When you picture having a long and happy marriage, vacuuming
may not come to mind, but it should. A new study of 220 couples published by
the University of Illinois found that wives who want to divide household chores
equally are significantly happier if their husbands agree. If their spouses
don't, wives' happiness levels plummet.
Yes, it sounds obvious, but according to researchers,
marital happiness is linked to housework only for wives who want their husbands
to clean just as much as they do. As for women who are content doing all the
housework, if their husbands end up pitching in, they’re happy just the same.
(Perhaps unsurprisingly, a husband's marital happiness had nothing to do with
household chores!)
No matter how you feel about household labor, it’s important
to establish guidelines right when you get married, according to the study's
lead author Brian Ogolsky, PhD, an assistant professor of human development and
family studies at the University of Illinois. "The first two years of
marriage are crucial for determining the division of household labor, because
that's when lifelong patterns are established," he tells Yahoo Shine.
"That’s important, especially if you decide to have kids down the
road."
Ogolsky and his team didn’t study the reasons behind their
findings, but a wife’s happiness could be linked to chores because wives often
end up cleaning more than their husbands do, spending about six extra hours
cleaning the home and three additional hours caring for their children per
week, according to recent research conducted by the Pew Research Center.
So what do you do if you want more help from your husband?
For starters, try giving him "manly" tasks. One study published in
the American Sociological Review found that guys who complete traditionally
"masculine" jobs, such as taking out the garbage or fixing a broken
door handle, report higher sexual frequency than those who fulfill
traditionally "feminine" roles. A bit sexist, yes, but hey, whatever
it takes!
No comments:
Post a Comment