Chapter 10

In chapter 10, I really wanted to talk about the Sharing Tasks section. Of course I was expecting and not surprised that the book brought up the fact of “traditional” sex-role division. This is something that bothers me just a bit. Where and why and how has society allowed these rules of who does what or provides what in a relationship set a president on how genders are represented in a relationship? I don’t like that a man should be the one to mow the lawn and the woman the one to cook. My sister sometimes mows the lawn if her husband is too tired from his hard day at work. Or my brother in-law sometimes makes the dinner or takes care of the children when my sister is too tired from day at work. I understand the whole idea of what is expected but that doesn’t mean that that is the way it has to be. We can in fact change roles and still give the same amount of sharing of tasks in a relationship. I think that sometimes these “traditional” sex-roles hurt a relationship as well. My parents for instance….my mother was always the planner when I was growing up. She would plan where we went on our vacations, what we did and the rest of us, including my father just went along for the ride. Now, as my parents are in the older days of their life my mother often gets frustrated cuz my father never plans anything. And so because somewhere in society it was mapped out that the mother needs to care of the kids and the family and the direction or even in my Latin culture that the mother is one who maintains the family togetherness, now she is left frustrated that my father doesn’t 1. Know how to take on that role and 2. Has no desire too. I think sometimes that these sharing of tasks help to ruin a relationship because expectation of the “traditional” doesn’t happen as one gender would like. If people just instead mapped out in their own relationship what works best for them and what each brings to the table the best then maybe we’d have less divorce.