It was mostly a good time. I say mostly because being 8 months pregnant is just hideously uncomfortable. My normal self would think nothing of walking around a museum for 2 hours. My current self took advantage of every available bench, but it turns out you can still see a lot of art while sitting on benches, so there we go.

My husband drove us into the city on Friday afternoon. We stayed near Grand Central (courtesy hotel loyalty points…this was a cheap baby moon too). We took in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is open late on Fridays. I spent quite a bit of time looking at American landscape paintings, and then at a special display of historic clocks. The angel-bedecked Christmas tree is always spectacular.

We then took a cab across Central Park to go to the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus concert on the upper west side. I sang with the choir for 9 years when I lived in Manhattan, and I definitely miss it. Young (good!) voices can produce quite a tight sound, which was particularly apparent during the men’s production of Biebl’s Ave Maria. Humorously, there are still a few singers who joined around the time I did…which means they are not young. But the definition is fluid!

After, my husband and I went to a Mexican place near our old apartment. Then back to the hotel where I thought I would not sleep. I can barely sleep in my own bed right now but after a 5 a.m. wake-up, I managed to get back to sleep again by 6 a.m. and then slept until…8:30. Not bad!

We went to breakfast at the Gemini Diner, which we used to frequent as a young, childless couple. I think we ordered the same things we always did. It was fun to reminisce, and to see which businesses were still around as we walked through our old neighborhood. Then it was back in the car to drive to PA.

The kids were not exactly thrilled about our taking this trip but now I have no plans to be gone overnight for roughly the next 4 months. So it was good to get away for a bit…

One of their guests, Andy Hill, was speaking about his various side hustles, and Joel and Matt asked how he found time for these amid his family duties. Hill mentioned that he and his wife had decided that each of them would get two nights a week to do their own thing. On the nights he covered, she could walk out of the house at 7 p.m. or so (she’s mostly home with the kids during the day) and do whatever she felt she didn’t have time for during the rest of her life. Likewise, he got two nights as well, which he often used for his side projects (like his podcast).

While two nights a week might not work for many families, this is a version of a practice I’ve long suggested for helping people maintain their sanity: give each parent one night off per week. It can be easy to decide that you “can’t” do X, Y, or Z after having children, but this is often not true. It might not work to take an hour long class at the gym every single work night, but if you have one you particularly love, it’s quite reasonable to go to that Thursday boot camp. Likewise, it’s probably not fair for someone to go on a 2-hour bike ride with a group every single week night, but once a week? Why not?

By trading off, with each person getting one week night off per week, each of you can keep up with at least one time-specific interest outside work and family. And that can make life feel more rich and full.

Now, there are caveats to this. Both partners need to have relatively predictable jobs, and jobs that don’t generally involve a ton of evening activities or travel. Party A might be willing to commit to covering a night for Party B, but if Party B is constantly working late on short notice, or might be out of town 2-3 nights per week (in which case, Party A might note, Party B is already off from kid duties multiple nights), this can lead to resentment.

This is why we’ve never done the trade-off. My husband generally is around some non-zero number of weeknights per week, but he does travel for work, and not necessarily on the same nights every week. So we’ve taken another approach: arranging for regular childcare. Back in NYC, we always had a sitter come on Tuesday nights so I could go to choir. Here in PA, Thursday is now choir night, and so we have later coverage that night. This can work too. Or you could arrange for childcare and both take the same night off. It’s more expensive, but perhaps more efficient.

Do you give each parent one night “off”? What do each of you do with the time?

In other news: Jasper has more box office predictions for this weekend. The Lion King will take the first place spot with $94.5 million in domestic sales (down 51 percent from its opening weekend take). Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will open to $45 million, and take second place. Spider-Man: Far From Home will take in $11.5 million (down 46 percent) and Toy Story 4 will hit $10 million (down 36 percent). Crawl will hit $3.6 million in order to round out the top five.

He also predicts that Aladdin and Spider-Man: Far From Home will both pass $1 billion total worldwide revenue this weekend. Tune in next week as we check his predictive powers….

My husband and I both work, and while we have a high degree of control over our schedules, we both travel.

All this means that there are various moving parts and logistics. I don’t mind thinking about moving parts and logistics, but I get resentful if I am the only one thinking about moving parts and logistics, and if dealing with them seems to be entirely shoveled into my mental load.

So, in the past few years, my husband and I have started having semi-regular calendar meetings. We sit down with our calendars and look at the next few weeks.

