I Choose...To Play Fair (or at least try) with Eve Rodsky
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to I Choose Me. This podcast is all about the choices we make and where they lead us. Today, I wanted to get into a really cool topic, something I think my hubs needs to join me for. Babe, can you just join me for this conversation? I'm here. Okay, good. It's something that all couples have to navigate.

How do you decide who's going to do what when it comes to running a household? No one talks about this. Well, today we're going to be joined by Eve Rodsky, who wrote the New York Times bestselling book all about this topic. It's called Fair Play. Just the title alone has me ready for this fun conversation. Are you ready for it, babe? Yeah, I think so. Let's do it. Please welcome Eve Rodsky to the podcast. Hi.

Hi, Eve. Thank you for being with us. I'm so happy to be here. Hi, Dave. Hi, Jenny.

This is so fun. I want to just let's just start with this. How did you come to write a book called Fair Play? And it's not only a book, it's a it's a documentary and now a card game. Correct. It's everything all in one. And I will say a very simply, Jenny and Dave, it's because my husband, Seth, sent me a text that said, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. Wait, wait, wait. That's why. That's why I needed blueberries at home.

So let's just, you want to, let's picture the scene. Okay. I had a breast pump and a diaper bag on the passenger seat of my car. I was driving to pick up my son from his toddler transition program, which lasts like three minutes in LA as we know, and they cost our entire salaries because we don't have universal childcare in the United States.

I was, I had just been gotten off the phone with my workplace who told me that they had given away all my direct reports. I'm a lawyer and I was working in corporate finance while I was on maternity leave. And that if I wanted to breastfeed when I came back, that it would have to be in a supply closet. And I'd have to bring a battery pack because they didn't have an outlet because we had an open floor plan at the time. What year was that? Oh, this is 2011. Oh, wow.

This is 2011. And so this is what's all. And then, of course, there's the gifts for the newborn baby to return in the backseat of the car. You're a busy lady. That that and then on top of it, I get this text. And so, as you know.

for those who live in LA, like we don't really take it lightly to pull over because, you know, there's a lot of traffic getting across town, especially if you're going east around three o'clock. And so nightmare. So for me to pull over and be late to pick up my son, Zach, and to cry in my car about being the fulfiller of my husband's smoothie needs.

You know that something was going wrong. And what I wanna just say is that I think my life changed that day because as a private citizen, as a lawyer, as somebody who is no, what I take pride in is my research. I was really, really alarmed later on that women shoulder two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family.

regardless of whether or not they make more money and actually even gets worse for women as they make more money in the family. I think if I had known that, my life would have been a lot better. So ever since that blueberries breakdown, my trajectory in my life has been so different because I feel like a personal zealot committed to warning couples that as fair as you think life is going to be,

And as one woman said to me, what Fair Play taught her, what the movement taught her, which we'll talk about the documentary, the book, the cards, what it taught her and her partner was that she actually didn't have a magical vagina that whispered in her ear what her husband's mother wanted for Christmas. And so that's really the goal. The goal is to realize that this is work. It's a lot of work. It's a practice.

And if we all just got rid of that assumptions and we move to more structured decision-making tools, then couples and relationships, they just get better. Absolutely. A hundred percent. I think I've had a blueberry breakdown of my own, but it looked different, just the similarities. And I perhaps might have a magical vagina, honey. So don't let her convince you otherwise. Right, right, right. No, no, we don't have to.

I'd like to know your blueberry. What's your blueberry? That's a good one. We'll just, yeah. What's your blueberry? No, I think my blueberry was a little more simple than yours. It was just, you know, when you drop all the blueberries either in the grocery store and they fly everywhere or in the kitchen. Yeah, that's a blueberry breakdown for me. But yours is much more profound because you're right. There's just not enough information out there about...

you know, what happens after you say I do. And then, you know, there are books about becoming a parent, raising a baby, raising teens, all of that. But there's no information out there about how to navigate the day in, the day out, the nitty gritty, that not so fun conversation with your partner that we have to have in order to make everybody feel comfortable

appreciated. To run essentially the business of the family. Yeah. It's a structure and it has to have a schedule. It has to have...

you know, everybody has their jobs. Yeah. I think when we first met, you didn't really have any concept of like running a household or running, being a partner in running a family because he came into our lives. I had already had three kids. I was divorced. We had four dogs at the time. I was coming in with a seven-year-old, a

11 year old and a 16 year old. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And, and there was a lot, and there was also, um, not a lot of structure where no one had labels of what was their duty around the house. Yeah. That goes like to the family extension, the family unit. That's all me. That's my bad. I did come in and go, okay, well,

uh the girls are supposed to do this i'll do this i'll do this and then we'll do that what yeah well it didn't work out that way no okay no well well you know what i'll tell you why it didn't work out it didn't work out that way because no one's ever ever talks never has talked about the home as an organization

And so I will tell you, Dave and Jenny, that even my Aunt Marion's Mahjong group, I feel for Dave. Even my Aunt Marion's Mahjong group, I realized as I was writing Fair Play, had more clearly defined expectations in the home. Like you didn't bring snack twice to that group and you were out. But literally, I remember interviewing a systems engineer.

A man who literally wrote systems for a living. And he said to me that in his home, they just, they make the same decision every night. They decide who's taking the dog out right when it's about to take a piss on the rug. And this is a man who creates systems. What a system is, is as Dave was trying to do, figure out in advance who's responsible for what so that in the moment that

your emotion can stay pretty low and your cognition can stay high. Because when there is no system, what happens for everybody is we have this three toxic words, right? We're going to figure it out.

