I have found that I don't care what a housemate or boyfriend does to help, just that he's not sitting while I am not. Steve and I found a good solution was for him to take the dogs out while I cleaned/cooked/puttered. Got them all out of my way, and I didn't feel like someone's slave. But we didn't live together, and he wasn't working, so we had our own issues.

I have found that I don't care what a housemate or boyfriend does to help, just that he's not sitting while I am not.

so much this. It's not so much the task as the feeling you are the only one contributing.

Huh. I don't mind if only one of us is doing chores at a time, so long as I feel there's not a huge net imbalance.

It's not so much the task as the feeling you are the only one contributing.

Yup!

Huh. I don't mind if only one of us is doing chores at a time, so long as I feel there's not a huge net imbalance.

Yeah, the problem with me and Steve is that if I am sitting, he also sits. He simply doesn't do stuff if I am not.

My mom use to get really irate with my dad, because she'd be working on something she considered direly important to keeping the house working properly, and he'd be sitting there, reading a book. (They both had full-time jobs for most of my childhood.) It wasn't that dad was unwilling to help with household things, it was that he and mom fundamentally disagreed on what household things mattered. For example, dad firmly believed that no house ever fell down due to a living room being one color or another, and he refused to get involved with repainting. Mom would look at a living room that hadn't been painted in 10 years and think it looked like we lived in a slum. So she'd spend hours selecting the right paint, doing the painting, cleaning up after the painting, and dad would be sitting there with his book. They'd both be cranky about the whole thing for weeks after the paint dried.

It's really amazing they both died of natural causes.

Often when DH appears to be "sitting around" he's actually working on some project.

When I was growing up, there were years where my mom was depressed and did no housework at all. Meanwhile, my dad was averaging working about 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Not good times.

Huh. I don't mind if only one of us is doing chores at a time, so long as I feel there's not a huge net imbalance.

This is me, too. Although I also have pangs of guilt if I'm the one sitting around reading when The Boy is cleaning the litter boxes or something.

I love this story!

Tbe manager on duty, Linda (who asked that I not mention her last name here, for reasons I can't get into but let's just say everything worked out okay...), tells me that a couple in their 30s paid their check at the register, then asked the cashier to let them secretly pay the check of another couple in the dining room - a couple they didn't know.

"They just wanted to do it," she said. "They thought it would be a nice thing to do."

When the unsuspecting patrons went to pay their check, they were floored to find out that strangers had picked up their tab. So they asked the cashier to let them pay another table's check, also anonymously.

When that table's patrons approached the register, they, too, decided to pay the favor forward for yet another table of unsuspecting strangers.

You know where this is going, right?

For two hours, delighted customer after delighted customer continued to pay the favor forward. And a buzz began to grow. Not among patrons, who had no inkling what was going down at the register, but among the dining-room wait staff - Marvin, Rosie, Jasmine and Lynn - and other Aramingo workers moving in and out of the room.