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Chores

Adam Mastroianni has published part 2 of his three-part series on negotiation, and it is well worth your time. The problem of dividing household chores fits the theme perfectly while also being easily understandable, practical, and — if you haven’t gotten that part of your life sorted out yet — immediately actionable.

In case you were wondering: if we ever had to share chores, my preferrence is for doing the dishes, I am neutral on vacuuming, and you would have to pay me — and pay me a lot — to do laundry and clean the bathrooms. One of the keys of happiness in life, conditional on not being wealthy enough to pay people to do all your household chores for you, is finding a spouse whose preferences do not match your own.

Before getting married I (wrongly) tended to assume the preferences of others matched my own, and that every issue was a distributive one, to use Mastroianni’s terminology. But, of course that cannot be the case, Though even now I have a hard time imagining anyone preferring to scrub toilets over loading a dishwasher. which living with a spouse tends to demonstrate quickly and abundantly. The negotiation aspect is one reason of many why dating a (gender-appropriate) copy of yourself would be a bad idea.

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