Wife's creative solution to teach husband about equal division of household tasks gets much praise

For any marriage to work smoothly, there must be an equal division of household labor for the partners to feel equal and valued. Such a balance creates fairness and harmony and allows both partners to pursue personal and professional aspirations, creating a more supportive and fulfilling partnership. When a couple does not give preference to this balance is not kept, it leads to resentment. u/afoendo shared her own story about subtly implying to her husband that he wasn't pulling his own weight in the house. The story on Reddit begins with the woman stating that she has been married to her husband for ten years. However, she states that her husband has become lazy over the last three years. Her husband works part-time due to a disability which she says is not physical. The woman also has a part-time job while indulging in other activities to get secondary income.

Her problem arises because the husband ends up working a total of 26 hours a week and then does not do any household chores. She writes, "He doesn't cook, clean or go shopping for household items. All of this, within the past few years, has been pushed off onto me." She then goes on to state that her husband lazes around as soon as he gets home by watching TV, playing video games, or being on his phone. He does all this while the woman does all the household work. She has tried to bring it up diplomatically, but the husband does not pay heed to her requests. Her husband's continued behaviour eventually got to her and she decided that it was time to do something about it. She says, "So I came up with a plan. Two weeks ago, I decided to take his behavior and mannerisms and use them to prove a point. I stopped cooking and cleaning. I stopped shopping for house items (unless 100% needed)." She also went to the extent of downloading games on her phone and playing them all the time while she was at home to prove her point. Interestingly, he did not notice anything until he began to run out of clean clothes to wear.

Soon, he begins to ask her about chores around the house. Since the woman stopped doing everything, the husband had no choice but to start doing chores around the house. Eventually, she sat him and asked him, "See how difficult it is? Now that you know what I go through with zero help, can you start helping me?" The husband, realizing his mistake, agrees to help her and starts contributing to household chores so while apologizing. The woman concludes the post by saying her husband's disability is "mental" and not physical, so it was only fair that he contributed a bit. She also clarified in an edit that he suffered from dissociation which made him zone out. Users on the platform sided with the woman in the comments section of the post. u/hello_friendss commented, "NTA, if he can play video games, then he can help around the house. Glad your husband got the hint and took action." Another user, u/RedoubtableSouth, said, "NTA. You proved our point without fighting or being mean. You also proved that doing his own share of chores is within his capabilities with his disability, so, the fact that he's disabled is a non-issue."