So I fell off the blogging wagon for awhile, but I’m back. And I’m kickstarting the wagon-ride with what seems to me to be one of the latest topics du jour, marriage.

Is it just me, or does it seem like marriage is the new “in” thing? It went out of vogue in contemp lit for awhile, but I’ve read some damn fine novels lately that focused on the M-word: The Unnamed, Happy Now, The Three Weismanns of Westport. Even the author of Eat, Pray, Love came out with a missive on marriage.

The media have been giving coverage of late to a number of studies on marriage, and the biggie is the one showing that men fair better in marriage than women. They tend to live longer, happier, more professionally successful lives. A recent NYT article commented on the different difficulties men and women face in marriage. Men don’t tend to have their family responsibilities taken into account at work – they’re less likely to get time off for child care, for example. (“Now, Dad feels as stressed as Mom,” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/weekinreview/20parkerpope.html?_r=1)

The funny part was the comments from men who complained that the work they did around the house wasn’t “counted,” and that even when they did help out, they couldn’t do anything right because their wives would be critical. Control-freakery is to blame.

“When are men going to get equal credit for doing the “Man Chores?” Saturday I cooked breakfast, washed and waxed both cars, mowed the lawn, edged, worked on the A/C in the Attic…..While my wife does appreciate me helping with the inside stuff, I get very little in the way of cred for all the outside things.”

“Housework is a no-win situation for me. My wife will always find something to complain about. When I do my fair share — and more — she criticizes the manner in which I do it….It’s not about having a perfect spouse. It’s having a spouse who’ll do your bidding.”

What exactly is “fair share”? This excerpt from the NYT article really hits it, though this isn’t the main focus of the story:

“Then again, some contributions may be unrecognized by the other partner. For instance, a father may prepare school lunches half the time, so he thinks he’s sharing that chore. But he doesn’t factor in the time his wife spent shopping for the ingredients, planning healthy, appetizing menus and emptying and cleaning the lunchboxes every day.”

Or putting the groceries away after shopping. Or keeping in mind what the picky little eaters will accept, or what they now find too embarrassing at their age to carry in their lunches, or what has been banned by the school due to food allergies. Not to mention the personal judgment some mothers feel about the quality of the lunches they pack.

How many men have felt they were “sharing” a task like that without sharing all the preparation, follow-up and general oversight involved? I imagine that at least part of the perceived control-freakery comes from women who know that the way they do things save them time and effort down the line in the part of the chores not handled by the husbands. If you think that having to put something back in the same spot in the cupboard is control-freakery, maybe it’s because you won’t be the next person having to look for it – if you only cook on weekends, it’s not that big a deal. If you don’t make the grocery list, you won’t look in that spot to see if you’re out of that ingredient. If you don’t handle the child care, you won’t be the one interrupted when the kids yell “Mom, where’s the X?” because they won’t think to look in the next cupboard over. Unless you’re the one doing it, it’s hard to fully comprehend the constant background of responsibility (and thus stress, for someone who’s overtaxed with both household and a “real” job) when it’s not just the chores but all the ongoing mental and physical management of a household. I honestly don’t think that this can be completely understood even by well-intentioned spouses in any meaningful way – it’s something you have to experience all the time, not just occasionally. Because you don’t get time off from your house and kids.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve known women who are just into control for control’s sake. Maybe it’s because they don’t feel they have it elsewhere. Or maybe they grew resentful from having to balance all that mental work with everything else.

As for work “counting”…Traditional men’s work is usually more permanent. Fixing, building – my husband has rebuilt nearly half our house. We see tangible results of what he’s accomplished every day. Traditional women’s work, housework and child care, is not so tangible. Housework is never finished – it’s constantly being undone, sometimes in just minutes (if you’ve got kids). It gets more notice when it isn’t done (messy house) than when it is. Child care is obviously important, but not something you can point to as something you personally did, like a new kitchen sink. Children are a product of both parents, so they represent both mother and father, not just the time and effort spent by the primary care giver.

Also, traditional men’s work is often done on the weekends or later at night, after coming down from work (like that of the first commenter above). Women often don’t have that luxury, especially if there are kids in the household. The meals and the schoolwork and the groceries and that mess the kids made all need to be tended to – and can’t wait for the weekend or when you’re feeling less stressed.

So where am I on the control-freakery continuum? Well, I consider my unofficial arrangement with my husband to be pretty good. I do most of the housework, but I also only work part-time – a luxury that allowed me to finish my first novel. He’s done an amazing amount of work on our fixer-upper house and can fix nearly anything, from computers to dishwashers. In fact, one of the things that I’ve always loved about him is that he combines intellectual interests with hands-on work, both practical and for play. And while having very high standards (to the point of being his own harshest critic), he doesn’t shy away from trying new things. So for a couple of highly educated people, our division of labor is pretty traditional.

But I’m sure some of what I do comes off as control-freakery. He doesn’t understand why people want to clean up right after dinner – and I don’t really enjoy getting up in the morning to a disaster in the kitchen, one that is my job to clean up, before going into work. I’m sure I come off as a bitch sometimes for making the kids put their stuff away, but guess who cleans it up if they don’t? On the other hand, he doesn’t complain when I do take a few days off of housework, and the dishes pile up and the laundry doesn’t get done. I eventually get to it. I’m a slacker on a lot of other things that I think of as second-or-third-tier chores, like dusting or wiping down the kitchen walls and appliances – stuff that can really make a difference in making a house look clean or dirty but I rarely do them. We’re both just more interested in other things – life’s short enough as it is.

In the end, control-freakery, in my mind, is just another of those labels, like “lazy,” “emotional” or “irresponsible,” that often just indicates the speaker’s self-centeredness. It translates into: “Your priorities should be the same as mine, but they aren’t so that makes you a freak.” That can be just as true of the person accused of control-freakery. “You did that wrong” really means “You didn’t do that the way I wanted it done.”

So here’s my parting question: What’s the deal with “credit” (as in the comments above)? I’m interested both in the general psychology of this concept and the use of credit as a metaphor here.