THE CARD GAME THAT COULD SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE.
This card game could help save your marriage
Eve Rodsky nearly ended her marriage over fruit. Already late to pick up her eldest son — her car littered with things familiar to any working mother on the school run: a client contract on her lap, a breast pump for her new baby on the passenger seat, a package awaiting postage in the back, an endless To Do list running through her head — she was floored by a text from her husband, which read: “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries.”
Overwhelmed by always being the “shefault” parent, responsible for every aspect of the busy household she shared with her equity investor husband, Seth, and the couple’s two children (they have since had a third), Rodsky, then a 35-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer, pulled over on the side of the road and started to cry.
Instead of opting for divorce, however, she set out on a “quest” to revolutionize the domestic imbalance that, according to her research, plagues almost every marriage, regardless of wealth, class or nationality — and somehow always disproportionately affects women.
Rodsky, who worked at J.P. Morgan before setting up her own philanthropic advisory consultancy, dealing with highly complex families, was spurred on by the thought that if even she, with her legal background and years of organizational management experience, was unable to communicate her domestic burden to her husband, other women had to be feeling equally tonguetied.
Her starting point was an enormous spreadsheet she sent to every woman she knew, including family friend Reese Witherspoon, asking them to fill it out. It was titled S--t I Do. The result is a book called Fair Play, which intersperses Rodsky’s personal experiences with seven years of research — drawing on everyone from neuroscientists and marriage counsellors to hundreds of fellow parents — to create a system of family management, set out like a card game.
Rodsky suggests using physical cards (a set of 100 is available from her website, Fairplaylife.com), each of which is marked with a household responsibility, ranging from taking out the bins to packing school lunches to buying Christmas presents. Couples deal them out via nightly, weekly or monthly “check-ins,” which can be as short as 15 minutes and are best accompanied by a drink, she suggests.
Crucially, the card holder takes responsibility for the entire task until the cards are re-dealt — that means its conception, planning and execution. Rodsky gives her children’s sports activities, as an example.
Once her husband took on that card (Extracurricular: Sports) he became responsible for every aspect of it, from signing consent forms and preparing post-activity snacks to coordinating pickups and drop-offs. “Eight hours a week I got back in my life from just (handing over) that one card,” she says.
Released in November, the book, which Witherspoon enthusiastically endorsed on social media, quickly became a bestseller. But it has taken on a whole new meaning since lockdown, which has heaped additional domestic pressures predominantly on women. (Rodsky says she has come across one U.k.based Facebook group called Reasons I Hate My Husband During COVID with 27,000 members.)
Above all, campaigners fear school closures will rollback women’s progress in the workplace by 70 years, with many unable to fulfil corporate responsibilities alongside childcare and home-schooling.
At the beginning of lockdown, Rodsky sent out another survey asking couples how they were coping.
As we catch up via Zoom, she reads me some responses: “Even though we’re both working from home, I end up doing full-time childcare all day so Dad can get his work done,” wrote one woman. “Meanwhile, I’m falling behind in my job.”
Another replied: “Can somebody please explain how to home school the kids, take care of all the meals, and also work full time from home without adequate support?”
The answer, according to Fair Play, is this robust yet adaptable system of household management underpinned by constant communication. Something akin, in fact, to the way in which most offices operate. “Not treating our home as our most important organization, to me, is our biggest failure (in the) 21st century,” Rodsky says.
Fair Play is revolutionary in two ways: first, in acknowledging that women have to be the ones to encourage men to come to the table.
Secondly, it recognizes that, for most couples, a 50/50 split of domestic chores isn’t realistic. Rodsky points out there are “ebbs and flows of life, where some people lean into their careers and some people lean out of their careers.” She considers it a win if women can hand over even one card.
During lockdown, she and her husband have upped their 15-minute weekly check-ins to daily, which are dispensed with each night over a tequila before settling in to watch TV.
For women currently buckling under the strain, she urges them not to let go of their rung on the career ladder.
“Do your best to hold on right now,” she advises those on the cusp. “Because things will get better. These are short-term issues.”
While she acknowledges the pandemic will be devastating for many women’s careers, she is (as befitting a blond, Harvard-educated lawyer with a penchant for pink) a consummate optimist.
“I think we can harness that (frustration and anger) into a new movement for women,” Rodsky says. “One of the points of Fair Play was to make the invisible work of women visible. I do think there is nothing better than a global pandemic to have that happen.”