But figuring it out just means that we're going to either go back to assumption or the dog's going to be pissing on the rug or the tooth fairy doesn't come that night because we all thought we were going to do it. And that is what I was coming into when I wrote Fair Play, that this can't be good if Aunt Marian's Mahjong group runs more smoothly than people's homes. And it actually allowed me to get more grace for Seth.

Because this poor man, right, to this day, he says, how do you get more fairness in a heterosysgender couple? He's like, well, you just have to have your wife write a book about you that portrays you in a really bad, terrible light. But really, the empathy I was able to get for Seth over time was that that magical vagina, those assumptions that we're talking about, if you think we're going to figure it out, all we have is really what we saw in our childhood.

All we have is what society tells us, right? We don't get to make those active decisions for ourselves. So then we just become the default. And often that's a race to the bottom. So it's not something that was going to work for me anymore. Right. I mean, we come from, you know, similar like households where, you know, everybody had like some sort of structure and chores and all that stuff and hardworking and everybody pitched in.

But it's kind of gone off the rails. I mean, it does go, it just goes off the rails naturally. But I mean, it's, yeah, it goes off the rails. We literally, we just had a couple days ago, we had this conversation. There's, you know, about what certain chores and what people do and this and that. And

Sometimes, you know, my chore is to unload the dishwasher. I do it because I'm the first one up in the morning. So I'm like, I do it. And sometimes...

I just don't want to do it. Yeah. And I'll just leave and go to work and I'll see, I'll see if someone's done it. No one's done it. So I'll just do it in the afternoon. Sometimes I throw tests out there. But again, that, that is that I'd say that that is what's great is like hashtag. We're all normal because we're all doing that, that same thing. But I think what's so hard about that is that often we're communicating in our heads that

And so we're expecting that somebody knows what, you know, what, what we should and shouldn't be doing. And, but, but the problem I also think, especially if you're bringing kids to the table with this is that,

What I'm trying to convince people, and this, I'll just take one step back. So after the blueberries breakdown, one thing I realized as a researcher, I put my researcher hat on. It turns out that what we're talking about actually has a name. It's had a name for many decades, right? It's called the second shift.

emotional labor. It's called invisible work. It's often done by women. But what this work is, it's the work of the household. But the problem is because people hadn't been treating the home as an organization, we just associate it with motherhood. But as Dave just said, what does dishes...

have to do with motherhood, right? What is taking out, not the garbage, because that is a male, a masculine task that people understand, but what is teaching a kid how to ride a bike and knowing that you have to do that? That's one of the fair play cards I'm showing you. What does that have to do with motherhood? When you have to decide whether your child's adenoids are being taken out or not.

Why does a doctor just call the mother? Why does that have, why would that fall on the mother? Maybe the father or the stepfather or the partner has more information on adenoids. But that's what happens is that we make these assumptions. And so, and then it sort of falls on our kids too.

to look at this as, oh, I don't want to help with chores of the housework. So I always like to say, let's back it up. Maybe I didn't ask your producer whether this would be okay, but I think it would be fun, given what we're saying, to like play a little game about why this is, how kids should be looking at this, just because you just said that. Would you be willing to

We'd be totally willing. I mean, the only thing is that the kids have a dad who I kind of do a lot of the nitty gritty of the parenting. Also, I need to come back and circle back on the adenoid thing. I want to make sure I know what an adenoid is. By the way, I second that. And then the other thing is, you know, Dave and I do work.

in partnership on this home and as it runs now with two adult children and one well I guess three adult children now she's 18 so things are different than they were when they were things are different when they were little for sure totally let's play the game though oh yeah let's try it

Well, I think what you'll see what I mean about how to start having these conversations, especially what I like about it, even with your daughter, as she starts to partner with someone, right? We don't want to model. I was the person who had to do it all so that you have to do it all like that. I saw that because I had, um,

I didn't have a father really in the picture. So I really didn't really know that there was a Dave or someone who would even open the dishwasher to see if there was like a dish in there. I mean, sometimes even if you do have that male figure in the home, sometimes.

You're still the lady, the mom. That's right. The woman, the magical vagina is still doing. That's right. So let's play. I think these are the conversations. So we're looking at the fair play card. So if you step back, when I was starting to look at this issue around invisible work, the second shift, the only advice I had, Jenny and Dave was, if you're so overwhelmed, make a list.

If you're so overwhelmed, get help. And so I ended up doing that. I made this huge spreadsheet called the Should I Do spreadsheet. That was 98 tabs and about 2000 items of invisible work. And it took me nine months.

I did send it to Seth. I didn't get the response that I was hoping for. Did he know you were working on this? No. Nine months in 2012 over, this is early Facebook, where I was sending it out to women I didn't even know. I was getting responses. I got a response from a woman at the Jewish Federation of Arizona, I remember. And she said, I got your spreadsheet. I want to let you know that I'm not staying in my marriage. So I was like, whoa, this is...

I do way too much shit. Yes. So I was like, oh, thanks for the information. But so this was sent to Seth. I did a can't wait to discuss. I got the early version of like a pixelated monkey emoji with him covering his eyes. So learn very early on that, you know, no context is...

is not so helpful in a partnership. See no evil is sort of probably the easiest way not to engage. But what I did know from my day job, because I'm a lawyer, I work with the families that look like HBO shows succession. You should feel bad for me. But what I do for those families is I do use governance and organizational tools, as we were saying earlier, Dave, to bring structure together.

and grace and humor and some generosity to these really difficult succession decisions. So I thought, well, what if I use those same tools and build something for the home? So one of the first things I do with my clients before they start getting into, well, I'm doing this job or I'm going to take this over. You just have to sort of bring it back to the why. So that's what I wanted to do with the exercise. I just want to grab people.

