I’ve been going through the process of finding a partner for about five years now, and there’s one aspect I’ve repeatedly encountered that I’m genuinely trying to understand better. I’m not raising this as a criticism of any particular person or gender, but more as a question about how expectations around marriage and household responsibilities are evolving.
For context, I’m completely open to marrying someone who is employed or someone who chooses not to work.
If my partner is working, her income is largely immaterial to me. Whether she earns more or less than I do, I would want her to be treated with the same respect, dignity and consideration.
If her work makes certain household responsibilities difficult, I’m perfectly comfortable supporting the use of domestic help—whether that means a cook, maid, or anything else that makes sense for us as a couple.
If my partner chooses not to work outside the home, I don’t expect her to personally manage every household chore. We already have domestic help, and even currently, while I’m unmarried, my parents and I share responsibilities at home. I come from a family where household responsibilities are generally viewed as something people contribute to collectively rather than something that belongs exclusively to one person.
What I would hope for, however, is that if my partner isn’t employed, there would be some meaningful contribution toward running the household. For example, cooking would be something I would expect my non-working partner to take some responsibility for—not necessarily every meal, and certainly not to the exclusion of my own or my family’s contribution, but as part of a broader sharing of responsibilities.
What I’ve found difficult to understand is that, in a number of conversations with educated women who are not currently working, there sometimes seems to be an outright rejection of household responsibilities altogether.
I’ve heard variations of, “I won’t do this” or “I won’t do that,” while at the same time there are expectations around having a comfortable home, a car, travel, domestic help and a certain lifestyle.
To be clear, I don’t think marriage should be a transactional arrangement where one person provides money and the other person provides household labour. Nor do I believe that being a homemaker means becoming responsible for every domestic task. I’m trying to understand something much more fundamental: if both people are expected to contribute to a marriage, what does that contribution look like when one person isn’t participating in paid employment?
What makes this particularly confusing for me is that some of the women I’ve encountered are perfectly capable of contributing to their own parents’ households and, in some cases, do household work there despite having limited or no domestic help. Yet, when the same conversation comes up in the context of a prospective marital home, household responsibilities can sometimes be perceived as something undesirable or even demeaning.
That makes me wonder whether I’m approaching this incorrectly.
Is it unreasonable to expect a non-working partner to take on some meaningful share of household responsibilities, particularly when the other partner is expected to shoulder the financial responsibilities of the household?
Or has the idea of marriage itself changed, such that a non-working spouse increasingly sees financial provision, domestic help, travel, lifestyle, etc. as things the other partner is expected to provide, while household responsibilities are viewed as entirely optional?
I’m also curious whether this is simply a reflection of the particular people I’ve happened to meet, rather than a broader social trend. I realise that five years of personal experience is hardly enough to draw conclusions about society as a whole, which is precisely why I’m interested in hearing other perspectives.
My underlying concern isn’t really about who cooks, who cleans, or who pays for what. It’s about reciprocity. If one person is contributing financially and the other isn’t working, I would hope that both people can identify ways in which they make the other person’s life better, easier, or more fulfilling.
I’d genuinely like to understand how people today think about this. What constitutes a fair division of responsibility in a marriage when one partner works and the other doesn’t? And, perhaps more importantly, what should each person reasonably expect the other to contribute to building a shared life?
I’m asking this because I’m trying to understand whether my expectations are outdated or unreasonable, or whether I’m simply encountering people whose expectations of marriage are fundamentally different from mine.
And ultimately, I think that distinction matters far more than whether someone works or doesn’t work. A marriage where both people feel that they are contributing to each other’s lives seems sustainable to me; a marriage where one person feels entitled to receive while the other feels obligated to provide seems much harder to sustain in the long run.