We note travel and potential travel. Mine tends to be set at least a few weeks ahead of time. His shifts more, but one upside of the calendar meeting is that I can help him direct those shifts by making sure he has complete information: Wednesday would be OK to be gone, but Thursday would make for a logistical nightmare, so he can express a preference that a meeting happen on Wednesday. If it looks like we will both be gone for a night, or one of us will be home, but late, or leaving very early in the morning, we make sure G (nanny) has these dates for her calendar as potential overnights. My goal is to have all overnights flagged well in advance.

We note special kid events. If one party absolutely cannot be at, say, a kid performance, the other party knows to protect this date as much as humanly possible. We have an upcoming specialist visit for our daughter that involves traveling 2 hours away. My husband is planning to do this, but I’ve also marked my calendar to try not to schedule anything that can’t be moved that morning.

We look at kid events we might need to schedule. The elementary school has parent-teacher conferences on 4 days in November. Only one of them really worked for both of us but because I got on the system shortly after it opened I was able to get conference times back-to-back for that window.

(I could do this because the time the conference schedule would open was on my calendar. Our preschool, on the other hand, sent a Sign-Up Genius for conferences while I was on a 6-hour flight and my husband was in meetings and by the time I landed a lot of the times were gone…sigh.)

We look at weekends that look logistically…complex. Sometimes these turn out, pleasantly, not to be as complex as imagined. We are staring down one Saturday in November that involves a choir rehearsal for me, a flag football game, a swim meet, and our rescheduled family photos (which were rained out). It seemed possible that the football practice, the swim meet, and my rehearsal would be simultaneous, thus requiring another driver, but in fact the swim meet is in the afternoon, and I can drop the 9-year-old off at flag football on the way to rehearsal so everyone else can just linger in their jammies much of the morning if they wish.

We also note weekends that are less logistically complex. If there is an open day, or at least semi-open day, we might decide to keep it open for a family trip or activity (like a bike ride). Without this discussion, I wouldn’t know to suggest a proposed playdate happen on a different date.

We discuss current thinking about upcoming family events and vacations. During our last calendar meeting (Sunday night) we discussed Thanksgiving and Christmas and our options on those.

And then — the key — we discuss fun stuff too. We ended the most recent calendar meeting with a date night on our calendars and a text out to a sitter to get coverage. Planning can be tedious, but planning enjoyable things we can anticipate is a lot less tedious. Making sure we plan things we are thrilled about alongside things we aren’t thrilled about means that the planning meeting itself is a lot more pleasant than it could be. I highly recommend making this a regular part of all calendar discussions.

One side note for Myers-Briggs fans. As you might imagine, I am a “J” (which, colloquially, means a planner). At the recent celebration dinner for my husband, his colleagues were joking about how hard it was to find anyone more “P” than he is. This is not 100% true, but it is true that he is often looking at three different flights right until the last minute. In any case, he is not a natural planner in the way that I am. But if we didn’t plan and schedule, life would be a lot more stressful. Just because someone is not naturally a planner doesn’t mean that they get out of planning when groups of people are involved. We all give a little here and there.

Do you have calendar meetings in your family? At some point, do you start having calendar meetings with the kids? Ours still rely on us driving and signing them up for things, so I mostly ask for input and we talk about things we’d like to do over dinner and in the car and then my husband and I sort these out during our meetings.

This difference in attitude was creating a lot of tension in the house. He said he’d discussed why he wanted to pay closer attention to time — to make sure they were spending it how they wanted, and not doing things (e.g. housework) that they didn’t want to do, and that they were getting enough sleep — but she was resistant. “I know why,” he noted. “She hates living like [she’s] watching the clock every minute. I also do not enjoy that but the alternative is that I don’t get to do everything I want.”

He knew that they were different people and it was unfair to expect her to manage her time exactly as he would, but he wondered if I had tips for resolving this not-uncommon challenge.

I agree that it is not uncommon for spouses to handle time differently. Indeed, shortly after receiving this note, I got another note from a woman who felt that her husband was spending time in disagreeable ways. In this case, he said “yes” readily to all sorts of things that she knew were not top priorities for him. As a result, he wasn’t getting to do stuff that she knew he did want to do. He accepted this as the way of the world, but she didn’t like this defeatist outlook. What could she do to convince him that he could make time for the things he wanted to do?

The funny thing is, these differing views of time were probably among the things that drew these readers to their spouses in the first place. I’m guessing that the man who wrote me once loved his wife’s free-spiritedness. It was probably all kinds of fun to date someone who’d be like “hey, let’s go to Atlantic City tonight just for kicks.” As for the woman who wrote about her husband, she probably loved how agreeable he was. She wanted to go for sushi — they’d go for sushi! Especially if she’d dated really stubborn sorts in the past, that could have been a breath of fresh air.

