Dividing up household chores is probably the most tedious part of moving in with your sweetie. Dividing up household chores is also, according to my friends, the number one cause of arguments between couples who are just starting to live together. Here's some tips on how to avoid most of the fights and fairly share the domestic work load.

Sit down together and decide who is better at what task. Look at your respective work schedules, physical abilities (or lack thereof), and also take into account what chore or chores each person enjoys doing, as much as anyone enjoys chores. For example, when my husband Alex and I first moved in together, it made sense to both of us that he do the majority of the cooking. I was working a 9-5 job, and his graduate student schedule was a lot more flexible. It made sense for him to come home and start supper at 4:00 or so, rather than for us to wait until 5:15 when I got home and could start cooking. Also, Alex likes to cook and I do not (outside of some holiday baking that I do enjoy). He's also better at it than I am. So it made sense for him to be the one to cook supper, a chore he still does 90% of the time to this day, seven years later.

However, in the interest of being fair about chore division, I do the dishes. With a dishwasher, it's really not that onerous a chore in my mind, compared to actually having to cook something tasty (as opposed to merely edible) every damn night!

If you come into the relationship with a pet or pets, in all fairness, you need to continue to be the one to provide primary care to that pet. This includes walking, feeding, and cleaning up after your pet. If you brought the aquarium into the relationship, it's still your sole responsibility to keep it clean. If she brought a cat or two with her when she moved in, it's her sole responsibility to clean the kitty box. Period. At our house, though, this has gotten rather jumbled up. We have two cats who have naturally divided themselves between Alex and myself. So we share kitty box duties (which reminds me, it's my turn!). Since he almost always stays up later than I do, he feeds them before he goes to bed. Since I'm usually up and moving around in the morning before he is, I feed the cats breakfast. We also divide dog chores up equally - training, feeding, bathing as needed; two of the four dogs are mine, one is his, and one is shared by him and our 2-year-old. And believe me, she is expected to help at dog feeding time and she picks up her toys every night before bathtime!

Clutter makes me absolutely nuts, so it's my primary responsibility to keep the house as clutter-free as possible - keeps me mentally healthy, too! On the other hand, dirt drives Alex absolutely crazy, so he vacuums, mops and cleans the bathroom. I do laundry (we have lots less inadvertently pink underwear that way); he takes out the trash and keeps the lawn mostly mowed. He takes care of most of the wild creatures that make their way into the house (bats, snakes, etc.). I schedule times to clean and reorganize the laundry room, the garden shed, and the pantry.

The key to all this is: divide up your domestic tasks as fairly as possible. Not only does it cut down on ill-feelings and resentment, it makes sure the tasks actually get done, since someone is responsible for doing them.

Do you need a chore schedule? On Friday the house is vacuumed and on Thursday the bathroom is scrubbed and on Saturday the house is de-cluttered? You might want to try one, but we don't use one. If we did, I suspect our house would be a lot tidier!

On the other hand, my grandmother always told me, "it takes a lot of living to make a house a home." Home to me, and I suspect to my grandmother, is not a perfect, pristine room that looks like it could grace the cover of Southern Living Magazine. Home is a little lived-in, a little messy, and a lot of not driving your family nuts by being obsessive-compulsive about making it perfect.

May your home be as tolerably clean and comfortable as mine!