A typical arrangement for dinners at home tends to be that one person cooks and another cleans.
In a recent Reddit post shared in the popular “Am I the Asshole?” subreddit, a wife explained her decision to stop cooking for her husband entirely because he refused to do the dishes.
She mentioned that she loves to cook and prepares dinner for herself, her husband and her four-year-old son. Typically, what needs to be washed after a meal is “a couple of pots and pans, some utensils, and a cutting board.”
However, according to the woman, while her husband and son rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher, they usually let her clean up the leftovers. Her mother explained that this bothered her and that's why she asked her husband to wash the dishes, because cleaning for her can be tiring.
“He says since I made the mess, I should take care of it myself. I got angry but I didn't ask again,” the Reddit post said.
In the post, the woman said she then went back to making dinner, but only enough for herself and her son. “I was confused,” she wrote in her post.
“I told him if he wasn't going to do his part in the food, then he could make his own. I think this is fair! If he thinks about cleaning our plates from our potluck that I worked on, then he can take care of his own cooking! she wrote.
After the post, many people took to the comments section to defend the woman for standing up for herself.
“By your husband's logic, you should also stop doing laundry, making his side of the bed, and any other household chores that involve things he uses,” one comment read.
“I would take this even further,” another commenter agreed. “For a whole month, I just did things for myself and my son. Did your clothes get dirty? He can wash his own clothes. He can cook by himself. You can iron his own clothes. He can clean up the mess from him. He wouldn't vacuum where he normally sits, etc., etc. It is his line of reasoning and I would go crazy with it.”
Other commenters pointed out that your husband could make the decision to wash the dishes, but could use a different technique to avoid it.
“OP needs to be prepared for weaponized incompetence. In the end he will agree to wash the pots, but he deliberately won't do it right,” one person wrote in the comments.
Another person responded to that comment by pointing out how he was responding to this concept of deliberately doing a task poorly to get ahead. “I used to save dishes that weren't clean enough to wash again. He didn't like that. Although I would do it to myself too! Then he would keep it since he considers it clean enough. Then if he said something when he was outed, you said that was enough,” the commenter explained.
“Also, when it was my turn to wash them, I also had to put them away when they were dry. When he washed up, it would be my job to put them away afterwards. And he didn't clean the benches or the cabinet doors either, which for me is part of washing the dishes.”