Then you get married, and live together for a while, and realize that these differences can become really annoying. People like us (and if you are reading this blog, I’m guessing you’re in the “us” camp here when it comes to time) can know that, rationally, we are on solid ground. If you want to live a fun life with small kids, you have to accept a certain amount of planning and structure. Babysitters don’t just randomly drop by to work when you want them to! You also eventually must learn that going to bed early is how grown-ups sleep in. It’s tempting to tell the free spirits to just grow up. Likewise, it can be frustrating to listen to someone whine for YEARS about how he just can’t get to the gym and then watch him say yes to some community organization committee that you know he doesn’t care about, because he’s telling himself the story that busy people like him just CAN’T go to the gym. Meanwhile you, who know how to say no, are running marathons.

However, if there’s anything I’ve picked up from all the relationship books I’ve read over the years, it’s that saying I’M RIGHT, YOU’RE WRONG is not a winning argument. It has probably not won an argument in human history. Instead, if you plan to continue to be in the relationship, you need to do a few things.

Focus on your own happiness. Our spouses’ quirks most irk us when they prevent us from living the lives we want. So make sure you get what you need to be happy. I can argue that my husband should not agree to do things for work that I don’t really think are necessary. But it’s more effective to make sure we have enough childcare that I can exercise, and read, and sing in my choir. Then he can deal with the consequences of his obliger nature. So for the two readers mentioned in this post, in the woman’s case she should just keep pursuing her goals, and maybe her husband will at some point come to be inspired by her. She could also sign the two of them up for a race as a way to give him accountability, or schedule joint sessions for the two of them with a trainer. As for the man who wrote, he is a grown-up who can decide his own bedtime. Spouses do not have to go to bed at the same time every night. Maybe 2-3 nights per week he could stay up late with his wife, and go to bed early the other nights. Alternately, he can say “listen, I will stay up late talking with you, but then you need to take the kids tomorrow for an hour so I can nap. I seem to need more sleep than you.” She might not view this as a great trade-off.

Think in terms of the other person’s interest. For the man with the free-spirited wife, I think he hated feeling like a nag, constantly trying to get her to agree to talk about plans. This inspired her resistance, since she wanted to feel off the clock. I suggested proposing a time every week to talk about the schedule with the agreement that he would absolutely NOT talk about the schedule at any other point, as long as she agreed to that one planning meeting. In other words: “If we can figure out what we’ve got coming up during a 30-minute chat on Sunday night, I will not keep asking about it.” She might resent the 30-minute meeting. But it’s probably better than the constant nagging.

Play to your strengths. It’s quite possible that the free-spirited wife didn’t want to hire extra cleaning help because it would mean organizing it and arranging it and scheduling it, all of which might make her feel weighted down. Her husband could simply announce that he would handle all such logistics. Then it’s just a matter of cash and I got a sense that this was not the problematic variable.

Appreciate your spouse’s nature. While a spouse’s differing personality can be a source of tension, it can also be a source of joy. I shop from lists and never deviate. My husband will come home from the grocery store with gorgeous bouquets of flowers. I love the flowers! But I would never buy them. If we are hosting a party, he will actually go back to the store after I’ve gone to re-shop, because he thinks I’ve underbought. He’s probably right. I’m the one demanding the Sunday night planning meetings. He hates the Sunday night planning meetings, and grumbles about them. But then when we have them, he gets excited about the restaurant reservations we make for date nights. Ideally, these things can complement each other.

Do you and your spouse have different approaches to time?

]]> https://lauravanderkam.com/2017/12/reader-question-spouse-arent-page-time/feed/ 8 6993 https://lauravanderkam.com/2017/11/podcast-discussion-thread-marriage-resentment/ https://lauravanderkam.com/2017/11/podcast-discussion-thread-marriage-resentment/#comments Tue, 21 Nov 2017 09:45:52 +0000 http://lauravanderkam.staging.wpengine.com/?p=6958 Today’s Best of Both Worlds episode covers the hot topic of marriage and resentment. A listener wrote in describing her family situation, which has some similarities to what Sarah and I both experience. Her husband works longer and less flexible hours than she does. She understands that, but she cares about her career too, and she occasionally feels like she’s running the home front while her husband works. Which is not what she signed up for! So how do you manage those occasional feelings of resentment?

It’s a good question. We started this episode as marriage therapists will often have people do, by describing how we first met our husbands. In the throes of early love, we are more inclined to be generous to people. This is a mental state that is then helpful for analyzing current situations.

I don’t think either of us have 100 percent sorted this out. But there are a few things that can help.

