Tim Dowling, swaps with his wife, Sophie
I expected my wife to have a lot to say about the swap. I did not expect her to refuse outright.
“No,” she says. “You’ll ruin the house.”
“It’s only for a fortnight,” I say.
“Anyway, you don’t have any chores.” This, to be fair, is what I expected her to say.
“Of course I do,” I say.
“So you would do everything I do, and I would take the bins out twice.”
“If that’s what you think, why are you turning down this sweet deal?”
“I’m just not doing it,” she says.
“Also, you’d have to mow the lawn,” I say.
“It’s too wet to mow the lawn,” she says.
“You’re getting the hang of my end already,” I say.
Tactically, it seemed wise to pretend this conversation had not taken place. The strategy worked, but I found my wife had accepted the terms only a few days later when I overhead her talking to someone on the phone.
“He’s making me do this stupid thing where we swap chores,” she said. “Exactly – so I’ll be doing nothing.”
The truth is, I do all the things my wife does, just nowhere near as often. I make about a quarter of the supermarket trips. I mop the kitchen floor, but generally only on the occasion of some catastrophic spill I don’t want anyone else to find out about – once a month, say.
There is no question that I am remiss, but the idea that I’m inept – that I have no idea how the washing machine works, for example – is a fiction. A fiction my wife insists on perpetuating.
“Now turn the dial to delicate,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“No, you don’t,” she says. “You’ve never washed a jumper in your life.”
“That’s a lie,” I say. “Why isn’t it coming on?”
On the first afternoon I go to the supermarket, and when I return my shopping is critiqued as if I’m training for a future exam.
“No fennel?” my wife says, pulling things from the bags.
“There wasn’t any today,” I say.
“Fennel was on the list,” she says.
“I can only buy things they have.”
The laundry regime is a little more full-time than I had anticipated: I lug a basket of dirty clothes downstairs to find the dryer and the washing machine still full. Working quickly in the cramped space – where the two machines are stacked one atop the other – I pull the clean clothes from the dryer, transfer the wet clothes from one drum to the other and load the dirty clothes into the washing machine. I am not just mastering the system, I think. I am the system.
When I’m done I start both cycles, and fold my arms in satisfaction. So far, so efficient, except the clean clothes are somehow missing – the basket at my feet is empty. I’m still not sure what happened.
For several years my wife and I have adhered to an arrangement with regard to meals: I always make dinner, and she always makes lunch. Although I would maintain this is not an equal division of labour – dinner is cooked, where lunch is merely collated. It is satisfactory to all parties so we decide not to mess with that bit of the system.
But I’ll tell you what: cooking supper for four people, then having to clear it all up, every night, is a hugely rich source of resentment. To find the kitchen dirty again in the morning is an occasion for rage.
Tuesday night is bin night: rubbish, food scraps, garden waste. In our swapped roles it falls to me to back the car out of the drive and then wait while my wife struggles with three overflowing bins in a cold rain, in the full glare of my headlights. It is tremendously satisfying, or it would be if I could be certain none of the neighbours was watching.
On Friday I have to go to the supermarket again – again! – and once more, the results are criticised.
“Where are my Quavers?” my wife says.
“They were out of Quavers,” I say, “and the apples you like.”
“Not very good at this, are you?” she says.
“Your issue is with the global supply chain, not with me.”
Towards the middle of the second week, faced with a large pile of clean clothes, I find myself holding a single orange sock when it hits me: I participate in the system in the sense that I am available to move things forward – to wash up a sink full of dishes, or escort some laundry through one leg of its journey – but I have almost never been in sole charge of the domestic machine. Consequently, I have no idea whose sock this is.
When my wife initially refused to participate in the experiment, this is exactly what she feared: that I would wreck the system; that there would never be any fennel, or Quavers. Clothes would get washed twice for no reason, and jumpers would be destroyed. This didn’t quite happen – things more or less functioned – but then I only had two weeks.
In closing, I think it’s only fair to point out that she didn’t mow the lawn, even once.
Joe Stone, swaps with his boyfriend, Peter
I’m the second to admit that I am not an easy person to live with; the first is my boyfriend, Peter. It took us 10 years to move in together and I sometimes get the impression that he considers this premature.
While we’re compatible in many ways, we are domestically opposed. By that I mean: I am someone who owns multiple vacuum cleaners, and he is someone who litters indoors. You might imagine that the absence of gendered roles in a same-sex relationship would result in an equal division of domestic labour – but as anyone who’s set foot in G-A-Y bar can attest, gay utopias rarely live up to their promise. In our house, I am responsible for: dusting, vacuuming, mopping, cleaning the kitchen, bathroom, oven and windows, most of the laundry, all of the admin and anything which requires confrontation. If I’m feeling particularly resentful, I undertake these chores while performing This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush, or loudly complaining about him on the phone while he’s within earshot. He cooks us three or four meals a week and does the washing-up when I give strong indications that he has wronged me in some way. I also once forced him to break into our neighbour’s garden (between tenancies) and saw down a tree which was blocking my light.
