The Great Debate: Who Should Be Doing The Laundry?

It’s a known fact that in most cultures and households in the world, the responsibility of doing laundry is gendered towards women.

But you know what? Culture, past history, and society can just get stuffed!

When women were objectified to being a housewife while the man goes to work to put food on the table, to pay the bills, and to bring home the bacon, there was a large expectation to be upheld.

For example; clean the house, raise the kids, have breakfast ready, have dinner ready, and the topic of the day.. do the laundry.

And for some people or societies, that norm is still embedded into their deep conscious minds, which makes it very difficult to grow out of.

Now there’s multiple arguments we can have here, but let’s try to keep as simple as possible and have a laugh along the way.

We love talking with our friends and finding out everyone’s different dynamics and what makes us tick, or what makes us stronger and happier as couples. This particular topic of laundry was no different.

So the great debate is; who should be doing the laundry?

We have one couple whom the female does all the laundry. One couple whom the male does all the laundry. And the last couple has divided the laundry.

With that being said, two of those couples found resistance in the task, where the other found a form of peace.

Ladies, it’s obvious we care more, way more than what our loving counterparts can comprehend.

That’s why we sometimes just tend to take on this dutiful chore because if we didn’t, our other halves would probably let their clothes rot in the washing basket for weeks, run out of clothes for the kids, or sleep in dirty sheets for months (or years).

No offence men, but we know you can live in a pair of shorts and a shirt for weeks on end, without hesitation either.

But on the flip side, those men who have learnt the art of housekeeping from their beautiful parents show remarkable resilience in performing this chore.

Our friend has found it to be very therapeutic. Much like cooking, it can have that effect too. But that’s a topic for another day. Being that he has more time in his daily life than his other half, it made it easier for him to do the mundane task.

But what we found with the two couples, with opposite sexes taking the reign on laundry, was that they projected their resentment onto their partners. For example, the golden phrase “I always do the laundry, why can’t you help?’ or ‘You didn’t do the washing right, I knew I should have just done it myself, now my clothes are ruined. Sound familiar?

Here’s an alternative solution. I am not saying it saves lives, but it could save having stupid arguments over laundry.

Clean and do our own separate laundry.

Full disclosure, compromise on who does what, when and how.

This is how we operate our laundry mission. We do our own.

The perspective is, I want my washing to be done a certain way (obviously the right way), but my husband doesn’t want to do it my way, and he wants to do it his way, but I don’t like the way he wants it done.

So we agreed on this compromise. And for some reason it works great for us. There’s no argument on whether he’s doing it wrong, there’s no fight about separating colours from whites, it’s just pure every man for himself.

Then when it comes to sheets, and towels etc, we both agreed it’s a combination attack on getting those done as we both use them and need them on a weekly basis.

When we told our friends about our secret to weekly laundry, and their faces just dropped.

“You can do that,” they said. We were like ‘yeah don’t you's?’. It was like they never knew that was an option.

It was most likely that day, our friends would have gone home and started writing up new constitutional agreements for doing their laundry.