Honey, get your own goddamn avocados

Everyone needs to carry their weight in a relationship.

5 min readAug 6, 2018

A friend of mine tells this story about her husband. Their first year together, he got pissy because she forgot the avocados. “He texted me while I was at work,” she said, “and I didn’t see it.”

That night, they had a talk about expectations.

Specifically, divisions of household labor. You know, groceries. Cooking. Cleaning. Laundry. The stuff once delegated to housewives, before women became a visible presence in the workplace.

“Basically, I told him he could get his own goddamn avocados — if he wanted them that badly.”

My friend makes a good point. Sometimes, you might ask your partner for a favor. They might cook for you. They might take on more or less responsibility around the house to offset your stress.

That’s love, and it works both ways.

There’s no good reason to make faces and passive-aggressive remarks, when avocados lie waiting for you not even ten minutes away by car. And you’re not all that busy. You just wanted her to make guacamole.

Avocados lie in waiting. That sounds ominous.

Some couples buy their groceries together. They have a routine. Some men even enjoy loading up the dishwasher, and they don’t mind vacuuming, or starting a load of clothes. Their moms didn’t do their laundry in college. They know the difference between spin cycles.

Until recently, I assumed everyone had some kind of agreement to split the dirty work. But I’m learning otherwise.

We still have a ways to go.

Plenty of guys don’t grasp the idea of chore sharing. Sometimes, it’s not that they actively resist. More like passively.

“They just suck at everything,” another friend said over coffee last week. “My husband can’t even chop vegetables. We tried once, and I thought he was going to slice his fingers off.” My friend took over meal prep that night, and she’s been doing it ever since.