Dishwashing causes more relationship distress than any other household task

boing
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I think that this may be the single hardest thing about co-habitation. We all have things that we do particular ways, and those ways are almost never universal. Finding the balance between insisting on some things that really matter and just putting up with others so that there’s a fair distribution of labour is key.

The example of dishwashing is just one little thing. I’ve seen parents (generally moms I’m afraid) take over almost all parenting duties because of the view that the other parent did not parent “correctly.” The results aren’t good for anyone. In a whole lotta ways.

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For me and my wife it’s how they are put away. She doesn’t like how I do it.

The compromise we have reached is that I load the dishwasher and run it, she unloads it once they are clean, and the cycle repeats.

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Not just clean to my standards, but DRY. I always dry dishes by hand while taking them out of the dishwasher, neither my husband or my teenager do, and it drives me crazy. All dishwashers leave behind little particles, and if you dry the dishes you get rid of those. But always use a clean, bleached kitchen towel.

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Agree wholeheartedly, and it spans parenting, housekeeping, even budgeting. I see discussions in forums where women moan about how the towels are folded, or how the toilet paper is hung on the roll. Are you actually f*cking kidding? These are, for the most part, career-employed (like their partners), reasonably intelligent people (like their partners). In my house, if the towels are put away, they’re done correctly. As in, someone washed, dried, and folded the buggers, then put them away. Yay! And do people really, honestly give a damn how the toilet paper rolls? Again, the roll has been replaced. Splendid!

I see this crap as a weird hangover from our/my obsessive full-time home-making mothers, for whom these details likely took on a lot more importance (for many, often understandable reasons), but largely utterly inappropriate at best and destructive at worst, today. And it’s offensive, insulting, and condescending to boot.

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I’ve noticed that a lot of women with those hang ups see those details as a moral or value indicator of their character and competence- like their full time housekeeping mothers. They feel they are judged on their housekeeping. And generally women are blamed for untidy homes far more than men are even though they obviously aren’t the only inhabitants.

Often those holding themselves to ridiculous standards judge others just as harshly- it’s a nasty cycle.

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Actually, I do… and I will take them off the roller and turn them so they face the “right” way.

But this is the thing – I realize that this is my being a wee bit crazy, so although I do actually care, I am intelligent enough to realize that insisting that everyone in my house put the roll on this particular way is not a battle worth fighting. So long as there is a roll to use, that is good enough

People are all different, and have different hang-ups. Figuring out which preferences are actually worth forcing someone else to change their behaviour over – that is the challenge of cohabitation. Most aren’t. A few might be. There is give and take.

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If i had something akin to a big commercial sink with one of those nifty high pressure detachable faucets i definitely would not mind doing the dishes but as its it’s a pain in the ass. I prefer tossing all that in the dishwasher.

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I’ve worked at coffee shops so i had to do dishes. I quite enjoyed it because it would allow for me to not have interactions with customers so it was like a mini-break, the warm water was also nice to handle.

Though like i said in a different post above, its not quite the same using a standard kitchen sink setup at home.

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Hey! Let’s not bring religion into this!

:wink:

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… and even worse sex, than women with partners who help.

Partners who help with the dishes or help with the sex?

Because sometimes if you want the job done right, you have to do it yourself.

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I’m a monster. :wink:

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I take no joy in dishes or other people’s misery, well mostly on the latter.

I had a professor who was prone to taking her narcolepsy medication inconsistently and was also prone to getting derailed from the lecture. When both events happen at the same time we got fantastic tangential lectures ending in real life advice. I still remember much of her germain thoughts on English literature, (more specifically Middlemarch, Virginia Woolf’s Corpus, and the author/poet Anne Michaels), but what I remember most were the stories from her own life.

