In return, I make him the occasional cup of tea. :)

Of course, we end up with a problem whereby some particular bit of clutter is annoying one or the other, but the perturbed one doesn’t want to do anything about it without help from the other (or the bothersome bit “belongs” to the other, such as my pile of clean clothes, which I know bug him but that he doesn’t want to touch because they’re my clothes).

What’s the deal woth making beds?

I never really bothered until SOMEBODY around here started leaving poop stains on my sheets.

Next I’d like to know what’s considered household cleaning because, based on recollections of single life, both seven and fifteen hours a week seem a little off. Do single women really average more than two hours a day cleaning, even including laundry and dishes? Does the average single man really spend an hour a day?

I once had a job that involved in-home research as follow-up for phone-based surveys (about personal record keeping) and I gotta say that self-reporting isn’t very reliable. Two generally accepted reasons in human factors circles: people are lousy estimators of time, and people tend to inflate up or down based on how much they think *other* people do (whether or not, in fact, other people really do that much.)

And finally I’d want to know if the couples component was limited to childless couples since a) the workload goes up when children arrive and b) although I love being a stay-at-home dad most women tend to stay home, for longer, when there are children around.

That said, the claim that most women clean more than most men, and that in relationships women clean even more than men sounds unfortunate but about right. I think that Zuzu and other correctly suspect that women feel under more pressure of responsibility when someone else is around, although I expect that for similar reasons men tend to let themselves go. Which is a shame.

I’d point out another possibility for the extra three hours some folks have noticed: different people have different criteria. Thus my partner drops both clean and dirty clothes on the floor. Since I lack her magic clean-clothes glasses I end up doing more laundry than I would if I was single. On the other hand in the kitchen she does more hand-washing while I use the dishwasher. Since I tend to use more kitchenware when I cook she winds up doing more dishes than she would if she was single.

Finally there’s a sort of Murphy’s Law for roommates to contend with: in any given household even if one roommate has even a slightly lower threshold for cleaning they’ll almost always wind up either doing most of the cleanup (leaving the other with less to do) or initiating cleanup (leaving the other roommate feeling less in control and/or more like a slob.) Socially acquired gender expectation can muddy that dynamic, which helps account for Mnemosyne’s “proof I’m actually a man” quip. But because it’s a structural phenomenon you can encounter the same dynamic whatever the gender mix.

figleaf

I use this example because I personally would say the hell with it and walk around town with a jelly stain on my shirt. I just can’t be bothered, and in that sense I’m like the guy upthread who thinks women just need to care less. But my partner, who normally is like the carefree guy upthread, has a problem with the woman he loves walking around town sporting a jelly stained shirt. Because it hurts him that people might think I look a bit like a crazy woman. And I love him, so I try to tend to these things. I don’t think he should ‘care about them less’. I think, in a couple, unless someone’s being absoloutely psychotic, the person who has the higher standard of cleanliness or order should have his or her needs respected.

why is it women see the need to clean obsessively when their pods are going to be in the view of any “outside” person, while men apparently clean less when there’s anyone else to do it?

I think those are two different things. I know my now-husband would pick things up in his apartment before I came over. But I think most women would consider him “normally clean” even on a female scale. He’s not one to mark the toilet with urine or leave his underwear on the bathroom floor. He’s a packrat like me and will let newspapers pile up, but he’s not a true slob. And he had NO illusions when we moved in together that I would suddenly turn into a domestic goddess, though he would have liked me to at least get up to his level.

I’m just glad I only have a minor amount of guilt about my horrendous messiness. That means that I have no problem picking up the phone and getting Merry Maids to do the work for me rather than angst-ing myself to death about my failures as a woman.

Ironically, the Merry Maids workers that they send over most frequently are two men who do a great job, at least to our standards.

These days, I seem to lack that cleaning gene as well. I’m decent with general cleanliness but have a very high tolerance for clutter. I’m pretty sure my boyfriend spends more time doing housework than me but we don’t live together. I don’t know how much or if this would change if we co-habitated but for what it’s worth, he currently spends more time cleaning than his two female roommates.