Debt Reduction 101

No, I’m not making some social commentary in the cool alliteration of my blog title – I’m just recapping the sentiment of a New York Times op-ed piece that I read this morning called “My So-Called Wife.”

I found this article interesting. By no means am I the breadwinner of the family, but I am amused by the writer’s commentary on how household roles have changed from the 1950s to 2010. When you have both partners in a household working 40-plus hour a week jobs, who is the “housewife?”

Or as the writer succinctly put it: “In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household’s natural rhythms. And in the transformation of men and women into domestic co-laborers, the Art of the Wife is fast disappearing.”

So how do other couples handle this sort of thing? In my home, the husband and I have a pact – I cook, he washes dishes and we both do our own laundry. We both hate dusting – I’d rather clean a toilet and he’d rather clean the darkest corners of our basement. In the end, we somehow make it work – even if the bookshelves are populated by killer dust bunnies.