I know I have written about this before, but at some point in the past few years, I asked my husband if he would please unload the dishwasher on the weekend. It’s not that unloading the dishes is difficult, or time-consuming – in fact, it takes about five minutes, tops, which is exactly the amount of time it takes to steep my favorite black tea. So unloading the dishwasher allows me to feel efficient while also making that five minutes pass by more quickly than it would if I were just staring at the tea bags suffusing the water with their sweet, sweet caffeinated elixir. It’s just that it feels like such drudgery when I do it every single day without stop. 

He agreed and for the most part he unloads the dishwasher on weekends without me having to ask. He usually waits until far, far later in the day to unload it than I would choose to – I hate the sight of used dishes piling up beside the sink – but that’s a preference on my part, so I keep my lips zipped. 

On weekends that he is on call, I unload the dishwasher. And sometimes I will unload it just because it’s easier to do so than not: This morning, I needed butter for my breakfast, but the butter dish was in the dishwasher. To get it out, I needed to move a bowl and a wine glass – which I wasn’t going to lift out of the rack to free the butter dish and then replace in the dishwasher – and the blade of the blender. And if I was removing the blade of the blender, I might as well put it IN the blender and put the blender away, and by then I had some momentum going so I just did the whole thing.

When my husband unloads the dishwasher on weekends, I always make a point to thank him. But when I unload the dishwasher on weekends, he never seems to notice. (Once, I unloaded half of the dishwasher – my rationale being that I was unloading dishes that he never seems to know where to put; I end up putting them away anyway – and rather than saying, oh hey, awesome, I have less to unload now, he complained that I did the easy part. Sigh.)

It’s not that I necessarily want or need to be thanked. I do it on weekdays and don’t think anything of it. But on the weekends, it’s HIS job, and I feel like I’m doing him a favor. And it would be nice if he at least made note of the favor. 

But maybe he thinks it’s odd that I thank him for unloading the dishes at all. Maybe he thinks that there is no need to express gratitude for the completion of routine chores. In general, I guess I agree? It can be highly irritating when someone goes around pointing out all the tasks they have completed, seemingly expecting praise, without acknowledging that others are also going around completing household tasks without naming every single one. We should not have to thank each other every time someone refills the water pitcher or empties the trash or pays the bills or feeds the child. 

Then again, I find it bolstering when my husband does express gratitude for something I’ve done. He says “thank you for making dinner” most nights when I cook, which conveys “even if I don’t like this meal, I understand that it required planning and energy and I appreciate those things.” That’s a welcome message. When I put out the trash cans and he thanks me for doing so, I feel better about doing it than all the times I put them out and he says nothing. 

Then today I had a realization: He probably feels that “unloading the dishwasher” is MY job, and he’s doing ME a favor… not that it’s a joint job that belongs to me on weekdays and to him on weekends.

I will note that when I initially typed out the first sentence of this post, I wrote “if he would please unload the dishwasher for me on the weekend,” so one can understand how he could arrive at this conclusion.

It’s not a huge deal. It doesn’t make me mad or want to rend my garments or anything. But I do wonder if there is any way to change that perception of task ownership.