I eagerly await Jon Cohn's findings regarding this new study showing that married women shoulder a greater percentage of the domestic burden than their shacked-up sisters. Much like Yglesias, I have to think this has something to do with children, if for no other reason than kids exponentially increase the amount of life-maintenance work required in any family. Pre-procreation, my co-habitating husband and I didn't have much trouble keeping our household running smoothly. He dealt with dry cleaning, car maintenance, and trips to the liquor store. I handled bill-paying, grocery shopping, and home maintenance (and by that i mean calling the plumber, not fixing the exploding toilet myself). Surviving entirely on takeout, neither of us cooked. This isn't to suggest that the work was divided exactly down the middle. What can I say? I have much higher hygiene standards than Chris. But, for the most part, we each handled the chores that most concerned us: He has more non-machine washable apparel than I, so he either made regular trips to the dry cleaner or found himself wearing sweatpants and a 20-year-old Fine Young Cannibals t-shirt to the office. I, in turn, prefer to pay the electric bill before PEPCO threatens to disconnect our service. Thus, early in the relationship I took over household accounting. The system wasn't perfect, but it was manageable. Toss in two kids, and the tend-to-your-individual-priorities balance goes straight to hell as two adults scramble to keep four people healthy and reasonably happy. In a perfect world, perhaps, this additional work would be split 50-50. And I'm sure some couples manage to do so gracefully. (I just don't happen to know any.) But I have two theories as two why this doesn't typically happen: 1. Efficiency. More often than not, splitting parenting duties evenly just doesn't make sense. From a financial standpoint, for instance, it's madness to have both parents opt for reduced work schedules--and pay cuts--for the sake of equality. And once one parent agrees to assume a larger percentage of the life-maintenance workload, the roles are set and tend to harden as the workload expands. (Yes, I do have male friends who chose the daddy-track--just not very many.) 2. Mommy guilt. While I don't buy Stephanie Coontz's theory (see Jon's post) about equality-minded gals suddenly adopting 1950s views on housework when they get hitched, I absolutely believe that--thanks to whatever mix of genes, hormones, and social programming--women tend to feel more pressure to be super-involved mommies than men do to be super-involved daddies. (Or rather, women's definition of super-involved tends to be stricter than men's.) So, once kids come into the picture, mommies feel compelled to keep the house cleaner, make mealtime more nutritious, make the holidays more festive, get more involved with their kids' teachers, etc. than do daddies. All of this, of course, adds to Mom's workload vis a vis Dad's. Then again, maybe there's something in the wedding cake that causes gals lose our minds and suddenly long to pick up that toilet brush. Conspiracy theories, anyone? --Michelle Cottle