In the context of family/marriage there is a negative connotation to the term boss.
It implies inequality, perhaps dominance of one spouse over another, possibly gender roles and bias etc.
From my perspective the division of responsibilities should be flexible and evolving. Either spouse can do the things they most enjoy or are better at as long there are not peculiar expectations surrounding those tasks.
With raising a daughter I have become very sensitive to “traditional” roles and gender related bias.
I am likely taking a more serious perspective on this. Obviously a lot of these things are cultural and generational.
Who cooks, who cleans, who is the bread winner, who handles the financial matters in a home, what are the responsibilities in regard to who does what with your children?
Hopefully all these things are evolving and there is a sharing of all of these roles, where it is a more blended set of circumstances.
Anything that hints of subservience of either gender too the other doesn’t set well with me!
Raising a daughter has really heightened my sensitivity surrounding these things.
I like everyone pitching in and getting the things done that need to get done without preconceived expectations.
When our first child was born in 1991, she was a “difficult” baby. Screamed unless mommy held her. Before children we split household tasks pretty evenly, but after our daughter was born H started doing all the housework, shopping, etc because it was easier. The baby is now an adult and lives in another city, but H still does most of the housework, shopping, etc. I’m fine with that.
@college_query, D1, born in 1990, cried/screamed for the first two years of her life. Sometimes holding her helped, other times nothing did.
For her 1 year portrait, I hired a photog to come to our house so that I didn’t have to make the difficult trek to the mall or studio. That typically resulted in meltdowns and terrible photos. That morning, she was in a mood and could not be comforted. Her portrait is funny (now), because you can still see just a hint of a tear glistening on her cheek, and she is holding my eye shadow brush, because giving that to her to hold was what finally got her to quit sobbing.
OMG, it’s a miracle I ever agreed to have another. And she now has the calmest, most peaceful disposition in the family!
@mycupoftea, I do hear you on the decorating thing. It’s something I love doing, and I am far better at it than DH (he would have huge ugly pillowback sofas and recliners in every room, and nothing but photos of the girls all over the house instead of any art if this was his responsibility). He usually doesn’t care enough to try to take over, but every once in awhile, he does want to have input, and it becomes quite a challenge for me to (nicely) persuade him to my point of view.
I have a friend who figures that in any couple there is one captain. Not a boss, but generally the one who steers the ship. Generally. Maybe he only thought of that because in his relationship HE is the captain. Anyway, he pointed out that I am the captain of me and H. I don’t disagree!
I like to think that we are “co-bosses”.
I’ll let you all know when we retire. If we end up on several acres of land or in H’s (tiny) hometown- he is the real boss.
If we end up in a high rise in a major city- the boss is me. Anywhere else - we are really “co-bosses”.
@FallGirl - I am fighting the exact same battle. When we attempt to come to some agreement on where we will live once the children are launched we hit an impasse. My idea is to return to a high rise in the middle of manhattan and his is to retreat to a sparsely populated mountain state or to Canada. Ugh - I feel like the wife in Green Acres.
Harvest moon- I hated , hated Green Acres as a child because she had to leave the view of Central Park for that dumpy farm! It actually made me cry.
I was just going to post the link to that, you guys! Lol.
Too sad, nrdsb4 
I am living that life right now @Nrdsb4! I am 2 and 1/2 years into a 4 year experiment living in a sparsely populated mountain state where my son attends high school in the place of his and H’s dreams. It is not going well for me!! I return to civilization for the summer months.
As a teenager, I pictured myself living in a high rise apartment building in Manhattan. And here I am, in a small town in Maine! But I’m very happy. DH and I are business and life partners. I own 51% of our business (so we can be called a woman-owned engineering firm).
I asked Mr R who the boss in our family is. Without hesitation: “the dog.”
Yup.
I was thinking of how to articulate my answer when I read @GreatKid 's and that’s exactly how I feel. I am very glad that I like to cook and my husband likes to fix everything. I do the bills but he does the investments. Generally whoever feels stronger about something “wins”, but I can’t think of any big decisions we had to make where one of us was spectacularly disappointed with the outcome.
@GreatKid - I have been thinking about your post.
I am in my mid-20s and married (female married to male). I grew up in a feminist household where tasks were simply divided by who had time to do what and what made the most sense at the time. My parents split cooking, cleaning, etc and for half of my childhood, my dad was the breadwinner and my mom did most of the child-raising tasks and for the other half, it flipped. Yes, my dad did most of the fixing tasks around the house but that’s because he’s a plumber. On the other hand, mom generally took care of finances because she’s a banker. Neither of them had more weight in a decision than the other and they were a wonderful, model couple for me to look to.
