Alternatively, Tom, you appear to be trivializing your wife’s feelings about having things cleared away as a personal quirk, as opposed to talking to her about what it was like growing up with a hoarder in the house. She may have a genuine horror of slipping into the abyss if things cross a certain line. I recently got the clue in the lead pipe about living with disabilities in my own marriage. After a nephew was diagnosed with Asperger’s recently, my husband and I did some reading so we could help his brother and sister-in-law out and interact with my nephew better, and we discovered that my husband may actually have an autism-spectrum disorder. After all of these years of low-level disagreement over household chores, we now both have a better understanding of where the other one is coming from! He now understands on an intellectual level why I’m not bothered if (for instance) there is a pile of things on the dining room table for a couple of days, and I’m better able to understand why he sometimes throws things away wholesale instead of sorting through them. I had been dismissing his dislike of clutter as a personal quirk and not very important, because a certain amount of clutter doesn’t bother me, but in reality he gets overwhelmed visually if there are too many things to choose to look at. Just a thought.

One thing to consider re the schedule - sometimes, especially when one is doing multiple chores, you can’t do chore B until A is done. So it may not matter in the grand scheme of things if you wash a pot today or tomorrow, but it matters very much if I need that pot to make dinner. Or your spouse may be thinking (justly or unjustly) that “I’ll do it later” means “I’ll stall until you nag me, or until you give up and do it yourself.” She may really not be understanding how you perceive it - that it is actually not an issue if the dishes wait a day.

I’m afraid that I don’t know the surrealist lightbulb joke. Care to enlighten / amuse?

And the fury can go both ways. If I see it not as her picking up my slack, but instead pestering me incessantly over things that I don’t see as that critical in terms of either time or intensity of efforts, I can get just as angry.

Sure. This isn’t about her being 100% right and you being 100% wrong.

But really, the schedule thing is a red herring. She’s perceiving it (from what I can tell) as an issue of quantity and quality of work. The time-critical nature of bill-paying is irrelevant to those issues. “Yes, you have to do more and crappier work but yours doesn’t have a fixed deadline!” is almost like that joke about how many Surrealists it takes to change a lightbulb.

Speaking from experience, the only way to get out of this trap is to set aside the power struggle and figure out what needs to be done, agree that you’re not both going to be 100% happy, and that it needs to be done fairly.

She just picked up a new work assignment, and my summer might see a lighter load than usual, so we’ll see.

It isn’t an out and out question of not KNOWING what the household responsibilities are. For one, I’ve lived on my own before and she hasn’t (at least not without housemates or something) and I’ve been living under my own roof for longer. It just comes to a disagreement as to what has to be done and how often. KMTBerry used the phrase “what needs to be done”, which is something that I’d interpret in a strict sense.

Um. Since the point is to try to get a sense of what she thinks of as her responsibilities around the house, then shouldn’t you do pretty much everything that she would include on that list for that month?

KMTBerry, part of the dispute is what constitutes the “ALL”. My “ALL” is not her “ALL”. Cleaning toilets, which seems to get a lot of mention here as a sort of palladium of odious household tasks, is maybe a once every month or two kind of a thing in my book, to cite one example. Sterilizing a fridge is something you do when you sell it, maybe.

Mythago, I’ll concede the difference in time required for different tasks. The point more that I was trying to make was how necessary it is that they be done & done on a particular schedule. The bills are non-negotiable as to when they’re due. The dishes, if they go a day or two and are soaking, won’t be a cause of disaster. And the fury can go both ways. If I see it not as her picking up my slack, but instead pestering me incessantly over things that I don’t see as that critical in terms of either time or intensity of efforts, I can get just as angry.

Paying the electric bill takes me perhaps five minutes, once a month. Fixing the computers? Well, maybe an afternoon if things are REALLY fubar, but usually not more than an hour or two every so often. Compare that to, say, dishes, which must be done *every* time we have a meal or cook, and which have side effects if they aren’t done (they smell bad, attract vermin, clog up the sink, and you can’t cook if all the pots are dirty).

Plus, you and I *both* know how much more fun it is to pay bills than to scrub a toilet.

I think you are very right that the issue here is more power struggle than anything else. But if you really are saying that you know you’re letting her pick up your slack and you don’t care, can you see why even a spouse with reasonable standards would be furious with you?