A piece titled You’re Dividing Chores Wrong by Emily Oster argues that spouses should divide chores based on increased marginal cost. It’s an interesting argument, but the part that I found most compelling was her comments about loading the dishwasher:
Before my daughter was born, I both cooked and did the dishes. It wasn’t a big deal, it didn’t take too much time, and honestly I was a lot better at both than my husband. His cooking repertoire extended only to eggs and chili, and when I left him in charge of the dishwasher, I’d often find he had run it “full” with one pot and eight forks.
While I have no doubt about Oster’s skill at cooking and washing dishes, the problem isn’t her ability to do household chores; it’s her assumption of the moral high ground when it comes to chores like loading the dishwasher.
As inefficient as her husband may be at loading the dishwasher, her “one pot and eight forks” example is obviously an exaggeration. Nevertheless, why does Oster care if her husband fails to run a full load of dishes? While her standards for a full load may differ from her husband’s, that doesn’t necessarily make his standards unacceptable or wrong.
Perhaps her husband believes in applying the greatest amount of mental and physical effort to the tasks most important in life. Maybe his unwillingness to fill the dishwasher comes from his desire to recapture precious minutes of the day to play with his kids, advance his career, or improve his exercise regimen.
Maybe he knows the dishwasher is more likely to be emptied sooner if it isn’t completely filled.
Or maybe her husband simply doesn’t care that much about the dishwasher.
For reasons I fail to understand, people often assume that the person with the highest standards for a given task has moral authority over it, but that is not necessarily true.
My wife, for example, doesn’t like it when I put away dishes that aren’t bone dry. I argue that dishes can dry nearly as well in the cupboard as on the drying rack, and a few drops of leftover moisture in a cup or bowl won’t hurt anyone. My priority is to put the dishes away as soon as possible because I abhor clutter and disorder most, but because her standards of dryness exceed mine, her position inherently carries more weight.
We encounter a similar discrepancy with the laundry. If left up to me, we would be washing enormous loads of clothing and separating colors to a lesser degree than she does, and when I am washing my own clothing, this is what I do. But if the laundry load also contains my wife’s clothing or even the children’s clothing, I adhere to her standards. Smaller loads and a greater separation of darks from the very darks.
Once again, my method of washing is perfectly acceptable and practiced by millions of people around the world, but because Elysha’s standards are higher than mine, her standards prevail.
This principle applies to activities across the spectrum. The person with the lowest speed limit tolerance inherently sets the speed at which a vehicle should be moving. The person with the highest cleanliness standards typically dictates what a particular room will look like. If a spouse believes the bed should be made every day, the bed is usually made, even if the other spouse sees it as a waste of time.
In this world where the highest standards take precedence, and those who possess them assume greater moral authority, the people who tend to suffer are the corner-cutters, the shortcutters, the devotees of efficiency, and the big-picture thinkers. These people’s opinions and beliefs tend to take a back seat to the rule followers and detail-oriented individuals who dominate so much of society.
It’s not right.
Disciples of efficiency, productivity, and speed must take a stand against the tyranny of unnecessarily high standards and pointless detail. We must insist that our half-filled dishwashers deserve the same amount of respect as the full dishwasher. We must fight for our principles and our priorities in the face of never-ending rules and overly specific expectations that only seek to slow us down, stifle our productivity, and trap us in a miasma of unneeded perfection.
Are you with me?