Make sure you get what you need. What makes life feel good for you? Sarah described thinking through the weekends when she covers her husband’s call, and making sure that she got in (for example) two workouts, a nap, some reading time, and a social occasion. One is less inclined toward resentment when there are positive things going on. It’s less “woe is me” and more “hey, I’m having fun going out with my friends; I’m sorry my husband is missing this because of work.”

Spend to get to 50-50. We now have evening childcare because I was tired of handling so many evenings by myself when my husband traveled. I still do a lot of childcare in the evenings, but now there’s almost always an extra set of hands. I don’t feel guilty about it at all. I’m still around! I’m not outsourcing me, I’m outsourcing my husband’s half of all this. Extra help costs money, but if one party is working long hours or traveling, hopefully their compensation is commensurate with those extra duties. If not, that is a different discussion, but somewhat outside the scope of what we covered in this episode.

Communicate. We discussed Sarah’s “household summit,” in which she and her husband discuss plans and parenting decisions and such. Other people can’t read our minds, and if issues are approached in a non-accusatory manner, sometimes both parties can brainstorm good solutions.

Nurture the relationship. Anything that helps keep that spark of early love can reduce the resentment factor. So plan in date nights, or date weekends, and make sure to keep the physical aspect of the relationship going. As frequently as possible!

We welcome any other strategies for reducing the resentment factor. Also, a surprising number of our new episodes are now based on listener questions, so please keep those coming!

While Sarah and I recorded this episode a few weeks ago, based on a listener question, its release today allows me to rope in an article that’s been making the rounds. Numerous readers sent me Gemma Hartley’s piece for Harper’s Bazaar on “emotional labor.” Her opening anecdote is about asking her husband to arrange a cleaning service as a present to her. It wasn’t so much about the clean floors as it was about having someone else ask for recommendations, call companies to get bids, choose one, do any paperwork, and book them to come. She didn’t want this all on her plate, because she felt it would be exhausting. So she requested it as a gift. Her husband called one company, balked at the price, and then cleaned the bathrooms himself, which she felt misread the whole situation, since she suspected she’d have to ask him to clean the bathrooms again the next time. She wrote about feeling like a nag when trying to get her husband to do stuff around the house. He was willing to do whatever she asked, but she resented having to ask. Or as we put it in the podcast, “Having to ask for things is hard,” particularly for women who are not socialized to ask for things. Shouldn’t he feel equally motivated? If he did, wouldn’t it ease her burden?

I love Gemma’s writing (and have been thrilled to be cited by her in the past! See this and this ). I would say I have mixed feelings on this article, which is more about household management than what I tend to think of as emotional labor. I’d define emotional labor more as the relationship maintenance that women often do: remembering their mother-in-law’s birthday, for instance, and reminding their husband to do something about it. Or being the parent who’s home in the afternoon and gets dumped on when a kid had a bad day at school. By the time Dad shows up at dinner the kid has worked through it. I think there is something else to be written on that, but whether the topic is household management or emotional labor, Sarah and I hear over and over again that it’s easy to fall into gender roles, and that women who feel like they married “woke” men still wind up fighting time-worn battles.

I do know in married, heterosexual couples, that women do the majority of household management. (A not unrelated point: In such couples, men also traditionally work longer hours for pay. Indeed, total hours worked — both market and non-market labor — is, over the population, shockingly similar, though obviously society does still tend to respect labor that earns wages more). Many men will “chip in” or “help out.” The issue Gemma is getting at is that household management takes brain space in a way that simply folding the laundry after being directed to do so does not. Using up this brain space can detract from other things. Time spent thinking about the kids’ activity schedule is time not spent coming up with your next article idea (except for Gemma and me…it is. Because we write about this stuff. But anyway).

As Gemma notes, her husband is not a bad guy. She notes that he always does the dishes. She mentions that she does the laundry. This struck me as a relatively fair split; both are tasks that need to be done constantly, so many couples might do well with splitting them. As for the opening anecdote, and her anger that her husband only called one company, it struck me that she might be a maximizer married to a satisficer. That’s not an inherently gender-based thing (though women may be socialized to have higher standards around the house). When my husband and I decided we wanted a cleaning service, I also only called one service. Are they the best? The most economical? I have no clue. But they do roughly what I want done for what I felt was a reasonable price. I failed to see how anyone’s life would be improved by my taking several more hours to meet with other services.

Anyway, one way to advance toward a 50-50 split is to lower your standards.

