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 Well, while trying to prove a point to my kids, we’ve just surpassed the 48hr mark of the “who will pick up the random piece of trash that they KNOW isn’t supposed to be there” challenge... Between the kids AND the husband, and MULTIPLE trips in and out of the bathroom, this little piece of heaven may just be in it for the long haul!   |
I wonder if this might have changed the course of my triad relationship.
But, then again, someone would have had to actually pick something up in order to discover the money, which would lead to a change in behaviour "just in case" money was on the bottom of everything. The main reason, I think, that women still do the majority of the domestic labor in relationships, or if not the labor, then the Household Management labor, is because we are conditioned to both believe that things will not get done unless we do it and then conditioned to be "bothered" by things before everyone else.
As long as we really are "bothered" by the mess sooner, then the people we live with never have to learn how to be "bothered" by it themselves. It will always get done. We have to really learn how to not do shit until either the consequences for not doing it get bad enough or the reward for doing it is high enough that people will learn how to be "bothered" themselves. That's how we were conditioned, after all.
In the last days before my triad imploded, the house was a fucking disaster. You see, we had an unequal distribution of income, so we redistributed the other parts of the household to compensate. The person who made the most money was responsible for the highest financial contribution and that was it. The sole household "job" she had was to write on the shopping list what she wanted from the store because I am not a mind reader.
(incidentally, she refused to put anything on the shopping list, because she didn't want to "bother" me by requesting things even though that was the point of the shopping list. So I outright refused to buy her groceries, even those few that I did happen to remember she wanted or liked. She ended up paying more than her share simply because she also had to buy her own food in the house.)
The person who made the least amount of money had no financial contribution other than donating his food stamps to the household groceries. Instead, he was responsible for all the household chores. Since his most recent job *was as a personal house cleaner*, this should not have been difficult for him.
My job was to make up the difference in the finances, to manage the finances, and eventually to manage our houseboy because he wasn't doing any chores at all by the end.
We were so poor, that one time I took a 6-week contract job that took me out of the house for a month and a half. The amount of money I made for that job should have paid for my share of the bills and given me a cushion for the next month. While I was gone, he was responsible for managing himself and she became responsible for managing the finances, including paying the bills on time and doing the shopping.
I came home to find the electricity and gas shut off, no food in the house, and an overflowing litter box. She had forgotten to pay for 2 months in a row and he didn't clean anything. So all my "cushion" went towards reconnect fees.
By the end, I had given up. I had previously put a trash can in literally every room of the house, so that nobody even had to get up to throw something away. And yet, trash would pile up on tables, furniture arms, any available surface, including the floor.
A few weeks before I moved out, I spotted some trash sitting on the floor next to the trash can in the living room. One of them had thrown it towards the trash can from the sofa and missed and then left it there. The bin happened to be in the path between the living room / kitchen and the hallway that led to their bedrooms and the only bathroom.
Which means that you literally had to step over that trash to get to anywhere in the house except *my room* which was an add-on on the other side of the house. Anyone using the bathroom had to step over it. Anyone going to his or her bedrooms had to step over it. Anyone coming from their bedrooms or the bathroom into the living room had to step over it. Anyone going into the kitchen had to step over it.
That bit of trash was still on the floor when I moved out about 5 months later. Since all the furniture was mine, I cleaned out the entire house in all the rooms except their own bedrooms (and I did go through their rooms too, looking for my things - he had a habit of leaving his dirty dishes piled up behind his computer desk and they were all my dishes).
But I left that fucking piece of trash right there on the floor of the empty house.
If I had had the money at the time, I wonder if this would have worked? I did use my father's tactic of taking anything they left in the common area that shouldn't be there and putting it out on the curb (Dad has OCD and would accidentally throw away my homework if I left it out on the table, just because "it shouldn't be here" got expressed in his brain as "I will throw it away then").
But all that did was teach them not to leave things they wanted to keep in the common rooms. It didn't stop them from from leaving *trash* around, and if I had picked up their trash for them, that would only have reinforced the problem. I wonder if I could have retrained them with positive reinforcement instead, since they clearly weren't bothered *enough* by the mess to fix it themselves. But someone would have had to pick up that first piece to find the positive reinforcement in order for that to work.
So I applaud this person for attempting such a creative solution to this pervasive problem. My cynical brain, however, is not at all surprised that it doesn't seem to be working.
