Fairness in Marriage: Part 2

A defense of Fair Play

This is the second post in a series on equity/fairness/equality/scorekeeping in marriage! Catch the first here and the third here.

In the previous post, I talked about fairness in broad strokes: couples will always differ in the value they assign to marital outcomes like sex, childrearing, and spending. Past a certain threshold, unexamined disparities tend to erode the marriage, as do efforts to reduce disparities that involve reducing your partner’s well-being via yelling, pouting, begging, sneering, whining, blaming,¹ guilt-tripping,² and so on.

There are some practices that help a couple manage these value differences effectively. I mentioned two ways of altering outcomes with respect to these imbalances, and as I said in a Note:

One of the most consistent mistakes different couples make is trying to get their partner to care more or less about a source of conflict, rather than to ask for particular behaviors or make doing those behaviors more appealing and/or lower cost.

I’m devoting this article to a book that was designed to give wives a means of making preferred behaviors lower cost to their husbands: the much-discussed book Fair Play, and I’ll additionally discuss the broader question of household chore division vis a vis marital fairness.

Fair Play is a formalized, off the shelf example of an attempt to structure a productive response to a values difference between couples, specific to concerns about household chore disparities. I haven’t read this book; what follows is an analysis of secondary sources. If you want to criticize me for writing this piece under such conditions you are welcome to and feel free to stop by my other piece of the same type.

Fair Play has gotten a lot of press in recent years, including a favorable New York Times write-up, a mention as part of a piece on the inevitability of gender roles, and perhaps best known around these parts, a post on divorce that heavily features the book. The book is designed to give couples a way to split up tasks that they agree on and then leave the other alone about. This solves several problems at once, when done appropriately.

It encourages spouses to agree upon the most basic ways to do a task, not unlike work site signage and rules on how to use and maintain necessary equipment. This systematizes chores and reduces micromanaging on how they’re done. When done right, it reduces the likelihood that a task will be done in so low-effort a way as to have not really been done at all.

It places all the responsibility for the beginning, middle, and end of a task with one person, which reduces the likelihood of blockage or responsibility shifting. To give you an idea of what that looks like: while it could work for some couples, when hanging Christmas lights, to have one person get out the ladder and the lights and have the other half to go up the ladder and put them on the house, for most couples, the chore would end up in limbo, half done, with one or both people sniping at each other over the status of the job. If one member of the couple did all of these steps, they would get to decide when they’re up for the job and how they want to execute it, no cross talk and most previous friction points completely removed.

It divides these tasks - cards, using the vocabulary of the book - between couples according to their agreed-upon preferences, with an eye toward not leaving one member of the couple with an outsize number of cards without very good reason to do so.

The book is certainly not a panacea, not even for chore disputes, nor is it perfect. It’s gotten quite a bit of criticism from across the ideological spectrum. Some of this focuses less on whether it works and whether it, in and of itself, is a fair ask of both parties, per the NYT:

“A lot of it reinforced what you’re trying to undo, which is how much of the labor is on, typically, the wife to read the book, to consolidate the book, to manage the partner’s emotions,” she said. “It seems like an enormous amount of mental and emotional labor to get the project going.”

If you’re interested in my perspective on the above, it is that if you care more about an outcome, you will always have to decide how to manage that value, whether you are single, dating, cohabiting, married, or divorced. It’s not fair per se - this is but one of many pinch points where values difference risks tipping itself directly into marital conflict around fairness. It is however reasonable that if you want something, you have to be willing to shoulder some responsibility for getting it, up to and including more responsibility than even loved ones who want it less.

Olga Khazan (a longtime favorite Atlantic contributor) notes some more common pitfalls with the approach -

“To name just a few of 10,000 examples: Rich was in charge of cleaning the floors, but he forgot to do it unless I asked. We hired a cleaning lady. He forgot to pay the cleaning lady. The cleaning lady texted me to ask about getting paid. I would task him with taking Evan to a doctor appointment (which I had made), and he would forget the diaper bag.”

‘It could be that ‘you and your partner have very different underlying goals and intentions,’ Daminger said. ‘And I think if that’s the case, then systems for dividing up tasks better are probably not going to be effective.’

It’s true that Fair Play cannot overcome a spouse’s refusal not only to play ball but to check the calendar for the time of the game, find their keys, and get in the car to travel to the pitch. Gottman’s research notes that this is more common in husbands and in extremes³ a legitimate threat to your marriage. That’s an incredibly difficult, unenviable situation to be in.

There are variations of it too, everything from “technically well-meaning and usually good-natured spouse who can’t bring themselves to care enough about what they agreed to to complete it” to “spouse who shuts down, ignores you, or even berates you when you bring up a specific concern about housework.”

People have a few options in response.

1. Yell/blame/be sarcastic/sneer/call them names/beg/whine/pout/attempt to make them feel guilty. If I had a partner who ignored me when I asked them if they could help me with the dishes, I’d do this too. Readers may recall that it was fear of exactly this among other dynamics that drove my long standing fear of marriage. However, this response is more effective for letting off steam on your end (and it will not do so perfectly) than it is for solving problems. It’s easy to forget that it’s an unkind thing to do, because whatever your partner did first was so unkind. This type of intentional punishment tends to make a situation worse, even if your partner is being extremely unfair.

2. Go silent. This will allow the behavior to continue, perhaps with a side helping of resentment on your part because you are angry at them for treating you this way - especially a risk if you’ve brought up the behavior before with no change.

