How Do You Make Chores Fun?

By Crabby McSlacker

It's not exactly a shocking confession: I am a foot-dragging, excuse-making, pathetic, whiny chore-hater.

So the title question "How Do You Make Chores Fun?" is not just a rhetorical question. I'd really like some advice!

And yeah, I have some tricks that I use that help a lot that I'll pass along, and I've gotten way less lazy and petulant than I used to be.  But I still dread most forms of manual or clerical labor and make a huge melodramatic production out of it when I'm forced to do any.

A brief search of the interwebs was not much help: I kept finding pretty much the same small handful of ideas I'd already "invented" myself.

So I'm hoping someone has some thoughts?

Psst, Girls... Get Your Hot Porn Here!

[By Crabby]

Cover Photo: Porn for Women

So I'm about a year late on this and you all probably have seen it, but what the hell: this book looks hilarious. And there's a new one coming out soon called: Porn for New Moms.

The premise: guys who actually do their share of the chores and are extremely sensitive to their wives desires are... well, mostly amusingly fictional. But to the extent that they do exist: they're HOT! Hotter, actually, than the square jawed guys who bare their six pack abs and pose in skimpy underwear.

So the "pornographic" pictures feature men dusting and vacuuming and saying things like this:


Which play on gender stereotypes, sure, but so what. They totally crack me up.

I probably shouldn't be weighing in on the issue of heterosexual chore division at all, since I have zero personal experience to draw on. But I have noticed that it's not an uncommon expectation that the "home" stuff is predominantly the woman's job, even when both spouses work. And that this expectation persists even though women have been saying "hey, what the hell's up with that?" for the last 40 years or so.

The good news: apparently that expectation is finally beginning to shift a bit, and there's more recognition that guys who do chores are hot! And that at least some men are figuring out that learning to pull their own weight domestically can make them a more desirable mate.

I often wonder how some of you gals who have demanding jobs and kids and a bunch of other responsibilities manage to get enough time to pull off healthy meal planning and shopping and cooking and still have time for exercise. Do chores ever get in the way of your health goals? And are you getting 50/50 help from your significant other? Or are we not quite there yet?

(Anyone hear an odd noise, sort of a chomping, spitting, gargly sound? That's the sound of Crabby physically restraining herself from expressing opinions on matters she knows nothing about. She will be listening, for a change, not spouting off, if any of you want to share how the whole chore-sharing thing works in your relationships or what sort of stuff you've observed watching other couples you know. Crabby will put on her anthropologist's pith helmet and take notes! She finds heterosexual relationships fascinating.)