Bad-Husband-Lady and Neurotic-Wife-Man Review "Fair Play"
I'm the primary childcare provider and chill about chores, he works full time and is neurotic about chores. We argue over chores constantly. Who will win Fair Play?
A great deal of discourse has been circulating about Fair Play, a card game (or more realistically, conversation facilitator) meant to help couples equitably divide domestic labor. Each card in the “game” is a different task to be distributed, and while the designer, Eve Brotsky (also behind the eponymous book and documentary) is clear about the goal not being a perfect 50/50 split, the endgame should be a division of labor that feels, well, fair, and upon which both people can agree.
The underlying assumption is that even after everything is split equitably, the woman will always be doing more. Lyman Stone negatively reviewed the game for being based on passively-aggressively shaming the person with fewer cards. I was a bit afraid of this myself because my husband, well…as soon as I told him we were doing this, he insisted he would “win.” I cannot imagine anything more defeminizing than seeing my husband hold all the Fair Play cards. I was terrified I would be the first woman to “lose” this game. But alas, I was willing to brave this possibility for you fuckers.
Let me back up here, because obviously our marriage is not a typical dynamic. It’s not atypical because my husband is a #FeministAlly, but rather because he’s far more neurotic and tightly-wound about household stuff than I am. As I’ve written about before, domestic labor is a common bickering topic for me and my husband. I’m relatively chill about everything that isn’t safety or child-oriented, and he has diagnosed OCD that basically makes him a neurotic control freak about everything involving our house, food, or plans. Just an example: he regularly deletes “unnecessary” grocery items from the Whole Foods/Amazon cart before it’s placed, and eventually made a rule that I’m not allowed to place the grocery order myself. This is something I’d be perfectly happy to handle, but he gets anxious giving up control. He also doesn’t let me arrange double dates with other couples. Once, I tried, and after the other wife and I agreed on a restaurant we all liked, he jumped in to change the restaurant because he wasn’t in the mood for sushi. Because he invariably changes or erases my work on various tasks, I stop doing them.
He would readily admit this, by the way, but he would insist he needs to be a control freak because if he let me decide things, everything would explode. Don’t worry, he’s not a “I need to read your texts and you can’t have friends,” control freak. He’s a “you’re not allowed to turn on the lights in the house after 6 PM unless it’s red light for my insomnia” control freak. He’s like Squidward in that episode where he leaves Spongebob in charge of the Krusty Krab and repeatedly runs back to make sure Spongebob hasn’t burned the place down or given all the money away.
So either way, we seem like the perfect couple to review this game—we don’t fit any predetermined archetype, we have no specific political or ideological agenda going into this it, yet domestic labor is clearly a hot button issue for us. Before we played the game, I’d say both of us felt that the other one was blind to the extent of our invisible labor.
Perhaps the first sign this would be an interesting experience was that my husband got annoyed that I spent $18 on the game without asking him first.
