Totally verifiable on the mental workload. I’m 10 hours a day, 5 days burning hard at work that is mentally taxing. When it’s over I’m not checked out, my brain is mush. All I can do is a list of things that I will happily hunt down and kill because I can’t think anymore. She says she does all the work around the house which is not true, but she’s the manager so the mental load is higher and she’s working too. What’s the moral of the story? We work too much. We can’t help each other because the two of us are running a workload of 4 people. It’s why we’re all burnt and feel like we are doing everything.
Strikes me that the downfall of this system is entirely Utilitarian: we just spreadsheet everything, and if Number on Spreadsheet = Win, this is how we live our lives. "Fair Play" is just doing this warped, demented practice on turbo. We take some snap numbers, drill down and refine them to the 2nd decimal, that's much better.
What does any of this have to do with the Spirit, the Heart? Perhaps your life purpose, your Passion? That is, anything to do with who you really are, since you're as far from being a spreadsheet as you are from Jupiter. And that's its downfall.
So it may look like moving a few more decimal places, by trading 100 hours in expensive therapy gets you more successful win, you beat out your less fortunate peers. But do you?
Nor is this going to be much of a help: the alternative is likely to be a heart-based life which is radically different and eg your clients will reject as unsuitable. However, if not then isn't what's discussed here just a software patch?
I'm not saying there's an easy answer, but never addressing the Spirit and the magic in your lives is no answer either.
I figured you would know this. I look at things from the Enchantment, magical side. Has that been working any better? Yeah, Almost certainly not. New Age people are top divorcees I would think, with your career college professionals being only No 2.
However, I think the people who stick have deeper roots, which we call "religious" but that word can sound pejorative to many.
Don't think of it like a compatibility test: we scored high; we're doing well.
Think of it as a priority determinant: these tasks scored high in value for both of us, so they're priorities; these tasks were high value to her, so I should praise her when I notice them; these tasks weren't high value to either of us, but we're spending a lot of energy on them, so we should consider not doing some of them.
With only a minor bonus value: I didn't realize she noticed I was doing these. She did see but just hasn't said anything, so I wouldn't feel unseen when I do them.
Spreadsheet headers (before compilation, done separately): task I'm doing, value to me, energy requirement assessment, task my spouse does, value to us/me, energy expended assessment (may be as simple as high, medium, low)
Comparing these lists can be a starting point to understanding, to arrangement of priorities, and possibly to reshuffling of duties, if one spouse sees a task as no problem and the other see it as a drudge. There's something that's viewed the same way by the other person, too trade off.
I think your note 1 is very important and is really a crux of your post here: these behaviors occur in high income, often upper-middle class families. These families are under unique emotional burdens to perform and appear a certain way and thus results in certain complexes about what things “should” look like. The idea that women in particular bare some unique burden to always be on time and perform at the maximum level is, I think, an artifact of the kinds of cultures that dominate upper incomes, which often feature detached, hard-working patriarchs supported by intense matriarchs who control the household sometimes more than the man does. This goes doubly if your analysis are driven, as they are based in California, from ethnically East Asian mothers whose frame of reference for maternal behavior are first or second generation immigrant families. These obviously aren’t examples of what we should expect walking into a lower or middle income family from an east or southern WASP background.
In short: is a good analysis but I really think you need to couch claims about the broad applicability of these narratives in the specific fact you have built this analysis from studies of upper income families.
Thanks for the close reading. While my examples come from high-income, progressive couples (as I noted in 1), I’ve found the energy gap shows up in other demographics too. You’re right, though — context matters!
I can see this playing out in my own marriage. We are pretty supportive of each other. There are a lot of benefits we experience from the “opposites attract” scenario. We’ve also worked through where that’s a challenge. But every once in a while I can see the mental load my wife endures. It’s a lot.
Spot on, John. Thank you for sharing. Depending upon how much one consumes, there is a significant amount of noise pertaining about what it means to be a man. Wrestle with the questions (rather than running from them) individually, and each of us will be on our way to becoming who we need to be.
Partners can be more similar than initially assumed but the small difference can look huge day to day. The parent who jumps into disciplining a child first can become the parent who always disciplines the child, even if given a few seconds more, the other parent may be galvanized to act. My husband is giving antibiotics to our dog everyday and he asks me to remind him. He’s usually done it before being reminded, but it’s still my mental load to carry because I’m reminding him (and he’s reminding himself). I think this is an illustrative example. If he’s even a little more forgetful than he currently is or he does it later in the day than my reminder, then it will LOOK LIKE nothing happens without my intervention. So if your partner says he micromanaged, drop your mental load for a few days and see if he does as you expect given time and freedom to execute. And if not, if what he ends up doing *actually works*. You’ll never lighten your mental load if you need to control everything.