All of these cards, I'm just going to shuffle them and I just want to stop at one. Which one are we going to get? I'm going to practice and each one of you will pick one or we can just do one for both. And then we can, well, I just want to show you how to have the why conversations that you can bring your children into because it's going to show you, spoiler alert, that this is the stuff we're talking about is so much more than chores and housework and how to run your home. It's about

really the core of like our humanity and our values. So this is great. So let's just, let's just, I'll just tell you, just tell me when to stop and we'll just see what we get. Ooh. Okay. Let's see what this one is. This will be Jenny's and then we'll do one for you, Dave. Okay. Jenny, you got gifts for family. Oh, yes.

So what I want to know, and there's a different card for gifts for VIPs, which is people outside your home, but family gifts. What I want to know is like, what do you remember about any gift giving from your childhood? From my childhood? I remember my mom and dad giving me gifts mostly. I don't really remember my siblings giving me gifts. Okay. Off the top of my head. And they were always...

At Christmas and birthday, just that. Okay. And do you remember, were you more excited for your birthday or Christmas? Did your family have big traditions around these? Yes.

Yeah. Or is it more like we just throw a dollar under the pillow for, you know, or something? No, it was Christmas. Definitely. That was the one to look forward to all year. Okay. What did that look like? So tell me a little bit about, do you remember any gift that you got in your childhood that you can remember that you're excited about? I remember my mom would always wrap things really beautifully. And so it was just, you just would shake them and try to figure out what was in them for the week leading up to Christmas. And

And I remember, this is so silly. I got a Michael Jackson record, which I was stoked about. Oh, my God. That would have been so good. Would you remember if it was Thriller or which one it was? Oh, Thriller. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

That would have been literally my favorite gift because we, Billie Jean, we used to like go to the roller rink. So a Michael Jackson record. And did you get that from your parents or Santa? Well, that's what I don't really remember. That feels like a sister gift. No, I feel like it was mom. It doesn't seem like a Mimi would buy you a Michael Jackson album. Maybe I'm mistaken. She did buy me some piggy slippers though. I remember that.

Oh, I love that. And I will say that maybe that's just a really good mother who's like, like right now I'm, I'm a good mother. I like woke my son up when Playboy Cardi's album dropped. So maybe she just, that was a big one. Yeah. Maybe this was like the, the Playboy Cardi album drop of, of the eighties. Okay. So that's well, and then how many siblings did you have? How many other people were getting gifts around that time? Yeah.

Three sisters in the house at that time. Oh, wow. So, okay. So in 30 seconds, I learned that Jenny had a robust family, that her parents were together, that Christmas was a tradition. So I'm starting to learn stuff about you, that you like Michael Jackson. So that's really fun. Loves MJ. Yes. Let's do it with you. Let's just keep going until we stop. Dave? Stop. Ooh, okay. Okay.

This one is hard questions. Oh, great. Hard questions. So anything off limits in your childhood? Like, how did you learn about the birds and the bees? Did you have any difficult conversations with your parents? Do you remember anybody? Did you just sort of sail through, have to figure it out yourself? Like, do you remember any adult actually answering hard questions for you? I'm just curious. No.

No, no. Okay. Elaborate a little bit. I'm trying to think of all the questions that I would have had. You didn't ask your mom and dad tough questions? Well, when my... I didn't either. I just later found out that my mom would embellish things. Give me an example. What do you mean? God. God.

Okay, so I remember I was like 12 years old and we were walking into a, it was like a Kmart or Roses. It was a Roses on the East Coast. And I heard a different language and I was like, oh, like, what is this? Or whatever.

And I was like, mom, what language is that? And she's like, I don't know, but it's illegal to speak a foreign language in America. And I instantly, like at a young age, I remember at 12 years old was like, well, that's false. That's not true. You knew she was lying. I was like, she's crazy. Wow. So I kind of like, you know, had that example. And then like the birds and bees talk.

I remember I asked my dad something, but my dad would always be like, you know, let's talk about sports. He would change the subject. Well, how the, how the Phillies. Yeah. The Eagles are, they're going to be good this year. So, I mean, I just kind of, and I had two, two older sisters, uh,

I probably had some conversations with them. That's my favorite configuration. From now on, if I had to start over, I'd only marry a man that had two older sisters. Yeah. I mean, and they just, I would ask them a lot of advice with girls. So, and they would always set me straight with that. Well, what do I do? And does this girl, this girl doesn't like you. Yeah.

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I was like 16. Yeah, I was. She was 16 when I was born. 16, 17. So she was like kind of my mother because she knew how my mother was. So she always kind of protected me. And she got married when she was like 19. So. Wow. Like I was always at her house. Yeah. And she didn't tell you that it was illegal to speak. No, quite the opposite. Right.

Right. She said, just don't listen to anything Cheryl says. Right, right. Well, it's actually funny. When I first met my husband, Seth, he said something like that to me. You know how women are. They just don't understand things. I was like, what are you talking about? I'm like, I understand a lot of things. But again- Which is like from my father has told me the same thing. Yeah, yeah. Growing up, my dad, he would be like,

"Ah, well, just don't say anything. And then you just don't cause a hassle because it's just, she's not gonna understand." And so then me growing up going like, "Well, why would I ever communicate something like that? They just don't understand."

And then as you parents, right? Yeah. How do you write? So you were just about to say that. So breaking those cycles. A hundred percent. Cause I, I see my parents cycle and I don't want that even though that they're still together to this day. I mean, it's, it's just something that was, you know,

My sisters and I, we just kind of were like, no. You're communicating to the end, sharing your communication to the world as opposed to the opposite of what you just said, which is that you were told not to say anything. So what a different what a cycle breaking move you're making just in the in the in the doing of this.

