The Chore War Is Real—and Your Marriage Is Losing

This all started when my wife called me out on my parenting abilities during a family vacation. She recounted how, at a brewery earlier in the day, I had watched as our son picked up two mason jars filled with crayons and began banging them together. You just kind of stood there. Like you werent worried he might shatter them and hurt himself, Meghan said.

I admitted to her that I hadnt thought that might happen. It was like previous times, when Id let our son get dangerously close to an exposed wall outlet or lamp cord and my wife had to jump in to rescue him. I didnt know it at the time, but Id been relying on Meghan to do more than her fair share of mental laborthose household tasks that demand vast stores of cognitive energyon my behalf.

If this isnt something we can fix, Im not sure Ill ever want to have another kid, she said.

If my own wife couldnt trust me with our child, then perhaps I had to become better at undertaking those mentally demanding jobslike watching our son closely so that he doesnt accidentally shock himself.

The prospect of another kid wasnt the only thing at risk. Women who felt that they bore the majority of the mental labor inherent in running a household were also likelier to feel empty, less satisfied with life, and less emotionally and physically intimate with their partners, Oklahoma State University and Arizona State University researchers found this year.

On top of all this mental labor, women are doing the majority of the chores, despite the fact that more of them have jobs. In 1965, women spent on average 42 hours a week on chores and childcare and nine hours on paid work. In 2016, they spent 32 hours a week on those domestic duties and almost tripled their paid work hours. Men today, by comparison, spend 43 hours a week on paid work and only 18 on housework and childcare.

You could fool yourself into thinking that, well, men spend more time at work, so theyve earned their time off. Except that most breadwinning mothers report that they handle all (not some) of the familys responsibilities, according to a 2017 survey by the childcare company Bright Horizons. While men might be doing slightly more housework than they were in the 1960s, were not doing nearly enoughand its breaking our partners.

And something happens when men become fathers. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that in heterosexual marriages in which the couple reported sharing the domestic workload pre-child, the man went on to decrease his housework contributions by as much as five hours a week after the child was born. The wife picked up his slack, and all that slack amounted to 2.6 extra weeks of work for her over the course of a year. One explanation: Babies upend the dynamic that couples have and, as parents, they default to the domestic roles they grew up with.

So, for instance, if your dad didnt do the laundry in your house growing up, youll likely follow suit.

Which brings me back to folding my wifes underwear.

A WEEK EARLIER, Meghan and I had agreed to follow the rules of a new book, Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). The Fair Play system was devised by Eve Rodsky, an organizational specialist with mediation experience. She argues that in order for women to avoid being the She-Fault parent, they must create equity in household chores, or else risk frustration, resentment, and divorce.

She also argues that to achieve this equity, they must participate in the Fair Play game, which centers on a deck of 100 cards. Thirty of these cards deal with what youd expectdoing dishes, taking out the garbage, handling the mail. There are 54 other cards devoted to chores that occur less frequently (thank-you notes, health insurance, lawn and plants). The remaining 16 cards are divided into ten wild cards (moving, new job, death in the family) and six happiness-centric cards (adult friendships, self-care). The goal is not to carry an equal number of cards but to feel like the responsibilities each person holds are fair and reasonable.

Is this a ruse to get me to do more cooking? Meghan asked when we sat at our kitchen table for our first summit. Going into it, I felt like I may have had the higher ground: I do all of the cooking for our family, and the yard work, and most of the nasty cleaning, dishes, grocery shopping, and holiday-related stuff. Because I work from home, my daily breaks involve household choresand a good number of them. Although I calmly reassured Meghan that, no, this project wasnt intended to unload my responsibilities onto her, I was hoping that maybe it would.

But as we divvied up which responsibilities we would each handle for the week ahead, I noticed that while Meghan and I held roughly the same number of cards, the type of cards differed. I held the majority of the cards that required physical labor. Meghan held the majority of the cards that required mental laborcards like calendar keeper, money manager, and medical and healthy living (kids). Wanting to retain my perceived footing on higher ground, I asked Meghan for the local packing and unpacking card, which entailed stocking the diaper bag for outings around town. It seemed like an easy one.

My father did more around the house than I think most dads did, but I can guarantee you he never held the local packing and unpacking card. My mom did that, and we always had what we needed. This is what my wife did, too.

Until it was my turn.

