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?
I wholly agree. "Landscaping" for my wife and the two acres "assigned" to her in the summer is quite literally a full time job. It would be better instead of only counting tasks, to count time spent on the task. I suspect, as well, that there are seasonal variations. This may be less obvious to urban dwellers. I suspect that CHH's lawnmowing is accomplished in less than 15 minutes.
i think the purpose of fair play is to change the narrative of “i bring home a paycheck so i don’t need to lift a finger and anything i do for kids/home is helping” mentality. if you are at the point where you need to beg your partner to notice you are drowning, you’re already not in a great spot. in general the tit for tat mentality is not great for marriage and you should be able to find a natural rhythm through conversation/trial error without a “game.” in general we also do too much for magic making/school stuff. we need to roll that wayyy back.
What happens when the engine light goes on in the car? I am guessing you take care of that! Great writing, wonderful style, and you always have something thought-provoking to digest. Sensational work.
Something that's worked very well in our marriage, tangential to the game, is that what my wife Debbie does she's generally better at and vice versa. So we are each disproportionately impressed with each other's skills.
A few examples: She continues to be impressed that I can take things down from a high shelf or that I actually like researching and curating our entertainment or that I don't mind making phone calls or running to the kitchen to get something for her. I'm impressed that she can fix things in the physical world and how organized she is and how her aesthetics are so exquisite.
So it adds up to more than 100% if you weight it by lack of skill.
Something that I found totally absurd when I first heard it was that Scottish highland men would proudly do little to no work, sitting on a rock while their wife would labour in the garden. Their job was to fight the other clans on the weekend
Whether or not that's apocryphal it seems instructive. Men protecting against violence has no personal salience in modern society. The most romantic energy I have ever seen between a couple was a Native man and woman who had hitchhiked from the Yukon down to Edmonton, where they lived homeless by the river
They were absolutely thrilled to be on this adventure together. She cheerfully related how she would have been sexually assaulted a few days ago if he hadn't beaten up the other guy. They were 100% in it together
Hi CHH, this was entertaining but you dropped the ball on school being a) female coded and b) overgranulated. Because when your kids get to be tweens and teenagers, showing up for all their stuff and managing the volunteering/service are definitely two different things. I'd argue that transportation to the weekly activities is separate from just sliding in to watch the recital or ball game, too.
The really insane discourse I saw around this game was an endless back and forth of “it’s not a game, it’s just a framework to facilitate household systems that you may or may not find helpful and which happens to be printed on cards” versus “I don’t care, if you print it on cards then people will assume it’s a game which means there’s a winner and a loser and that’s incredibly toxic and damaging and violent”
Brilliant breakdown of the card imbalance problem. The holiday/lawn asymmetry really exposes how the game can undermine its own credibilty before couples even get into the actual distribution debate. I ran into a similr issue when my partner and I tried dividing household stuff informally, we kept arguing over what counted as "one task" vs multiple. Kinda wonder if the game works best for couples who already mostly agree on scope?
Another fundamental thing about this that I don’t quite understand is, can’t you just notice how much free time (if any) the two partners have? If one of you has a large amount and the other doesn’t, then the one with the time should probably do more in some way. If you’re both working insane hours all the time, then your problem isn’t your spouse, it’s the modern world. (Or even just … the human condition.)
Also, I can’t be bothered to look this up, but isn’t there a documented “roommate effect”, whereby everyone who shares a living space with others always thinks they do more than their fair share?
I have no idea how other couples live together. I know two couples pretty well: my parents and my wife and I. I'm pretty sure that in the 36 years we've been married we've never had a conversation about things like this. It's pretty much divided into guy-things and female-things. I do all the fixing of things, building of things, computer things, writing things. My wife cooks five suppers. I cook Sunday brunch. The rest of the meals are on our own. I wash all the dishes. She likes using the dishwasher. I don't. She mops and cleans all the floors, does most of the vacuuming, and dusting (I never dusted in my life). She does all the laundry, but you'd be surprised at how little laundry I generate. We keep separate calendars. Mine is far more complicated than hers. We own a 72 acre farm. She gets the house and surrounding two acres. I get the rest. Landscaping, she does almost all of it. During the summer, this is a full time job. We've had discussions about the massive amount of yard waste that she accumulates. I want to compose it. She wants it off the property. We both have our own gardens. Livestock are all my job. As is haying, fencing, tractor repair and maintenance.