Right. And so I think it's, yeah, I was good. Oh, sorry. What were you saying? No, I was going to say like, I mean, I approach her with a lot of different questions and things like that, that I don't think my father would ever really speak to my mother about, you know, certain stuff like that. I love that. He's evolved. Yes. But what I love is that, you know, I'm not sure even if we were sitting together at a dinner that I would feel as close to both of you just as

by being able to ask that type of question. By pulling two cards. By just pulling two random cards. We didn't prep this in advance. I didn't even tell the producer that I was going to bring the cards out. But I think the spontaneity is so beautiful. And I think even for your own children...

A, people do like to hear your stories as they get older. Maybe if they're 12 or 13, my son would not want my stories right now, except for to use them against me. He uses all my stories against me. But as they get older, Jenny, like where your kids are now, you know, this idea that they can learn a lot about you, that this work we're talking about isn't just unloading the dishwasher, which is where we started. It's really our humanity. It's not just chores and housework. Yes, it's an organization, but a healthy organization has...

really important things besides just systems and who does what. It has boundaries where you respect the other person, you go to the other person, and it has communication, which is what you're talking about. And if you don't have all three of those things, then it really can't be a healthy organization. And that's what I'm hoping the next generation can learn. For sure. And I think it also has the component of

giving a shit about the other people that you work with basically in the house. That's, that's yeah, very true. Absolutely. And I think about the opposite of giving a shit. It's when, like you said, you have this silent expectation in your head and then that thing doesn't get done. You know, if I had picked a card, one of the ones that was really triggering when I would pick it and tell my story was about garbage because giving a shit to me is taking the garbage out.

I grew up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and Alphabet City. There were a lot of cockroaches and water bugs, and I would help my brother. My mother was a single mother, as I told you earlier, and she worked nights. So my brother had autism and other problems. So I would help him get to bed, get him water, go into the kitchen. I had my routine. I closed my eyes. She's

flick on the lights, the cockroaches and water bugs would scatter. Then I would go fill up the water in the sink because we didn't have water bottles back then. And then take it to him in his room. And what I remember about that was our garbage was just like a takeout bag. I got a knob and it would always like spill out over to like our little apartment common area. And so I think for me, when Seth would

As Dave was saying, when you wake up and maybe those dishes are not unloaded or you're waiting to see what someone else is doing. For me, in my mind, I hadn't told Seth this. He never knew this about me. But I would just see when the garbage would overflow or when the bag, the liner wasn't put back into the garbage. And I would become Seth's garbage stalker.

And I think it took me a while to understand that instead of just saying, put the liner back in, put the liner back in. Before you even like communicated. Right. And so he was like, you are literally a garbage stalker. And so I think it took the why conversations around fair play, where I'm trying to say, invest in the practice like you do with exercise. One of the most depressing surveys I ever did, I did it on purpose, was I asked over a thousand people what their most important practice is.

I did it very vaguely. And I got some interesting answers, as you can imagine, like all the way from like exercise to like ayahuasca. But not one of those thousand people said that communication was their most important practice.

And I did it on purpose so I could have that stat because I think it sounds important that nobody said communication. But I think what I've realized being a mediator for really difficult families and also developing the Fair Play system of discussing these hundred cards that go into running your home and family is that the key is really that communication is a practice.

And the more you can practice when emotion is low and cognition is high, the more that you get better at knowing how to communicate with Jenny. The more I would get you get better at knowing how to communicate with Dave. It's a practice. Just like the more you get better at progressive overload when you lift weights. What's a good, what's a good drill? Yes. You want to know the drill? Yeah. I mean, I,

You know, I work at golf. I work on drills. Like what is a good drill for that? I mean, that's a great point. Number one is I'll ask, I'll do it as a diverse, newly, there's three steps. Again, we didn't make the, we didn't know we were going to get here, but I think it's a fun way to, to play. Okay. So I want to know Jenny, if Dave had to say what your communication, so step one is knowing your own communication vulnerability. It's very important because it allows you to have humor and,

in the moment once you know it. So if Dave had to say about you, like reverse newlywed, what your communication vulnerability is, what do you think he would say? And I'm going to give you some options. What do you say? What do you say? Avoidance? What do you say? All or nothing? Like you never do this. You always do that. What do you say? Tone?

Like this is a nail on the chalkboard issue. Would he say ignoring where you just want the issue to go away and not bring it up? That's like another version of avoidance. Would he say verbal assassin, which is when you say things in a really nice tone? Like, Dave, you're the best. But, you know, did you know you're like the worst person?

Stepfather or his father of all time. I didn't know that it was gonna happen How'd you get this bad that happens a lot and to a lot of couples? So what would he say about you? I think I would have to pick all of them I am a known I would say that and I would say avoidance would be probably Do you have an example?

Um, she'll say things. I didn't want to talk about that because I didn't want to see your reaction, which is making it an assumption. But yes, have I done that in the past? Am I reactionary? Yes. Like, for instance, this ties back into household things. Yes. Can you help me fix the bathroom door handle? To which I might go,

Right now. Oh, that's the sound. The sound. And then you go, right now. And then she goes, yeah. No, no, no. Usually I say whenever you have time. Whenever you can get to it. Whenever you have time. But it feels like right now.

You feel like it's right now, but I'm not saying it. You're assuming that I want it done right now. Yes, you're probably right. Which again, I do love because that is all things that I think everyone is going to laugh at. But she wants me, in her brain, she wants me to be like, can you do this? And she was like,

yeah, I want to do it right now. I love it. I love it. I want to drill holes in a wall. I want to make this. Do that. And here's my notebook where I'm going to write it down and I will not forget. It'll get done in a timely manner. That is very, very, very common. But I do, but you see what though, what happens with avoidance.

