Feminist Advice Friday: What are your tips for talking about household labor before marriage?
You cannot let your emotions distract you from your right to safety, love, and freedom.
A reader asks…
Any tips on how to bring up chore equality before you get married?
My Answer:
This is a great question. The mere fact that you’re even thinking about it gives you a major advantage. Even though household chore inequality is one of the most important predictors of marital happiness, my research shows that just 35% of women discussed the issue with their partners prior to getting marriage.
Household chore equality is not some shining beacon of marital joy. It is the bare minimum. Marriages in which there is household chore equality can be severely unequal in other ways. They can be abusive. They can suck. So even if your partner is totally receptive and on board, please remember that marriage advantages men. There are myriad ways that men take advantage of women in marriage. So you have to choose very carefully, especially if you have children. Choosing to have kids with someone is likely the single most important decision you will ever make, and one of the few that you cannot undo.
I want to start by talking a little bit about my own marriage—something I don’t often do, because I think too often “good” men are lauded as gods worthy of worship when being decent to a partner is the bare minimum. I do think young women need to hear about good relationships so they have something to emulate, though. They need to understand that a good marriage isn’t just “he begrudgingly agreed to marry me and do the dishes sometimes” or “he’ll talk about household equality but only by gaslighting me.” So here goes:
My husband talked to me about household chores, about power balance in marriage, about childrearing and lifestyle and feminist philosophy and all of the things that matter to me hundreds of times before we got married. These conversation were never adversarial. They were always practical: How can we build equality? What is the best way for us to raise children? What is a way to live that empowers us both to be happy?
This is how these conversations should go. They should be frequent and friendly. If they’re not, it’s a huge red flag.
From day one, my relationship has been transformative. It offers me more opportunities, more safety, more love. It’s been the spring from which everything good in my life flows. My relationship has expanded my opportunities—multiplying them thanks to the power of connection and two people working for the same goal.
This, friend, is the bare minimum.
If this is not what your relationship offers, if this is not what your conversations around equality look like, then it is time to leave and call off the wedding right now. Because it will not ever get better. A liberatory marriage is the only marriage that is worthwhile.
We are 14 years into our relationship, and 10 years into our marriage. I started writing about household inequality because I was so tired of seeing something that can be a tool for liberation be used as a tool for oppression. I was tired of seeing women indoctrinated to accept abusive marriages as the only way, to believe that men can’t do better.
I want you to either have a marriage like mine, or to have no marriage at all. Because anything else is going to dramatically undermine your sense of self, your possibilities for your life, your whole world.
I’ve often wondered why so few young women discuss household inequality with their partners, and I think two social forces are at play here:
Our society has done an incredibly effective job making everyone hate mothers. We collectively dismiss them as stupid, hysterical, pathetic, and uncool. And who wants to be those things? So even feminist women ignore what mothers say. They don’t want to be like us, and they sure as hell don’t think we have anything worth saying. So when they see women in unequal marriages, they assume it’s because those women just chose poorly or were otherwise unworthy. When they hear mothers telling them to choose wisely, they discount the message. Their marriage will be different. Their relationship, through magic and romance, will automatically be totally equal and wonderful. So generation after generation replicates this cycle because we refuse to listen to mothers.
We indoctrinate women from birth to be absolutely obsessed with marriage. And we indoctrinate men to be suspicious of partnership, even though the data show that it is men who should be clamoring for marriage and women who should be avoid it (and of course, men are kind of clamoring for marriage, as evidenced by all the men who are very angry at women who choose not to get married; on some level, men recognize that thy need marriage in a way women do not but that’s beside the point). So women enter their marriages from a position of vulnerability. They really, really want to get married, and they worry that if they assert their needs, their partners will leave or be unkind. Any relationship in which this is true is not a relationship worth having. Remember this every time you discuss your needs, for the rest of your life.
The time to address this issue is not when you’re already wedded to an abusive manbaby. It’s before you’re stuck. And that’s because talking early gives you the chance to get unstuck. It gives you the chance to declare that you deserve better, to leave, and to avoid fighting over property and child custody with someone who wants to treat you like a servant.
