The reality is that you need a system for a household, which ideally grows organically out of the kindness and care partners have for each other, but sometimes needs a bit of structure and accountability. On the internet, the sexes are typecast into *unbearable neurotic nag* and *stonewalling deadbeat*, but most people fall somewhere in between and need some instruction to meet in the middle. Modern marriage is a novel institution and people need new tools to make it work outside of “we are equal” or “we are so different that we’re stuck im the same gender roles from 1643.” But this conversation implies openness and love and once terminal resentment is installed, I can imagine bringing up “Fair Play” is a one stop ride to the courthouse.
Yes, I think that there are some differences that cannot be resolved, some marriages that can’t be saved, and that most marital improvement structures aren’t so good that they can be applied with unrelenting negativity and be expected to work.
No adult is sufficiently immature that household chores meaningfully impact the success of their marriage, it is always a cypher for deeper incompatibility. Trying to save a marriage by moving around who does the dishes is stupid. If you can't manage that basic level of interpersonal conflict without outside help, you shouldn't be married to each other. Every married person who turns to books and posts like this would be better served booking a couples retreat to smoke ayahuasca and answer the hard questions about their marriage.
Having admit I view the entire discourse as misguided, I am annoyed that you've turned a portion of the rhetoric into a strawman in a transparent attempt to justify your misandry.
"Men are saying I'm neurotic because I want a clean home for my children!"
No, there's a huge space between "basic cleanliness" and "millennial gray HGTV bathroom with decorative towels you aren't supposed to use". You admit that the partner who cares more about a thing should shoulder more responsibility for it, but then you immediately start haranguing men for not caring about the things these hypothetical women care about. In any given situation either the man or the women will be correct about how clean the home needs to be, and your unwillingness to admit that a certain subset of women wildly overdo it is intellectually dishonest. The entire point of the discourse is that attempting to change what people care about is a losing proposition.
That actually demonstrates why the whole discourse is futile, actually. People don't bitch about chores because getting the chores done is actually too much to handle. They bitch about chores in an attempt to force or manipulate their partner into caring about arbitrary things, to convince themselves of their control over their partner. If you've reached that point your relationship already needs reworked from the ground-up.
I don't remember my initial reaction to the post you link to, but I do recall that it shifted to "strongly negative" in a way that surprised me a bit when I got to the author's comments, which I read as unreasonably uncharitable (tbf I don't think I would manage to discuss any discourse about any of my relationships well let alone a divorce on substack). What the whole ordeal cemented for me was a sense that the conception of these things as "work" - that is, obligations that you have no inherent interest in performing - is the thing that is poisonous, both in marriage and in courtship generally. Because once you've reached that point, any disagreement obviously threatens resentment.
This in turn made me more dismissive toward some arguments against Fair Play. I truly cannot grasp the pettiness of not responding to your wife asking you to do dishes. Fair" != "equal," esp. when "equal" is being measured by your own yardstick. It truly is not that big of a deal to pick up the slack! Maybe the issue is that I do naturally gravitate to performing acts of service in relationships, so it's just weirdly visceral for me to see that kind of behavior.
The obvious answer to me (before your last post on fairness) re: values divisions like housecleaning was that, assuming people are acting in good faith, the clean partner will probably find their minimum standard is lower when they're not mad about it, whereas the dirty partner will see that their minimum standard is higher when they're not doing the work, and the former will ease up while the latter takes up more work. Ofc, that's not really a solution, because methods like FP are meant for situations when that sort of natural burden sharing is not taking place.
I guess I don't really explain the obligation thinking bit explicitly here - I'm saying, you gotta find your way to a mindset where you're doing these things, at the very least, to make your partner happy, not just to avoid them being mad.
Similar issue in courtship is asking people out - initiation discourse is really resentment driven because anyone who doesn't like doing it conceptualizes it as a sort of tax.
Several people have mentioned the scene from “The Breakup”:
I want you to want to do the dishes!
Why would anyone want to do the dishes?
What strikes me is the communication failure. For her, it’s not about his attitude around the dishes per-se, but that she reads his willingness to execute on the task as a gesture of care for her. And even this is possibly only half true - a man that executes on the little things is someone she can trust. The dishes are a proxy for her environmental discomfort. But because she turns it into a criticism of his behaviour (aka nagging) he gets defensive and turns it into an argument about the dishes themselves
Neither of them is connecting with where the other is at. Perhaps because they’re both thinking of obligation (tax) rather than how to bring the other person into a good space where they can respond in kind
Sure, if it’s this reasonable a disagreement I think it falls under my example re: housecleaning. When I typed out the picking up the slack comment I was thinking about the mentioned husband who “refuses to play ball.” Being a himbo and not doing tasks consistently or up to snuff I get; actually protesting communication is another thing.
I don’t know why I was struck by the image of a guy giving his spouse the silent treatment, reading back over the post today.
I was going to link a certain Twitter thread about another book, but given your part near the end about female neuroticism, something tells me you’ve seen it already.
Upfront I’ll say I value domestic work highly, it has always been difficult for me to do consistently and it makes me really mad that some people have others open to helping with it, but won’t manage other things to make it easier for them.
That said, there is a specific type of person that *is* kinda “in their own way” with these things, and the book referenced in the review twitter thread (“how to not hate your husband after kids” or something like that) did have some good points for that type of person
Different book, different review, but I hope that bad discourse around books like this don’t prevent people from trying them out. I don’t think “female neuroticism” is a problem or something that is being stoked. I do think there is a certain type of woman that says she wants a certain type of life, and makes it hard for others to give it to her, thus she benefits from advice ~targeted at neurotic women
Doing this reading (about parenting, childcare, relationships, etc) has also made me think about how I might also be neurotically in my own way
The reality is that you need a system for a household, which ideally grows organically out of the kindness and care partners have for each other, but sometimes needs a bit of structure and accountability. On the internet, the sexes are typecast into *unbearable neurotic nag* and *stonewalling deadbeat*, but most people fall somewhere in between and need some instruction to meet in the middle. Modern marriage is a novel institution and people need new tools to make it work outside of “we are equal” or “we are so different that we’re stuck im the same gender roles from 1643.” But this conversation implies openness and love and once terminal resentment is installed, I can imagine bringing up “Fair Play” is a one stop ride to the courthouse.
