Marriage causes housework inequity?

Damn it. If any of this study is accurate, I really need to get married, so I can start doing fewer chores.

The split in my relationship has always been pretty fair, I think. We both tend to gravitate toward the things we're good at and tend to share the things we both hate pretty evenly. I don't think that marriage would change that, but the study's certainly a little statistical backing for never trying that experiment.

Now I want to see a study about the long-term effects of Chore Wars on couples' housework habits.

clipped from www.collisiondetection.net Here's an interesting finding: It turns out that unmarried couples who live together are more likely to share the housework equally than married couples. That is, men in unmarried couples do more housework than married men, and women in unmarried couples do less housework than married women. Why? Possibly because, as the authors -- Theodore Greenstein and Jennifer Gerteisen Marks of North Carolina State University -- suggest, marriage is such a culturally powerful institution that men and women shift their views of themselves when they say "I do". "Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples -- even couples who see men and women as equal," says Davis.