‘Whose job is it to empty the dishwasher?’ Experts on the conversations every couple needs to have

Many households have an imbalance in domestic duties, and women often struggle from carrying the weight of the organisational side of life. Here, mental load experts share the secrets to having a more equitable home – and the rewards that can be gained from it.

Get your head around the mental load

There are three categories of household labour, according to Kate Mangino, who lives in Washington DC and is the author of Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home. These are “physical, like unloading the dishwasher or doing laundry; cognitive, which is the thinking, scheduling and anticipation of needs; and the emotional work”. The mental load is the weight of carrying all these elements at the same time, which can often get too much, says Mangino. “I hear from people who carry the bulk in their household that they feel trapped or like they are suffocating. They’re not getting enough sleep. They’re not taking care of their bodies. It’s even gone so far as depression. I’ve talked to couples who are considering separation or divorce, so it can get quite severe.”

Leah Ruppanner, a professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne and the author of Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More, says that mental load burnout is a precursor to physical burnout. If you are organising everything, explains Ruppanner, you can’t enjoy life because you are constantly thinking about what is happening next. The first step is accepting how it is affecting you: handily, Ruppanner has created a website – lightenlab.com – where you can measure your mental load and get advice on how to manage it.

Both partners can experience a mental load, as Mangino points out: “There is a lot of pressure around employment and being a provider that we don’t always acknowledge,” for whoever that falls to. Mangino is also keen to stress that it isn’t always a negative thing: “There is a certain amount of mental load that is actually healthy and makes you feel good.” Interacting with your family, she says, is what builds relationships.

Fight for more equal policies

We need to campaign for policies that equalise the distribution of caregiving, says Ana Catalano Weeks, a political scientist at the University of Bath. “In the UK, statutory paternity leave for fathers is two weeks of very low-paid leave, so right from the get-go, the assumption set by the state is that mums are going to be the ones staying home and are mostly responsible for children. We need policies that incentivise men to take leave, because that is the way to get them noticing that the socks are too small or the milk is running out. Otherwise, it is too easy to slip into the assumptions for heterosexual partners that are just so dominant in society.”

Mangino points out that in the US, one member of a couple often feels pressure to be in full-time employment to access health insurance for the family, which can lead to an imbalance. But she adds: “We can’t sit around and wait for policies to save us – that’s going to take too long. We need to advocate for policy change and then work on household change today.”

If you have a breakdown over blueberries, it is time to make a change

Eve Rodsky is an LA-based author, lawyer and founder of the Fair Play Policy Institute, which trains facilitators to help couples run more equitable households. Rodsky had a revelation about domestic inequality when she was on maternity leave with her second child and her husband texted her saying, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries,” which caused her to pull over in her car to cry. “It was a really difficult time, then on top of it I felt psychologically abandoned by my husband, who seemed to think I was the fulfiller of his smoothie needs.” In all her preparations for having children, Rodsky says that no one suggested “having a conversation about the division of domestic labour, and so I want to be the person to say that now for every woman until the day I die”.

These experiences inspired Rodsky to write 2019’s Fair Play, which she says is about “understanding that in all patriarchies, women’s time is viewed as sand, it is infinite, and men’s time is viewed as diamonds, it is protected … the ‘non-valuable work’ goes to the people with infinite time. Fair Play aims to correct that.” She says that the benefits for her have been massive. “My husband is a different human. I have a partner, not a helper, and that is the only reason why we’ve stayed married.”

Admit that you can’t do it all

Brian Page is a financial coach and Fair Play facilitator from Atlanta, Georgia, who quit his job to support his family. “My wife has a big job – I had a big job – and it was too much with three children. So I made the decision to step back, in part because she was, at the time, more ambitious than me.”

What are some of the common missteps that couples he works with make? “The most challenging dynamic is when one partner is ultimately the default parent and the default home manager, and the other partner doesn’t recognise that or see how much work that takes. Then, on top of that, when the default parent or the default home manager needs help, the other person feels like they are being nagged.”

Accept that your home is an organisation

Rodsky defines an organisation as “people working together towards a common goal. If someone does not believe that the home is an organisation, I can’t help them.” Fair Play will work for any home, says Rodsky, and it has been used by housemates, in communes and by polyamorous couples. But be careful not to fall into the trap of having a boss-and-helper situation, warns Mangino, as that rarely helps.

Reject the myth that time is more precious for someone who earns more

“A lot of us hold the belief that if somebody is paid more, either because they have a better paid job or they work more hours, their time is worth more,” says Helen Mason, a women’s leadership coach and Fair Play facilitator in Milton Keynes. “We all have 24 hours in a day, so there often needs to be a shift in belief for both of the members of the couple that time spent in service of the home and the family is as worthy as time spent in service of work.”

Mason continues: “Men are better now than possibly the previous generations were, but if you’re a woman – and I’m talking very much about heterosexual couples – so much of the thinking, the cognitive load, still sits with you.”