Another, which we talk about in the podcast, is to stop fretting about asking. It need not be a source of guilt or exhaustion. While women often feel they should do something if someone asks, which means they feel bad about asking, men might not feel the same way. If you believe the “men are from Mars” psychology, they will say no if they don’t want to do something, so you may as well ask. No harm, no foul. Or you could simply announce a fair split, and let them react as they will. “Saturday will be my morning to sleep in and Sunday will be yours.” Or “I will be staying at the office late on Tuesday to get through some important stuff. If there’s a night you would like me to cover for you, please let me know.”

The other is to realize you might be closer to 50-50 than you think. And one way to do that is to realize that there is always a danger in the sorts of personal essays that run in Harper’s Bazaar. We don’t get the other side. The other person can’t defend themselves. This is one reason I rarely complain about my husband in what I write, even though I feel like there may occasionally be legitimate things to complain about! Because I’m sure if he were given to writing personal essays, he could find legitimate things to complain about too.

In fact, I’ve taken the liberty of writing the essay he could write if he wanted to complain about my skimping on household management/emotional labor. If he wants to submit to Harper’s Bazaar, it’s ready to go!

“First, let’s talk about the dry cleaning. I do not wear 100 percent of the dry-clean-only clothes in this house, but I am definitely the only person visiting the cleaners. Laura acts like she doesn’t even know where the dry cleaner is. She actually threw a fit when she needed an outfit for a speech and it was still at the cleaners, as though she were not an adult capable of driving herself over to the cleaners and paying to pick up her clothes, as people do at a commercial business. It isn’t a private club that only I am capable of accessing.

“I read Gemma’s article in which she mentions her husband leaving the gift wrap in the center of the room for two days. Only two days? Items appear in places in our house and then sit there for months. Years. Right now there is a broken office chair sitting in the master bedroom. Laura said something about getting a new chair for her office, and then she put the old one up there where I trip on it on the way to the bathroom every morning. I think she thinks she’ll try to re-cover it like she’s the Pioneer Woman. She will not actually succeed in this project. But will it be moved? I’m guessing it will still be there at Christmas. Also, her sink will still be broken then. Instead of buying a new pair of faucets and calling a plumber to install them, she just started using my sink. And leaving stuff by my sink. I finally asked, very nicely, what the cardboard box sitting next to the sink was. It turned out it was the contact lenses she had ordered a month ago, and never opened and put away. When I asked, she opened it. But it’s still on the counter. I’m guessing it will be there at Christmas too.

“Speaking of Christmas, lots of kid movies come out around then. And you know who will take the children to all of them? Me. Laura refuses to set foot in a movie theater. I don’t mind taking the kids to see Wonder Woman, but The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature? Captain Underpants?

“Another place Laura has never set foot: a liquor store in the state of Pennsylvania. It’s like she thinks the Blue Moon fairies simply appear with beer and wine, including a variety of bottles at different price points, so we can bring appropriate bottles to parties as gifts. I would also add that she has never cleaned the pool filter, changed a lightbulb in our house, put air in a kid’s bike tire, or charged the batteries in those car-toys the kids drive around the backyard. She expects me to handle all things electronic, like figuring out how to download the kids’ games or tape TV shows the kids want to watch. It’s not even safe to assume basic competence. The other day she came hunting for me while I was in the bathroom because the home computer had one of those standard warning messages about a download that Windows puts up all the time. She didn’t dare touch the computer until I figured it out. She will say things such as ‘we should have mums in our yard’ or ‘we should tape Caillou’ but we both know she means that I should do it.

“I do almost all the bill-paying around here. I make sure our assets are in a properly balanced portfolio. She’ll make a big deal about the fact that she puts money in the kids’ school lunch accounts, but she doesn’t even think about plenty of other kid stuff, like that our water doesn’t have fluoride in it here. So the kids need updated prescriptions for ‘tooth vitamins,’ which I get from the dentist (when I bring the children to the dentist, I might add), and I make sure the prescriptions get to the pharmacy, and I’m almost always the one picking them up. I am also the one distributing the vitamins to the kids in the morning. I am 100 percent sure that on the mornings I am not home, no one gets a tooth vitamin. Does she not care about their teeth???”

And so on it could go. In any given couple, it might be worth trying to write such a personal essay in the voice of your partner some time. It might be enlightening.

I am not saying that household managerial work is evenly split in many two-parent families, but it’s probably not 99-1. And as for emotional labor, I’d ask women to consider that there is emotional labor in growing up being socialized to feel like you need to provide for your family financially whatever your partner winds up doing. There is emotional labor in reporting daily to a career you don’t love, but that you do because people have been telling you since birth that people will judge you on your income. There is emotional labor in knowing that any requests for flexibility or a reduced workload for family reasons will be perceived far more negatively than they will for your female colleagues. Not all men face this labor, but many still do. In a 50-50 world, we need to see and respect all kinds of work.

