22 Household Chores Memes for Adults Spending Their Day Off Cooking, Cleaning, Doing Laundry and Cooking Again and Doing the Dishes and...

Celeste Mello • Writer and Editor

Oct 31, 2026 8:30 AM EDT

Is sharing the housework enough if one person still has to plan everything?

I live alone, so dividing the housework is a very short conversation. I mean, there is no conversation. It's all mine. I do the laundry, I clean and handle everything else, and I'm also the person who has to remember what needs doing. Before I can wash anything, I need detergent. Before I can buy detergent, I need to notice I'm running out. No one thinks about all the thinking behind housework tasks. We often think about the physical workload and the visible results like a clean room or clean clothes.

That's why this University of Queensland paper caught my attention. Researchers studied heterosexual couples and divided household work into three kinds of loads: physical, cognitive and emotional. The physical load is doing the chores, the visible ones like cooking, cleaning, or doing home repairs. The cognitive load is the thinking and planning behind those activities. Who's going to do this? When? How? Do we need to buy something? So basically, cooking dinner means figuring out what to cook, how to get the ingredients you need, and planning how that will happen. There's much more effort than what we tend to think when we see the prepared meal as a result. Finally, the emotional load includes noticing how every household member feels and offering care.

And you know what? To absolutely no one's surprise, women reported having a greater contribution in all three areas.

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It makes me think about my mom. When I lived with my family, she did everything around the house. How was she able to keep a family functioning all by herself? Cook, take the kids to school, prepare lunch for the kids, remember the kids' appointments, feed our pets, comfort us when we were not feeling good, do laundry, think about what to eat the next day, etc. Now that I'm responsible for my own place, I keep thinking about how exhausting that must have been. I'm managing things for one person. She was keeping things going for a family. I can't imagine all the decisions I never noticed.
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I find that distinction between physical and mental loads useful. For example, if someone cooks, but their partner chooses the meal, checks the ingredients, and writes the shopping list, both people have contributed. It's exhausting if one partner does all the planning and the cooking too. In my home, my mom used to give the shopping list to my stepfather, and he would go buy the ingredients my mom had noticed were missing to cook the meal she planned for the family. So, the “just tell me what to do” approach doesn't solve the unequal workload. It still leaves one person noticing, deciding and assigning tasks.
According to this study, the biggest difference actually was in the planning. The researchers also found that the greater the difference between partners’ views of how household labour was divided, the worse their relationship quality. I can imagine how frustrating it would be to feel constantly responsible while your partner believes everything is shared equally.
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Now I think about my mom in a different way. I appreciate the clean clothes and the prepared meals, but I also appreciate everything she had to keep in mind to make them happen. I wish I'd understood more of that while we lived together. She deserved to have that responsibility shared.
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