JAY HANNA: Is your partner really rubbish at washing up, or is it strategic incompetence?

“What do you mean you can’t lift it?” my husband said scowling at me. “I thought you were strong, you spend half your life at the gym for goodness sake”.

Our new outdoor table lay on the floor in front of us, still wrapped in cardboard and waiting to be lugged outside.

“I am strong,” I said glaring back at him. “But I have small hands and I can’t get a grip on this thing.”

He harrumphed at me and told me he’d get the neighbour to help.

Thank goodness for that, I thought cheerily as I went back to eating peeled grapes while the children fanned me with palm fronds. Now before you call child services, that was a joke, I probably went back to washing dishes.

I didn’t think too much more about the table incident until recently when I read an article about weaponised incompetence.

Weaponised incompetence, sometimes referred to as strategic incompetence, is when a domestic partner pretends they are useless at certain chores to avoid doing them.

The topic has more than 66.6 million views on TikTok where the videos, featuring mostly female creators, lament being left to do all the housework or redoing chores after their partner because their efforts were so poor.

Examples included one partner doing a load of washing but purposely mixing reds and whites or another forgetting half the items on the shopping list to avoid ever being asked again.

I was nodding my head in agreement with some of the incompetencies people were pointing out about their other halves when I remembered I was not faultless when it came to shirking on domestic chores.

In addition to the table incident, there was also the time I got “excused” while helping paint a bedroom because my cutting-in was so dire.

I also felt a bit guilty about the fact that when we hear the garbage truck rumble down the road at the crack of dawn, my husband is the one who is expected to leap from the warm bed if we forget to put the bin out the night before.

But he does have much longer legs than me so technically can get the bin to the kerb quicker.

In my defence, I tend to do the bulk of the shopping, cleaning, laundry and organising the children’s lives and schedules.

My husband and I are mostly OK with the way we split chores but ask me again when I am elbow-deep in a toilet bowl or he’s mowing the lawn on a 40C day and you may get different responses.

According to psychotherapist Dr Kate Aster from Alchemy Therapy, avoiding doing chores we hate or are ill-suited to is normal and acceptable (phew!) as long as a couple are generally in agreement about the division of domestic labour.

Where things become problematic is when one partner ends up bearing the brunt of the chores and responsibilities, especially if it gets to the point where that load impacts their mental health, social life or even their ability to leave the house.

Given that Australian women still spend on average eight hours more per week on unpaid domestic work than men, which doubles to around 16 hours if there are children in the home, women are more often the target of weaponised incompetence, but it can impact either gender.

Dr Aster explains that it is an “insidious manipulative strategy” that can increase in severity over time.

“We see it a lot when one person in the relationship is a covert narcissist.,” Dr Aster said. “Essentially what the partner is trying to do is avoid any form of responsibility. It is quite often tied in with gaslighting as well so, they might say things like, ‘you didn’t tell me that it needed to be done this way’.

“Eventually they might drop any form of responsibility, in all areas of the relationship, and then all of a sudden what the other partner is doing is basically running two adult lives.”

Dr Aster recommends that anyone who feels they are being mistreated in this way should start by talking to their partner.

“Some people are doing it consciously, but other people may not know that is what they are doing or that they are playing the victim,” she said.

“It might even be stemming from some kind of anxiety. So, you should start with an open conversation and what you want is for them to take some form of accountability for that division of labour and assurances they will work to develop or improve their skills.”

If the situation does not improve, Dr Aster recommends couples therapy with someone experienced in dealing with narcissism.

If the mistreatment is teamed with other forms of abuse, threats or violence, seek individual help or advice.

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