During the opening weeks of Fair Play, we were invited to a family friends pool. I packed the sunscreen, my sons swim diaper, a few pool toys, his water cup, and what else, what elseI thought that was good. Two blocks from home, I realized Id forgotten his pool float. I turned the car around to pick it up; I delivered him to the pool, where he had a ton of fun; and afterward I suggested we all go out for dinner. Then I realized I hadnt packed him a change of clothes.

How could I have failed so poorly at something so simple? I wondered. I began to understand: Mentally mapping out exactly what a super-needy kid will require for four hours is daunting. In fact, its emotionally exhausting to prepare for all the scenarios, including the worst ones, and especially if its a habit youve never seen practiced or practiced yourself.

Meghan and I returned home that night to find I wasnt the only one struggling with our new division of labor. A squadron of flies had stormed our kitchen, likely bursting forth from the fetidness of the trash can. Meghan held the trash card. Maybe theyre coming from outside? she pondered.

OVER THE NEXT MONTH , Meghan and I discussed our domestic life ad nauseam. For as convoluted and overwhelming as the Fair Play system is, it does force you to have difficult conversations. About what it means to truly execute a task. About what your agreed-upon minimum standard of care is. About competency and consistency and, all along in the background, the by-product of those two things: trust.

Trust is earned, and it is earned in a trust spiral, a phrase coined by Sibout G. Nooteboom, Ph.D., a public administration researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Positive trust spirals grow from a repeated sequence: establishing a common goal, having enthusiasm, navigating tensions to reach the goal, and reward. Negative trust spirals feed off the opposite.

Helping in the form of nagging or swooping in to finish the job does not feed trust, Rodsky says. In fact, the Fair Play system discourages helping. If one does the laundry, one does all of the laundry. This includes deciding when to do laundry, doing the laundry, folding the laundry, and putting away the laundry.

When you hold a card, you own it. You conceive, plan, and execute. And your partner isnt allowed to give feedback in the moment. Thats saved for weekly meetings, Rodsky says. And while she describes her plan as hardcore change from how things are done currently, she argues that anyone who has ever had a job understands what it means to take on a task and complete it. Every business works on a direct-responsibility model. Why shouldnt the household?

Before Fair Play, I was routinely miffed at my wife for not taking out the garbage as much as I did, without ever giving her full responsibility to do so. My wife was routinely miffed at me for not watching our son as closely as she would have, without ever entrusting me to carry out the full responsibility of what that means.

I kept coming back to that vacation fight my wife and I hadto the mason jars and what they represented to her. She wasnt just asking me to watch our son when we were out in public. She was asking me to handle the mental responsibility of making sure he was safe, so that she could be comfortable.

At our week-three summit, knowing that wed be attending a birthday party for our friends two-year-old son that weekend, I took the watching card and actually brought it with me to the party. Carrying around Fair Play cards isnt required, but I deemed it necessary for the task at hand. I traded watching with Meghan exactly once, when I needed to eat, but otherwise hovered over my son as he splashed at a water table, pushed a toy lawnmower, shoveled a god-awful amount of fruit into his mouth, and meowed at cats. Two hours in, I was spent.

After the party, Meghan told me, Youre more competent than I give you credit for. I took it as a compliment.

DURING OUR LAST SUMMIT, I asked Meghan if she was ready to burn our cards in a ceremonial bonfire. After our usual griping about the madness of the system, we decided instead to reduce our load to just a few key cards that served as trouble spots for uspacking and unpacking, weekend meals, and watching included.

We were starting to build something, to trust-spiral upward, and we werent quite sure that our work was finished. But we both decided that we didnt want to run our home like a business, because, well, home is a respite from business. Though Meghan did say, Maybe well bring the full deck of cards back if we have a second kid.

I had always followed the advice of my hero, Tom Waits, when it came to marriage. When reporters have asked him the secret of his long marriage to Kathleen Brennan, hes replied, in reference to doing dishes, She washes, Ill dry. I had always assumed that meant splitting the work 50/50, but now I understand that true synergy in a relationship comes from each partner holding an equitablenot equalshare of physical and mental chores. No woman should carry the mental weight of childcare. No man should bear the load of labor tasks. And vice versa.

In the end, my wife actually did start cooking more, on weekends, so that I could devote more mental energy holding on to that damn packing and unpacking card. I wash and I dry so she can keep the calendar. We take turns watching. And I do the laundry. Im even starting to enjoy folding her underwear.