'Helping around the house?' Think again

I was leading a couples' discussion group a while back when the topic of household responsibilities came up.

I was impressed, pleased and proud (being a "liberated male" myself) at how many of the husbands there readily volunteered that they helped their wives around the house.

Impressed, pleased and proud, that is, until one of the wives raised a rather telling issue about semantics - the words we were using.

We husbands, she noted, all claimed to "help" our wives. Yet the word "help" implied something less than egalitarian about how we ultimately saw what we were doing.

You see, when we help someone, we don't accept responsibility. If I help my friend take his air conditioner out of his window (an annual event), I am not assuming it is my job. It's his. Sure, I'm helping out, and glad to do it, but it is not really my responsibility.

Or, if we help our neighbors watch their children at the pool, we are accepting some responsibility, but certainly not equal to that of our neighbors.

And, for instance, if they need to run an errand and want us to watch the kids without them, they will probably say something like: "Will you be responsible for the kids while we're gone for a bit?" We all clearly recognize that we are being asked to do a lot more than just helping.

Helping always implies that we are less responsible than whomever it is we are helping. Sure, that's just semantics, but words are important.

When we husbands proudly claim that we help out around the house, do we mean that it is really our wife's job and that we are assisting? Or do we mean we are equally responsible for household management and divide this job as fairly as possible?

Actually, either approach can be just fine. In a family in which the husband works outside the home full time and wife works in the home full time, it can make sense for her to manage the home and for him to help.

She is home more and has a better sense of what needs to happen, how, and when. Or they may divide up responsibilities around the house, with her taking the greater share.

On the other hand, if both spouses work outside the home, it is probably fairer if they divide up household responsibilities fairly equally so that neither husband nor wife is "helping." Maybe we could just call this "sharing responsibility."

I think you get the point. Our words do need to reflect what we mean.

If we husbands see ourselves as helpers, we need to check this out with our wives and see if they, in fact, really do see themselves as ultimately responsible for homemaking. If we see ourselves as partners, we need to make sure our words, and perhaps even more importantly, our actions, reflect this assumption.

A lot of marital conflict can occur around just this distinction, often with neither spouse really understanding what they are actually arguing about.

• Dr. Ken Potts is on the staff of Samaracare Counseling Center in Naperville and Downers Grove. He is the author of "Mix Don't Blend, A Guide to Dating, Engagement and Remarriage With Children."