I think there’s a worthwhile distinction between “thing that couples fight about” and “thing that causes couples to fight more”. In general, something in one of those categories will be in the other, but how strongly a thing is in one isn’t a great guide to how strongly it’s in the other. My guess is that if people are having big arguments about dishes then it’s probably more symptom than cause. (And if they’re just occasionally getting annoyed about dishes, it probably doesn’t matter much.)
I should add that, although there are a bunch of numbers in my comment above, I haven’t actually done a time-and-motion study and figured out exact timings, and my estimates absolutely could be wrong. For me they’d have to be a long way out before it became worth switching from “permanent” to disposable eating-tools.
(Another factor that might be relevant to the decision: maybe the amount and type of storage you need in your kitchen or, if you have and use one, your dining room, is different in the two cases. E.g., if you get disposable things in plastic wrappers, maybe you just leave them sat on the kitchen table all the time, whereas if you have china plates and steel cutlery you probably keep it in cupboards and drawers. That could have implications in cost, convenience, clutter, etc.
[EDITED to add:] Point taken about “well functioning household”; more broadly, the right tradeoffs can change a lot if e.g. some or all of the people in the house suffer from depression or other things that mess with motivation, or have much worse than average mobility, or hate dish-washing / dishwasher-loading a great deal, etc. I certainly don’t want to claim that no one would do well to use disposable cutlery and crockery. I’m just not convinced by any general claim that most people, most LW readers, most prosperous people in the US, etc., would have better lives overall if they used disposables.
I think there’s a worthwhile distinction between “thing that couples fight about” and “thing that causes couples to fight more”. In general, something in one of those categories will be in the other, but how strongly a thing is in one isn’t a great guide to how strongly it’s in the other. My guess is that if people are having big arguments about dishes then it’s probably more symptom than cause. (And if they’re just occasionally getting annoyed about dishes, it probably doesn’t matter much.)
I should add that, although there are a bunch of numbers in my comment above, I haven’t actually done a time-and-motion study and figured out exact timings, and my estimates absolutely could be wrong. For me they’d have to be a long way out before it became worth switching from “permanent” to disposable eating-tools.
(Another factor that might be relevant to the decision: maybe the amount and type of storage you need in your kitchen or, if you have and use one, your dining room, is different in the two cases. E.g., if you get disposable things in plastic wrappers, maybe you just leave them sat on the kitchen table all the time, whereas if you have china plates and steel cutlery you probably keep it in cupboards and drawers. That could have implications in cost, convenience, clutter, etc.
[EDITED to add:] Point taken about “well functioning household”; more broadly, the right tradeoffs can change a lot if e.g. some or all of the people in the house suffer from depression or other things that mess with motivation, or have much worse than average mobility, or hate dish-washing / dishwasher-loading a great deal, etc. I certainly don’t want to claim that no one would do well to use disposable cutlery and crockery. I’m just not convinced by any general claim that most people, most LW readers, most prosperous people in the US, etc., would have better lives overall if they used disposables.