From Messy Chaos to Domestic Bliss: The Simple Fix That Changed Everything
Tackling the laundry (and our relationship) one X at a time

This past fall, my wife and I were soon to host my family at our new apartment in Chicago, but our sink was full of dishes, our laundry hamper overflowed, and countertops and side tables were littered with the everyday clutter of life. On the Saturday morning before my family was set to arrive, my wife and I looked at each other and sighed.
“I’ll take care of the kitchen if you vacuum and declutter,” my wife said. I agreed.
The mad-dash cleaning spree that ensued was not unlike many others we’d had before, which is what led us, a couple months later, to dream up the seemingly simple solution of making a chore chart.
But allow me to rewind. When my wife and I first moved in together a few years before, I was high on domestic bliss and homemaking, happy to take charge in keeping our apartment clean. Then, over time, I noticed a new feeling crop up: the slow leak of resentment. It wasn’t so much that I resented her right then, but rather, I felt positive that if I, the less messy between us, continued to bear the brunt of keeping our space tidy, I would one day feel resentful.
Committed to the longevity of our relationship, I stopped being so diligent in my initiative. I still did chores, but I no longer wanted to bear the brunt of keeping our home. There’s often a perception of sapphic relationships that housework, without the shackles of gender roles, is automatically equal — but we are still different people with different ways of being.
So we decided to create a chore chart, one that we would see every day, and which took the guesswork out of who would do what and when. We needed routine, structure and consistency. Newly married and entering our late-20s, it was, to put it simply, time to get it together.
At the time, my wife was a teacher. She’s an introvert, and each work day left her depleted. Each weekend was spent recovering. In the years that followed, we existed in a sort of feast-or-famine state when it came to housework. We’d fall behind — the dishes, the laundry, the clutter — and then, overwhelmed and fed-up, we’d spend a weekend frantically cleaning. We moved about in frustration, less frustrated at one another than at us, as a unit.
It was a few years into this cycle when my wife came up with the idea of a weekly check-in in which we’d discuss, among other things, what needed to be done around the house and who was going to do it. This was the first, less formal iteration of the chore chart. For a little while, it helped. But then, we’d miss a meeting for one reason or another, or forget who said they’d do which chores. We eventually jumped into planning a wedding and a cross-country move (events I would not recommend doing simultaneously), and our weekly check-ins fell by the wayside altogether.
After the wedding and the move, while we hoped to bask in the joy of newly wedded bliss, life continued to be chaotic. I lost my job a couple weeks after our wedding, and then, a few months later, I was diagnosed with two large ovarian cysts requiring surgical removal. I had stretches of days where I was barely able to go from the couch to the bathroom, let alone do chores. My wife tried her best to hold things together, but between working full-time, caring for me and our three cats, we entered another famine state with our space.
Toward the end of December, as I still hadn’t undergone surgery but was feeling better, we decided that, in 2025, we had to do something different. Having chaos in our environment only compounded the chaos of our lives — and as a cherry on top, it wasn’t a conducive environment for romance, either. We’d both reached a breaking point. “2025 is the year we figure this out,” we agreed.
So we decided to create a chore chart, one that we would see every day, and which took the guesswork out of who would do what and when. We needed routine, structure and consistency. Newly married and entering our late-20s, it was, to put it simply, time to get it together.
My wife took 10 minutes to draw the chore chart with a dry-erase marker on our refrigerator. There are daily tasks, weekly tasks and monthly ones. For almost a month, we’ve diligently — albeit, not perfectly — completed our chores and placed X’s in all the boxes. It’s simple, silly, even, but the difference it’s made in our home, our lives and our relationship was obvious from the jump and left me saying, “I can’t believe we lived that way for so long.”
We are now equal partners in keeping our home. There is no question about who is responsible for what. There’s no pressure for one of us to take on more than the other, because we’ve already agreed on who will do what. But if one of us happens to be flying through her chores or finds herself with more energy, we can help the other out because we want to, not because we’re frustrated or resentful. The chore chart gives us built-in opportunities to show appreciation for one another, too.
“I’m so proud of us,” my wife said one day in mid-January as she placed a few X’s on her half of the chart. I’m proud of us, too. Sticking to the chore chart is a habit we’ll have to continue to work at and refine, but we end each day grateful to be gifting ourselves an orderly space, a soft place to land.