25
votes
Fair Play, a gamified way to talk about domestic responsibilities
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- Title
- I Played a Card Game With My Fiancé to See Who Does the Most Housework. It Didn't Go As Planned.
- Authors
- Paola de Varona
- Published
- Feb 28 2023
- Word count
- 2035 words
A few months ago, I read the Fair Play book. When I read it, there were lots of parts that I didn't agree with (or made me feel uncomfortable to read about how poorly many men treat their partners when it comes to sharing domestic responsibilities). However, it has sparked a really good discussion with my partner and has lead us to make some changes for our parenting/household responsibilities.
I wanted to post it on Tildes as I though there might be a few people here in relationships who might also benefit from reading this. Would also love to hear about any other resources that others have found that are good for working through this issue.
The gamified concept feels a bit silly at first, but we quickly got used to the language of "holding cards". We didn't actually play the game as it is described, but looked through the cards that she includes and talked about which ones were applicable to us and which ones were a bit silly.
The importance of owning a responsibility entirely (she calls it CPE, for conception-planning-execution) makes a lot of sense to me. It doesn't always apply to every card in our life (for example, we both enjoy grocery shopping and have a good system to share this responsibility). But it can be super powerful when it makes sense, and addresses the conflict that can happen between partners when one does all of the conception/planning for a responsibility, and the other one tries to step in to do the execution.
The book is definitely written for a cis/het audience, which I think rubs some people the wrong way judging from the goodreads reviews. It is written for the woman as the reader (there are suggestions on how to get your partner to play the game with you). In my case this didn't apply. I started to feel grumpy about this but realized that probably how it works for a lot of couples who could benefit from this conversation. Anyway, if you do read the book, try to keep an open mind and get to the part where you are talking with your partner.
It is ironic that the emotional labor of getting the partner to engage in this conversation is still settled on the hypothetical woman in the relationship
I read this book and it opened my mind to new ways to think about chores and how to share them.
The book points to a few sources of repetitive conflict in relationships. One is where a partner who is only responsible for executing but not defining, conceptualizing or planning the task can come to see the partner as a nag, or can perform it in ways that are entirely different from how the planning partner intended it. If you yourself see a task as needed and do the planning yourself, you are much less likely to forget to execute it. Also it solves the problem of unequally distributed mental load regarding necessary chores, errands, childcare, socializing, travel etc.
I thought the book made a very useful point in only allowing distribution of responsibilities that both partners see as a priority. If you are the only one in your relationship to see something as important to get done, that rightly falls on you. On the other hand, the list of typical household tasks to be discussed with your partner means that that partner is less able to simply be unaware of the work being done. Sadly it can be common for people who have work done for the benefit of their household to not know the specifics of what is being done, and to not have any idea how much effort it takes to achieve the desired results.
This book is not at all a magic bullet but it is one path toward equitable sharing of domestic work.
I think this can be a huge part of it.
I remember being a kid and having no problem doing chores that I could properly own. I was very happy to clean my room, for example, because I fully understood the process and could take complete control of it. However, I found it very stressful to do even simple tasks (like make a bed after I slept in it) when I visited someone else's home because I didn't know how much I needed to do or how I should do it. This was such a source of stress for me that I tried to avoid visiting other people because I would spend so much of the visit just worrying that I was not cleaning up after myself correctly.
My partner tells me (and his mother reiterates it) that he had a lot of the same issues growing up. He was very nervous about doing things incorrectly when he was a kid, and it caused him a lot of stress. When he got older and shared spaces with others, he would volunteer to do the worst chores no one else wanted because it meant that he could fully own those tasks; but with more common tasks (even if they were arguably much easier and more pleasant), he had a much harder time knowing how to approach them and would often "get in trouble" with roommates for not doing them the right way.
Early in our relationship, I could see echoes of this in the way we load the dishwasher. When we load it by ourselves, we each load it a different way, and both ways are absolutely fine. The problem arose when we both loaded the dishes together; our loading styles are not fully compatible, so if I was loading plates in one section and I saw that he'd put a plate in a different spot, I might grab it and move it to my designated plate area to make more room. I just saw this is me "owning" the plates, while he could "own" the bowls or whatever; but he saw it as me quietly fixing something he has done wrong (I guess because this is how adults handled his mistakes when he was growing up), and it made him more hesitant about loading dishes in general. I also noticed that he would copy my loading style, but he didn't do it very well because it's not his style and he didn't understand the decision process behind it; he did a much better job when he just stuck with his own style. (Don't worry, this is a thing we've talked about, and he is much more confident with the dishwasher now.)
I saw on twitter this very true adage: In every relationship, there is one person who stacks the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and one person who stacks the dishwasher like a racoon on meth!
(In our relationship, we go through cycles where each of us thinks we're the architecht, and the other the racoon. Both strategies have their strengths.)
Is that referring to like making a grocery list? Those sound to me like terms that I would expect from work projects, not simple chores and household tasks.
Not just a list, it can be "doing the laundry" where the person doing it needs it gather laundry, sort as appropriate, put in machine, wash, swap, dry/hang, fold and put away.
But if I've picked up all the clothes and made the "do laundry" plan, my partner may not have thought all the steps through. (Or vice versa).
If I leave the clothes in a basket unfolded I haven't finished the task. "I don't know where they all go" or "I don't know how to fold them the way you do" are excuses. And they're ways to avoid finishing the execution. The only reason I don't know where they go is because my partner has done all that labor this whole time.
I may not be explaining it clearly but it's the difference between "tell me what to do to help you out"( which means "give me a list of tasks" which is yet another task for the other person) and "I'll take care of these tasks".
It is not as simple as making a grocery list. It's been a few years since I read the book, but it caused me to rethink a few ideas. In the end my husband and I chose not to play the game distributing the cards for tasks. I am however happy I saw and interacted with the author's insights and perspective through this book
(I linked to the Slate post about the book since it seemed fairly representative of how the game works, but I don't think I necessarily agree with all of her critiques.)