“Broadly speaking, heteronormative couples struggle more than same-sex couples,” says Mangino. “However, even in queer couples, you do see an imbalance, where one focuses on work and one focuses on home.”

“There are inequities between couples without children, but because there is less to do, one person can do more and still get that rest and rehabilitation time,” says Mangino. Ageing parents and other caring responsibilities can add to the mental load. “It is especially taxing when you are managing elder care and that person is living with you.”

Gamify household chores

At the heart of the Fair Play system is a pack of cards, which is available to buy (or a digital version can be accessed for free online). A 2024 study by the University of Southern California found that using the system had the potential to reduce burnout and improve relationship quality.

Mason explains how it works: “There are 100 cards that represent all the domestic tasks that have to be done around a home. It is not all chores; it also includes things like self-care, adult friendships and “unicorn space”, which is your creative outlet. The first thing to do as a couple is to reduce those 100 cards as much as you can, deciding what is important to you as a family. One of the cards, for example, is potty training. Around 40 cards are only appropriate for households with children, so if you don’t have kids you can ignore them. Then the idea is to divide cards and responsibilities, so it is clear who is in charge. Cards can be redealt at any point.

“One of the biggest myths around sharing the domestic and mental load is that it needs to be 50-50. That is not the goal. The goal is fair,” says Mason, because, as we all know, some jobs are bigger than others. “If either partner is feeling resentment in some way, the balance probably isn’t right, and something needs addressing within the dealing of the cards.”

Draw on your strengths to divide out tasks. “Our skillsets and our personalities are excellent determinants of what it is that is most appropriate to tackle in the home,” says Page, “and it’s not always lined up perfectly with gender expectations.”

Establish boundaries and don’t breach them

This can be easier said than done, says Rodsky, because of ingrained “toxic time messages” that suggest our time isn’t as important as someone else’s. Women will say they won’t pick up their phone today, and then the school calls and they do; the call is to say the child forgot their lunchbox and the woman will stop everything to take it in. “We boundary breach because women have been taught that we’re better multitaskers than men, which is fundamentally completely erroneous,” says Rodsky. As in the common misconception: “In the time it would take me to tell my husband to pick up the phone from the school, I could just do it myself.”

In actual fact, no one is good at multitasking, says Ruppanner. “Our brains are terrible at multitasking. What we are good at is switching between tasks, which makes us feel like we’re multitasking, but that is just task switching. And every time we switch between tasks, what we’re doing is a cognitive turn.” This “fragments your thinking and it makes you tired”.

Find a calm moment to discuss potential changes

“Set aside time to talk when you’re both calm,” says Mason. “If this topic rises to the surface in a heated moment, and somebody attacks and somebody else defends, it descends quickly into an argument and nothing gets resolved.”

Mangino recommends a technique devised by the Gottman Institute, where you take it in turns to talk for 10 minutes. “The other person is not allowed to respond, just listen. And you talk about all the things that are on your mind. Often, both partners are surprised at how much the other person is thinking about. If it is dramatically imbalanced, that will come to light.”

What can actually work best, says Ruppanner, is to start any such conversations by focusing on your goals and dreams, rather than merely who does what.

Agree on a minimum standard of care

For each household, this standard will be different, but you need to decide on what is non-negotiable to you for each task. Rodsky gives the example of serving the kids’ dinner, which of the people she surveyed came out as having two priorities: “Relatively healthy and timing. So the minimum standard of care is that they have something healthy on the plate and do not try to feed the kids at eight o’clock. It’s not rocket science – that’s the system.”

Furthermore, what “done” looks like to one person can look entirely different to another, says Page. If you are in charge of the dishes, says Mason, “does that mean it is all washed up? Is it fine to leave it on the draining board, or does it all need to be put away? What goes in the dishwasher? Whose job is it to empty it?”

Have a weekly check-in

“Let’s say you have a meeting every Sunday,” says Page. “It might only take you 15 or 20 minutes, but you just go through the week and decide who is responsible for A, B and C.” Maybe you have a big work presentation and need to focus on that, or have to travel somewhere – this is the time to flag that up, not when you are in the midst of it and feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

Get tech help

It has never been easier to synchronise diaries, set alarms, or use apps to help manage domestic life. Mason says that she and her husband sit down with their electronic calendars. “If there is anything that affects the other person, we send invites to each other, so it is blocked in each other’s diaries.” Mason also suggests apps like Nipto, which you can use to split household chores and give points to jobs depending on how arduous they are. Embracing this kind of tech can particularly help members of the household who struggle with organisational tasks.

Ensure all household members are involved

Mason puts jobs on Post-it notes on the wall, which also includes her six-year-old son, who puts his clothes away, feeds the dogs in the morning, and sets the table. She says: “We hope that making the domestic and mental load visible means he grows up knowing that a home runs on shared effort.”