When most people my age think about getting married, they think of white fairytale weddings, Prince Charmings and being with the one you love for all eternity yada yada yada.
Ok, but basically, getting married is like putting together two people coming from different backgrounds, with different habits and quirks, different attitudes and different expectations and expecting them to live together. Not an easy thing imho.
Anyway, they’re missing out one important part of living together: Doing the household chores.
I don’t have any statistics, so I’ll just assume that most Singaporean guys are looking for a wife who loves them, is decent-looking and is willing to cook and do the housework. And most Singaporean girls are looking for a guy who loves them, is decent-looking, can cook and is willing to do the housework. Let’s leave the rich part out of this cause it’s enough to make another blog post all on it’s own (and besides it’s probably been said to death on all the forums already).
Ok, in my family we had it this way. Three of us who never did much housework. Three of us suddenly expected to do housework.
So in the end it was like this: Everyone does their share of the work required to keep the house up and running (cooking, washing clothes, etc.). For the rest, whoever thinks there’s a problem either fixes the problem or learns to be more tolerant.
i.e. if you don’t like the dirty floor, you either sweep it or shut up.
You leave your clothes crumpled up on the sofa without hanging it up properly, you have crumpled and smelly clothes tomorrow.
You don’t like the food that was cooked (allergies and medical reasons are another matter), you cook the dinner tomorrow. Easy.
So after the initial round of disputes, we were all happy people.
But part of the reason why we were able to resolve it so quickly is that we grew up together (well, sort of, in my dad’s case) and therefore our attitude towards life is similar.
Our family doesn’t tend to have that kind of “you’re the girl, you should do this” or “you’re the girl, you should act this way” kinda rubbish.
While washing the dishes, something got me thinking.
What if, let’s say a couple gets married, obviously both parties will be different in terms of family attitude and upbringing.
If they all agree about who should do the housework, i.e. the guy is a traditional guy who expects the wife to do the housework, and the girl comes from a traditional family and thinks it’s her duty to do the housework, then it’s all peachy. (Unless the husband starts to get pissed at the wife over badly done housework, and the wife starts to nag her husband about leaving things around)
But if the guy expects his wife to do all the housework, and the wife expects not to have to do the housework at all, wow, that will be interesting.
And if I’m not wrong, most of the young people now don’t do any housework at all. So this scenario is much more likely to happen nowadays.
So if their finances allow, they can hire a maid, having never done housework before and not understanding how irritating and tiring it is, they can vent their anger over badly done housework on the maid, whether that is good or not I leave you to decide.
As for me, it’s pretty simple here:
I don’t need you to do romantic things for me and buy me expensive presents on all our anniversaries. You don’t even need to remember our anniversaries.
Just do your share of the work, don’t get all anal over the house being dirty and untidy (unless you’re willing to clean it up yourself if you don’t like it), don’t give me all that “you should do it, it’s women’s work” bullshit and we’ll be happy campers.
All this from someone who has to do the housework.
(Sometimes, I wonder why my ma never let me do the housework, I mean she could have just made me do my part of the housework from day one and it’s not like I wouldn’t be able to cope with it. But she always insisted I leave the housework to her and I feel kinda sorry about that now… haiz)
SATan's kingdom 