There’s no magic script you need to use here. Just bring it up. Address the issues that are most important to you. If you find yourself wondering how to bring it up without upsetting him, or without him knowing that you’re bringing it up, or without being perceived as a feminist, it’s a really bad sign. This conversation should be open and honest, or else it’s a sign of a serious problem.
Remember also that men are indoctrinated to view inequality as fair, and to exploit women. Women are indoctrinated to accept exploitation. This means you are going to need to have this conversation over and over again, for the rest of your life. If your partner can’t stomach that, run.
Some things you should discuss many, many, many times before marriage include:
What is equality? How do we define it?
How are we splitting chores now? In the future?
If we want to have children, how do we intend to raise them? How will we handle disagreements?
Can we both agree that all forms of work, not just paid work, count as work?
Do we agree that we are both entitled to free time and sleep?
When an imbalance is necessary (such as if one partner is breastfeeding or one partner is working longer hours), how will we ensure both partners are still getting access to similar quantities of sleep and free time?
Do we both agree that this is a serious issue, not a trivial one?
What about other needs? Can we talk about the effort we put into holidays, birthdays, supporting one another when ill, etc?
If things are already unequal, run now. Leave and do not look back. That’s because inequality is not an accident. Your partner knows things are unequal, and he likes it that way. Leaving forces him to ask a critical question:
Is it more important to me to have a servant, or to build a life with this person?
It also forces you to grapple with his answer. Because if you do leave him, there are only a few possible outcomes:
He’ll stay gone because you were never an actual person to him—just someone to do his chores.
He’ll make meaningful changes because you have shown him you’re not taking his shit, and because he cares about you and being with you.
He’ll promise to make meaningful changes, do it for a while to reel you back in, and then become even worse. So then you’ll need to leave for good, with no third chances.
I think it’s important also to only enter marriage from a position of strength, and to retain one for the entirety of the marriage. You must be equipped to leave, because any person can become abusive—and in a culture where men are raised from birth to abuse others, the odds of your partner becoming abusive are significant.
So before you even consider marriage:
You need to be financially independent. If you can’t support yourself on your own, you should never have children with a man.
You need to be emotionally capable of living alone. If you have a profound need to be in a relationship, your partner can and will exploit this.
You need a support system external to the relationship—family, friends, and ideally both.
After marriage, I strongly discourage you from becoming a stay at home mother. Caregiving work is valuable, and in an ideal world it would be valued. But it is not, and stay at home parenthood puts you in an extremely vulnerable position. If you decide to become a stay at home parent anyway, I’ve written more extensively here about how to protect yourself.
You may want to check out this guide I wrote for more tips on choosing a good partner. Consider also drawing up a family constitution now. It’s a great way to force your partner to get really specific, rather than just offering vague reassurances of his commitment to equality. Here’s how to make one.
Ultimately, at every stage, you must be willing to leave and not look back. It can be hard. You can be sad. It’s ok to grieve making the right decision, to be sad that leaving had to be the right decision. But you cannot let your emotions distract you from your right to safety, love, and freedom.
I could not agree more with every word of this. I also want to add that in the best possible efforts, sometimes relationships do fall apart. There’s no such thing as perfection. People go through traumas, they change, and one can find themselves doing the very best to follow these ideals, and one partner may fail in someway later. Even if that happens, I don’t think it’s an excuse to be eternally fearful of marriage or partnership, but it is important to know that the reality can really suck, and you can end up stuck, and if there are children involved, this does mean it’s something you will deal with for the rest of your life. But there are communities of people like this in the world, that support you, and that the idea of advocating for your needs— especially as a woman and mother in this context— is still paramount and worthwhile. No matter what, it will affect the children positively, as well as waves of other women in the world.
(Also I believe this advice is extremely important regardless of gender status or motherhood status, because there is a range of relationships and gender identities, but I believe that the concept still applies whenever there is a relationship of inequality, where one partner socio-culturally has more power than the other. )
Adding a cool resource here: https://engenderedcollective.org/
Thank you so much for your work, ZV!