c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreeaol.com.)

UNDATED _ Men still don’t get it!

Sharing in the housework is the key to a happy marriage, especially if both spouses work outside the home. However, for all the talk about equal sharing of chores, even”liberated”men who think that they fairly share household tasks with their wives in fact do not do so.

As psychologist John Gottman observes in his excellent book”Why Marriages Succeed or Fail”(St. Martins), so-called liberated men on the average do four minutes a day more of work around the house than do the unliberated ones. That’s roughly the equivalent of pushing a vacuum cleaner around one room.

The result is that, on average, it’s the wife who does virtually all the housework in contemporary two-income families. The liberated, working woman must bring home her check and clean the house and take care of the kids.

Inequitable?

You’d better believe it!

One of the reasons women give up and do it all themselves is that men are so inept at it, mostly, one fears, because they want to be inept. Thus, Gottman tells of an argument between a husband and wife because the former has never learned to put the glasses in the top of the dishwasher. He also describes a fight over a husband not buying onions when he went to the store.”How was I to know that I should buy onions?”he demanded.”Couldn’t you see that we didn’t have any?”she responded.

But how was he supposed to see that? Well, had he been an equal partner in the home, he would have developed the skill of scanning the fridge and cupboards to see what was missing before going shopping.

Is that, a wife might wonder, demanding too much of him?

Some college women tell me that their generation of men is pretty good at shopping. Let’s hope so.

As someone who does all his own shopping, I find that it is possible to notice such matters, though never so quickly as a woman might. If I can do it, any man can do it.

And they have more motivation than I do.

Gottman points out that there is a strong correlation between equality in home management and marital satisfaction and the frequency of love making. Housework for a man is an investment (on the average) in more and better sex. That fact should surprise no one, but it seems to escape most husbands.

If the Promise Keepers want to persuade me that they are more than pious phonies who want to reassert power in their families, they will promise to do at least half the housework (when their wives work outside the home) as their wife defines half the work. That would be a promise worth making and very hard to keep.

Somehow in the major”feminist”battles this dimension of the struggle for equality is rarely noticed. Women seem to take it for granted that men, even those who talk about helping with the work, will never really we willing or able to play the role of the home manager in any other than a childlike, little-boy way. Their ineptitude _ a practiced and protected ineptitude _ serves as a good excuse for not sharing in the family tasks as mature adults.”Real men”don’t load dishwashers.”Real men”don’t look for onions in the fridge.”Real men”don’t do the necessary drudge work around the house and”real men”don’t clean up after the Christmas mess.”Real men”find it hard to understand why their wives are not particularly interested in making love after they’ve done all the work at home on top of putting in a regular 40-hour week.”Real men”are fools.

But real men vacuum _ and they do it for as long as is necessary.

IR END GREELEY