Not all went perfectly. For instance, I thought I had booked a hotel room with an ocean view. I opened the window and saw no such thing. So I called the front desk to ask about this. They said they would call me right back. In the mean time, I walked out on the (shared with 4 other rooms) balcony and saw that you could see a small sliver of the ocean peaking out between the roof of the hotel pool and the other rooms. So maybe technically it was an ocean view room, but not exactly. Anyway, the front desk never called me back so we eventually left and figured we’d just spend a lot of time looking at the ocean in other places.

We went for a solid hour-long walk on the beach, which is not something the kids would ever consent to do. Then we went to the Lobster House for dinner. It’s one of our favorite places. We sit outside and look at the boats and eat take-out seafood. The place was mobbed, so we were waiting 20 minutes to give our order, and then another 20 minutes for the food, but because we didn’t have kids with us the wait was fine. We drank our beers and ordered oysters from the raw bar. And then we enjoyed our lobster, scallops, and shrimp.

After we got back to the hotel, I wound up walking into town by myself to get ice cream. Then there was this adults-only trip treat: sleeping in. Granted, sleeping in means 7:45 a.m. these days, but I’ll take it! We went for a run together on the board walk Monday morning, which is another thing we never do anymore (because we generally trade off kid coverage while we run solo). We had breakfast at our hotel, then went walking in the Nature Conservancy preserve, and into the Cape May State Park.

It was really beautiful. The swamp rose-mallows were in full bloom, and the birds — sand pipers, hawks, seagulls — swirled overhead. The grand bird migrations will come in another month or so (we might go back!) but it was still good bird watching now. Many trees were covered with this incredibly fragrant vine. I’m posting a photo if anyone knows the name of it. I am not sure if it is supposed to be there or not, but it gave the place a distinctive scent. We hiked for 90 minutes. Then we drove to Cape May Point to see the tip of the Jersey peninsula. Then it was back to the Lobster House for yet another round of broiled lobster, scallops, and shrimp (no beer this time).

We drove home, making it a few minutes before 3. G had asked me to text when we were close. When I opened the door, the kids leaped out with a sign saying Happy Anniversary. And they’d made these cupcakes! Wow! So incredibly sweet.

Photos: Take-out broiled lobster dinner, ocean view (not from our hotel), the fragrant vine, cupcakes for the 13th anniversary

Tiffany Dufu’s new book, Drop the Ball, proposes another suggestion: you could try doing less. Lower your standards. Don’t gate keep or assume you know best. Expect competence from your partner, framed with incentives that matter to him, and don’t rescue him. Go ahead and drop the ball. Odds are good he’ll pick it up.

As you can imagine, I’m a fan of this message. Dufu, who’s led various non-profits, and her husband Kojo, an investment banker for much of the book, have two kids. Early in their parenthood journey, they fell into the usual stereotypes: heroic, resentful working mom. Incompetent, lazy husband — or at least that’s what Dufu thought. All of it seems a bit rehashed at the beginning of the book, the same “recitation of dark moments” prevalent in much can’t-have-it-all literature, but then Dufu rescues the narrative through enlightened self-deprecation. For instance, in her new mom fanaticism, she reports that she actually created a list for Kojo on “Top Ten Tips For Traveling With Kofi” (Kofi being their son). It included items such as “Don’t forget to feed Kofi breakfast, lunch, and dinner!” As she notes, why on earth did I need to tell my husband that? “I see in this list clear evidence of why I felt so overwhelmed: I was juggling so many balls myself because I didn’t trust my husband to hold any of them.” At one point she created a sticker chart of chores for her husband (seriously), and he got a sticker when he did the task during the time frame she deemed appropriate. The kicker? She never actually gave any of the tasks a deadline. He was just supposed to know when she wanted them done. But of course he didn’t know, and at one point expressed bafflement as to why he received stickers seemingly at random. Clearly, this incentive system wasn’t working.

Eventually, Dufu realized they needed to try something different. So she made a list of all the things she did around the house, and created a “Management Excel List” with a column for Kojo and a column for her (and a column for no one – which turned out to be a key breakthrough). She presented this list to him, smug, to show she was doing 95% of the work. But then he started pointing out all the things that weren’t on the list. It started small (changing the filters on the Brita) and then went on for there. It turned out that Kojo was always the one planning vacations, including booking family airfare and rental cars. He listed “Botanist” as a role and pointed out that Tiffany had not watered a plant since 1996. He put “Chief Technology Officer” down and asked who had programmed her phone and laptop. Kojo also turned out to be dealing with their retirement accounts, the car, and when pressed, Tiffany had to confess that she didn’t even know the building super’s name. Then there was this one: “Kofi Night Nurse.” Tiffany complained that this didn’t count because Kofi slept through the night and Kojo said “No, you sleep through the night, and it’s because of me.” Ooooh. Looking at the list, Dufu had to acknowledge that her husband was doing closer to 30% of the work, which while not half, is not 5% either.