I love this example. Timing makes a huge difference, and you’re right: sometimes the hardest part of lightening the load is letting go long enough to see what your partner actually does.
It sure is interesting that individuals/couples are expected to solve societal labor issues via their relationship while the outsourcing of said labor to the family, the ever increasing demands for productivity and the constant clawing back of resources for families is rarely discussed.
How many people would pay higher local and school taxes to alleviate some of the mental labor dumped on them? Probably none.
I really like this point. Couples end up negotiating at home what are partly structural issues. Care being outsourced, productivity pressures, thinning public support. That weight gets privatized into relationships.
Awesome read. You touched on men/women concepts at 30k feet but always bring it back to “it’s two individual humans that have to work it out”.
I think that’s important because I agree you and a number of comments that “necessary” is very broad and person specific. My version of clean enough for a kitchen before we are “done” is very different from my wife. Our solve would prob not work for others, but after 25 years we have it down to: I do what I think is 100% done, and if she wants more she does it, and I don’t get pissy (anymore 😇) about her fixing my work”.
If someone says “But see, she still has to be the one to worry about the last little bit”, then they are saying it’s not about being done the “right” way, it’s about being done “her” way.
This is so good. Every time I read articles like this, they name the issue without identifying what I always see as the core problem. This nails it. The issue is shared vision. No system works in service of nothing. A car with engine needs to be going somewhere. No mountain can be climbed if two people see a different peak—or worse yet, don’t see one at all.
Sometimes I think about the word “credit,” and how people say “amazing things can happen when no one cares who gets the credit.” But I think it’s more true that no one cares who gets the credit when amazing things are happening. “Credit” is something we use to go somewhere—or do something—else. But when we’re doing something great/hard and understand the PURPOSE behind it, we don’t want to be doing anything else. We don’t want to be anywhere else. We’re exactly where we want to be, doing exactly what we want to be doing.
Totally. No system can carry the weight if there’s no sense of where you’re going together. And your reframing of credit is spot on: when the purpose is clear, fairness feels less like a ledger and more like a shared vision.
An energy gap is an interesting idea. Your line that fairness isn’t a math problem but a meaning problem is so spot on.
In my own marriage, I found fairness itself was the trap that kept me in scorekeeping mode. I no longer want symmetry but what I call mutual selfishness: each of us taking responsibility for our own joy, then meeting each other there. It made our giving less transactional and more generous.
Abigail, I loved this piece. That equality isn’t sameness, fairness isn’t symmetry, and the minutes vs. dollars comparison all really resonate for me. I see a lot of couples get stuck in that tug-of-war and both end up feeling shortchanged. This is very much in keeping with my own thesis that fairness is less a math problem than a meaning problem. And your idea of “positive selfishness” paradoxically shifts the focus from measuring to creating space for generosity.
I’m so glad/grateful you read it and felt this way. Reading your piece, I just immediately felt ideological kinship. I think our pov’s are a bit abnormal and so needed! I’m glad I found you here!!
A bit late- but I remember before I had my first child, I listened to Mike Birbiglia reflecting on being a new father. He said his advice for new fathers was to always do more than you think you should.
And that was great advice! For my first child.
Mike only ever had one child, so when my wife I had our second just before our first turned two, I found that the “always do more than what you think is your fair share” principle fell apart.
I literally recorded (and scrapped) a podcast episode called “Are Men Useless? Are Women Crazy?” Thank you for reading my mind and wording it in a more appropriate fashion!
No matter how much a man does it will never be enough for the vast majority of women in 2025. They seem to need this Cinderella fantasy they create in their heads to be true.
Totally verifiable on the mental workload. I’m 10 hours a day, 5 days burning hard at work that is mentally taxing. When it’s over I’m not checked out, my brain is mush. All I can do is a list of things that I will happily hunt down and kill because I can’t think anymore. She says she does all the work around the house which is not true, but she’s the manager so the mental load is higher and she’s working too. What’s the moral of the story? We work too much. We can’t help each other because the two of us are running a workload of 4 people. It’s why we’re all burnt and feel like we are doing everything.
Such an important point!