3. Make a good faith attempt to tell them how their response feels and ask for something different. If you’re not a shitty person you probably try this at least once. It’s worth trying as often as you can, because of the items on this list, it is most likely to improve your relationship with your partner, whether or not the outcome itself changes.

4. Divorce. This is not a joke. If you have a partner who persistently shows a lack of interest in addressing (not removing, not fixing, but addressing) a value difference, and your good faith best efforts have led nowhere, I do not believe that marriage is so sacrosanct that you should sign up for being dismissed and ignored until death do you part.

And this last is almost definitely a felt source of contention from the other major criticism type that this book tends to get. Many people who dislike this book when they read about it online, especially as in the above post, worry that it is facilitating unproductive female behaviors around household chore division, up to and including increasing “frivolous” divorces. The strongest critics claim that use of the book itself is an indication that something’s gone wrong.

As evidence: I’d just about forgotten about Fair Play when a post on divorce and the book started cropping up on my substack page. It ignited a multitude of arguments strongly in favor of or strongly against the author’s point of view. As my friend (subscribe to her, she’s excellent) said, it was a scissor statement of a post.

Perhaps the central dividing line statement was this:

By bringing his list of work to our conversation, it felt like he was doubling down on the fact that he DID his part. It was the paycheck. Everything else was really a favor he would do to try and keep the peace. Like doing the dishes was somehow my love language.

Read the whole thing if you like. Full disclosure, my initial read was fully in sympathy of the author. It wasn’t until my partner read it and responded negatively to the above that I realized that the evidence provided was not entirely clear cut - there isn’t actually evidence that what this author’s husband was asking for was “I shouldn’t have to do any of this, because I work, but I can make occasional, limited exceptions” rather than “If we are dividing tasks, I would prefer that my paid work be accounted for, and I’m worried that at present it is not.”

There’s a lot of information in people’s strong reactions of this type. Many people, particularly men, seriously underestimate the complexity and demands of full-time parenting and household management. There's a strong and persistent misconception that stay-at-home parents have abundant free time, and that directly links to a broad societal lack of respect for the critical work they perform. Stay at home parents are NEETs in name only (,,,NINOs?): they perform work requiring significant emotional intelligence, strategic planning, and continuous problem-solving. Women are not immune to this.

I’ve noticed that the people who react most negatively to Fair Play - men and women alike - tend to be people who claim to appreciate directness and clarity in communications. I think this may be because such people are a) more likely to be sympathetic to men, regardless of their gender, b) more likely to conclude in response to the above substack post that this system is naturally unfair and/or unreasonable to a partner who does paid work, c) more likely to be dismissive of the value of unpaid work, and perhaps most of all d) more likely to be sensitive to criticism, and to see this book as facilitating rather than ameliorating it.

Such individuals often say that only marriages that are in trouble do any kind of scorekeeping, and accuse the book of being exactly that. This, in my opinion, is like saying that only cancer patients take chemotherapy, which kills cells. If you are in a bad enough place you definitely need the right remedy, and ignoring imbalances past a certain threshold is not a workable solution. Every couple has some imbalance, and many couples have significant ones. Even the latter are absolutely workable, including via discussion and compromise. If that’s scorekeeping, call me a fucking referee.

The book is almost irrelevant when held against the deeper worldview in play. A dismissive attitude towards domestic labor—particularly tasks involving meal planning, child care, and household maintenance—is felt by all who perform it; it’s part of the negative reaction to books like Fair Play. I’ve recently seen a reviewer (who I won’t bother to link to because I have nothing nice to say about said writing) accuse the book of simply encouraging female neuroticism.

It’s ugly to treat a desire for a clean home, well-fed family members, and an active social life as simply the result of neurosis: to do so is more or less a declaration that nothing stay at home moms do is all that important. In this model, such women are simply foisting their low-level mental illness on other household members when they ask others to participate in their completely unnecessary make-work chores.

I’ve noticed a lot of people like to blame feminism for widespread disrespect of the work of motherhood, and I’ve noticed that the people who agree give themselves significant passes to dismiss the value of home making, caregiving, and cleaning, describing them as more or less completely unnecessary behaviors made up by women with nothing better to do. If it’s not clear, this is a very direct suggestion that stay at home moms aren’t doing anything worthwhile.

It’s also not uh particularly effective as a persuasive tool or anyone who sees the good or importance of these things. Once again for emphasis: you can’t talk people out of valuing what they value, and you really can’t do that by calling them neurotic idiots.

Perhaps most of all, it’s completely inaccurate. Cleanliness is necessary to at least a basic standard - you wouldn’t work in an office where no one cleaned the toilets if you had the option to work the same job at one where they did. Childcare, done well, has the potential to produce capable, agentic children, and it’s in many ways harder work under those conditions. Everybody needs to eat, and people usually care about both the contents of their diet and its impacts.

None of this is to excuse unrealistic domestic labor expectations - those absolutely exist - or inappropriate behavior in the service of getting more equity from your partner. What I do think is missing is that many people do not have an appropriate way to ask for a better-shared burden with respect to the home sphere, and that Fair Play can fill that niche, when correctly applied.

Ultimately, I’d defend the book as a potentially valuable tool for a hard problem. A more accurate understanding of the necessity of domestic labor would bridge several painful gaps in our personal and societal lives.

1. “You never help me at all” “You’re so selfish” “You care about the kids more than you care about me” etc etc

2. “You’d have sex with me if you really loved me”

3. so, worse than Khazan’s description