When It Comes to Household Chores, Think Newton’s Law

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Want to have more and better sex? No seriously, this isn’t a cheap ploy to get your attention, do you? Well, apparently there’s a trick to getting both, and it’s as simple as splitting up household chores. According to a recent study that culled data culled from a 2006 marriage and relationship survey, couples who share housework evenly not only had 7.74 times more instances of sex per month, they also enjoyed the sex they had more. Because it’s like the old saying goes, scrubbing toilets is sexy.

Okay, maybe that’s not why, but numbers and nerd data aside, there really does seem to be a connection between housework strategy and relationship health. Anecdotally speaking, most of the happiest couples I know are pretty egalitarian when it comes to maintaining the household. And that doesn’t mean divvying up the housework based on “guy” chores vs. “girl” chores. It’s the 21st century; get with the gender-neutral program already. What it simply means is that happiness comes from doing what your parents should have taught you to do when you were two years old: share.

It’s time to accept the fact that the Flintstones philosophy of marriage and relationship has (thankfully) gone the way of the buggy whip, and that teamwork is the key to keeping things healthy. A good way to think of it is that chores should be divvyed up based on a sort of household Newton’s Law: for every chore there is an equal and opposite chore. One partner cooks, the other does the dishes. One partner does laundry, the other mows the lawn. One partner cleans the bathroom, the other…you get the idea.

What it all really comes down to is respecting each other’s time. Regardless of whether only one of you works, or both of you work, chores suck, and heaping them all on one person, or thinking about them as one person’s “job,” is nothing but a recipe for unhappiness. Even if your division of labor takes into account the fact that one person is at an office all day and the other isn’t, keep in mind that it’s still a division; that a day at the office maybe accounts for a few chores, not all of them.

Not to keep harping on it, but again, it’s all about teamwork, about sharing. It’s like coach used to say, there’s no “I” in team (ok, yes, there’s a “me,” but that’s probably why he was a football coach). It’s about creating habits so that your default setting is to take care of each other rather than expect to be taken care of, even when you don’t feel like doing it. And knowing that it’s your job to do the dishes at the end of the night, regardless of how you feel, or regardless of what you think you “deserve” based on how your day went, is a good way to keep resentment from sprouting up in the relationship. And then there’s all that sex.