Bill And Melinda Both Shares House Chores, She Revealed This As Their Marriage Secret

 

 

 

Philanthropists Belinda Gates and her husband Bill Gates are both very successful people. They have lived a very comfortable and happy life in their work and in their marriage. They have been married for 25years. They both met in 1987, at work when Melinda worked as a Project Manager for Microsoft. Bill asked her for dinner and she rejected him because he was not 'spontaneous enough'. Bill called her again 2hrs before a date that night and asked her if it was spontaneous enough. They married in Hawaii in 1994 and now have 3 children. They have founded the world's biggest charity which focuses on poverty alleviation all over the world; providing education, healthy living and good drinking water across Africa.

In a recent interview with Business Insider, Melinda revealed one of the secret to her 25-year marriage to the Microsoft co-founder is sharing household responsibilities i.e. washing dishes together every night after dinner.

According to Melinda, it all started when she realized she was always in the kitchen 15 minutes after Bill and their three kids had gone upstairs, leaving her to finish cleaning up alone. 

 

 

“So one night we stood up after dinner and people in the family started to melt away, like, off they go upstairs. So hand on my hips, I’m, like, ‘Nobody leaves the kitchen until I leave the kitchen!’” she said. “What happens is that last 15 minutes gets divided up really fast. And then five minutes later we all go upstairs. So I think we just have to sometimes name these extra invisible things that people don’t even see that we do as women.”

 

 

 

In her new book, “The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World,” Melinda writes about how so much of the “unpaid” household labor — like cooking, keeping track of the family calendar, folding laundry, organizing childcare, scheduling dentist appointments — often falls on women’s shoulders. Over the course of a lifetime, she said, women spend seven more years doing this type of household work than men do. If their male partners stepped up more, just think about what women could accomplish with the extra time. 

 

 

“I don’t know about you, but I think you and I could probably go and get a couple of graduate degrees and a Ph.D. in seven years,” Melinda told Business Insider. “Some of that’s work you want to do. It’s tender; it’s lovely. But some of it is also the mundane of doing laundry and the dishes and packing lunch boxes.”



Indeed, research seems to back up the positive effect a more equal division of household labor can have on a relationship. A 2016 Pew Research Center study found that 56% of married respondents believed sharing household chores was “very important” to a happy union.

She added: “As I’ve thought more deeply about equality for women around the world, I’ve been proud that Bill and I have achieved it in our life together.”