Want Romance? Put down the vacuum cleaners fellas. It looks like mowing the lawn still is the way to go.
According to NBC’s Today Show – it has been found that helping around the house is still what women want men to do, but it’s the type of chore that counts.
Married men who spend their time doing yard work, paying bills and changing the oil have more romantic relationships than husbands who spend their time cooking, cleaning and shopping, according to a new study on the subject of housework and romance.
“Households with a more traditional gender division of labor report higher (romantic) frequency than households with less traditional gender divisions of labor,” says Sabino Kornrich, lead author of a study that appears in the February issue of the American Sociological Review. “Housework is something that people use as a very important way to express gender, masculinity and femininity. We weren’t surprised to think that (romance) might be more tied to this type of gender expression.”
Additionally, other studies have found that men who make the bed also have better relationships with their wives as well. But Kornrich and his research team from the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid wanted to test claims that women might “exchange” romance for men’s participation in housework.
As it turned out, they found a statistically significant difference between men who did no “core housework” – that is, chores that are typically identified with women – and men who regularly handled the cooking, cleaning and laundry. Their findings came from data collected from Wave II of the National Survey of Families and Households, or NSFH, a 1996 national survey conducted by James Sweet and Larry Bumpass. Although the comprehensive study is almost 20 years old, Kornrich believes the household division of labor hasn’t changed much and the data still applies.
So maybe cooking is not a way to her heart?
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