Men: PUT ON YOUR BIG BOY PANTS AND START MANAGING YOUR OWN FUCKING HOMES. Don't wait for the women in your life to tell you what needs to be done, just fucking do it. And start getting on your friends' backs about them doing it too.
But, then again, someone would have had to actually pick something up in order to discover the money, which would lead to a change in behaviour "just in case" money was on the bottom of everything. The main reason, I think, that women still do the majority of the domestic labor in relationships, or if not the labor, then the Household Management labor, is because we are conditioned to both believe that things will not get done unless we do it and then conditioned to be "bothered" by things before everyone else.
As long as we really are "bothered" by the mess sooner, then the people we live with never have to learn how to be "bothered" by it themselves. It will always get done. We have to really learn how to not do shit until either the consequences for not doing it get bad enough or the reward for doing it is high enough that people will learn how to be "bothered" themselves. That's how we were conditioned, after all.
In the last days before my triad imploded, the house was a fucking disaster. You see, we had an unequal distribution of income, so we redistributed the other parts of the household to compensate. The person who made the most money was responsible for the highest financial contribution and that was it. The sole household "job" she had was to write on the shopping list what she wanted from the store because I am not a mind reader.
(incidentally, she refused to put anything on the shopping list, because she didn't want to "bother" me by requesting things even though that was the point of the shopping list. So I outright refused to buy her groceries, even those few that I did happen to remember she wanted or liked. She ended up paying more than her share simply because she also had to buy her own food in the house.)
The person who made the least amount of money had no financial contribution other than donating his food stamps to the household groceries. Instead, he was responsible for all the household chores. Since his most recent job *was as a personal house cleaner*, this should not have been difficult for him.
My job was to make up the difference in the finances, to manage the finances, and eventually to manage our houseboy because he wasn't doing any chores at all by the end.
We were so poor, that one time I took a 6-week contract job that took me out of the house for a month and a half. The amount of money I made for that job should have paid for my share of the bills and given me a cushion for the next month. While I was gone, he was responsible for managing himself and she became responsible for managing the finances, including paying the bills on time and doing the shopping.
I came home to find the electricity and gas shut off, no food in the house, and an overflowing litter box. She had forgotten to pay for 2 months in a row and he didn't clean anything. So all my "cushion" went towards reconnect fees.
By the end, I had given up. I had previously put a trash can in literally every room of the house, so that nobody even had to get up to throw something away. And yet, trash would pile up on tables, furniture arms, any available surface, including the floor.
A few weeks before I moved out, I spotted some trash sitting on the floor next to the trash can in the living room. One of them had thrown it towards the trash can from the sofa and missed and then left it there. The bin happened to be in the path between the living room / kitchen and the hallway that led to their bedrooms and the only bathroom.
Which means that you literally had to step over that trash to get to anywhere in the house except *my room* which was an add-on on the other side of the house. Anyone using the bathroom had to step over it. Anyone going to his or her bedrooms had to step over it. Anyone coming from their bedrooms or the bathroom into the living room had to step over it. Anyone going into the kitchen had to step over it.
That bit of trash was still on the floor when I moved out about 5 months later. Since all the furniture was mine, I cleaned out the entire house in all the rooms except their own bedrooms (and I did go through their rooms too, looking for my things - he had a habit of leaving his dirty dishes piled up behind his computer desk and they were all my dishes).
But I left that fucking piece of trash right there on the floor of the empty house.
If I had had the money at the time, I wonder if this would have worked? I did use my father's tactic of taking anything they left in the common area that shouldn't be there and putting it out on the curb (Dad has OCD and would accidentally throw away my homework if I left it out on the table, just because "it shouldn't be here" got expressed in his brain as "I will throw it away then").
But all that did was teach them not to leave things they wanted to keep in the common rooms. It didn't stop them from from leaving *trash* around, and if I had picked up their trash for them, that would only have reinforced the problem. I wonder if I could have retrained them with positive reinforcement instead, since they clearly weren't bothered *enough* by the mess to fix it themselves. But someone would have had to pick up that first piece to find the positive reinforcement in order for that to work.
So I applaud this person for attempting such a creative solution to this pervasive problem. My cynical brain, however, is not at all surprised that it doesn't seem to be working.
Men: PUT ON YOUR BIG BOY PANTS AND START MANAGING YOUR OWN FUCKING HOMES. Don't wait for the women in your life to tell you what needs to be done, just fucking do it. And start getting on your friends' backs about them doing it too.