With avoidant people, people where that's their vulnerability, then they'll start to say things like, well, I might as well just do it myself or I might as well not even bring it up to Dave. And then the rage and resentment start. So avoidant people, rage and resentment, you know, are pretty close to the avoidance because it doesn't go away.

sadly from avoiding it. It just means that it sort of, it just builds and then it can often explode at some, you know, later time. Yeah. Yeah. So, so again, so that's number one is knowing. So let's do the opposite. So Dave, what would Jenny say about you? You think of, do you remember the choices? Yeah, I know she'd say tone. Okay. I would say tone because I get anxious when

when you have that tone of like, you don't want to be talking about something. And it's like, you're like annoyed with me by even me asking the question. But I love you both ones, the tone that shows you're both. I'm super sensitive to sound. I think it's because I get a little like my tone gets loud because I'm trying to like get all these thoughts out and be defensive or like,

Trying to make someone understand so emphatically, my tone goes up and it doesn't stay the same.

Right. With sound effects like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shaking of the head to as he walks away is another like, oh, man, see, I should never even asked him to fix the damn doorknob. Right. OK, that that that can feel like nails on the chalkboard when someone's tone is is frustrating. And I think that that's again, what's what's fun about that number one step is that it doesn't mean it's going to go away.

But at least you, like, you know your, but you know your patterns. So that's step one. So for me, it's always tone. Like Seth would joke, you know, you could be saying like, let's go have sex. But he doesn't want me to say anything because it's always in the tone of,

like a drill sergeant or like nails in the chalkboard. He's like, I have no idea what you said. Yeah, not you. Your tone is just so bad. And then he becomes incredibly avoided. And I'm like, where the fuck did he go? And then he's hiding. So that becomes the pattern. ♪

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She would say I'm avoidant too. Yeah, okay. Because I mean, I think to a certain extent, everybody is like that. Because you just, in the moment, you don't really, I mean, because you try to like, am I really feeling this? Is it really worth it? Are my feelings just unnecessary feelings? Or should I really have a communication with this?

But what I like about that is if you're assuming that there's avoidance also, not assuming, but you're recognizing that there's avoidance also in some of the ways that can vacillate with tone to avoidance. What I think is interesting is both of those, avoidance and tone, have the same root of the vulnerability, which is what I like because it makes it easy for us to go to step two.

So the root of avoidance and tone is to not have the feedback in the moment. So there was something about that, that asking you to do the thing, right? And so when you're an avoidant communicator or you are a tone communicator, typically you're giving feedback in the moment, whether that's disappearing and having a different reaction than your actual reaction or you're,

initially reactive, like you said, or why are you bringing this up now? It's hard for avoidant people and people who have tone issues to do something in the moment that's productive. So let's just say that. So step two is to recognize what your vulnerability means about the types of patterns you get into. So I'm going to say that that's a feedback and not a productive feedback in the moment pattern. And so then step three, if you're looking at that program, how to get better at golf,

The third step would be, you know, whether it's great that you do the podcast together, but because you're doing this, you already have this idea of structured conversations when emotion is low and cognition is high.

So do you do a family check in a communication check in right before the podcast or right after or when you're in a place where you have short term reward substitution? That's what we call it as economists, like you're bringing alcohol with you or cookie dough. But this idea that there are times for avoidant and tone people to invest in low emotion, high cognition conversations.

And so that's what I would say. You want to get better at golf? Make sure you have that 15 minute check in a week. Right. When you say we're in, we're highly, we have a lot of cognition right now and very little emotion. So you kind of say, and when you recognize it, it's kind of like my brain imagines things like it's like a snow globe, you know, in that moment, it kind of gets shaken up and your triggers are flying all over the place.

And you're trying to manage them as best you can. But maybe in that moment, if I fail at my reaction to what she's asking me,

Is it like we're saying, like, take a time out? Well, let's get to this later. You can even use the word snow globe. I love that. Like this was not, I need a snow globe moment. Or really just what Seth and I did in the beginning to practice this. And now we're better, except for, you know, you can always regress. I regressed yesterday. I have a teenager problem.

Seth's ownership is of his, all the homework and he wasn't on his tutor. And I like lost it. I was like, you're the worst. You know, I went verbal assassin, like, you know, but typically, typically we're, you know, we've been practicing fair play for a long time. So typically, um,

I said, I did my tone thing. I'm sorry. You know, and then I took a break. But typically what I like to do is write things down. So the person that is going who may have that tone issue or doesn't want to approach something in a moment. What's nice is if you know that there's going to be accountability and trust.

in that check-in later on, if you feel that safety and you can agree to that, then if over time what happens is you can write things down and not deliver that feedback in the moment.

which is actually really cool because it's happened to me many weeks where we'll come to sit down about something and I'll have things in like all caps. Like this happened to me one week where it just said yellow rag in all caps. And I literally had absolutely no idea. Like,

complete senior moment. Like I had zero, I had no idea what yellow rag is, but I was thinking, oh, that's good. It's an all caps. That's like me yelling on the page. So it would have avoided the yellow rag argument because it obviously wasn't relevant to me two or three days later. However, maybe the fact that the dishwasher is never unloaded is still bothering me. Right. It's good to have a weekly check-in. I think the family as a whole, I think like it

we are four people, like sometimes five. We have boyfriends here. But we need to have a family unit check-in. I mean, I'm having a staff meeting next week.

Like we need to do that for the family. Yeah. But I like for you to do it both with each other first. So you're aligned because sometimes when the other people sort of come in, it can derail what the unit, your, your joint values are together for how, as Jenny said, because there's another home out there with different values and you co-parent, it's nice for you and Dave to align each week on your priorities. And then of course you can bring the other family,

members in as well. But I think saying that this is a practice, you know, one of the funny things to me is when I do it as an analogy to exercise, like you would never go into your doctor's office and they said, like, do you feel fit? And you'd say, yeah, I like exercise once in 2005.

