Is paying a cleaner reasonable when we could do the work ourselves?

The cleaner quoted $60 for a visit. Two visits a month would cost $120, which is about what we spend on two restaurant evenings. I suggested swapping the meals out for the help.

My partner said, "We can clean our own home." We can. The question is that I usually do most of it while he catches up on other things. He's not refusing every chore; our routines have just settled into a division neither of us has recently discussed.

I'd like two weekends where a big clean doesn't take the first half of Saturday. He values the meals out because they get us out together, and I value those too. We have room for one of these choices, not both. I'm not expecting paid help to make the house maintain itself between visits.

Would you try the cleaner once, renegotiate the chores first, or keep the dinners and make a firmer shared plan? I don't want buying help to avoid an honest conversation, but I also don't think doing every possible task ourselves is automatically the best use of our money.