So, here's the real point: I run a non-profit during tax season, actually for months before tax season in preparation. People above me in the pecking order are always trying to define roles and filling them with names. That's not the way things are done: You start with what has to be done and then make sure they get done. I take CHH's point that not everyone agrees on what has to be done. Well, I've got a word for you: "Then you do it." If someone feels like something needs to be done that isn't getting done, then take responsibility for it and do it. It's like a vacuum: it sucks people in to fill all the holes.
I frankly don't know how we've done it. What probably happens is that when you get married, you simply adopt the roles and responsibilities that you learned probably as a child. It's not that simple, but it's a start. I can imagine all sorts of problems for couples with vastly different learned patterns and roles. Ours were pretty similar, but not a perfect match.
I was 44, my wife 37, when we got married. That's a lifetime of having things our own way. All the issues with keeping up a home had been adopted by both of us before we got married. I had been a vegetarian for twenty years before we were married. She was raised on a cattle ranch. I knew my way around in the kitchen, and still bake every week, unfortunately because she is gluten-free, nothing she can eat. We've adapted without too much fanfare. I'll eat meat occasionally. After all, she spent all this time making it.
Reading Reddit comments about this game - just sounds like a ton of bitter women who are looking for any reason to divorce. My suspicion is that this “game” is mostly used as a way to initiate a divorce than it is to show the specifics of how someone feels bad in the relationship and they’re hoping to fix it.
>Men like to win, okay? If you play a card game with a man, his mind will be on winning. Even if he tries his hardest to view it not as a game but as a “conversation facilitator,” he will likely still want to win
Whereas my husband is obsessed with letting me win, which I hate because I find it infantilizing 🤣 (though it is ultimately endearing too) I guess no matter what move men make they can’t win lol
Making lawn care or house maintenance one card is an affront to labor-in-relationships as a whole. Great breakdown of the game. Thanks.
I wholly agree. "Landscaping" for my wife and the two acres "assigned" to her in the summer is quite literally a full time job. It would be better instead of only counting tasks, to count time spent on the task. I suspect, as well, that there are seasonal variations. This may be less obvious to urban dwellers. I suspect that CHH's lawnmowing is accomplished in less than 15 minutes.
i think the purpose of fair play is to change the narrative of “i bring home a paycheck so i don’t need to lift a finger and anything i do for kids/home is helping” mentality. if you are at the point where you need to beg your partner to notice you are drowning, you’re already not in a great spot. in general the tit for tat mentality is not great for marriage and you should be able to find a natural rhythm through conversation/trial error without a “game.” in general we also do too much for magic making/school stuff. we need to roll that wayyy back.
What happens when the engine light goes on in the car? I am guessing you take care of that! Great writing, wonderful style, and you always have something thought-provoking to digest. Sensational work.
Something that's worked very well in our marriage, tangential to the game, is that what my wife Debbie does she's generally better at and vice versa. So we are each disproportionately impressed with each other's skills.
A few examples: She continues to be impressed that I can take things down from a high shelf or that I actually like researching and curating our entertainment or that I don't mind making phone calls or running to the kitchen to get something for her. I'm impressed that she can fix things in the physical world and how organized she is and how her aesthetics are so exquisite.
So it adds up to more than 100% if you weight it by lack of skill.
Something that I found totally absurd when I first heard it was that Scottish highland men would proudly do little to no work, sitting on a rock while their wife would labour in the garden. Their job was to fight the other clans on the weekend
Whether or not that's apocryphal it seems instructive. Men protecting against violence has no personal salience in modern society. The most romantic energy I have ever seen between a couple was a Native man and woman who had hitchhiked from the Yukon down to Edmonton, where they lived homeless by the river
They were absolutely thrilled to be on this adventure together. She cheerfully related how she would have been sexually assaulted a few days ago if he hadn't beaten up the other guy. They were 100% in it together
Hi CHH, this was entertaining but you dropped the ball on school being a) female coded and b) overgranulated. Because when your kids get to be tweens and teenagers, showing up for all their stuff and managing the volunteering/service are definitely two different things. I'd argue that transportation to the weekly activities is separate from just sliding in to watch the recital or ball game, too.