Paraphrased from one lecture that was spun far away from Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice:

“You know what was the last straw for me?” The class started looking around; we knew this lecture was going down a path that was not on the syllabus. “Do you know?” She leaned on a desk and started moving her arms as though she was brushing her teeth. “Well do you?” She smiled and paused for a few moments as though remembering something happy. “You see the problem was he liked to squeeze the toothpaste from any damn place on the tube.” Blowing a raspberry she grotesquely mimed somebody squeezing a tube of toothpaste. “I liked to squeeze from the bottom of the tube. There isn’t really any other sensible way. It’s quick, efficient, and …” She drifted off for a moment . “and, AND, you know what my therapist said years after the divorce?” As in Jurassic Park, we did not move for fear that the T-Rex would zero in on us. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled for an inordinate amount of time. “Well, WELL, she said 'Why didn’t you buy two tubes of toothpaste?”

Our teacher laughed and continued, "Divorce, breakups and the like are terrible. If you find somebody good, buy two tubes of toothpaste, or two sponges, or work out the everyday problems because it is just not worth going though. Nobody is perfect and your love will definitely be wrong about all sorts of ways to do things. What I’m saying is… let it go. Figure out some way to agree to live with somebody and talk about the compromises you make for each other. " “Now where were we?”

I still hold some of her life advice in my head. My spouse and I own two tubes of toothpaste, though that’s because one is a prescription. We both do the dishes, and I force myself to do the dishes whenever I can because I hate doing them. When I feel like I’m irritated at how we do some required domestic task, I remember that what truly matters is that how the tiny stuff is done doesn’t matter as long as it gets done. We love living our life, together and tiny irritations aren’t worth conflict. What is worth significant conflict, nothing that I have found yet.

I get wrapped up in my own thoughts constantly, and I have to remind myself that I am no mind reader, and neither is anybody else.

One of my kids just woke up from a nap and I am off to do the dishes.

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33

The problem in my household is that we’re both totally willing to avoid loading the dishwasher until we have completely run out of clean dishes. What’s weird is I’ve caught my husband stirring his coffee with a measuring spoon or table knife rather than just… quickly washing a single spoon by hand for that purpose. He’s lucky I find it kind of cute.

The only sustainable rule I’ve found re: different methods on arranging items in the dishwasher is whoever is doing the loading does it their way, and the observing party shuts their damn cakehole unless they want to take over.

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My wife and I fight over doing the dishes all the time. Our agreement is that one person cooks, the other does the dishes. We fight when she cooks and also tries to do the dishes. Sometimes I have to order her to stop clearing the table because she cooked. Sometimes I’ll empty the dishwasher when she’s in the shower so she won’t have to. Damn woman thinks she can get away with doing extra work; well, not on MY watch.

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It’s not the dishes that drive me crazy. It’s leaving the cupboards open! Why?!!

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That’s what I do now except for pots/pans that don’t fit or need some Bar Keeper’s Friend + elbow grease.

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The only relationship distress I have is with our year-old Bosch dishwasher dishwarmer that neither cleans nor dries the dishes, and is designed to hold some mythical special set of dishes and no other, because the racks are so poorly designed. The machine uses bitumen (a less well-known euphemism for asphalt) as a sound deadener and house petroleum-smell filler. It’s a piece of crap designed by corporate monkeys adhering to badly thought out environmental rules enacted by mind dead legislators. How am I saving water and energy if I have to pre-clean the dish manually before putting it into the machine?

Other than that there are no problems in our household; I do what I do, and the SO does what she does. It works.

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As a perhaps-perpetuating cycle:

A friend I know was forced to wash dishes as a kid, because his father refused to help and made him instead.

As a likely consequence, he hates washing dishes more than just about anything - and has had to struggle with forcing himself to do it in a lot of his adult relationships.

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HEY! My neighbors have the same dishwasher and problems! I silently listen to their litany of complaints, wondering if it all boiled down to the fact they’re a little (a LOT) paranoid and anal. They decided that the city had bad water and now have bottled water delivered. I just figured that the dishwater preheater was less than optimal. But it sounds exactly like the same complaint - good to know, my neighbors are less cuckoo than I thought.

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Thank you - that’s really what I meant. I have a particular way I like the shower mat. But I also acknowledge there’s no real reason for this, so I will just ‘fix’ it and carry on. :smiley:

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