Ha! I find this whole thread a bit hard to relate to my own life, Kat, because I am a man who has never gotten married. Accordingly, I have done my OWN housework and cooking most of the time since about age 21. How good am I at it? Reasonably good. I vacuum, I do laundry, I scrub out toilets, sinks, and bathtubs, I put out the garbage, I cook, I clean windows, I wash the dishes, and so on. I do everything. I dust, but not too often, not as often, I'm sure, as some people do.

Now on top of that...I have lived with 3 different women...one for 5 years, and the other two for about a year each. Now in the case of the first one, I started out by doing all the housework. I kid you not. I taught her how to cook! She wanted to do her bit, so she gradually learned, and she got fairly good at it (cooking) by about the 2 or 3 year mark, and we basically split the housekeeping after that.

Gal # 2 was very independent and self-sufficient, so she did most of the cooking and we split the rest of the chores.

Gal # 3 was not the world's best housekeeper! I did most of it, specially at the beginning, but she did some, and we split the cooking duties fairly evenly, as I recall.

Not exactly typical, eh?

Look, when you are used to living alone most of the time, you learn how to do all that stuff. It's not difficult. You just have to want to, that's all. ;-) Some people really don't want to, and they are happy to live in total squalor...and that's okay with me as long as I don't have to live under the same roof with them!

Autolycus - Good post! You are so right.