All's fair in love and housework

There's hardly anyone who hasn't been there: she comes in the door at 6 p.m. ready to drop, and sees hours of housework, cooking and childcare ahead of her. He comes in the door at 7 p.m., drops onto the couch and flicks on the TV.

He doesn't seem to see the toys littering the floor, the toilet that needs cleaning, the fingerprints on the windows and the dirty laundry going mouldy, she thinks resentfully. Meanwhile, out of the corner of his eye he watches her stewing and thinks: "Why can't she give me a break. Doesn't she notice all the work I do around here?"

What's wrong with this picture? If the German Greens seriously think they can solve the problem by legislating for equality in relationships, they would do well to look at the work of two Israeli psychologists, Claire and Jossi Rabin. The Rabins advertised in the media in the US, the UK and Israel for egalitarian couples to come forward for interview. After analysing more than 150 couples who claimed to be shining examples of egalitarianism, the Rabins found that equality was a matter of perception, not reality, and that men and women define equality differently.

"Fairness for a woman is when men and women share the housework 50/50. Fairness for a man is when the woman does more than her fair share. If the breakdown is 50/50, men are less happy in their marriages because they think they shouldn't have to do it," says Claire Rabin.

As a result of conducting lengthy interviews with these couples - meetings that often turned into counselling sessions - the Rabins think they have found the root cause of this misunderstanding: gender stereotyping in childhood. We rear little girls to be obsessively neat and tidy as well as anger-suppressing, so that when they are feeling hostile because their male partners aren't pulling their weight, they take it out in the bedroom, where they icily withdraw. Men, meanwhile, have been raised to be separate from their mothers, distant from their fathers and terrified of emotion. In adult life, women end up as nags obsessed with housework, while the men are so frightened of female anger that as soon as an argument flares up over housework - or anything else, for that matter - they leave the room.

"Equality is so much more than who washes the dishes," says Claire.

The Rabins, who have three children aged 22, 17 and 11, are unusual in that they counsel other couples as a couple and do media interviews in tandem, offering the male and female perspectives simultaneously, often with great humour.

"In counselling, we ask each partner to write a list of what they did. The woman often says, `he does nothing', but when she sees his list, she's forced to admit that she didn't notice his contribution."

Couples who divide everything up between them and make complex lists are more likely to have an unfair, oppressive relationship. If a couple is truly intimate and egalitarian, they don't have to talk about the housework, say the Rabins. It just gets done and no one complains. But such natural fairness is rare.

"We can recognise an egalitarian couple in a second. They are very happy and housework doesn't come up as an issue. They are basically talking and sharing all the time and they don't have to write anything down. Some of the couples who considered themselves to be paragons of egalitarianism were not at all," says Claire Rabin.

One incredibly tense couple - both doctors - were so determined to be egalitarian that they divided all the housework equally, 50/50, making complex rosters that alternated each week. When interviewed by the Rabins, the doctors hadn't spoken to each other in two weeks. After four hours of therapy the reason emerged as the coat-rack. "She hung her coat on my hook," complained the husband.

However well-intentioned the German Greens may be, their legislative proposal to force men to do their share by artificially dividing the work into two equal parts is naive. The Rabins have found equality cannot be objectively measured in terms of crude hours of housework and childcare. Equality is so subjective that if two people in a relationship both perceive their relationship to be fair, then it is, whatever outsiders may think. Even when women with children, for example, perceive themselves as doing 80 per cent of the housework, they feel it is fair if they are convinced that they are being appreciated and that their time will come.

The Rabins found that fairness in relationships has nothing to do with whether women work outside the home full-time or part-time, or full-time in the home. Many women felt free to express their anger in the workplace, yet felt utterly disempowered at home. Women working full-time outside the home did just as much housework as women working full-time within the home. Amazingly, the higher status a woman had in her career, the more - not less - housework she did in comparison with her partner.

Another surprising finding was that men whose partners work full-time within the home were more likely to treat their wives fairly. "A lot of men told us, `do you know how difficult it is for her to be home with three children all day?' They really had empathy for their wives, so their attitude was: `Now that I'm home I'm going to get stuck in immediately to the housework and childcare,' " says Jossi Rabin.

The sure way for a woman to turn her man off housework was to criticise him, the Rabins found. Put simply, if she criticises the way he vacuums the hall, he's likely to hang up his Hoover for life.

Women are often dissatisfied at their partner's contributions because women tend to be "gatekeepers", taking responsibility for all household functions and family relationships, even when they don't have to.

"A lot of women, even if they work outside the home, have a hard time giving up the power at home. He wants to help and he feels she won't let him because he is constantly criticised about the way he helps. She complains about unfairness, but won't give up responsibility for household tasks, so he feels that she is undermining him, that she does not appreciate what he is doing and that she puts him down a lot. So he says, `I don't need this criticism, forget it'," says Jossi.

On a deeper level, "men feel resentful at being trained into doing housework by a woman", Jossi adds. Men are controlled by women from the day they are born, but are conditioned by their mothers to disconnect socially from women at sometime between the ages of five and seven. They end up feeling ambivalent about women and fearful of intimacy. They don't want to be like their mothers and do housework and they are terrified of emotion, so that when their partners get angry with them for not doing enough housework, the man feels a double blow to his masculinity. The ensuing lack of intimacy makes the woman feel lonely and burdened emotionally, so she tends to blame the burden of housework for her resentment.

Women know instinctively that when a couple are truly loving and intimate, they genuinely care for each other. This means that a man notices when his female partner is overburdened or upset, and responds appropriately. A man who really loves a woman does his share. When he doesn't, the woman gets angry, the man detaches and the vicious circle starts all over again.

The Rabins argue that sorting all this out is nearly impossible without counselling, ideally in a group, where couples can compare experiences.

"If a man has shut down his feelings for 20 years, you can't expect him to suddenly open up," they say. Younger couples usually catch on after only one or two sessions while older couples often need many weeks of therapy. This week the Rabins are in Dublin, sharing their experience with counsellors at the Marriage and Relationships Counselling Service, which hopes to pass on the knowledge to Irish couples. Watch this space.