pre-nups, but for domestic work
hear me out
Today is International Women’s Day (IWD) and to celebrate I’m giving couples a free activity: if you have a prenup for money, make a prenup for everything else. Screw the chocolates and flowers on Valentine’s Day, doing a domestic chores contract on IWD is the new grand romantic gesture.
Because of capitalism, we cannot conceive of unpaid work as counting. I remember sitting in my macro economics class in my student days and letting out an audible gasp when my professor called domestic work “unproductive labor” because it doesn’t “contribute to the economy.” Putting aside the fact that this is an atrocious lie and that capitalism would completely collapse without women making people, women’s unpaid labor isn’t worth zero it’s worth $10,900,000,000,000 (that figure is in the trillions if the commas are intimidating for you). If we have a written contract where an engaged couple delineates their rights and responsibilities when it comes to money, why not when it comes to domestic work?
As person who identifies as extremely not married, I often look to women who are for guidance and I found my North Star in this viral Reddit post. According to her fiancé, this hero without a cape is asking her partner to shoulder the costs of her pregnancy. He is perplexed by the idea that he would need to share the financial penalty of having a child in a country that doesn’t provide paid parental leave or free health care. Maybe if more women demanded that men carry half the burden of a sexist society more men would join them in fighting for a more equal one.
Given that women often overestimate how much their husbands do around the house and that men are bad at evaluating how much domestic work they do (they inflate their numbers) and that a husband creates on average seven hours of extra work for a woman per week, it only seems fair to acknowledge all of this before getting hitched. Especially when we know that the separation of domestic chores is among the top three reasons couples fight or breakup. One quarter of people who divorce say it was because one partner wasn’t pulling their weight with chores around the home.
Across the world, there are scores of couples fighting over the dishes, when the conflict is not about the dishes at all. Domestic labor is a proxy for respect, recognition and safety in intimate relationships. Cleaning up after yourself is a way to show love to your partner. Expecting them to clean up after you is a way to neglect them. Unloading the dishwasher after you said you would do it, is a way to communicate loyalty, predictability and consistency. The fact that women do more of their share of domestic work across the world isn’t just bad news for gender equality, it’s bad for news for couples.
That’s why men should be the ones initiating this domestic chore contract because if they’re careful, the patriarchy could cost them their marriage. I’ve seen it happen. I’m sure you have too. We often view patriarchal roles as disadvantaging women and I’m not denying that women who end up being time-poor and stress-rich, lose out in this equation. But in a world where divorce is freely available to women, men should be the ones who are worried about what their sub-par performance in the home is costing them. Women say size doesn’t matter, but when it comes to a man’s domestic chore footprint, it sure might start to.
Protect yourself from divorce, make a domestic work prenup! Copy-paste these questions into a document and answer them as a couple.
1.What kind of domestic work do you have as a couple? Make a list.
2.How will you divide domestic chores during the relationship?
3. Will time spent doing domestic work be divided equally between both partners? If not, why? Under what circumstances could it make sense to distribute them unevenly?
4.When does this contract expire and need to be revisited?
What else should a domestic pre-nup include? Let me know in the comments!
Domestic work and childcare prenups/relationship contracts must include the MENTAL LOAD of the house and family and food intake as well as the physical labor loaded onto women. Even when a partner is "super helpful" or physically picking up half or more of the responsibilities, the effects of being sometimes the soul carrier of the family/household mental load is crushing. And my friends are running from their longtime marriages, suddenly unable to sit across the table from their mentally relaxed partner for another hour. ...while they lost years of hours having to THINK of everything.
Completely agree. Can we have an extended convo about this? It’s a huge source of erosion of trust, confidence in the relationship and sense of fair play. It deserves quality time and attention at scale. Want to reverse poverty? Normalize the valuing of domestic labor at the individual level, at scale. Share stories like the one you did where the child bearing partner is valuing their self and taking control of their means of (re-production. Economics 101 - they who own the means of production have power and leverage.