When it comes to dividing up the chores in a given household, it often seems like it shouldn’t require much thought on paper.
While there aren’t many of us who outright enjoy doing the little tasks that make a home run, there are preferences and chores that we’re better at doing than others so it should be largely easy to divide them along those lines. However, if one partner creates the impression that they’re hopelessly bad at all of them, their spouse can often feel like it’s easier to do everything themselves than fix the other person’s mistakes later.
This is known as weaponized incompetence and it’s something that many women report experiencing from their spouses while they’re living together.
But while a greater number of people have become more aware of this concept lately, that doesn’t necessarily make it easier to resolve issues of weaponized incompetence.
In some cases, we’ve seen people go on a ” wife strike ” where they stopped cleaning only to learn that their partners are fine with living in filth .
But one woman has a different strategy. And while she described it as petty, it seemed to work for her.
On January 15, a woman in the U.K. uploaded a TikTok in which she shared that she asked her husband to put away some laundry.
In a follow-up video , she explained that they had already negotiated that this would be one of the things he’d do for the family while she had other tasks that benefited everyone.
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And while she said that there were some instances of him doing this half-heartedly in the past, this incident saw him outright refuse because the laundry in question was her clothes.
In response, she laughed and said “Oh, is that what we’re doing? OK.”
As she went on to explain in her original video, that meant she was going to adopt the same philosophy for all the things she does around the house.
So while she would have normally been inclined to do everyone’s laundry, she then decided that only her and her two children would get to benefit from this work now.
And that wasn’t the end of it either, as another shot showed a bed that only had the sheets changed for her side of it.
But while the husband didn’t notice what she was doing for the first few days, there was no way he could miss it once she went grocery shopping.
Because once again, the food she had bought was only considered usable to her and her children.
That’s not to say that nothing in that fridge was for her husband, but it was confined to a small shelf and constituted just a few products.
As you might imagine, the woman’s video raised a few questions.
One that she addressed in a follow-up video concerned how long they had been together by this point to not have already had these conflicts worked out long ago.
To that, she replied that they had been together for about a decade, but that people change as they grow older together and their needs and awareness of concepts like weaponized incompetence do as well. There are also external factors like kids and pets that can change a couple’s whole dynamic.
In her words, “The idea that you can date someone or be with someone live with someone long enough that you will just have all this stuff figured out and you’re good to go now? Total fallacy.”
And as for whether her strategy worked or not, she shared in another follow-up that it had and he understood that both of them can benefit from doing things for the whole family.