My Boyfriend Helps Me “the Normal Thing”

Abuse due to unequal division of tasks is one of the leading causes of divorce today. Women are tired, we are exhausted and we are fed up with the mental and emotional burden of running a home and family. The double working hours we do have consequences on our physical, mental and emotional health: having so little free time makes us sick, stresses us and makes our lives bitter.

Many men have not yet assumed that women are not born to serve or work for free, that we have the same right to rest as they do, and that it is not fair that they have more energy and more free time than we do. Although there are things that have changed in recent years (the men of the past lived like kings in their homes), the men of today “help” the normal, some less and others more. And many others, nothing at all.

The unfair unequal distribution of household chores

The accumulation of resentment due to work overload hurts ourselves, because it fills us with anger, rage, frustration and other negative emotions. In the feminist struggle, women feel accompanied and we manage to bring out those emotions to protest, to denounce the exploitation in which we live, and to demand a more just, more egalitarian and more supportive world.

And it is that the issue of homework and care is not only a matter of machismo, but above all of selfishness. Men who do nothing at home are unsupportive because they expect to be served like kings: they behave like kings and live like kings in their own homes.

It does not matter if outside they are the poorest and most exploited men in the world: in their homes these men rule and have subjects and servants.

Some do not get up from the table when they finish eating, and others do the dishes. Some help a little and others stay until the end collecting and cleaning. Some wait for you to bring their coffee and dessert to the table, others wait for the clothes to be cleaned, folded and placed alone in the cupboards. We wait for the miracle: the day when they become aware and decide to assume their responsibilities.

We hope that this awareness will lead them to show solidarity and work as a team. But the truth is that nobody teaches them to work as a team with women. Children are taught from a very young age that women were born to care for them, adore them, love them and wait for them.

Towards the end of the monarchy at home

We women today do not want to have adult children at home, nor do we want monarchies at home: what we want is a partner with whom to share life. And if the partner is not a partner, then it is better that it is not our partner.

Let us stop believing that we can educate men who have not reached adulthood and who need a self-sacrificing mother or an enslaved maid to take care of them. We cannot educate anyone if the other person does not take it inside as a vital need.

If your partner does not assume it, if agreements cannot be reached that balance the division of tasks and free time, if the boy does not measure up and behaves like a spoiled child, I think it is better to live alone with our order and our mess to go picking up the underpants of a guy who dreams that he is the king of his world.

If with your partner you cannot agree to an egalitarian relationship based on mutual care, then there are no conditions to build a partner. Because solidarity and care are the basis of any love story between two people.