Me (35M) and my wife (35F) have been married a few years.

No kids.

Certain things we do that are “equal” between us, like cleaning the house, vacuuming, etc — she might clean the bathroom more than I do but I always do the dishes (we don’t have a dishwasher) so overall ‘cleaning things in the house’ is pretty much 50-50 overall

Certain things I do more include: doing all the laundry, cooking breakfast every morning, and doing all the driving (she actually doesn’t have her license, driving was stressful for her back when she first started and so she just never got her license. told me she still doesn’t want to get it).

I also work more days during the week. I work normal business hours Mon-Fri, 40 hours, she works Tuesday-Thursday 10 hours each (30 total).

The one area where she definitely shines more than I do is cooking (non breakfast, regular meals). I didn’t have much experience with cooking going up, and she is an amazing cook.

We typically arrange our cooking for the week as follows: on Sunday or Monday, she’ll meal prep for the week. It pretty much is her cooking a few meals — if it’s on Sunday I’ll be in the kitchen with her to assist her, but if it ends up being on Monday, she does it by herself since I’m at work.

Later on in the week, like Thursday, I’ll cook a meal to get us through the weekend. If it’s a simple meal, I usually make it pretty well. But if it’s anything remotely complex, she often says she doesn’t like it, or that I didn’t put the right amount of seasoning on… Sometimes I’ll even tell her ahead of time what I’m making, and she will say she’ll just make it because she trusts herself to cook it more than me. So I’m like ok sure, no harm no foul.

Well now she’s telling me she wants there to be weeks where I do all the meal prep because she’s tired.

Why is she tired? Because

• she works 3 10 hour days a week
• on her days off she often goes to a friends house for most of the day, either a stay at home mom friend or someone else who has the day off. She also will babysit her god kids on her day off whenever she is asked to, which is about once a week — for a few hours.
• she says “yes” a lot to serving in our church choir which takes a lot of energy out of her, several hours practice and rehearsing etc

So from my perspective, she should be saying “no” to other things a little more often, and she admits she has a problem being a people pleaser. This will give her more energy to cook food for us on her day off when it’s needed. She may be doing more of the cooking, but I do more of other things too, and she’s a much better cook than I am

From her perspective, it’s not fair that she has to do most of the cooking. It doesn’t feel equal to her. And she wants to be able to have time with her friends and god kids too, and staying home and cooking on her day off will take away from that.

AITAH?