But that's sort of how we view the home. Like I had a conversation once about the dishes. It's like, what are you talking about? We talk about having those conversations all the time, but we don't actually have them. You don't actually have them. Also, many of the conversations are going on in each of our individual brains.

And I'm like, wait, are you thinking something that you want to tell me? Because a lot of the times he and I will both be just going about our business, getting all of our work done and having these important conversations, but not actually verbalizing them with our partner. That's really funny. The invisible conversations in the brain. And it is true because you do sort of assume that you've said it.

I don't know. It's a very strange thing about how you communicate with a partner because you do sort of assume that either they should know or that you've said it already or that you said it once that you wanted the garbage liner to go back. And then now I'm going to hold it against Seth

for the rest of his life. It's just, it's not fair. Again, like if I hadn't exercised for a week, I wouldn't expect to get back on the treadmill and be at the same level of performance as even if I took a week off. But yet we have these conversations again in our head. And then once maybe a year with our partners, and we expect that we're going to have relational health. And I think that's what's so hard. So many people now are so focused on functional health

And they're obsessed with these metrics. But I'm going to just say one of the most interesting things I ever learned in my Fair Play journey was a study from Robert Waldinger's project at Harvard. He studied men. And this is important for you, especially Dave, to listen to. He studied men over 75 years. They've been looking at men and they controlled for everything, smoking, poverty, ethnicity, genetics, everything.

And what they found was there was actually really only one predictor of whether men were alive at 85. And that was the quality of their relationships at 55. So everyone's like, Dr. Atiyah and this, and I'm going to maximize my VO2 max. What I wish men especially understood was that instead of working so hard in your VO2 max, if you want to live, if you want longevity, if you want life and health span, invest in the quality of your relationships. Yeah. Yeah.

And that work is some of the time the most difficult work.

I think it is the most difficult work. People always say, but this work needs a trigger warning. Like this episode will need a trigger warning because I think so many people will say, I can't talk to my partner about these issues. Yeah. And it seems silly because it's just how do we divvy up the household responsibilities? But emotions can really charge the conversation and cause avoidance, cause tone, all the things that we're talking about.

So how do we not avoid the conversation? Well, the first thing I just want to say is back to that formula. There's a secret formula, right? It's boundaries, systems, and communication. But I want to say one more thing about communication because you just brought up avoidance. And I want to just say I thought this was really interesting. During the pandemic, given that –

Fair Play had launched in 2019. So I was arguing at Davos that year, right before the pandemic, that the home is an organization and that our home and our work spheres are not that different. And then bizarrely, like two weeks later, our home and work spheres were not different at all. But during the pandemic, there was a group that someone referred me to out of the UK that was called the reasons I hate my partner and kids during COVID. Yeah.

It was this big, like monster, like graphic design. And this person alerted me to this woman who wrote in this chat, it's 27,000 members at the time. I wonder if it's still active. I wonder what it evolved into, but it was 27,000 members. And this woman said, if my husband dies during COVID, it's not going to be because of the disease. It's going to be because of me.

Yeah. There was a lot of like separation and divorce. Oh, for sure. For sure. But what was so funny was that I reached out to her though on DM and I said, hey, I'm a researcher on, you know, gender division of labor and resentment and communication. I want to know, how do you communicate with your partner about domestic life? And this woman wrote back, I don't communicate with my partner about domestic life. This is my safe space.

So can we just reflect on the fact that publicly threatening to murder her partner in front of 27,000 strangers felt safer to her than talking directly about these issues? Wild.

That's how hard this is. So I just want everybody out there to understand it's not just a, why can't you discuss who's taking the dishes? We started with a perfect example of like, is this really about who unloves the dishwasher? No, the presenting problem is never the real problem. It's not about the dishwasher or anything like garbage or even the hard questions. This is about how we want to relate to each other and our humanity. And that's why I said it has to be a secret formula of investing in a practice because

of these systems, the communication check-ins, those emotion is low, cognition is high. Yeah, I like that. And also boundaries, which is you respect each other's time enough so that you're willing to sit down. That's what people forget. Like nobody wants to be the nag or they're like, it's time for our check-in and it sounds terrible. Both people have to say, you know what? We respect each other's time enough.

that we're both there, we treat it like an important meeting, and we really don't miss that investment time. You want to get that on the calendar? Yeah. Yes. I love it. Weekly check-in. We need our weekly check-in. Yeah, how do... I'm going to do a notebook too. I'm just going to put notes. Okay. No, I like this idea. I love it.

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for a chance to win. Visit iHeartCountryTrip.com to learn more. Get this. Adults with financial literacy skills have 82% more wealth than those who don't. From swimming lessons to piano classes, us parents invest in so many things to enrich our kids' lives. But are we investing in their future financial success? With Greenlight, you can teach your kids financial literacy skills like earning, saving, and investing. And this investment costs less than that after-school treat.

Start prioritizing their financial education and future today with a risk-free trial at greenlight.com slash iHeart. Greenlight.com slash iHeart. Our kids have said to us since we moved to Minnesota, we are far more active than we've ever been anywhere else we've ever lived. Moving to Minnesota opened up a lot of doors for us. Just this overall sense of community and of values that, you know, Minnesotans have. It's a real accepting, loving community, especially with two young kids.

See what makes Minnesota the star of the North. New residents share why they love calling it home at exploreminnesota.com slash live. For people that are listening, how do we find the balance with household duties in our marriage, like in our home? Like, how do we find it? What's the key? There is one important key that, again, I've been studying this for 10 years now.

you have to stop looking at 50-50 as any sort of metric for a marriage. It literally is this 50-50, we're equal partners.

