A mom who refuses to do her husband’s laundry (or cook dinner, make his doctor’s appointments or buy his underwear), says household chores are not acts of kindness. Her opinion is dividing people on TikTok.
“There is a (societal) expectation that because I’m married, I’m expected to do my husband’s laundry, but we both work full-time and we have four kids — that can be up to six, seven, eight loads of laundry per week — so, his is one load that I don’t do,” Paige Turner, an operations manager in Massachusetts, tells TODAY.com.
Turner made another video, clarifying that while they divide their laundry, they both wash their children’s clothes.
After many years of marriage to her high school sweetheart, during which she happily did his laundry, she recalled advice she once ignored.
“When I first got engaged, my mother-in-law gave me a piece of advice about marriage that I did not take but I absolutely should have taken,” Paige Turner, a mother of four in Massachusetts, explained in a TikTok video. “She said to me, ‘Don’t do his laundry — you’re going to learn to hate him.’”
Although Turner didn’t heed the advice, she now believes that women and men’s responsibilities are often unbalanced in relationships. Data from the Pew Research Center backs her up, finding that women in relationships do most of the caretaking and house chores, while men spend more time at work and on leisure activities — even when both partners’ salaries are comparatively equal and when the wife is the primary earner.
“Every time we do something — especially if we do it often — it sets an expectation ... and this is how the domestic labor goes from equal to very unequal very quickly,” Turner said in her video.
TikTok mostly saw her point.
- “Somehow, my acts of kindness turned into permanent jobs. His did not.”
- “I stopped buying the Christmas presents so this year, nobody got gifts.”
- “I wash, he folds. I used to fold but he had the audacity to say, ‘Can you fold my pants this way?’”
- “Do it once, they are grateful. Do it twice, they become expectant. Do it three times and they become entitled.”
- “I sign wedding and birthday cards with just my name if I get it. It’s my small act to maintain those boundaries.”
- “We do our laundry together. Ours and our kids’. House chores are a shared responsibility.”
- “I had far less issues before kids.”
Others objected to Turner’s division of labor.
- “What you’re essentially saying is, never do any acts of kindness for your partner. Your man should be doing these things with you/for you and not expecting it from you.”
- “We do each other’s laundry.”
- “Wild! My husband and I just about do everything together. Cooking, cleaning, farm chores, etc. I don’t get this at all!”
- “Literally just communicate then?”
- “No point in getting married.”
In a second video, Turner shared the other tasks she doesn’t do for her husband.
Cooking dinner (she makes breakfast and lunch for her husband and kids while he manages dinner), making his medical appointments (“I want him to be healthy but he’s a grown-a-- man”), packing his suitcase for vacation or buying him new underwear.
“I’m not my husband’s personal secretary or his personal assistant,” Turner said in her second video. “I am his partner, I am his equal and I do not have to do things to cater to him and serve him at all times to be kind and loving.”
Turner laid down the law after the birth of her fourth child. She asked her husband to do more around the house, specifically, taking out the trash and unloading the dishwasher.
“One morning, I was changing my 18-month-old’s diaper while wearing my 2-month-old (in a carrier) and my other kids were getting ready,” Turner tells TODAY.com. “I went to throw out the diaper and the trash was full.”
When Turner went downstairs, the dishwasher was full of clean dishes. “I felt so unseen ... and taken advantage of,” she says.
Turner’s husband later explained that he was running late for work. “But he made me late for work,” she points out.
To Turner, the point isn’t laundry.
“Whenever I talk about laundry, it always goes viral because laundry is a metaphor for unspoken expectations” for women in relationships, she says.
“There’s a difference between doing something out of kindness and because it’s expected,” she says, pointing out that men typically handle chores that are outside the home or that are seasonal like mowing the lawn, changing the car oil or cleaning the gutters.
“Maybe those chores are more physically demanding or take more time but the lawn doesn’t multiply with the number of kids you have,” says Turner. “The lawn is still the lawn (unlike) the laundry or the dishes.”
Expert view: Should you do your partner’s laundry?
“If the domestic act of laundry is done on a consistent basis, it becomes more of an expectation and therefore will be viewed less by the other as an ‘act of kindness,’” Erika Stapert, lead psychologist at Manhattan Psychology Group, tells TODAY.com.
Stapert agrees, it's not about the laundry; it's about expectations and the dynamic of the relationship.
“Some spouses might feel completely comfortable with doing all of the laundry if, for example, they have a preferred way of doing it or if their spouse tends to take on other household chores,” she says. “The important thing is that both spouses feel as though the other contributes to the household in a meaningful way.”
Stapert says no two relationships are alike. Some people are comfortable taking the lion’s share of domestic labor.
“If you start to feel any sense of resentment towards your partner ... it’s time to have a conversation about ... what needs to be done to improve the situation,” says Stapert. “Resentment breeds relationship killers.”
