‘Wife Hacks’©: Strategies & Techniques to Manage your Husband

Oxford Dictionary defines ‘life hacks’ as "a strategy or technique adopted in order to manage one's time and daily activities in a more efficient way."

I like the definition provided by my generation’s most trusted academic source, Wikipedia, "A life hack (or life hacking) is any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life."

What was once probably a term used in common slang and found on Urban Dictionary has been widely adopted in academic vocabulary and expanded to suit many subcategories such as:

There’s a special type of ‘hack’ which women develop overtime, when they learn to co-exist and live under the same roof as a man; they’re those clever ways of addressing problems to subtly prompt changed behaviours without resorting to ‘being a nag’. I’ll share some of my personal favourites of these domestic life-saving tips I call ‘Wife Hacks’: strategies and techniques to manage your husband.

Wife Hacks © is an original term first used on Figuring Out Your Thirties, 2022.

Almost every husband, regardless of doing a physical job, has no problem falling asleep on the couch. We ladies on the other hand have to deal with a half hour bedtime beauty routine in addition to cleaning up the kitchen so we aren’t left with a mess in the morning. To do all that, and then wake him up, just so he can hop into bed with an extra hour's sleep is pretty unfair; not to mention, when he then keeps you up snoring, you’re sure to be a pretty bitter wife in the morning.

Wife Hack: Quietly turn off the lights, tip toe away, and get a head start alone in bed. Allow yourself to get an hour or two of peace before he comes and belly flops beside you. Tell him you tried to wake him, but he kept falling asleep… he won’t know that you didn’t even try. If he doesn’t like being left out in the living room, maybe he will learn to stay awake long enough to help you with the bedtime housework .

One thing my coworkers and I can agree on is our frustration with the amount of time we’ve spent picking up dirty socks and underwear and sweaty shirts left on the ground. There’s a perfectly accessible hamper in the bedroom, hooks on the door, and the washing machine itself is close by, yet still, without fail, there will be clothes left on the floor or flung over furniture and in corners of the house. I’m fine being the one who stays on top of the laundry, does the washing, drying, folding and even putting away when I have the time…but is it too much to ask that clothes be in one of three places: in the closet/drawers when clean, on the door hook if worn, and in the hamper if they’re ready to be washed? While it’s safe to assume clothes on the floor belong in the hamper, after finding clothes in places like on the kitchen counter, I’ve had enough at this point to feel some training is in order.

Wife Hack: Get a separate hamper specifically for clothes you find on the floor or in undesignated areas around the house. When the clean laundry keeps appearing and they wonder why there aren't any socks or their favourite underpants, you can kindly direct your husband to the new laundry hamper of clothes you didn’t know were dirty or clean, and remind him that dirty clothes belong in the goddamn laundry hamper.

Side Note: Does anyone ever get in one of these ‘wife of the house’ moods where you just look at all the slightly worn clothes which have been hanging on the door hooks in the closet for weeks, and want to just lose it, tear them all off and throw them on the ground and scream “IT’S EITHER DIRTY OR CLEAN AT THIS POINT!” and then toss everything in the wash? I do.

This came to me as an idea after my friend told me how much she hated how her husband would set an alarm for 5:00 a.m. and then hit snooze about six times while he kept sleeping, yet she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep until minutes before her own alarm. While she appreciated her husband waking up early to go to a physically demanding job, the selfishness of the snooze button was causing fights that his extra sleep wasn’t worth. Fortunately, he agreed to set his wake up time later and get up with the first alarm.

Wife Hack: If your husband isn’t understanding the pain of the snooze button when you are trying to sleep, test it out on the weekend when he gets to sleep in and you have to set an alarm for your ‘early morning yoga class’.

My husband doesn’t do this, thank god, but if he did, he would quickly learn not to. From speaking to other wives I’ve learned that husbands in general do not easily grasp the idea of proper sanitary protocols to avoid cross-contamination in areas where you prepare food. It grosses me out when people think it’s hygienic to leave the kitchen counter cloth in a ball in the kitchen sink, rather than aired out at the side of the sink. Whenever I see this, it is an immediate toss in the laundry, and that can quickly lead to no clean cloths to use.

