The textbook question of a husband, angry with the excessive housekeeping of his wife. And why exactly this situation has become so typical? Psychological substantiation of the phenomenon.
The redistribution of household chores between men and women is still going at a snail’s pace, demographers say*. At this pace, centuries must pass before equality comes. And this despite the fact that nothing was said about the worst. After all, the researchers considered only the time spent on manual labor on the farm, but not the mental load. And in this area, the inequality is immeasurably stronger: women have the whole life of the family in their heads, they think about the smallest details every moment, even at work. “What will I cook for dinner tonight?
If I boil spinach for the girls, they will leave it on their plates. Okay, I give up, I’ll have to make French fries again … ”Everything is weighed and mixed: nutritional knowledge (fries are bad), choice in terms of human relations (children will be happy), possible guilt if the third time in a week cook frozen pizza. Close ones have no idea about this intellectual load when they ingenuously ask: “What do we have for dinner tonight?” But this is quickly forgotten if they are happy. A couple of words «how delicious!» enough to get rid of fatigue.
No, the most exhausting thing is in the other — in the invisible eye managing the order of things. Cognitive experts talk about «implicit memory»: we unconsciously retain a perfect plan for all the things in our family life. And there are countless of them, a huge assorted army of tubes, shorts, glasses, notebooks. When everything is going right, there is no need to think. Like where the breakfast bowl is.
The hidden plan sets the body in motion. It is enough, barely waking up, to reach out to the closet. But alas, the picture deteriorates if the thing is not in the place provided by the implicit memory. Moreover, it is especially difficult for women, because they mentally store not only their own things, but also the things of others — children and husbands.
Women have to instantly store everything in their memory: their own things, and the things of their children and husband
Three levels of nervous tension and mental fatigue are piled up in women’s thoughts. The first is connected with persistently disappearing own things (this is already very unnerving, but in this case the battle is only inside). Added to this is the mental burden due to the things of the husband (this is even more annoying, but the woman herself agreed to this domestic role). I have to sort out all these nasty socks in pairs so that my husband does not get angry when he takes them out of the drawer.
And finally, the last level, the most terrible, truly dramatic — when the husband dryly inquires: “Where did you put my green shirt?!”, And the wife feels that he could know just as well as she where this damned shirt is. The difference with the second level may seem insignificant, but it is critically important. The devil, as is well known, is in the details.
* Project of the French National Institute for Demographic Research (INED), November 2009.