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Comment by saint_fiasco | Hacker News Reader

The actual work of cleaning does not come naturally to anyone. The "emotional" work of worrying about cleanliness is a different matter.

If she did not care about housework, she would just not do it, not hire anyone else to do it, and the house would be a mess. That's what the husband does and it works for him because that's his personality. He only cares when someone important to him nags him about it, and he has to "work" to at least pretend to care.

The actual work of cleaning the house he did, eventually. He never did the emotional work of convincingly pretending to really care about it.

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You missed the point of the article. The husband screwed up with the cleaning too, even though he did the cleaning. It was never about the cleaning, per se, but the mental drain of running a household.

Read the article again. This is the key part...

"I was gifted a necklace for Mother's Day while my husband stole away to deep clean the bathrooms, leaving me to care for our children as the rest of the house fell into total disarray."

If the idea behind Mother's Day is to give mothers a day off, can you see why the gift of getting cleaners in would've worked, but the gift of offering to do the cleaning did not?

I agree with you, but I think we are using different semantics.

He technically did the cleaning. He screwed up because he didn't consider what the point of cleaning was (like you say, giving her wife a day off) and he just did something that he thought was approximately equivalent to what she literally asked.

I call that "not really caring". If he cared, he would have realized he should have cleaned the day before and given "a clean bathroom on Mother's Day" as a present instead of "the act of cleaning the bathroom on Mother's Day".

> "I call that "not really caring"."

I call it "not really understanding". The cleaning was most likely more work than a few more phone calls to cleaners for quotes would've been. If it was about not caring then why wouldn't the husband put in the minimum effort and get in someone else to do the cleaning?

Because it was expensive and it goes against his pride to pay so much money for something he can do himself. Maybe he cared a lot about his self-image as a self-sufficient most-definitely-not-a-spoiled-rich person.

I'd suggest that's a massive stretch considering the lack of details about the husband's attitude towards money in the article. The only relevant information was him finding one particular quote too high. I don't think you can extrapolate a pattern of behaviour from that single data point.

Throughout the whole article, the author gives the impression that her husband is a stereotypical man. According to stereotypes, typical men don't want to call "the guy" to repair things when they break, especially when it costs a lot of money.

To be honest, the author's culture is alien to me and I only have stereotypes (TV and movies, mostly) to go on.

"He told me the high dollar amount of completing the cleaning services I requested (since I control the budget) and asked incredulously if I still wanted him to book it."

In the article she mentions that she controls the budget, so it was probably over the budget he had to work with.

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