You’re probably thinking that I sound like a very sweet person who is being horribly taken advantage of. I should mention that I have quite stringent standards when it comes to housework, and have discouraged Peter from doing tasks which I believe him to be unqualified for (I banned him from doing laundry after he put a duvet cover on the washing line without pegs, and I had to retrieve it from a flower bed). I’m a big believer in “indoor” and “outdoor” clothes, and won’t get into bed unless I’ve had a shower first. Last summer Peter lost his tent on the way to a festival, and slept outside for three nights.
For a while we trialled doing the cleaning on alternate weeks, but when his week came around he never thought anything needed doing yet. So when I agree to a chore swap, it’s not without significant anxiety about what this will mean for my living standards. During week one, he attempts to replicate my weekly cleaning regime. What would usually take me about two hours takes him more than four, perhaps because he is less powered by mania (I find that listening to Taylor Swift revenge bangers allows me to enter a fugue state in which chores kind of do themselves. It’s the gay equivalent of 50s housewives being prescribed speed to do the ironing). He forgets to dust the banister and the tops of the kitchen cabinets, and leaves fingermarks on the patio doors. I try to wipe these discreetly and end up cleaning both sides with my beloved Window Vac while he’s out.
Fingermarks are my achilles heel, and Peter’s favourite way to troll me. I’ll occasionally discover a full forehead print on the bedroom window, where he’s pressed his entire face against the glass to better gawp at our neighbours, who never do anything interesting. As a result, I’m in the habit of producing glass cloths with the speed of a cowboy drawing his pistol from its holster. During the experiment, I resist the urge to wipe a set of fingermarks in the centre of our mirrored bathroom cabinet and – to my astonishment – discover that Peter does this unprompted. Perhaps his regular refrain of “let me do things in my own time” has been proven correct. Then again, by midweek the living room rug contains all sorts of detritus, and to my horror I discover an empty Coke Zero can under the sofa. When nobody puts the wheelie bins out on Thursday morning I can’t escape the breathless sensation that we’ve descended into anarchy.
In Peter’s defence, he’d claim that I’m neurotic and can’t cook – an accusation which hasn’t been tested since some time in 2019 when I served him a veggie burger on a bed of spaghetti. In normal life, Peter is charged with feeding us, including semi-regular roasts which he prepares while I read newspaper supplements and serenade myself in the bath. During the experiment, we agree that it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to attempt a roast dinner: it would be disrespectful to the bird. Instead, he encourages me to use my initiative. After three attempts (chicken sausages in buns with a side of Monster Munch, pasta with a tomato sauce and a glass of Huel, and more sausages in buns) he declares that he’d rather go hungry than eat my food. Rude!
In the end, we manage nine days of the experiment, including several cheats. He’s concerned that we’ll both starve to death, while I’m having visions of Staphylococcus aureus multiplying on the chopping board. What have we learned? Nothing we didn’t already know – that I’m a shit cook and he’s a savage. Normal service has resumed.
Zoe Williams, swaps with her husband, Will
I’d say my Mr and I share the cooking and washing-up burden; he would say we both cook, and he washes up after whatever it is I’ve done that I call washing-up (and that one could run and run, so let’s just believe me).
Consequently, our chore swap doesn’t involve the kitchen, which is the typical locus of most chores, so I hope this doesn’t sound too niche. On his list: taking the bins out; doing the garden; walking the dog last thing at night. “What do you actually do in a garden?” “Dead-heading; cut back the shrubs; weeding.” He eyes me suspiciously. “Sprouty, green, messy things with no flowers.” Somehow he soothes himself. “You know what a weed is.”
On mine: laundry, ironing, all other dog walks, feeding the dog, and miscellaneous emotional labour I won’t be able to pinpoint until I notice he hasn’t done it. It doesn’t look massive, but it will mean he has to work from home all week because of the dog, and he identifies this as the main chores gap.
We’re about half an hour into day one when his suggestions and discoveries begin: in an ideal world, he’d have five laundry baskets, one that was time-sensitive, one that didn’t need ironing, one that could be done at any time – here I stopped listening because it was grinding my gears. He starts to talk me through his big plans: he reckons this can all be knocked off in a couple of 10-minute segments, which he’s going to shave off his Zoom meetings; the time he saves on his commute, he’ll spend mainly reading. This is driving me insane. Eureka, he’s discovered a timer function so that the washing machine can … nope, it appears I’ve stopped listening again. And somewhere between me zoning out and zoning back in, it has become day two and there is laundry everywhere. On every surface and bannister; we have to surf on pants down the stairs. It looks like a curse in a Disney film, and he’s telling me about the theory of constraints in operations management. I can hardly believe it. All these years, I’ve avoided hearing about his MBA, and now he’s surveying the pipeline and identifying the bottleneck – his ironing capability – while standing on 17 sheets.
