The New Secret For A Successful Marriage: Sharing Housework

When the Pew Research Center asked adults what made for a successful marriage. 93% said "faithfulness" was "very important," off 2% from a similar survey in 1990. 70% put a "happy sexual relationship" in the "very important" group -- again, about the same as 1990 (+3%).

But there's a dramatic change in one item. 15% more people now say "sharing household chores" is very important. Those 62% moved chores into third place, ahead of "adequate income," "good housing," "shared religious beliefs," "shared tastes and interests," and "children."

(If sharing housework continues its rapid climb in importance, it will pass sex in about eight years to become the #2 reason for a successful marriage. One wonders what Cosmo will have on its cover in 2015 ... "10 Hot and Nasty Tricks for Removing Stains?")

Having children is no longer considered one of the top reasons a marriage is successful. In 1990, 65% thought so; now only 41% do.

The new importance of sharing chores may be generational. A 2004 Boston Globe article noted that marriages today are more balanced than in the past, when the husband worked and the wife took care of the home:

Men increasingly seek a partner who is "bright and professional whom they don't have to take care of," said Steve Penner, who has watched the shifts in romantic preferences since he founded the matchmaking service LunchDates in Boston more than 20 years ago.

... Young people looking for love are likely to have grown up with two working parents, (Match.com spokesperson Kristin) Kelly and other social researchers said. They know their working mothers often resented being expected to cook and clean after a hard day's work. Today's generation wants to distribute housework more evenly, Kelly said.

... Robert Mare, a sociologist at UCLA ... said men and women expect each other to contribute to the bank account as well as to household chores. They share a more "symmetrical view of the world" than they did 30 years ago, he said.

Research shows that men have increased their hours per week spent on housework over the past several decades, although it's still about half of what women spend.

It's also possible men have an ulterior motive in sharing the housework ... the oldest one in the book. Author Neil Chethik surveyed 300 American men and told Newsweek last year that "Men said the happier their wives were in the division of housework, the happier the men were with their sex lives. We even looked at the numbers and found that there's more sex in the relationship if the wife is happy with the division of housework. It doesn't have to be exactly equal, the wife just has to think it's fair."

Will we see men's magazines follow Cosmo's lead and discover that the new foreplay is folding laundry?

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One choice that wasn't offered survey participants: emotional engagement. A recent study published in the academic journal Social Forces found that for women, "The most important determinant of ... marital happiness is the emotional engagement of their husbands. ... wives care most about how affectionate and understanding their husbands are, and how much quality time they spend with their husbands." As far as we can tell, no survey has analyzed the converse, men's emotional engagement with their wives.