get my partner to stop being lazy and do chores

I am soooo happy with this new system! So far it is working beautifully. Boyfriend did almost all of the things he agreed to. The two that he fell through on were understandable and he’d tried hard. I think having a jar for broken promises is what’s clinched it. He says he reeaally doesn’t want to see any cards end up in there and has started thinking it through before promising things now.

Surprisingly, he also likes the system. There has been none of the resistance or sulking that I anticipated. He says it’s because the jars give him a way to measure how good he’s being to me. He’s no longer seeing the chore or the duty. He’s seeing the care and the love. I’m so happy and relieved I could cry.

I’m at my wits end with my live-in boyfriend who doesn’t do chores or get necessary things done (e.g. paying bills, booking appointment at dentist). I feel like I’m coping with a particularly apathetic and disgusting adolescent son instead of sharing my life with a capable and reliable partner.

I have followed all the traditional advice. Talk to him. Tell him how it makes you feel. Be calm and friendly. Don’t reprimand. Make sure your expectations are clear. Demonstrate the task in case he’s never learned how. Let him choose his chores. If he doesn’t do it, leave it until it gets so unbearable he eventually does it.

None of it works because, contrary to the popular notion that it is always the woman’s fault, I am not “enabling” him. These methods achieve nothing. I am uniformly ignored. He leaves dishes until we get cockroaches. He leaves laundry until he has to rewear underwear! The problem is not ignorance or a lack of skill. It’s a lack of getting off his arse. Period.

What really gets me is that he doesn’t just say no when I ask him to do something. He promises he will do it, but never does. The broken promises are just as much of a problem for me as the unhygienic living conditions that I must supposedly endure so that he can grow up. He also doesn’t seem to realise how often he breaks promises and how little his word has come to mean to me.

So I have thought up a system to confront him with this in an objective and measurable way. I’ve put out 4 jars, one labeled promised, one declined, one fulfilled and one broken, along with a stack of plain white cards and a marker. Every time I ask him to do something, I write my request on a card. He then has the option to promise or to decline it and it gets put in the appropriate jar. Once either fulfilled or broken, promises get shifted to that jar. There is also a set of jars for me that work the same way.

This will hopefully do 3 things: give him visual, comparative feedback on how much (or little) he’s keeping his word; demonstrate the differential between what we are each contributing as well as our respective abilities to keep our word; and teach him that it is better to decline to do something if it’s a problem than to promise blithely and not follow through.

Will let you know if this works, for all the other women out there who are suffering with this and being told that they are the ones with the problem. We aren’t being nice enough. We don’t understand how hard it is for them, never having been raised to do this stuff. That is, ironically, just another way of enabling him. I say “Blooey!”. We have been too nice. It is time to lay the blame squarely with him.