The really insane discourse I saw around this game was an endless back and forth of “it’s not a game, it’s just a framework to facilitate household systems that you may or may not find helpful and which happens to be printed on cards” versus “I don’t care, if you print it on cards then people will assume it’s a game which means there’s a winner and a loser and that’s incredibly toxic and damaging and violent”
Brilliant breakdown of the card imbalance problem. The holiday/lawn asymmetry really exposes how the game can undermine its own credibilty before couples even get into the actual distribution debate. I ran into a similr issue when my partner and I tried dividing household stuff informally, we kept arguing over what counted as "one task" vs multiple. Kinda wonder if the game works best for couples who already mostly agree on scope?
Another fundamental thing about this that I don’t quite understand is, can’t you just notice how much free time (if any) the two partners have? If one of you has a large amount and the other doesn’t, then the one with the time should probably do more in some way. If you’re both working insane hours all the time, then your problem isn’t your spouse, it’s the modern world. (Or even just … the human condition.)
Also, I can’t be bothered to look this up, but isn’t there a documented “roommate effect”, whereby everyone who shares a living space with others always thinks they do more than their fair share?
I have no idea how other couples live together. I know two couples pretty well: my parents and my wife and I. I'm pretty sure that in the 36 years we've been married we've never had a conversation about things like this. It's pretty much divided into guy-things and female-things. I do all the fixing of things, building of things, computer things, writing things. My wife cooks five suppers. I cook Sunday brunch. The rest of the meals are on our own. I wash all the dishes. She likes using the dishwasher. I don't. She mops and cleans all the floors, does most of the vacuuming, and dusting (I never dusted in my life). She does all the laundry, but you'd be surprised at how little laundry I generate. We keep separate calendars. Mine is far more complicated than hers. We own a 72 acre farm. She gets the house and surrounding two acres. I get the rest. Landscaping, she does almost all of it. During the summer, this is a full time job. We've had discussions about the massive amount of yard waste that she accumulates. I want to compose it. She wants it off the property. We both have our own gardens. Livestock are all my job. As is haying, fencing, tractor repair and maintenance.
So, here's the real point: I run a non-profit during tax season, actually for months before tax season in preparation. People above me in the pecking order are always trying to define roles and filling them with names. That's not the way things are done: You start with what has to be done and then make sure they get done. I take CHH's point that not everyone agrees on what has to be done. Well, I've got a word for you: "Then you do it." If someone feels like something needs to be done that isn't getting done, then take responsibility for it and do it. It's like a vacuum: it sucks people in to fill all the holes.
I frankly don't know how we've done it. What probably happens is that when you get married, you simply adopt the roles and responsibilities that you learned probably as a child. It's not that simple, but it's a start. I can imagine all sorts of problems for couples with vastly different learned patterns and roles. Ours were pretty similar, but not a perfect match.
I was 44, my wife 37, when we got married. That's a lifetime of having things our own way. All the issues with keeping up a home had been adopted by both of us before we got married. I had been a vegetarian for twenty years before we were married. She was raised on a cattle ranch. I knew my way around in the kitchen, and still bake every week, unfortunately because she is gluten-free, nothing she can eat. We've adapted without too much fanfare. I'll eat meat occasionally. After all, she spent all this time making it.
I'm not a BDSM person, but I don't think the Dom is supposed to ask the Sub "Can you take out the trash". That's a question, a request.
The Sub straight up tells the Dom "Call me your little slut and tell me what to do."
(He messes up that instruction, calls her a hoe instead of a slut, but Subs don't give Doms direction anyway so I think that part's okay)
Reading Reddit comments about this game - just sounds like a ton of bitter women who are looking for any reason to divorce. My suspicion is that this “game” is mostly used as a way to initiate a divorce than it is to show the specifics of how someone feels bad in the relationship and they’re hoping to fix it.
>Men like to win, okay? If you play a card game with a man, his mind will be on winning. Even if he tries his hardest to view it not as a game but as a “conversation facilitator,” he will likely still want to win
Whereas my husband is obsessed with letting me win, which I hate because I find it infantilizing 🤣 (though it is ultimately endearing too) I guess no matter what move men make they can’t win lol