I remember being quite shocked when I started elementary school and found out that most people there (it was a private Catholic school) had a stay at home mom. Going over to their houses was simply bizarre to me because it was the first time that I had ever really seen a gender-stratified household. Females were expected to do X while males were expected to do Y. This just didn’t happen in my family and among my parents’ friends.
How does that translate to my own marriage/family? I take on a disproportionate share of many tasks simply because I am, frankly, better at them than Mr R. This is a result of him growing up in a very gendered family where mom did everything and dad and the boys (he has all brothers) weren’t allowed to cook or clean or do anything “traditionally feminine” like that. I do not in any way feel burdened and quite like having the majority of the responsibilities. If I ever felt overwhelmed, Mr R would take them on in a heartbeat. And he has before when I’ve had extended hospital stays or when I’m very ill. But, most times, I do the planning and he does the grunt work. He cleans and does the grocery shopping, but I’m usually the one that has to tell him to do it. This very much reflects our personalities- I am the worrier and chronic planner and he is laid back and more of a “tell me what to do and I’ll do it” type rather than someone who likes to take charge. We compliment each other well.
But I don’t, in anyway, feel as though the roles in our family are because of our respective genders. We’re probably about as egalitarian of a couple as you can imagine.
In our family, my wife takes on a disproportionate share of many tasks simply because she sincerely believes she is better than me on many tasks.
In the past, she claimed that she did not want to do anything related to finance. But recently, she thought she could do it better than me so she wants to take over this responsibility too.
The first “financially savvy” decision she has made is that it is a good idea to pay back the student loans as much as possible after she learns that the interest rate for the student loan is relatively high, and we do not earn much interests or money in our retirement account. She was pleased with herself when she had paid off two years worth of Federal Direct loans (granted, it is not that much because there are two other types of student loans.) At least she has not talked about raiding our IRA or 401K to do this yet. I am all about saving for both retirement and future wedding expenses, and she is all about paying off student loans. So we compromise – do a little bit on both.
Another couple and I had this discussion recently and our friend had figured it out…he said he just didn’t care about 95% of the decisions so he and his wife agreed that she was the “boss” (they don’t use that word) for pretty much everything aside from the 5% he really cares about. She happily agrees or acquiesces to the 5%. In their case, with regard to running the household, he has a chronic illness that doesn’t allow him to work any longer. She’s the bread winner and he’s quite handy. They seem to have divvied up their household responsibilities in the way the compliments their interests, skill set and available time.
Dh and I recognize we want the other to be happy so, unless one of us really cares about something, we’re pretty happy to go along with what the other wants. Having said that, we never did buy a vacation home because we could never agree on a location.
I do recall that, after DD2 was born and I was completely sleep deprived with a toddler and a colicky baby, I sent the mortgage check to the cable company and the cable check to the mortgage company. Dh took over paying the bills for awhile but, once some order was restored to our house, I took back the job of paying the bills.
When my first S was just starting to talk, I would ask him, “Who’s the boss?” and he would respond, “Mommy!”
I don’t remember how this started, but I probably trained him to do this to tease Daddy.
My dad always referred to himself as my mom’s “boss.” Sounds really sexist these days, but he thought of the man as the boss of the house. He wasn’t at all bossy toward my mom, though. He wasn’t a demanding/controlling type. But my mom was an “old school” wife who probably deferred to dad’s opinion and kept her mouth shut. If they ever disagreed on anything, we couldn’t tell. They seemed to work together well, but they had the traditional division of labor–mom doing childcare, housework, cooking, laundry, shopping, financial matters, and Dad working 8-5, taking care of the yard/garden, cars, home repairs.
What H does: goes to work, drives when we are in the car together. Even on long trips, he does all the driving.
What I do: everything else. I wish H would do more of the handyman/physical labor stuff that my dad did.
We don’t have a boss, either–and it did make it difficult when we had a decision that we didn’t agree on. As for how tasks are divided up, that really depends on who is the most effective shirker.
We don’t have a “boss” per se, but I currently do about 90% of household related tasks and he is the only “breadwinner.” But this has fluctuated wildly during our 30 year marriage. When we first married, I was the breadwinner and he was a full time student. He did most of the household chores and child care. Then I quit work to stay home with the kids for 7 years and work on my 2nd masters degree. Then about 15 years when we both worked and split chores about 50/50, and had a housekeeper. Now, he works, I take care of everything else. But is he “the boss”? Nope.
OT but @mcat2 wrote
It’s never occurred to either DH or me that we should be saving for future wedding expenses for either DS or DD. Do other families save for those the way they save for college or retirement?
Oh and my husband is the boss of his car, the lawn, and the mechanical/electrical/plumbing aspects of our house. I’m the boss of our social lives and everything else 