Does your man dodge doing the chores?

If the answer’s yes, your other half could be playing a very clever game of ‘strategic incompetence’. Here, Lynn James explains…

My husband Vinny has lots of strengths, but cooking isn’t one of them. Case in point: a few years ago, I had to take our three sons – Dylan, then seven, Josh, five, and Jack, two – to football practice, and delegated the job of making of dinner to him.

‘So the ingredients are in the cupboard, the recipe’s on the ipad. We’ll be back by 8pm – see you later!’ I said, and dashed out of the front door. Two hours later, we arrived home and you can imagine my confusion when I realised there was no sign of the spaghetti bolognese we’d been promised. ‘Where’s dinner?’ I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Oh, there was no oregano!’ he replied, completely seriously. ‘So it’ll have to be a takeaway for us tonight.’

And that was the end of my husband’s cooking career in our house. I let him off any cooking chores because he clearly didn’t understand recipes if he thought oregano was the be-all and end-all of a spag bol! It wasn’t a question of being angry with him, but more sympathetic. ‘Poor Vinny, he’s just hopeless in the kitchen,’ was the way I explained it to my friends.

In fact, ‘poor Vinny’ was apparently hopeless at a lot of things round the house, I learned over the years. Then a few months ago I happened to come across an article online about ‘strategic incompetence’ – that’s when someone pretends to be useless at a task, so they’ll never be asked to do it again. And finally the proverbial penny dropped. I suddenly realised my husband wasn’t hopeless at household tasks. He was just shirking his responsibilities in the wiliest way possible by making out he couldn’t do them.

Only now, clued up to his tricks, I’ll never be fooled again. So ladies, if any of the following sound familiar to you, watch out – you could have a master of strategic incompetence in your midst too…

‘i was clued up To his Tricks’