Balancing love, life and housework

Love and household: who is the boss at home? © Jupiter

According to an EU-wide study, women are still shouldering the greater part of the household chores, even when both partners work. Very few couples do equal shares.

For women, the unequal division of labour within the household often makes them feel unloved, sometimes eventually triggering rage. This is usually met with a lack of understanding on the part of the men. Yet some simple strategies can help avoid constant squabbling about cleaning and ironing and quickly restore the balance in love, life and housework.

A typical scenario: both go out to work and are under stress, both come home exhausted at night, let their shoes drop in the corner and themselves onto to sofa. When the time comes to deal with the dirty toilet, the mountain of washing or the unmade beds, it is usually she who reaches for the loo brush, the iron or the duvet. He stays put on the sofa.

Housework: cleaning to do after work
The majority of women are still doing household chores alone. If you add up the hours spent on both paid work and housework, a woman's work day is longer on average than that of a man’s, according to an EU-wide study.

Italian and Polish women work particularly long hours; they clock up almost four extra hours per day. They are outdone only by the women of Estonia, where the extra time worked on average exceeds four hours a day – men’s involvement in housework is virtually nonexistant. That things can be different is shown by the examples of Norway and Sweden, where the division of labour is nearly equal.