I don't know where that came from, but it's highly, highly toxic because it means that you're in the scorekeeping disaster of like, well, I did the dishes last yesterday, so you should do them today. It just it becomes really, really horrific and toxic. And so we have to burn this idea of 50-50 and we have to move instead forward.

To the way that it Marion and her Mahjong group does it or corporations do it. And what we found over 10 years, and this is now actually we have it in a quantitative study that's published in the Journal of Women's Mental Health, that women's burnout and men's relationship satisfaction go up if you move to an ownership mindset.

So what do I mean by that? Well, you have the Fair Play cards. And again, for people who can't afford them, we're a nonprofit. We have them at fairplaylife.org. You can put them in the show notes. People can find all of our resources. But what we would do with these is understand that I'm giving you the resources to have these conversations. There are 100 cards that make up a home organization. God forbid, hopefully you don't have to play with them all because some of them are wild cards like death or

Or an aging parent where you'll have to come back to the table. Most people are playing with kids about 75 cards. Without kids, you're playing with about 50, 55 cards. Or maybe it could be in the 80s, the amount of cards you're playing with. So you're starting with these tasks. So the goal is not, oh, you hold 40 and I hold 40. Like that is absolutely not what we're looking at. What we're looking at is the key insight is...

How did mustard get in your refrigerator? I'll give you, I'll tell you what I mean. By asking that question with each card. So not, that was the groceries card. But for each card, I asked how did the proverbial, how did mustard get in your refrigerator? The old way was typically, and especially in co-parenting, because it's really hard when you're coming in. Typically, it was that the woman married to a man was saying to me, well, I know that Johnny, my second son, likes yellow mustard.

not anything else with his protein, otherwise he chokes. So in a project management framework, we call that conception. In the workplace, we're paid big bucks to notice new things. So that's the conception part. Then women were the ones reporting that they monitor the mustard for when it runs low and that they get stakeholder buy-in from their family about what they needed on the grocery list. We can map that to what we call the planning phase.

Over 10 years, what we realized was that men were stepping in at the next phase. They were going to the store to go buy the mustard, Dave, but you're bringing home spicy Dijon every fucking time. And I asked you for yellow and- It says yellow mustard on the list. Yeah, what are you dumb? And then all of a sudden, here's my verbal assassin. Can you not read?

And then we're trying to make it better. It's better. And so then what happens is we're losing again. It's not about the mustard, but we're losing the thing an organization needs, which is accountability and trust. So if you believe me that the home is an organization, then you have to believe me that the two things you can't lose is accountability and trust.

And so to restore accountability and trust, the one key is to move away from that 50-50 and to move towards ownership. If I have dishes this week, I have dishes.

As my sons say, that's from the secret oils that go in the dish drawer all the way to unloading that dishwasher and going away. And carrying through my mistake if it doesn't happen. With laundry, I carry through many mistakes. I keep it in there. It smells like crap. I forget to put it. I have to redo the cycle. I'm carrying through lots of laundry mistakes when it's my turn. You don't hold these forever. You re-deal at your check-in. And then you just keep on going. And so, like I said, I loved...

I'm a student by heart. I love doing homework with my sons. It brought me so much joy until my kids turned 13. And I looked at my husband. I said, you either have two choices in a low emotion, high cognition conversation, not with that tone. But I basically said, you can homeschool them or you can keep them at these schools. But I need you to take ownership of the homework card. It is too hard for me. It's too triggering. It's ruining my relationship with my sons.

I'm using verbal assassin with them. I'm calling them mediocre. I'm saying, how are you, my child? I'm doing the same things that I did with you. It is not going well. I'll keep it with Anna. It could always be a kid split as long as they're ownership. So I own Anna.

And he took over for the two boys. It doesn't mean, I don't even know who's holding which cards right now. I mean, we know who's holding which. I don't know who's holding more cards. I just know that right now, that was the hardest thing for me to hold. I said to him, I will take dishes. I will take garbage. I will take buying gifts. I will take hard questions. I will take all of these other things because I know how hard homework is and schoolwork is for our two sons.

And so that is how you have those types of conversations. So right now he's owning it. And you're really suggesting to let go of that 50-50 mentality. I love that idea.

Because you know what? When I was on my book tour, Seth had a hundred of the cards. Yeah, right. When you're filming, maybe Dave is holding a hundred of the cards. Yeah, so that in the mornings, maybe he's sleeping in because he worked really late. You're holding more of the cards. But as long as in advance, you know what your responsibility is. It sounds daunting at first because I'm asking you to invest in looking at a hundred cards and deciding how to build your deck.

But it's so valuable. We call it the present bias. You don't want to do it now because you think it's going to be easier later. But I promise you the investment now makes it so much easier later because I know who's doing what in my family. And I can take accountability when I drop the ball. Like our minimums, I talk about the minimum standard of care. Just make sure there's a minimum standard of care. For Seth and I for dinner, it's just having one vegetable,

Somewhere around, like maybe it's an iceberg piece of lettuce. I grew up on bodega food. So he said, you know, when you do dining, when you do meals, I noticed that it's Lucky Charms is the only green I've ever seen. It's a green shamrock. And that's what our kids eat for dinner. Maybe make it so there's a little bit of vegetable adjacent food. And when he makes dinner, he'll do like the Kraft mac and cheese and just like steamed broccoli. But we have a minimum standard. So we understand the page we're on.

