A good conversation to have with your future lifelong mate is connected to how your house or apartment will be maintained. In other words, what are your expectations for how the household chores will be managed together?
I bring this up because one of the chores that I help with around our house--quite a bit, actually--is doing the laundry. With two active teenagers, we have an incessant pile of laundry in our home that never seems to go away. The pile just grows bigger and bigger like some grotesque monster in a "B" movie. Our goal as parents for some time has been to "groom the minors" in our family to take a good chunk of this responsibility, but effectually, they do a load themselves about once in a blue moon. So to help out, I don't mind doing up to a dozen loads of laundry a week.
The problem is that Kellie doesn't always like how I do the laundry. Apparently, there is a special system of some kind to doing laundry. She has a certain combination of detergents and sprays she uses on various things. They serve some purpose--although I'm not completely sure what. I guess I didn't pick that up in college. My simple effective method for this chore is to get as much of the growing, fermenting piles into that machine, pour gobs of soap in there and get that laundry going. Mixing colors with whites--not a tremendously big deal to me! Hot water--who really needs it? And besides, it costs more money, right? Just run that load!
You can see that I still have so much to learn. At any rate, with all the tedious chores connected with running a home, it's important to discuss ahead of time who likes to do what around the house--and who best knows how to do what. Clarify those expectations now and you'll save yourself from some very unnecessary (and sometimes hysterical) arguments.
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