They agreed to split up the gap more equitably, which led to some interesting discoveries on Tiffany Dufu’s part. For instance, she had been doing the dry cleaning pick up. After assigning it to her husband, she heard the doorbell one night, and there was Martin from the cleaners. It turned out they delivered — something she hadn’t asked in 2 years of patronizing the place. With her husband responsible for finding sitters for extra events, she marveled that he could always get one inside 30 minutes. She learned that he’d created a group text with all their regular sitters, and would post a job, and the first person to respond got it. She cringed a bit at the concept, but given that this is how a lot of small businesses staff extra shifts it’s not a bad idea.

Analyzing herself and others, Dufu discovered that women often hold themselves back professionally with the narrative that they have to do everything at home, because it has to be done a certain way. Asked to join the board of a non-profit she believed deeply in, she thought about turning it down because the meetings were on Sundays. No, it wasn’t because she needed to spend Sunday with her kids (she could bring her kids to the meetings — it was that sort of non-profit!) It was because Sunday was her meal prep day when she got dinners together for the week so they could be defrosted. Oh dear. Her husband pointed out the idiocy of this — that if they needed to meal prep for the week, he could do it once a month — and she took the board spot. We all view the world from our perspectives, but the things that matter to us don’t necessarily matter to other people, and if you’re in a heterosexual marriage, there are probably differences between how each of you approach things. That’s part of loving someone of the opposite gender! My favorite example: as the Dufus were trying to improve their marriage, Tiffany was writing long letters of gratitude to Kojo, which was how she would like to be thanked. But when she once asked him “how have I expressed gratitude to you in the past that’s meant the most to you?” he told her “the hot pics you text me when you’re traveling.” Texting scantily clad photos of herself took a lot less work than writing letters, and he liked it more. More time saved!

One you “drop the ball” at home, Dufu recommends four “go-tos” to use that increased bandwidth. First, exercise. It’s not about the fitness so much as the stress relief, and believing that you deserve to have time for your own care. Second, go to lunch — that is, have meetings where you network one on one with people in your organization and outside of it. Often working moms work through lunch to get everything done, but it’s more likely to be relationships that help you advance than crossing every t. Third, go to events. Being visible at industry events every week or two helps you make contacts outside your company so you can seamlessly transition into a new job should you need it. There’s no rule that working mothers can’t go to happy hours. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that. And the final “go to” is to go to sleep. Getting enough sleep (coupled with exercise) gives you enough stamina to make it through the rest of your life.

The good news there is that, as I found in I Know How She Does It, many professional women with kids do get enough sleep. According to the American Time Use Survey, working moms in general get a bit over 8 hours, so this situation is less dire than it’s often presented to be (Dufu uses some 5 hours a night number for working moms, which she is citing from a Daily Mail article, which got its number through problematic methodology). But in any case, with her newfound approach to dropping the ball, Dufu felt far more relaxed. She tells the story of going to MAKERS in 2014 (where I was too!) and having the flights to the east coast canceled for snow. My flight took off and made it to Philly, but she managed to score an extra spa day in the resort out of it. Knowing all was fine on the homefront, she enjoyed being able to chill. Nice.

Have you ever shifted the division of labor at home? What jobs do you take vs. your spouse?

In other news: My review of Donna Freitas’s The Happiness Effect ran in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. The WSJ requires a subscription, but sometimes not for reviews. If that link doesn’t work for you, try going through the link I posted on Twitter; there are exceptions sometimes made for social media links.

This is quite a hit. If your partner earns a spectacular amount of money, this wouldn’t matter. But in most families, that is not the case. And in some families, the female partner is better equipped to earn a good salary. So if she chooses to stay home, the family is making an even more consequential financial move.

The personal finance world is chock full of advice, and sometimes tough judgment, on people’s financial choices. Just try floating the idea of buying a new (not used) car. And yet when I read through the various literature while writing All the Money in the World a few years ago, I was surprised at how few personal finance gurus mentioned this topic — even though in terms of potential impact on long-term savings this dwarfs using or not using coupons.

