Hey, if you want your husband/boyfriend to take up more responsibility at home, the answer is inside your home, not outside of it. There is no such thing as an invisible thread linking and holding back men from participating in domestic duties.

If one guy refuses, it has no effect on any other guy in a different house with a different spouse or girlfriend. There is no such thing as “men” in fact — it’s an abstraction we use as a convenience to talk about more than one man. Instead of saying “more than one man” we say “men” because it’s much easier.

This abstraction makes our sentences neat, but when we reverse engineer a convenience of speech to dictate how actual individual actors should act or do act, it’s a fallacy called synecdoche: confusing the whole for the individual, or the individual for the whole.

And it fails to describe the problem adequately, because no individual person checks the vast matrix of other individual male behavior to come up with how he ought to or will act. He acts the way he does because of his unique, particular situation. If your spouse doesn’t pick his socks up, that’s not on me. It would be silly to suggest so.

There are lots of men who pitch in and then some at home. They did so before COVID, they’re doing it during COVID. They’ll do it after COVID. If you didn’t choose one of these individuals as a partner— and if you can’t communicate that you EXPECT an equitable effort at home from your man, then I guess I feel bad for you, but don’t put me on the hook. Don’t lump all men together like we all share some kind of original sin.

It seems like you and your man have a real problem YOU each need to sort out.

Writing blogs directed at “men” generally won’t work unless your guy is in to really subtle, really oblique hints. Does that sound like him? I don’t know him. Maybe he’s into that. Takes all kinds.