Woman 'At A Loss' After Her Husband Asks Her To Be 'DTF' Because He Wants A Reward For Unloading The Dishwasher
Demanding a reward for doing the bare minimum is bad enough.
studioroman, win247, oleksandranaumenko / Shutterstock via Canva Disagreements over housework between couples are so common they've become an eyeroll-worthy trope in a gazillion TV shows and movies. Given all the conversation about it since the pandemic kept everyone at home and exposed just how unequal the burden is, you'd think more husbands and partners would have more of a clue.
Turns out, not so much — at least in the case of one husband on Reddit, and his sense of entitlement after doing the bare minimum has people online urging his wife to put her foot down.
Her husband asked his wife for a reward for doing housework.
Right off the bat, you're probably thinking, what is this, 1953? But it gets even worse once you get into the details of the situation. The couple has been married since 2009 and has two kids, a four-year-old and a one-year-old. The wife is still on maternity leave, while her husband works full-time.
She's spread pretty thin as it is, but that's all made worse by how disengaged her husband is. "Ninety percent of the time he lays on the couch from when I cook dinner to when we go to bed," she wrote in her since-deleted Reddit post.
Photo: @ask_aubry / Twitter
Like many parents, the demands of their children have meant they rarely have time for sex — nor does she have the energy. "I have no time for intimacy because I'm doing so much alone all day and I'm exhausted emotionally and physically by the end of the day."
Things have gotten even worse recently though, as both she and her husband and their children all came down with a stomach bug and strep throat back-to-back. That seemed to do nothing to curb her husband's libido, however.
Despite being so sick she was 'dizzy,' her husband asked her for sex in exchange for having done a single chore around the house.
As if her days and nights aren't hard enough, recently it's been a full-on sickpocalypse in their house. She was so sick she was "questioning whether I should go to the hospital as I couldn't keep water down for 12 hours." Her poor kids have been so violently ill she writes that she's basically been covered in vomit for days on end.
Photo: @ask_aubry / Twitter
Cut to a recent night when she asked her husband to simply unload the dishwasher while she puts the kids to bed so that once they're down, they can relax. After putting the kids through their paces, she returned downstairs to find that her husband had both unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher — and now wanted a reward.
Photo: @ask_aubry / Twitter
"I walk downstairs...and he asks me if I'm DTF since he cleaned the kitchen." Handling the dishwasher is hardly "cleaning the kitchen," but even if it were... how does tending to your own home entitle you to a reward?
The woman was outright shocked at her husband's audacity. "I'm so confused because he knows I'm dizzy, barely eating, covered in puke..." and even her husband is still sick as well.
People online saw all kinds of problems with this disrespectful request, and experts say treating sex as a reward can ruin a marriage.
As you might guess, people on Reddit had plenty of advice for this wife and mom — much of it of the "leave him" variety. But others focused on the two core issues at play here: a husband who doesn't remotely pull his weight around the house and a marriage where sex has become a transactional reward.
Both are marriage killers. Some divorce lawyers and marriage counselors say that issues like so-called weaponized incompetence and husbands not pulling their weight — or pulling anything at all — at home is currently the top reason they see women ending up in their offices wanting to file for divorce. Studies have even borne out how bad this problem is — a 2022 Ohio State University study found 68% of wives reported burnout whereas only 42% of husbands did.
That's bad enough, but using — and especially demanding — sex as a reward? A huge no-no in marriage. Sex educator and therapist Gigi Engle warns against it at all costs.
"There is a lot wrong with this," Engle has said, "particularly that if sex is treated like a transaction, the partner giving away sex as a reward will almost certainly become resentful, and this will impact their desire for their partner." Over time, this turns sex into "something you have to do rather than something you want to do."
Or as one Redditor more bluntly put it, "here's a hot tip for all you husbands out there: nothing dries up a vagina quite so quickly as a grown man who wants a sex sticker for his chore chart."
Of course, the main problem here seems to be a simple lack of empathy on the husband's part, and no amount of rewards, sexual or otherwise, can make up for that.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.