Maybe people do not want to go there. It is a can of worms. The issue of short-term vs. long-term finances also complicates things. Childcare costs a lot, which may make it look like a short-term wash, though if you stay in the workforce, in general your salary will rise and your childcare costs will fall. Like choosing to go to college, this probably should not be a point-in-time calculation. But in any case, I was reminded of the widespread acceptance of this decision as I was reading Redbook’s May issue, which had a story on “How to be happier in money and marriage.”

The last profile chronicled the lives of an Iowa couple, Beth and Scott, who met as theology students. Beth was “an academic star, a much better scholar than me,” said Scott, and so they planned to “let her career dictate where we moved, and I’d do a larger share of the child care.” Beth got her dream job as a professor in Montana. But after their daughter was born, she decided that “leaving the baby every day, even for a few hours, was hard.” When she was pregnant with her second child, she told her husband that he needed to find a way to support the family. This came at an awkward time, as his dissertation was foundering. Beth responded by sending him job postings that, as he put it “no one was going to actually give me.”

Eventually Scott realized he could take a chaplain residency and someday get a job doing that. Of course, that meant they had to relocate and, with young kids, live on intern wages for a year. Having a normal professional life was stressful for Scott. An all-staff outing to a restaurant where he would need to spend $9 on an entree was happening while their family food budget for the week was $35.

But the profile portrays this as having a happy ending, because eventually they relocated again when he got a job at a hospital in Iowa. And though “finances are still tight,” they are “not as tight as they were.” They are living on one income, spending wisely so they can do a few things (like sign their daughter up for dance lessons).

In general, professors earn more than chaplains, though it is not an order of magnitude more. According to some Googling, a chaplain in the healthcare system where he works earns about $60,000. The average salary for a professor at the institution where she worked was $70,000 for 9 months (annualized, this would be like a $90,000 year-round salary – though not all professors wind up getting funding for summer work).

So is this a happy money story? The dollar figures may not matter much if either party is miserable. I am glad the family is happy, though I keep thinking that if Scott had planned to have a more chill life with less earning pressure on him and more time with his kids, then his wife’s decision to turn their lives upside down definitely had the effect of forcing him back into a traditional masculine role that he may not have wanted. It is an interesting thought experiment to try reversing the genders in this story, and then noting one’s reaction. A young couple moves so he can take a job as a tenure-track professor. She is still finishing up her dissertation, but making slow progress because she’s mostly staying home with their young daughter. Then, as she is expecting their second kid, he announces that he is done with this earning a paycheck thing, and she needs to figure out a way to support the family as soon as possible. It seems jarring. We could imagine her disorientation, and that she might not be very happy about what just happened, even if he sent her online job ads and talked about being proud of her for rising to the occasion.

In any case, I think that this is a complicated tale. A couple flirts with non-traditional roles for very practical reasons. But, like all of us, they live in the world as it is, where non-traditional roles are still seen as transgressive — the bad mom away from her kids during the day, the husband who must not be manly enough, because if he was, he would be supporting his family so his wife didn’t have to work. We all absorb these messages, and so the common feeling of missing your kids while you’re at work becomes a crisis, not a chance to say wow, isn’t it great that my awesome husband has this? And since mom staying home with the kids is seen as the way of the world, this doesn’t spark quite the backlash that other financial decisions would. Indeed, you might get to be profiled as a financial success.

I am curious what others think of how personal finance literature treats the decision to stay home.

It was a tough trip in some ways. A low moment: We ate at a wonderful restaurant Friday night, with a 5-course tasting menu, but something disagreed with me. Or maybe it was the strawberry in my drink at the hotel bar afterwards. In any case, I woke up with horrible food poisoning at 4 A.M. At least, unlike my small children who all had the stomach flu earlier in the week, I recognize when I am about to throw up and can get to the bathroom on time. Less mess!

I spent some time napping it off Saturday, but the good news about traveling without children is that you can nap it off. I took 2 naps on Friday (to recover from the overnight flight) and 1 nap on Saturday. We still managed to go to the Musee D’Orsay and the Louvre, go out for dinner twice and get together with friends. We stayed next to the Jardin de Tuileries with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Paris is a beautiful city, particularly in spring, even if the weather was cold and sometimes rainy. I got to laugh at the crowds flocking to the Mona Lisa, waving cameras in the air. We enjoyed some quality couple time.

Traveling overseas for the weekend is tiring, and a lot of bother. Indeed, even worse: my car got hit while I was driving home from the airport on I-76. All ok (and the other driver too), but the side is really scratched up. That said, as I thought about whether it was worth doing I realized I could have the kind of life where I go to Paris for the weekend or the kind of life where I do not. In general, I will take Paris for the weekend (although next time I hope for no food poisoning).