By KATE HUNTER
It was so simple in the olden days.
Men went off to kill bison while their women stayed behind and kept the cave nice.
Fast forward a few thousand years and things aren’t so clean-cut. Girls started skilling up and before you knew it, they were out bringing home the bison too.
So who was sweeping the cave and sorting the loincloths? No one, that’s who, and the arguments have been raging ever since.
It’s a big point of discussion in modern relationships: who does the housework?
It’s a rare household these days where it’s all lumped onto one person. Gone are the days where the man of the house would arrive home to a freshly lipsticked wife, bathed children and delicious smells emanating from the kitchen. The gent of a generation or two ago spent his evenings with his feet up, reading the paper. And why the hell not? He’d been working all day. He was the sole breadwinner, bison killer. Whatever.
Today, many men arrive home more or less at the same time as their equally frazzled partners. They are faced with hungry children, one of whom invariably needs to make a model of the solar system by 8am the next morning. No one has any clean socks, the dishwasher is buggered and the bathroom sink has a layer of toothpaste and soap scum that will have archaeologists of the future dumbfounded.
Whose problem is it? Who is responsible for cleaning when everything else is shared?