Yes, I think that there are some differences that cannot be resolved, some marriages that can’t be saved, and that most marital improvement structures aren’t so good that they can be applied with unrelenting negativity and be expected to work.
No adult is sufficiently immature that household chores meaningfully impact the success of their marriage, it is always a cypher for deeper incompatibility. Trying to save a marriage by moving around who does the dishes is stupid. If you can't manage that basic level of interpersonal conflict without outside help, you shouldn't be married to each other. Every married person who turns to books and posts like this would be better served booking a couples retreat to smoke ayahuasca and answer the hard questions about their marriage.
Having admit I view the entire discourse as misguided, I am annoyed that you've turned a portion of the rhetoric into a strawman in a transparent attempt to justify your misandry.
"Men are saying I'm neurotic because I want a clean home for my children!"
No, there's a huge space between "basic cleanliness" and "millennial gray HGTV bathroom with decorative towels you aren't supposed to use". You admit that the partner who cares more about a thing should shoulder more responsibility for it, but then you immediately start haranguing men for not caring about the things these hypothetical women care about. In any given situation either the man or the women will be correct about how clean the home needs to be, and your unwillingness to admit that a certain subset of women wildly overdo it is intellectually dishonest. The entire point of the discourse is that attempting to change what people care about is a losing proposition.
That actually demonstrates why the whole discourse is futile, actually. People don't bitch about chores because getting the chores done is actually too much to handle. They bitch about chores in an attempt to force or manipulate their partner into caring about arbitrary things, to convince themselves of their control over their partner. If you've reached that point your relationship already needs reworked from the ground-up.
I don't remember my initial reaction to the post you link to, but I do recall that it shifted to "strongly negative" in a way that surprised me a bit when I got to the author's comments, which I read as unreasonably uncharitable (tbf I don't think I would manage to discuss any discourse about any of my relationships well let alone a divorce on substack). What the whole ordeal cemented for me was a sense that the conception of these things as "work" - that is, obligations that you have no inherent interest in performing - is the thing that is poisonous, both in marriage and in courtship generally. Because once you've reached that point, any disagreement obviously threatens resentment.
This in turn made me more dismissive toward some arguments against Fair Play. I truly cannot grasp the pettiness of not responding to your wife asking you to do dishes. Fair" != "equal," esp. when "equal" is being measured by your own yardstick. It truly is not that big of a deal to pick up the slack! Maybe the issue is that I do naturally gravitate to performing acts of service in relationships, so it's just weirdly visceral for me to see that kind of behavior.
The obvious answer to me (before your last post on fairness) re: values divisions like housecleaning was that, assuming people are acting in good faith, the clean partner will probably find their minimum standard is lower when they're not mad about it, whereas the dirty partner will see that their minimum standard is higher when they're not doing the work, and the former will ease up while the latter takes up more work. Ofc, that's not really a solution, because methods like FP are meant for situations when that sort of natural burden sharing is not taking place.
I guess I don't really explain the obligation thinking bit explicitly here - I'm saying, you gotta find your way to a mindset where you're doing these things, at the very least, to make your partner happy, not just to avoid them being mad.
Similar issue in courtship is asking people out - initiation discourse is really resentment driven because anyone who doesn't like doing it conceptualizes it as a sort of tax.
Several people have mentioned the scene from “The Breakup”:
I want you to want to do the dishes!
Why would anyone want to do the dishes?
What strikes me is the communication failure. For her, it’s not about his attitude around the dishes per-se, but that she reads his willingness to execute on the task as a gesture of care for her. And even this is possibly only half true - a man that executes on the little things is someone she can trust. The dishes are a proxy for her environmental discomfort. But because she turns it into a criticism of his behaviour (aka nagging) he gets defensive and turns it into an argument about the dishes themselves
Neither of them is connecting with where the other is at. Perhaps because they’re both thinking of obligation (tax) rather than how to bring the other person into a good space where they can respond in kind
Sure, if it’s this reasonable a disagreement I think it falls under my example re: housecleaning. When I typed out the picking up the slack comment I was thinking about the mentioned husband who “refuses to play ball.” Being a himbo and not doing tasks consistently or up to snuff I get; actually protesting communication is another thing.
I don’t know why I was struck by the image of a guy giving his spouse the silent treatment, reading back over the post today.
I was going to link a certain Twitter thread about another book, but given your part near the end about female neuroticism, something tells me you’ve seen it already.
Upfront I’ll say I value domestic work highly, it has always been difficult for me to do consistently and it makes me really mad that some people have others open to helping with it, but won’t manage other things to make it easier for them.
That said, there is a specific type of person that *is* kinda “in their own way” with these things, and the book referenced in the review twitter thread (“how to not hate your husband after kids” or something like that) did have some good points for that type of person
Different book, different review, but I hope that bad discourse around books like this don’t prevent people from trying them out. I don’t think “female neuroticism” is a problem or something that is being stoked. I do think there is a certain type of woman that says she wants a certain type of life, and makes it hard for others to give it to her, thus she benefits from advice ~targeted at neurotic women
Doing this reading (about parenting, childcare, relationships, etc) has also made me think about how I might also be neurotically in my own way