The Sex Diaries: Why Women Go Off Sex and Other Bedroom Battles by Bettina Arndt

Author:Bettina Arndt [Arndt, Bettina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: SEL034000
ISBN: 9780600622314
Publisher: Octopus
Published: 2009-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

9

Laundry Gets You Laid?

Mary has pulled the plug. She’s put her husband, Peter, on starvation rations until he gets the message about housework. The 42-year-old Perth woman has been trying to get it through to him for four years, ever since they married; it was a second marriage for both of them. She’s mad about the man. ‘I really did win the jackpot when I met him’, she says, explaining that her two children also love him dearly. And yet … there’s a very big BUT.

‘He just doesn’t get the connection between housework and our sex life’, says Mary, and then the stories pour out of her. Like the night she asked him to clear up the kitchen while she was working on her tax:

He’d promised me he would do it in the ‘ad breaks’ on TV. At 11.30 p.m. I finished and went into the kitchen. He’d just moved all the dirty dishes to the bench around the sink, the dishwasher was still to be unpacked from doing the lunch stuff and there was gravy and crumbs all over the place. I said to him, ‘I don’t believe this—after all we’ve talked about this. WHEN are you going to get the message?’

He stormed off and, while Mary was unpacking the dishwasher and clearing up the kitchen, he went off to bed in their daughters’ room. ‘I’ve had a gutful’, explains Mary.

I’m working a full 5-day week, 6 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. days. I come home, usually have to cook (because he cannot and will not cook, at least, not reliably). Occasionally he might put himself out but it’s generally ‘let’s go to Subway’, which I end up spewing about because I don’t want the kids learning to rely on takeout and I spend a fortune each payday stocking up with fresh foods and meats. My weekends are guaranteed: all day Saturday cleaning the house itself, then Sundays attacking the ironing. Yes, he does ‘do the washing’—which consists of putting the washing into our 10 kilogram washer/dryer, and putting the finished dried washing onto a pile on the lounge floor, where the dog promptly lies all over it. Now if he took the clothes out straightaway and hung them up or folded them, life would be sweet. BUT he piles them load on top of load on top of load—so by the time I get to them, I’ve got steam-dried, cardboard lumps covered in dog-hair and he wonders why I’m so bloody ungrateful and why that night I’ll knock his block off when he wants ‘it’.

Mary is absolutely bewildered as to why her man is allowing this issue to sabotage what she sees as an otherwise beautiful marriage. But Peter just doesn’t get the point she’s making and feels that it is incredibly unfair of her to use sex as a weapon. Mary explains:

He argues that even if I were a lady of leisure with a maid and housekeeper and no need to work, with a million dollars in the bank, I still wouldn’t be interested in sex.

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