Men Women & Home Maintenance

Men, Women, and Home Maintenance; Functionality Vs Aesthetics Thanksgiving is just around the corner. Soon relatives will be getting together to drink, dine, and celebrate. As the women arrive you’ll hear comments about how nice the decorations look, and how clean the house is. Outside, the men will be inspecting a brand new shed, and discussing their home projects. This behavior difference between the men and women is not specific to Thanksgiving. All year round we see women decorating and cleaning while men put their effort into fixing and building. Women keep the home looking good and men make sure everything works the way it should. Why is it that women take on the aesthetic side of home maintenance and men take on the functional side? Is it their differing opinions on what they deem “necessary”? Is it their upbringing? Or could it simply be the way they’re wired? It’s quite obvious that men and women have varying opinions on what the requirements of a satisfying home are. Men believe it’s important to keep improving, to go above and beyond. Women tend to put more importance on maintaining what you have. My dad has always believed that, “If you’re going to put your time into something, you better make it special”. When I was 7, I asked him to build me a tree house, and he ensured it would be the best tree house in town. Against my moms pleas that a custom tree house was an excessive and unnecessary expense, he ended up equipping it with a hardwood floor, electricity, a safe, a fire pole and a sound system. My mom never fully embraced the tree house, she, like most women, believed the time and money could have been spent on something more important. My mom always kept things in order and would constantly remind my dad and I to clean up after ourselves. She would apologize to my friends if she thought the house was messy, and to her, that meant the beds weren’t made and the cheerios box was on the counter. For my dad on the other hand, a mess meant the sink was leaking or the toilet wouldn’t flush. My mom and my dad both wanted to take care of the house and keep it tidy, but they had two very different definitions of what tidy was. Upbringing also has an influence on men and women’s attitudes to home maintenance. Generally speaking, children look to men and women for different things. At a young age they learn to go find daddy when something brakes and to find mommy when you’ve made a mess. A prime example was when my cousin’s son, Carter, broke his toy truck. I asked if he wanted me to fix it, to which he replied, “No, papa will do it. Papa fixes everything”. A child who sees their father fixing things around the house will expect men to be able fix things. A young boy who idolizes his father will likely grow up to take on the roles of repairing and building just as his father did. Young girls on the other hand, grow up idolizing their mothers. When they see mom decorating and organizing, they too try to decorate and organize. When someone makes a mess, it’s mom they go to for help cleaning up. When I stained my shirt, I called my mom, not my dad, to learn how to clean it. It can be said that what you grow up expecting of your parents, you will learn to expect of yourself. Wiring has a large, yet subtle, impact on the type of home maintenance men and women take on. Men tend to be goal oriented, and get bored of repetitive tasks. Women on the contrary tend to be perfection oriented and don’t bore as quickly from repetition. Men are more likely to take on tasks that impose a challenge, and feel more accomplished when they have a concrete final product; when the car finally runs, or when the sink stops leaking. I have a friend who I do an adult gymnastics class with, who goes into every class with the goal of learning a new skill. It doesn’t have to look good, as long as he has learned something new he feels accomplished. When I go into the class, I’m perfectly content to work the same skill repetitively. I don’t have to learn a new skill to feel accomplished; I’d rather perfect the skills I have before learning something new. I’m an excellent example of how women can spend hours refining skills, trying to become more effective. Women are more likely to do dishes or fold laundry than to take on a challenge. Although not physically visible, wiring governs how we approach and choose tasks. We can see through men’s an women’s differing opinions on what makes a house a home, that men focus on and adding to what you have, while women focus on improving what you already have. Through upbringing we can deduce that we take on the gender roles we are exposed to in our youth, men taking to repairs as their fathers did, and women to cleaning and decorating as their mothers did. As a result of genetics, we see that men are more drawn to tasks which pose challenges, and produce tangible results; women alternately are drawn to tasks which require repetition, and allow improvement. From this, we can conclude that each of these factors affects the woman’s choice to take on the aesthetic side of home maintenance and the man’s choice to take on the functional side. For a man a house is just a home. For a woman, a house is a direct reflection of oneself.