His Beautiful Laundrette

Housework is the great divider in any new relationship, especially one that involves the two of you leaving the comfort of your familial homes and choosing a new spot altogether. My first live-in relationship was just me telling myself, “No! Don't fall into gender roles!” No matter how many stern talking-tos I gave myself, at the end of the day, I had to either pick up the dirty laundry off the floor, or deal with stepping on a layer of them by the end of the week. Because I was more particular about what I ate (and because this was mostly long distance) I gave instructions to the cook and the maid, because I cared about dusty cupboards, I made sure there was a dusting day.

“You?” scoffed my old flat mate once when she came over to my new set-up. She was right to sound surprised. In our old place, living with two women who were just so much better at this than I was, I wound up not doing very much housework at all. In retrospect, I feel awfully, terribly guilty at what a lazy housemate I was—I picked up after myself, but as far as I was concerned, my role ended there. Even my cat was messy, the cat I alone took responsibility for, and he was so much more finicky than I was—pooping on the floor when his litterbox hadn't been cleaned for a few days.

I didn't know how my various flatmates over the years had done it. When I lived entirely alone, it seemed everywhere I looked was a disorganised mess. If I dusted the shelves, there'd be dirty clothes. If I did laundry, I'd be too distracted to think about what kind of meal I wanted the cook to prepare. Lists were begun with all great intentions, but when you manage your household and have to work from home at the same time, days turn into drudgery—a never ending list of chores, chores, chores, and your house never looked as nice as your friend's did. With two people living and working in the house, and one of them seeming not to care at all, it was easy to get frustrated.

I was talking about this balance of housework the other day to a friend, adding a little smugly that the Partner and I have very rare disagreements about household tasks. He cares about some things, I care about others, and as a result, we putter along quite well. Our home now is no model of cleanliness—we have pets and dust and during this monsoon, an invasion of black ants that welcome any excuse to come indoors, but it's by no means dirty. Everything has its place, partly by architectural design, and partly because we put things away. “Yes, but when you guys first started dating, you were mad about him,” she said, “That makes everything a lot easier.”

It made me think: could my early frustrations with housework, and my resentment at being cast into a gender role I did not want be also because I didn't love the man I was living with? Or even if I did love him, did I simply not love him enough? It could be.

It could also be that at thirty four, I'm finally getting to that grown-up, put-together phase my friends seemed to have down in their twenties. I'm still not one hundred per cent there yet: they're throwing fancy dinner parties with matching cutlery, I'm still ordering in pizza and my friends can consider themselves lucky when I break out the cloth napkins for them. I'm reminded of what Linda Goodman, the famous astrologer, said about Sagittarian women (my star sign), something so true, that it made me believe in horoscopes forever:

Read more by the author: Friendship is a miracle, especially after 30

“Sagittarius girls are acutely bored by the confinements of dusting and mopping. [...] When she has a home of her own, she'll probably swallow her distaste. [...] Her mother will never believe it. That sloppy child waxing the coffee table? Impossible. Pride and the eternal Sagittarius logic does it. She needs to be surrounded with beauty and cleanliness to be true to herself. The message reaches her that, if she doesn't wipe up the linoleum no one else will.”

Maybe I should have given previous partners and flatmates Goodman to read as an easy way out for myself. Housework may be the great divider, but when it's done with compromise and ease, can be a pretty good unifier too.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of five books, most recently a YA novel about divorce called Split and a collection of short stories about love called Before, And Then After. The views expressed here are her own.