And then, you know, if you exceed it, great. You want to make the gourmet meal, go for it. But also he's saying to me in advance, it's not acceptable for you to keep feeding our kids Cocoa Pebbles for dinner, which we pretty much did for a whole year. And so we had these conversations and I didn't know he was raging about it internally because he's avoided and he didn't feel like he could say anything. And he is like he hated the way our kids ate.

I think I've heard you mention, I think I read it in the book, the mental load. That I know I will go to work and I feel as if I'm still fully running the household, raising the kids, and working at the same time. And I know every woman out there who is

you know, working and raising a family feels the same way. Like it does, it never stops in our minds. How can we get any freedom from feeling like we have to bear the load of all the mental load of running the house and making sure things are in the cupboards that they need and that their doctor's appointments are scheduled and handled and the orchestration of just the, you know, logistics of running a family and a household. Well, here's the beauty.

and this is what we learned from the study that we just published, ownership alleviates the mental load. If you know that Dave had dishes for the week or he had dinner for the week, then you're not thinking about it. You're not asking him to go get the mustard because you're still the one getting the stakeholder buy-in for what mustard you need. So I'll give you just a quick example. So we had this couple during the pandemic and

She was sick of the mental load for the caregiving, what we call caregiving and magic cards. Her partner is actually really great at what we call the house cards. He was great at dishes. He was really helpful with the mental load of dinner. But as we said earlier, those magic cards, like the hard questions and whether or not your child's learning to ride a bike, what we call informal education, Santa, what we were talking about earlier with gifts.

caregiving, like medical adenoids or your sinuses back to that, whether your child's adenoids and their sinuses are being taken out, they were falling on her.

And so what she said was that she needed more help with that, those cards. She felt the mental load of taking care of his in-laws, of remembering the Tooth Fairy, of remembering gestures of love, which is bringing the flowers to the recital, felt too much for her. So she wanted him to own some of those cards. So the first one he decides to take on is the Tooth Fairy.

And I'll explain why this is important about the mental load. He takes on the tooth fairy in advance in one of their check-ins. I love this man, Richard. And so what happens? It was this daughter's second tooth. The tooth fairy doesn't come. So what they recognized was that she had been holding the mental load up until that point, meaning before fair play, he would have said, it was your fault. You didn't remind me to put the dollar under the pillow.

That's the mental load. Yeah. Right. He was going to he was going to get up and do it, but she's going to have to set the alarm. She's going to have to remember. And it does. No, no. But but because he owned to fairy, this is what she tells me happens. He says, I messed up. He takes accountability. So she's like, wait a second. I didn't have the mental load. Something went wrong. But instead of having to fix it, I'm hearing something different from my partner. He's taking accountability.

So she's gives him the space to say, okay, it's still your mental load. I'm going to let you carry through the mistake. So he does. And this is the fun part. He tells me he emails truth fairy at gmail.com. He writes like, Hey, what's going on? You know, the truth is still onto the pillow. Like, did we not put it in the right envelope? Do we need more neon colors? Like he writes this, this letter in front of his daughter. What he didn't expect was he was actually going to get a response during the day. He gets a response.

From Tooth Fairy at gmail.com. So thank God for whoever's doing that mental load work out there saying, sorry, supply chain issues. I'm really late at picking up teeth. Yes, please leave it in a bigger envelope. And then the dad added, oh, when she's late because of these issues, she brings double the money. Oh, wow.

That's a nice fix. That's that's what I'm saying is these are small changes. But that mental load was on him. He made a mistake, just like we all do. But he took the accountability to say, I own this. And so I'm going to correct my mistake. Right.

They have this cool story now. We now know that ToothfairyGmail.com is like a real person. That's great. And that's what I mean. That's how the mental load starts to shift. When you empower somebody to own a task, to say, I trust you. And if mistakes happen, for that person to say, I love you enough. So I'm not saying, well, if you care about it more than I do, you should do it. Instead, it's you care about this so much, so I should do it.

That's the mentality that sort of fair play starts to, when you practice, it starts to change. - Babe, we gotta get these cards. - Yeah, they're fun. - I like the cards a lot. I was down to do a couple more.

I think they need to live like in the living room. Yeah. A hundred percent. I love the idea. I mean, we, we need to have a family check-in. We need to do our check-in. Yes. Yes. Yes. And maybe do, do a couple more with each other, please. Like before you even look at them, like spend the time with the cards, just telling some more stories before you say, this is the system we have to get into. I loved your stories. I actually thought your stories were really interesting.

beautiful and profound. And I feel like, again, being with you for an hour, I would know you more now than if we had been at a whole dinner party together. You know, I really do feel like the hard questions that we learned and

those dynamics and, you know, what it looked like to, to shake your presence and to get your, you know, to get your Michael Jackson album. Like those are things that, you know, that becomes part of our joint connection and humanity because we have those stories together. That's so true. This has been really fun. Really good. I'd love to talk more about ownership and stuff like that. There's so much. There's a lot. There's so much. There's so much. Before we let Eve go, do you want to ask her the question?

What question? The question at the end of every I Choose Me podcast. Oh, oh, yeah. I think I know this. You can do it. You do it. Eve, what was your last I Choose Me moment? Hmm. I'm going to say it was the active putting on, which I do every morning, of my necklace that is my initial.

Nice. I don't have any mom charms. I don't wear my kids. I don't tattoo them on my body or wear them on my neck. I wear one initial. It's mine. And I choose me because I want my kids to know that I have a life. I have a name. I have an identity outside of my role as their parents, outside of my role as being the fulfiller of Seth's smoothie needs. And so for me, the I choose me is the reminder for myself.

It's putting my own initial physically on my neck every day. I love that so much. I've never heard that one. Blueberry. No blueberry moments here. Gosh, thank you so much for spending your time with us. We really appreciate you and you're so fun. I love you guys. You're great. All right. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye.

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