If you grocery shop for the week with specific meals in mind, it can be frustrating when things don’t go according to plan. You slice open those avocados intended for guacamole, and they’re all rotten. You pull a jar of tomato sauce out of the fridge just to drop it on the floor, leaving you with a massive mess and nothing for dinner. Or you reach in the cabinet and find those baguettes that you bought are suddenly half their original size.

Below, you’ll find a story that a frustrated woman recently shared on Reddit, wondering if she was wrong for blowing up at her husband after he demolished their dinner ingredients.

In this family, the wife does the majority of grocery shopping and cooking

Image credits: Tima Miroshnichenko (not the actual image)

So when she found that her husband had already helped himself to the ingredients for dinner, she lost it

Image credits: iRubén (not the actual image)

Later, the woman provided more information on the situation

Image credits: Previous_Mood_3251

It’s common for women to take on more of the grocery shopping and meal-prepping responsibilities

When it comes to meal preparation responsibilities, it’s common for one partner to take on more of the burden. Perhaps they enjoy cooking more, or maybe their spouse has a more time-consuming job. But in the United States, it seems that it’s usually women taking on the lion’s share of food preparation. According to a 2019 study from the Pew Research Center, 80% of women in the US with kids say they’re the usual meal prepper, while 75% of women without kids say the same.

80% of American moms are their families’ usual grocery shoppers as well, while 68% of women without kids go to the store more frequently than their partners as well. When it comes to time spent preparing meals, women with kids say they spend about 68 minutes per day meal prepping, while their male partners say they spend about 23 minutes each day. So the arrangement that the couple in this post have certainly isn’t unusual, and there’s nothing wrong with it if they’re both content.

Image credits: Gustavo Fring (not the actual image)

But dividing up household labor evenly between partners can be beneficial for their relationship

In fact, the way couples decide to divide up labor can have a significant impact on how happy they are in their relationship. According to a survey from Roborock, half of all couples believe that not helping out with household chores is just as bad as, if not worse than, cheating on their partner. 

60% of couples admit that equally dividing up household chores would improve their loyalty, and 56% believe that evenly splitting up chores could even improve their sex lives. Apparently, 53% of couples consider balancing chore responsibilities just as important to their relationships as having sex.

But unfortunately, many couples disagree on how much their partner really helps out around the house. 34% think that their spouse or partner has at one point done chores poorly on purpose to get out of doing them again in the future, also known as weaponized incompetence. The pandemic didn’t help couples get on the same page either, as 40% say they argue more about housework now than they did prior to 2020. 

Image credits: Annushka Ahuja (not the actual image)

While the labor is still often unbalanced, men today are doing much more around the house than previous generations

Times are changing, though, when it comes to how couples balance responsibilities around the house. And according to associate professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah, Daniel L. Carlson, we’re slowly becoming more egalitarian. Carlson told Deseret News that even though women are still doing more than men overall, men are doing much more than they were a few decades ago.

Married fathers, who used to do only 2 hours of housework a week in 1965, are taking on 5 hours today. And among couples where both partners work, dads do on average 9.5 hours of housework each week. Carlson also says it can benefit couples to do chores jointly, rather than simply assigning them between the two of them. He recommends therapists consider division of labor when working with couples, to address and predict conflicts.

“We have higher expectations of fairness, communication and intimacy of our relationship, and that means we have to be more thoughtful and open about how to arrange it than our grandparents did,” Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, told Deseret News. 

We would love to hear your thoughts on this situation in the comments below, pandas. Do you think this woman was justified in yelling at her husband? Feel free to share, and then if you’re interested in reading another Bored Panda article, we recommend checking out another discussing couple conflicts and weaponized incompetence.    

Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual image)

Many readers assured the woman that she did nothing wrong, noting that her husband was being immature

However, some thought the wife could have communicated better

Later, she shared another update after talking about the post with her husband

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