From time to time, a young man who is about to get married will ask me, “You are in a long standing, happy marriage. What is the key to domestic bliss?”
“Erratic performance of domestic chores,” I respond.
My response confuses my young friend, so I elaborate.
Let’s suppose your spouse hands you a list of ten items to get at the grocery store. You go to the store, and you nail it. You come home with the ten items and nothing but the ten items.
The next time you are handed a list of ten items, you return with fifty bags of potato chips and nothing that was on the list. The following conversation ensues:
Your spouse: “What happened to the items on the list? What led you to think that we needed fifty bags of potato chips?”
You: “I like potato chips and they were on sale. How could I resist such a deal? After 50 bags, there was no more room in the shopping cart for the items on your list, so I did not get them.”
The point is that if you do a domestic chore correctly all the time you will own it. You will be the one who always mows the lawn or empties the dishwasher.
If you never do any chores correctly, your spouse will think that they made a mistake and you may be banned to sleeping in the garage or they may start looking for another relationship.
If your task performance is erratic, your spouse will conclude that there is hope for you. You are not so useless that they should move on to another relationship. However, you will not be trusted with chores that are important and must be executed correctly.
If your continued erratic performance begins to cause serious marital friction, you can show your spouse a picture of the male chromosomes. You will point out that women have two X chromosomes whereas men have an X and Y. Looking at the picture you can see that the Y chromosome is much smaller than the X chromosome. Men are missing a lot of genetic material.
What genes are men missing? The genes that enable them to dress appropriately for a fancy dinner, buy an appropriate birthday present, ask for directions, not wash delicates with gardening clothes in ultra-hot water and perform domestic chores consistently well.
You are not to blame for erratic performance. You were doomed from birth. You would be consistent if you could, but you are missing the genes that enable you to do so.
If your spouse were to think of moving on to someone else, they would face the same problem all over again.
Invariably the young man walks away from our conversation thinking that I must be missing an unusually large amount of genetic material. I may be the rare male with two Y chromosomes.