Illustration: Stephanie Hofmann
When my wife and I had only been dating a few months, I crashed with her for two weeks between apartments. The first day I returned from work, I found my clothes folded?lovingly, I felt?and stacked on her bed. When we later moved in together and then tied the knot, the fact that the detritus from my pockets never made it to the trash and that I rarely operated a broom caused minor skirmishes. This is my second marriage, so these disputes weren’t exactly surprising, but this time I was trying to do better: cooking the odd dinner, making sure the sink was empty before watching TV and regularly shoving all my dirty clothes into my corner of the closet. Back then, my wife, who relies on tidiness for her peace of mind, mostly put up with me?a semi-hoarding slob with good personal hygiene. But a few years later, when our baby arrived, the housework quad-rupled while the amount of time in which we had to do it was shaved to a sliver. When we filled our first four-foot-long diaper pail bag, I proudly held it up like a trophy marlin?but that was definitely the last moment of triumph when it came to post-baby drudgery. While trying to keep up with the incessant, daily laundering of onesies and change pad covers, I once wore the same pair of socks for an entire week. And although we were so exhausted at the end of the day that the last thing we wanted to do was sweep dust from the corner of every room, our newly crawling son, who used to cry at th...