Is Your Marriage Making You Accidentally Co-Dependent?

Our household and the responsibilities that come with it have always been a little more egalitarian than the norm. If he cooks, I do the dishes. If I sweep the house, he’s the one on hands and knees with a tub of hot water and Borax. But there are still things that one or the other of us does. Marriage means co-dependence, at least to a degree, and it’s always a struggle to figure out exactly how to balance that.

A few months ago, however, my husband switched to working nights, which has meant that all of a sudden there are more things around the house that I need to do, or otherwise they won’t get done for three days. It’s also meant that we’re at a juncture in our lives where I both want and need to know how to do everything, and so does he. When opposite work schedules enter into a marriage, you rarely want to spend the day or two you both have off doing chores.

Obviously every phase of life together isn’t the time to learn how to do All The Things around your home, and there are plenty of times when it doesn’t even make sense to try. Example: if you’ve got two kids under two, you’re probably just focused on surviving. But Sean and I are coming up on ten years of marriage and we have one seven-year-old, so things are changing. This new desire to learn and do has also inspired ponderings on what is or isn’t the inherent nature of partnership, the degree to which we are co-dependent and knowing when we’re merely relying on one another, and how our real-life partnership actually exists.

a story about worms

It all started with worms.

We are all big fans of composting in our home. Whenever we’ve lived in house that had space for it, we’ve always had a compost pile out back. Until recently, I never really paid much attention to it—composting was something my husband did. Often, it was something that my husband and our son did together. You know, digging around in the worms, checking out the decaying food, discussing the soil and the process that the entire pile goes through. I was vaguely aware of the fact that you actually have to turn the compost, but I legitimately had no idea just how many worms can live in compost heap.

That is, until the day that I realized that now I have to be in charge of the compost. It’s not every day, and it’s not like it’s particularly hard to grab the hoe and turn the pile, but I suddenly had this additional responsibility for something that I had previously just kind of assumed… happened. Much like when I was a kid and just assumed someone cleaned my room (thanks, Mom), I had assumed that someone just made the worms do their worm magic (thanks, husband). Because the truth is, I’m kind of grossed out by the compost container that sits under our sink, not to mention the worms. And, not to lose my enviro-cred here, it turns out that I’m a little grossed out by… composting. The whole process.

But however I feel about the old food and worms and dirt in a pile in my backyard, it still has to be handled, because otherwise we just have a what amounts to a pile of neglected garbage that’s ripe for the neighborhood cats and raccoon. And it turns out that learning to handle it didn’t even take that much time. And thankfully, the act of turning compost wasn’t nearly as gross as I thought it would be. And that left me wondering why I waited so many years to dive in.

do you even know how to turn on the dishwasher? (and does it matter?)

I have spent a lot of time believing that tasks in our household aren’t assigned to each of us as much as we just have a flow that makes them work. But I’ve discovered that, in fact, there are a handful of things that we each believe the other will always do, a hundred percent of the time. And from an informal survey of my peers, I’d guess that most households work the same way. And that means that, ten years into a partnership, you might realize you don’t remember how to make pasta. Or know when the car needs its oil changed. Or how your retirement accounts are balanced. You know: important stuff.

For example, I have a friend who swears up and down that her husband would have no idea how to turn on the dishwasher if he were tasked with it for one night. That sounds like an absurd story about why we need feminism—and maybe it is. But then I polled the APW staff, and our EIC told me that she recently ran a dishwasher with dish soap, to mildly catastrophic results. Why? Because it normally wasn’t her job, so she just figured if there are dishes inside, you must use dish soap? #Wrong.

All of that means there is a bigger question at play: How many of us have no idea how half of the stuff in our house even works? And sub-question: What’s okay to not know, and what’s not?

partnership = co-dependence… or does it?

The longer my husband and I are together, the more entrenched our habits get. At some point in long-term commitment, I think it’s hard to even distinguish where the partnership ends and co-dependency begins… or to even say that the two are mutually exclusive.

When I say we’re co-dependent, I don’t meant in a creepy, “OMG, we can’t go anywhere without the other one” type of thing. My husband and I are both happily and healthily totally cool with spending time together and apart, and alone time is one of my top priorities for sound mental and emotional health. I do definitely mean that there have been times at which one of us supported the other when we shouldn’t have. It’s also important to note that our marriage is more interdependent now than it was in its more co-dependent past. When it comes to dividing up tasks in a household in which both adults work full-time jobs and evenly split homeschooling duties, I don’t know how else we could keep the day-to-day tasks of household life up to par if we weren’t dependent on one another. Or I didn’t, until recently.

In my home, it’s less clear how gender norms come into play because we’re all over the map. But, I know that in many homes the division of labor does, at least subconsciously, become about gender roles. Because when you’re busy and stressed, it’s easy to revert to what you know best. Which can mean men who were taught about cars as kids handle the oil changes, and women who were taught about cooking, managing all the meals. Then suddenly you’re living Leave It to Beaver, and wondering what even happened. And it’s easy to think that it doesn’t matter because you’re just surviving, but… I think maybe it does. My son is part of the next generation of boys who will grow to be men, and I want him to be the kind of an who knows how to handle his household—and for him to be with a partner for whom this isn’t alien information, too.

this is what (i think) i have learned

My big takeaway from this season of our life together is this: it matters that everyone in your house knows how to do the things your house requires to keep all of you happily living there. When I say everyone, I mean everyone. Our kid has also been tasked with stepping up his housekeeping game (just don’t look in his closet any time soon). I’ve learned more about how to actually keep our vegetable garden alive, and my husband has learned that it actually doesn’t take that long to sweep the whole house.

To paraphrase a meme I’ve seen fly around social media every so often: you should learn how to clean your house because you live there, full stop. In that vein, I’m now of the opinion that learning how to run your household is the responsibility of everyone who lives there… full stop. This doesn’t have to be today, this week, or even this year, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and state that it makes sense to me that truly sharing responsibilities and having household knowledge will only benefit any long-term relationship. Maybe it begins with something small (like taking five minutes to show your partner how the dishwasher actually does work), or maybe it’s something grittier (oh, worms).

So really, all of this just leaves me with more questions. When is co-dependence okay, and how do you distinguish it from interdependence? Does our society over-emphasize individuality, and if so, how does that hurt us? Most importantly, how do you know when it’s a problem, and how do you keep your household balanced? When is it time to learn everything, and when is it time to just survive?

The truth is, I’m not sure. So I’m curious as to what you guys think. What do you know how to do in your household, and what don’t you do? Are you trying to learn more right now, or just survive? Where Is the Line between INTERDEPENDENCE And co-dependence?