Wife praised for refusing to make dinner for her husband

‘By your husband’s logic you should also stop doing his laundry, making his side of the bed, and any other household chores’

A typical arrangement for home dinners tends to be that one person does the cooking and another does the cleaning up.

In a recent Reddit post shared to the popular “Am I The A**hole?” subreddit, a wife explained her decision to stop cooking for her husband entirely because he refused to do the dishes.

She mentioned that she loves to cook and prepares dinner for herself, her husband, and their four-year-old son. Normally, what needs to be washed after the meal is “a couple of pots and pans, some utensils, and a cutting board”.

However, according to the woman, while her husband and son will rinse off their plates and put them into the dishwasher, they normally leave her to clean whatever is left over. The mother explained that this bothered her - and so she asked for her husband to wash the dishes because of how tiring cleaning can be.

“He says that since I made the mess I should deal with it myself. I was mad but didn’t ask again,” the Reddit post read.

In the post, the woman said that she then made dinner again, but only enough for just herself and her son. “He was confused,” she wrote in her post.

“I told him if he wasn’t going to do his part for the meal then he could make his own. I think this is fair! If he thinks cleaning our dishes from our shared meal that I worked to make then he can handle his own food!” she wrote.

After posting, many people turned to the comments section to defend the woman for standing up for herself.

“By your husband’s logic you should also stop doing his laundry, making his side of the bed, and any other household chores that involve things he uses,” one comment read.

“I would take this even further,” another commenter agreed. “For an entire month, I would only do stuff for myself and my son. He made his clothes dirty? He can do his own laundry. He can cook for himself. He can iron his own clothes. He can clean up his mess. I would not vacuum around where he normally sits etc etc etc. It’s his line of reasoning and I would run amok with it.”

Other commenters pointed out that her husband might make the decision to do the dishes, but he might use a different technique to get out of it.

“OP needs to be prepared for weaponised incompetence. He’ll ultimately concede to washing the pans, but deliberately not do a good job,” one person wrote in the comments.

Another person responded to that comment pointing out how they responded to this concept of deliberately doing a task poorly to get out of it. “I used to put any dishes that weren’t clean enough back to be washed again. He did not like that. Even though I would do it to myself too! So then I would just put it away since he reckons it’s clean enough. Then if he said anything when it gets pulled out of the cupboard, well you said it was good enough,” the commenter explained.

“Also when it was my turn to wash I had to also put them away when dry. When he would wash it would be my job to put them away after. And he wouldn’t wipe the benches and cupboard doors down either, which to me is part of washing the dishes.”