Love Languages, Feminists in Romantic Relationships & Prostitution

[iverglas]

21. but I don't want to have to pick my way carefully

around things like:


wives:

"When my husband helps clean up after me, I know that he loves me."

husbands:

"I feel loved when my wife does my laundry."
"Keeping the house clean is an important act of service."


! They make me gag. It's like AA telling people to just ignore all the god-bothering.

Nothing that starts out from such a fundamentally false premise as the idea that men and women have different roles in a man-woman relationship, and that it's to be expected that each will judge their partner's love according to how well they play those roles, is gonna do it for me, I fear.

Keeping the house clean, when one partner is responsible for it by definition because she is female -- it being the premise of the questions that the wife does the laundry and cleaning and the husband has no responsibility for it, is an act of servitude.

I look at a household as a joint enterprise. It involves certain necessary tasks: breadwinning, cooking, cleaning, administrative duties. Neither partner performs the activities involved in those things for the other partner; they do them for the household.


I don't mind this, though:

I ask nothing from him/her and she/he asks nothing from me accept for the light of love.

It addresses what I was saying about subjects and objects. We "use" other people to get love from them, and we give love in return. That's not a bad bargain.