Why doesn't my husband see the laundry?

I’m curious, does your husband ever do chores without you asking him to do them?

The invisible, yet never ending
pile of laundry

Many women have the same complaint, that they have to continuously ask nag their significant other to do chores that OBVIOUSLY need to be done.

Why? Why do men look right past a pile of dirty laundry, or a sink full of dishes, or a messy floor?

While I can’t claim that I am an expert, or that I have it all figured out, I do have a theory.

I blame Genetic Memory. 

In a nutshell, genetic memory is the instinctual understanding of the world that we are born with. Male babies may be born with the basic psychological understanding of what has historically been considered “women’s work” vs. “men’s work.”

It is only recently that the idea of shared household responsibilities has been prevalent. Just three generations or so of men have been involved in child rearing and basic household cleaning.

The storage device for dishes

Think about it, your grandfather probably didn’t help your grandmother out too much in the kitchen, did he? I know that my grandfather and great-grandfather where lucky if they knew how to turn on the stove, and I am fairly certain that they thought the oven was a portal to a world full of already cooked food.

Go back another 3 generations and you are on the homestead with women who couldn’t even own land.

We all know that evolution takes time. So, I would image that changing the genetic memory of an entire gender would also take some time, not to mention effort.

Unfortunately, what this means for us ladies, is that we are probably going to be nagging our men folk for the rest of our lives.