In fact, he’s also shy a shedload of expertise. He can’t put anything away because he can’t even tell the difference between his own pants and our son’s; he doesn’t have a hope with the rest of us. It takes quite a lot of embedded knowledge to tell one pair of tights from another. The sound of him ironing a thing I knew to be silk reminded me strongly of the time I was forced by circumstance to leave my four-week-old baby outside a pub in Soho with my friend, who was smoking over the buggy. It might have been five minutes. It felt like a year, and when I came back I was giving off a strong animal musk, like a squirrel in peril.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that as he made a full scope of works and realised his insufficiency before them, that would be the start of a journey towards humility. No, even by the experiment’s end, he was trying to make MBA-tweaks to the system. We needed a separate column for untoward events, he said, otherwise they just fall to the person who’s at home. I drill in a bit and it turns out he’s talking about answering the door for packages, and the dog, who crapped on a rug. I want to stop and stress that all the packages are for him, but the more important question is: in what world could you leave those tasks for later so they can be fairly allocated? Anyway, it’s all good, now he realises how much tiny stuff I do, and maybe he’ll think twice next time he wants to order stock cubes off the internet.
So, OK, I did forget to put the bins out. There is no natural way of telling that it’s Monday night. It’s fine, there are giant municipal bins next door, so realistically we don’t even need a bin of our own. But I was edging towards “you had one job” territory, so I went to have a go at the weeds and pulled up some herbs by accident. I put them back in again and so far as I know, they’re still alive. The outdoors is not really my scene: anything that doesn’t have a roof over it, I file under “God’s business”. Mr Z said, “so I’m God in this scenario?”, and I said “yes”, and harmony was restored.
PS I did also forget to walk the dog. That’s probably what kickstarted the chain of events that ended with the rug.
Coco Khan, swaps with her husband, Stephen
When it comes to chores we are harmonious: Stephen and I have been blessed with similar levels of tolerance to quotidian mess and – somehow – complementary cleaning approaches. He’s on “first line of defence” – think the little and often jobs like unloading the dishwasher – whereas I’m on “special ops”, preferring to rotate the deeper, longer, and grubbier jobs in less frequent purges. He sweeps the wooden floors each day, I’ll mop each week; he does the daily clothes, I do rugs, pillows, towels; he wipes down the hobs but I CRUSH THE OVEN (sorry, I mean clean it).
There’s also a space divide – he’s king of the busy kitchen-diner and garden, whereas I rule the rest (two bedrooms, a living room and bathroom). But I don’t do DIY. Or take the car to the garage. Or go near the plants. He doesn’t dust. Or polish. And he doesn’t remember things: birthdays, the names of his friends’ partners, the names of my friends, where I am going at the weekend, where he is supposed to be going in an hour. I therefore manage the gifts, cards and comms of our social commitments.
Yet these roles were never verbally agreed. Rather, over the years we’ve found a rhythm where each knows what the other does and trusts it will be done well, with time spent on chores shared equally even if what we do and when differs. (PS, could it be any more obvious that we don’t have any children?)
The first few days of our experiment go smoothly. But soon a philosophical question arises: what is a chore? Is a chore deemed so because we intrinsically dislike doing it or simply because it is something that must be done? The question was about cooking. As the better chef, Stephen does the lion’s share, spoiling me with impressive meals at inappropriate times (the curse of the ambitious home chef: 11pm chicken chasseur, anyone?). “I don’t see cooking as a chore,” he says, urging me to discount it from the experiment. I don’t, instead relishing the chance to eat at 8pm and watch my husband itch to take over, mourning for the meals that could have been.
A few more days pass, as do several plants I overwater, and I think about passion in relation to chores. Simply put, Stephen’s chores did not give me the same chest-bumping feeling as pulling out all the hair from the shower drain or gloriously watching the limescale fall from the toilet rim as I scrub, like it were ticker tape at my own victory parade.
Maybe, we thought, it was to do with childhood. My family home was worn (that’s social housing for you) and when replacing stuff is financially impossible there is a moment where no matter how much you scrub at something it never looks clean. Could this be why I enjoy making something grubby sparkle? While for Stephen, sweeping conjures up feelings of pride and care, formed as a teenage football apprentice where sweeping the changing rooms was part of the job.
Toward the end of the challenge Stephen is called overseas for work. Now flying solo, some of my chores increase, but many decrease. If I’m eating alone I don’t cook – every night is cheese, fruit and nuts – so there are no pots and pans to clean, no big shop to be done, and hardly any laundry. There are fewer footsteps to sweep away, less life to take care of.
When we started, I thought I’d be surprised by how much time we were spending on chores. In the end, I wasn’t. Still, it was good to take stock and deepen our understanding of each other by thinking about the past. But the one revelation was around mess itself: how mess is a fixture of a full life. Indeed, it is truly a privilege to make mess with someone you love.
