Desire Is Not a Wage

There is a joke that goes around every few years in different forms. A man discovers that if he does the vacuuming, his wife is more interested in sex. He vacuums. The joke is about the transaction, and it's told by people who find the transaction funny.

The women I talk to don't find it funny. Not because they're humourless about sex, but because the joke gets the mechanism backwards. Desire isn't a payment for chores. Nobody I've met wants a man because he emptied the dishwasher.

And yet there is something real underneath the joke, and it's worth looking at carefully.

What the research found, and then found again

In 2013, a study in the American Sociological Review by Sabino Kornrich, Julie Brines and Katrina Leupp got a lot of attention. Using American survey data from the early 1990s, it found that couples with a more traditional division of housework reported having sex more often than couples who shared it. Newspapers loved it. Some readers took it as proof that equality kills desire.

Three years later, Daniel Carlson, Amanda Miller, Sharon Sassler and Sarah Hanson published a reexamination in the Journal of Marriage and Family. They compared the older data with data from 2006. In the newer data the pattern had flipped. Couples who shared housework roughly equally reported sex at least as often as couples with conventional arrangements, and in some comparisons more often.

Both studies are correlational. Neither shows that housework causes anything. What they suggest is that the relationship between housework and sex depends on what couples expect, and expectations have changed.

Why the old pattern might have broken

One reading goes like this. In a world where most couples expected her to run the home, a traditional arrangement didn't feel unfair. It just felt normal, and normal doesn't damage desire. As more couples came to expect a partnership, an unequal arrangement started to feel like a broken promise. Broken promises do damage desire.

That fits what I hear. Women rarely complain that a man doesn't do enough chores in some absolute sense. They complain about the gap between what was agreed and what happens, and about what that gap says about how he sees her.

There is a second reading, and I find it just as plausible. The couples in the newer data may simply have been different people. Men who share housework in 2006 might also be men who listen, plan and pay attention in other ways, and it is those qualities, not the chores, that travel with desire. The studies can't separate these, and I won't pretend they can.

The mechanism isn't the chore

This is why the vacuuming joke is backwards. If doing housework increases desire, it's not because the floor is clean. It's because of what the act shows: that he sees the work, takes it as his, and doesn't need to be told.

That is the same quality I described in Expensive Isn't Generous. What women respond to is attention, and housework done without being asked is one of the clearest forms attention takes.

A man who does chores as payment, waiting for his reward, shows the opposite. He's still treating the house as hers and his help as a favour. She can feel that, and it isn't attractive.

I've also noticed that when women talk about this, they almost never use the word chores. They talk about whether he notices, whether he follows through, whether they can relax in his company. The housework is just the place where those things become visible.

What I'd say to him

Don't do the dishes to get anything. Do them because they're yours. The desire part isn't a transaction you can complete. But it does seem to grow, in some couples, in the space where she stops feeling like the only adult in the house.