Wife Hack: Keep your cloth aired out under the sink and leave his gross sink cloth there for him to use, and don’t change it. When his cloth starts to smell worse than the port-a-potties at his job site, you can gently explain that leaving it in the filthy sink will lead to a whole lot of stinky bacteria.

Again, this isn’t something my hubby does, yet I frequently hear wives complain about Tupperware returning home after a week of it festering in his car, gym bag, or some unthinkable location, only to be fused with food or have a stench which makes it not worth cleaning. There’s only so many empty tubs of margarine we can use before we run out of them too.

Wife Hack: Put his home-cooked chilli, mac n’ cheese, and other sloppy food into ziploc bags (make sure to double or triple bag to avoid a mess you will have to clean later). When he realizes not only how unappealing his food is this way, but how you can’t heat up a plastic ziploc bag, remembering to take Tupperware home on a nightly basis will soon become a priority.

Relationship advice 101 tells us to pick and choose our battles. As the woman and primary caretaker of the house, I can tell you that choosing our battles isn’t easy when we are the ones cleaning up the battlefield. Using a plate or bowl when eating a small and seemingly innocent snack may seem like an unnecessary reason to start an argument, but when you’re constantly sweeping up messes to stop dirt being from tracked elsewhere in the house, and more importantly, prevent a kitchen full of ants, it warrants either the typical nagging or a creative wife hack of sorts.

Wife Hack: Let the crumbs pile up…on his side of the couch. Instead of doing what I do and grooming the couch with a lint brush each morning, let the crumbs sit on his favourite spot for a couple of days, a week, or however long it takes him to notice how crumby it is (haha) sitting on pieces of broken food, especially when he’s just showered and sat down after a long day of work.

If I could do it myself or do it for you, believe me, I would. But there are things as a wife I physically cannot do, and certain phone calls to make or places to go where my legality as your spouse is as useless as me trying to remind you.

While I am sure not all husbands are procrastinators or forgetful, a significant number are, which is why wives are typically accused of ‘always nagging’. Sure, perpetual complaints and requests chip away at the sanity of everyone in a partnership, but ‘nagging’ often serves the purpose of reminding someone to get critical tasks done. Call me old fashioned, but I believe the man is the head of the household and should be the bread winner…however, I’m also well aware that most men need someone to organize their life outside the workplace to optimize a functioning household.

Wife Hack: Rather than face the accusation of being a typical nagging wife, let his phone do the nagging. During one of his pre-dinner naps, take his phone and set calendar events and reminders of the sh*t he needs to get done. 6:15 a.m. remember to bring your wallet to work, 12:00 p.m. call Service Canada on your lunch break. 3:15 p.m. go to the doctor's appointment I made for you, 10:20 p.m. wake your a$$ up and help me clean up this mess before bed. Saturday, All Day Event, here’s a list of projects you started and said you’d finish around the house.

When you’ve spent over an hour preparing a nice meal because your husband said he would be home for dinner, only to have him work late several times in a row, it can become pretty frustrating. While you try to be understanding because money buys the groceries, and sometimes things occur beyond their control, it gets insulting when you make a plate for them and leave it in the fridge, only for them to come home 30 minutes after your last bite with an empty bag of Wendy’s takeout.

Wife Hack: Go on a dinner strike. Unless your husband is a human garbage disposal, or a total tub of lard, there’s only so many Baconators and slices of pizza they can ‘conveniently’ grab on their way home before the accumulation of grease sitting in their intensities becomes so unpleasant that they crave a home cooked meal. When they make it home on time for dinner and you’re enjoying a healthy salad, a personal meal, or even a Big Mac yourself, tell them you didn’t make anything to avoid the waste. Sure, they’ll probably go back out and get take out; but continue eating and cooking like a single person until they clue in and promise to make it home when you’ve made a meal, or at least respect your cooking enough to eat the plate you prepared over fast food.

Stop Nagging, Start Wife Hacking

There’s a balance to be found between nagging your husband into insanity and bottling up frustrations until they erupt into a full blown argument; sometimes it takes one dirty sock on the dining table to unleash months of dormant attacks, circling all the way back to his past choices and insulting his former [trashy] girlfriends. Don’t settle for a life of crumbs and disorganized chaos; simply adopt these strategies and techniques and create your own Wife Hacks to manage your husband!