”

“For my husband and I, we have decided that whomever is home more gets more housework.”

“My husband and I picked our chores based on what we were good at and what we liked to do.”

If you think about it, some of the most common practical decisions you will make early in your marriage revolve around who does what. When you live in a home together, there are a multitude of chores to complete. Who cuts the grass? Who buys the food and cooks? Who vacuums? Who cleans the toilets? Who pays the bills? Who feeds the dog?

And this is all before you have children.

Dividing up housework is a big issue in marriages today. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center indicated that 62 percent of Americans ranked “sharing household chores” as “very important for a successful marriage.”¹ Sharing housework ranked higher than factors such as adequate income, shared religious beliefs, and children. In fact, when FamilyLife ran an article about this topic on our website and asked for reader responses, we received 85 long emails in just a few hours.

For many years surveys have shown that wives typically do much more of the housework than husbands, even when both spouses are employed full-time. This has been changing with each generation, however, and many couples today report that husbands share the burden.

But how do you divide that burden equally? Is that even possible?

We often hear in our culture that marriage should be a 50/50 relationship, where each spouse strives to do his or her share. The 50/50 Plan in marriage says, “You do your part, and I’ll do mine.” But when you try to apply that standard to a practical area like household chores, you quickly realize that 50/50 just doesn’t work. As one wife wrote in an email, “There is no way to split anything down the middle as far as housework goes.”

The biggest weakness of the 50/50 Plan is simple: It is impossible to determine if your spouse has met you halfway . . . and the person who says he’ll meet you half way is usually a poor judge of distance! Because it is unlikely that you can agree on where halfway is, each is left to scrutinize the other’s performance from a jaded and often selfish perspective.

Instead, marriage works when you both have a 100/100 philosophy, which requires a 100 percent effort from each of you. Start by stating the 100/100 Plan like this: “I will do what I can to love you without demanding an equal amount in return.” Yes, there will be times when one person appears to get the advantage in the relationship. And there will be times when, because of sickness or injury or unusual circumstances, one of you will need to shoulder 99 percent of the load. But love requires sacrifice. Stick with the 100/100 Plan, and you will see increasing cooperation and intimacy in your marriage.

One of our readers told us:

God has blessed me with a very loving husband who does not see that there is a division for the daily upkeep of our home. I am a stay-at-home mom now, but my husband has always helped with domestic duties . . . We are on the same team; there is no place for “your job” or “my job.” It’s “our job.” I cannot end this without saying that my husband has truly mastered the art of loving and serving as the Bible says in Ephesians 5. He daily looks for ways to ease my stress and help my day be brighter.”

One theme that came through loud and clear in many of the emails we received is that a marriage thrives when both husband and wife seek to love and serve each other. One husband wrote, “I see helping in the housework is one of the easiest and most tangible ways to serve my wife. Anything to lessen her burden.”

Another added, “As the man, my primary responsibility is love. I have found that my wife receives a great deal of love when I contribute to chores. As the man, I bite the bullet, and do the chores I don’t like to do for my wife in love. This has been a very successful way for me to shower love on my wife.”

Discuss

1. How was household work divided among family members as you were growing up?
2. Take a few minutes now to talk about who will do what in your home after you are married. Make a list of chores that will be required. Talk about which chores you feel you are good at doing, which chores you enjoy and which chores you hate. Talk about the standards you want to establish for your home—organization, cleanliness, etc. —and be realistic about your expectations.
3. Read 1 Peter 5:5-7. In this spirit, how can you follow the 100/100 Plan as you divide household chores?
4. In what other areas of your marriage will you need to follow the 100/100 Plan?
5. Pray together that God will give both of you the attitude of a servant and the humility you need to follow the 100/100 Plan.

Note

1. Paul Taylor, Cary Funk and April Clark. As Marriage and Parenthood Drift Apart, Public Is Concerned About Social Impact (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2007), p. 2. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2007/07/Pew-Marriage-report-6-28-for-web-display.pdf