How to Set House Rules for Your Marriage for Women

Setting up the house rules of your marriage has to start from day one. If you are a blushing bride, you may be overanxious to start running your household in the same manner your mother did, providing your mother actually married somebody and took care of the home. In the fifties and early sixties, women could still be found in their houses, raising children, happily vacuuming, cooking, cleaning, decorating, washing clothes and watching soap operas.

This is not the case today. Out of necessity, women had to leave their homes to supplement the income generated by their husbands or to support themselves and their families in the absence of a husband.

Still, if you were raised by a stay at home mom, who did everything right and was much beloved of her husband and children, you may fall into the trap of wanting to be the all around perfect woman- one who brings home the bacon and fries it up in the pan and, well, you know the rest.

After several years of rushing home from a job and putting on the perfect housewife apron the perpetual smile to go with it, you may start to wonder who this deadbeat is that you married.

Why is he sitting on the couch picking his toes while you're cooking, bathing children, dusting the furniture, doing load after load of wash, running out to the grocery store and just generally offering yourself up as an unpaid servant? This is the point at which a marriage goes south. To avoid this, set the boundaries early in the marriage.

Avoid being Wendy to his Lost Boy. Let him have his share of the responsibility of running a household from the very beginning. It may be a major hassle trying to reverse his pampered lifestyle down the line.

In the beginning actually making a list of his and her chores may be the way to go. Write out a list of responsibilities and sit down together to chose up whose going to do what. Or switch days to do the same chores to keep things from getting dull.

Then write it out on paper that can be taped to a refrigerator or cabinet door. This way, when it's his day to do the laundry, you can be sitting in front of the television eating bon bons. And when it's your turn to wash the cars, he can have his buddies over to watch the game. But it shouldn't be you doing all the work while he's having all the fun.

A good way to shirk your chores is to have children. That way when they get old enough to lug out the trash, you can both cross it off your lists.
The perfect housewife does not now, nor did she ever exist.

The cruelest thing the invention of television did to us was trick us into thinking that women were able to effortlessly do the work of ten large men in a skirt and heels and still greet her husband at the door with every hair in place, a grateful smile on her face and a martini. Because we all know that in reality, every man prefers a cold brew when he walks in the door.