Strikes me that the downfall of this system is entirely Utilitarian: we just spreadsheet everything, and if Number on Spreadsheet = Win, this is how we live our lives. "Fair Play" is just doing this warped, demented practice on turbo. We take some snap numbers, drill down and refine them to the 2nd decimal, that's much better.
What does any of this have to do with the Spirit, the Heart? Perhaps your life purpose, your Passion? That is, anything to do with who you really are, since you're as far from being a spreadsheet as you are from Jupiter. And that's its downfall.
So it may look like moving a few more decimal places, by trading 100 hours in expensive therapy gets you more successful win, you beat out your less fortunate peers. But do you?
Nor is this going to be much of a help: the alternative is likely to be a heart-based life which is radically different and eg your clients will reject as unsuitable. However, if not then isn't what's discussed here just a software patch?
I'm not saying there's an easy answer, but never addressing the Spirit and the magic in your lives is no answer either.
I agree that if the conversation stops at spreadsheets, it misses the heart of what partnership is about.
I figured you would know this. I look at things from the Enchantment, magical side. Has that been working any better? Yeah, Almost certainly not. New Age people are top divorcees I would think, with your career college professionals being only No 2.
However, I think the people who stick have deeper roots, which we call "religious" but that word can sound pejorative to many.
Don't think of it like a compatibility test: we scored high; we're doing well.
Think of it as a priority determinant: these tasks scored high in value for both of us, so they're priorities; these tasks were high value to her, so I should praise her when I notice them; these tasks weren't high value to either of us, but we're spending a lot of energy on them, so we should consider not doing some of them.
With only a minor bonus value: I didn't realize she noticed I was doing these. She did see but just hasn't said anything, so I wouldn't feel unseen when I do them.
Spreadsheet headers (before compilation, done separately): task I'm doing, value to me, energy requirement assessment, task my spouse does, value to us/me, energy expended assessment (may be as simple as high, medium, low)
Comparing these lists can be a starting point to understanding, to arrangement of priorities, and possibly to reshuffling of duties, if one spouse sees a task as no problem and the other see it as a drudge. There's something that's viewed the same way by the other person, too trade off.
Men attend to the necessities, women to the niceties, by & large. Woman's natural solipsism makes her the heavy lifter, whether she is or not.
I think your note 1 is very important and is really a crux of your post here: these behaviors occur in high income, often upper-middle class families. These families are under unique emotional burdens to perform and appear a certain way and thus results in certain complexes about what things “should” look like. The idea that women in particular bare some unique burden to always be on time and perform at the maximum level is, I think, an artifact of the kinds of cultures that dominate upper incomes, which often feature detached, hard-working patriarchs supported by intense matriarchs who control the household sometimes more than the man does. This goes doubly if your analysis are driven, as they are based in California, from ethnically East Asian mothers whose frame of reference for maternal behavior are first or second generation immigrant families. These obviously aren’t examples of what we should expect walking into a lower or middle income family from an east or southern WASP background.
In short: is a good analysis but I really think you need to couch claims about the broad applicability of these narratives in the specific fact you have built this analysis from studies of upper income families.
Thanks for the close reading. While my examples come from high-income, progressive couples (as I noted in 1), I’ve found the energy gap shows up in other demographics too. You’re right, though — context matters!
I can see this playing out in my own marriage. We are pretty supportive of each other. There are a lot of benefits we experience from the “opposites attract” scenario. We’ve also worked through where that’s a challenge. But every once in a while I can see the mental load my wife endures. It’s a lot.
Something for me to work on.
Appreciate you sharing this. Sometimes just noticing the mental load can make a big difference.
Spot on, John. Thank you for sharing. Depending upon how much one consumes, there is a significant amount of noise pertaining about what it means to be a man. Wrestle with the questions (rather than running from them) individually, and each of us will be on our way to becoming who we need to be.
Well said, Will.
Partners can be more similar than initially assumed but the small difference can look huge day to day. The parent who jumps into disciplining a child first can become the parent who always disciplines the child, even if given a few seconds more, the other parent may be galvanized to act. My husband is giving antibiotics to our dog everyday and he asks me to remind him. He’s usually done it before being reminded, but it’s still my mental load to carry because I’m reminding him (and he’s reminding himself). I think this is an illustrative example. If he’s even a little more forgetful than he currently is or he does it later in the day than my reminder, then it will LOOK LIKE nothing happens without my intervention. So if your partner says he micromanaged, drop your mental load for a few days and see if he does as you expect given time and freedom to execute. And if not, if what he ends up doing *actually works*. You’ll never lighten your mental load if you need to control everything.
