So, in our household, my wife makes way more money than I do. Taker her worst earning year and compare it to my best earning year (including cashing in stock op

So, in our household, my wife makes way more money than I do. Taker her worst earning year and compare it to my best earning year (including cashing in stock options after multiple splits), and she still made at least three times what I have. That pattern hasn’t changed over twenty-plus years. Yet, we do try very hard to equally share the burden of the household chores, and pre-COVID, we did have a house cleaner that came in every other week, and folks who came in more frequently but on a less regular schedule to help us with the bigger job of decluttering our lives. We do have different standards of what it means to have a clean house, and hers are higher than mine, so sometimes I do get a bit exasperated being asked to help clean something that doesn’t seem dirty to me. But I try to keep in mind that the important thing is that she feels it is not clean, and therefore it needs to be cleaned. I don’t always succeed at that conceptual leap, but I do try. Any kind of partnership doesn’t always work. But if both parties continue to be willing to try to make it work, then it usually works well enough the majority of the time. However, in the case of the author, it seems like her husband was never willing to do his part in making the partnership work.