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Automatic transcript; may contain mistakes, especially in Hebrew.
This week's question is, how do I get my husband to help more with chores around the house? I don't want to nag him, but I think he underestimates how hard I work. We both have full-time jobs, except when we come home, I take the main brunt of the cooking and cleaning and could really use more of his help. This is a very common question, and it can sometimes be a very challenging issue. First of all, it's very likely that your husband comes from a paradigm where maybe he saw this is what his mother did, or maybe this is his expectation that we both work, but the cooking and the cleaning is left to the wife, which is not necessarily fair. Today's day and age, most people have full-time jobs, both husband and wife, and there's no reason for there not to be a level of communal responsibility. Now, if your husband is going out at night and learning, and that's what you want him to do, naturally more of this burden is going to fall on yourself. But if you're both home at night, there's no reason that the burden should fall on you more than it should on him. And so what I would recommend is healthy communication, sitting down and talking to him about these are the list of things that are getting done in the house, and they're not getting done magically, they're getting done because you're putting in the hard work.
But it's becoming too much for you to do all of these things. And the question is, how can you divide up the responsibilities? Now, most husbands at that time will become more aware, more sensitive, and they'll live up to their end of the bargain. They'll fulfill their responsibilities. But let's create a scenario that's a little bit more challenging. Let's say you sat down with your husband. You divided up the responsibilities. You've come to an agreement that he's going to take care of X, Y, and Z, and you're going to take care of A, B, and C. The challenge now is, what happens when X, Y, and Z don't necessarily happen? In other words, let's say it was his job to do the dishes every night. Now it's 11 o'clock at night. He wants to go to sleep, and there's a massive pile of dishes. Let's say you feel uncomfortable with the dishes that are in the sink. At that point, we hit upon the critical issue of marriage, which is, as long as we're living on our own, we make choices that only impact ourselves. But when we get married, our choices impact another. So now you're not in control of your husband. And so you don't want to nag him and say, go do the dishes.
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And yet at the same time, he hasn't lived up to his responsibility. So what do you do? We do not control people, places, or things. And that is perhaps most seen in marriage. We don't control our husbands. We don't control our wives. And very often they will do things that don't work for us. And this is where the real avodah of being okay on an internal level and having your feet firmly planted on the ground makes an enormous difference. If you're okay with yourself, then you can, with integrity, calmly, and respectfully, have a nice conversation where you say, This is something that's important to me, and I'm asking if you could do a better job at it. Now, the truth of the matter is, he may not, or she may not, but that's not the real issue, because whether they do or they don't, we have to roll with the punches of the challenges that exist in our marriage that are likely not to change. So, this is the serenity prayer of.
Alcoholics Anonymous. God, grant me the wisdom to know the things I can change and to know the things I can't. It's such a pella that we spend so much of our time trying to make things happen that they won't, because we don't really know how to control another person. And what we'll do is just get frustrated and build up, rather than have healthy communication, but ultimately... level of bit of the ego to be able to say, I'm not in control here. And as frustrating as that is, it's not worth destroying my marriage over. So you're right. If you become a nag and you're constantly nagging him to do things, it's not just that that will create an unpleasant avira in the marriage. Very often it comes from a level of toxicity that exists inside of ourselves that we need to control other people. It's much better to have a marriage where there's dishes piled up in the sink and there's constant healthy communication about how to work through these things than have a marriage where each person is trying to control the other. That is definitely a corrosive marriage.
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