I love this example. Timing makes a huge difference, and you’re right: sometimes the hardest part of lightening the load is letting go long enough to see what your partner actually does.
It sure is interesting that individuals/couples are expected to solve societal labor issues via their relationship while the outsourcing of said labor to the family, the ever increasing demands for productivity and the constant clawing back of resources for families is rarely discussed.
How many people would pay higher local and school taxes to alleviate some of the mental labor dumped on them? Probably none.
I really like this point. Couples end up negotiating at home what are partly structural issues. Care being outsourced, productivity pressures, thinning public support. That weight gets privatized into relationships.
Awesome read. You touched on men/women concepts at 30k feet but always bring it back to “it’s two individual humans that have to work it out”.
I think that’s important because I agree you and a number of comments that “necessary” is very broad and person specific. My version of clean enough for a kitchen before we are “done” is very different from my wife. Our solve would prob not work for others, but after 25 years we have it down to: I do what I think is 100% done, and if she wants more she does it, and I don’t get pissy (anymore 😇) about her fixing my work”.
If someone says “But see, she still has to be the one to worry about the last little bit”, then they are saying it’s not about being done the “right” way, it’s about being done “her” way.
Love this example. After 25 years, that kind of clarity (and humor) is exactly what helps couples find what works for them.
This is so good. Every time I read articles like this, they name the issue without identifying what I always see as the core problem. This nails it. The issue is shared vision. No system works in service of nothing. A car with engine needs to be going somewhere. No mountain can be climbed if two people see a different peak—or worse yet, don’t see one at all.
Sometimes I think about the word “credit,” and how people say “amazing things can happen when no one cares who gets the credit.” But I think it’s more true that no one cares who gets the credit when amazing things are happening. “Credit” is something we use to go somewhere—or do something—else. But when we’re doing something great/hard and understand the PURPOSE behind it, we don’t want to be doing anything else. We don’t want to be anywhere else. We’re exactly where we want to be, doing exactly what we want to be doing.
Totally. No system can carry the weight if there’s no sense of where you’re going together. And your reframing of credit is spot on: when the purpose is clear, fairness feels less like a ledger and more like a shared vision.
You have hit the nail on the head, I think.
I wish everyone could read this.
An energy gap is an interesting idea. Your line that fairness isn’t a math problem but a meaning problem is so spot on.
In my own marriage, I found fairness itself was the trap that kept me in scorekeeping mode. I no longer want symmetry but what I call mutual selfishness: each of us taking responsibility for our own joy, then meeting each other there. It made our giving less transactional and more generous.
I wrote about it here if you’re curious!
https://contemporarylove.substack.com/p/alls-unfair-in-love?r=1ebkz8
Abigail, I loved this piece. That equality isn’t sameness, fairness isn’t symmetry, and the minutes vs. dollars comparison all really resonate for me. I see a lot of couples get stuck in that tug-of-war and both end up feeling shortchanged. This is very much in keeping with my own thesis that fairness is less a math problem than a meaning problem. And your idea of “positive selfishness” paradoxically shifts the focus from measuring to creating space for generosity.
I’m so glad/grateful you read it and felt this way. Reading your piece, I just immediately felt ideological kinship. I think our pov’s are a bit abnormal and so needed! I’m glad I found you here!!
I feel the same way—I'm so glad you shared your post here! I look forward to reading more!
A bit late- but I remember before I had my first child, I listened to Mike Birbiglia reflecting on being a new father. He said his advice for new fathers was to always do more than you think you should.
And that was great advice! For my first child.
Mike only ever had one child, so when my wife I had our second just before our first turned two, I found that the “always do more than what you think is your fair share” principle fell apart.
I love that rule of thumb. Maybe the humor lands because it sidesteps the scarier part: actually talking about how the load is shared.
I literally recorded (and scrapped) a podcast episode called “Are Men Useless? Are Women Crazy?” Thank you for reading my mind and wording it in a more appropriate fashion!
lol I’d definitely listen to that episode!
this information bulletin should be widely distributed, bless you for your observance, eloquence and fairness
Grateful for your words , and glad this resonated.
No matter how much a man does it will never be enough for the vast majority of women in 2025. They seem to need this Cinderella fantasy they create in their heads to be true.
Just lovely, and heartbreakingly adult. We all need a big fucking break from the constant press, the constant constant press, no?
Thank you. And yes, a big break would do us all good.