Oh man, I relate entirely. Ever since MrM started his PhD program and the pandemic hit (pretty much around the same time) it’s been nonstop stress and survival and very little bonding time. It’s definitely done a number on our marriage.
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On another note entirely! MrM and I worked through most of the feeding littles course and it has made meals so very much more enjoyable. 
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Yesssss this is why I annoyingly sing their praises at every opportunity lol. After lattes early feeding struggles, I knew we were going to have a ton of stress and tension around meal times if we didn’t have a plan in place. They really have helped us avoid the trap of trying to force her to eat because we’re scared about her weight dropping all the time. Which is what we did with bottles, following everyone’s advice, and that blew up in our fucking faces. 
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I’m glad you posted! We recently read through Fair Play and have been working through the “game” part of it and it’s been really great for us. They now have a card game you can buy that I assume would come with the directions you’d need without having to read the whole book about how she came up with it, but I just read the book from the library and then made a trello board with cards from seeing the cards on her website and then we’ve sorted through them.
A major caveat before I get into the reasons I’ve loved the system she outlines and what I think it’s doing for us in terms of not just balancing the workload but helping us get more positive time together and more time as individuals -
The book is super hetero- and cis- normative with a lot more stereotyping about how hetero relationships play out than I would expect for a book written in the last 10 years by someone who considers herself in a fairly modern relationship. From what I can see online, I think the cards you can buy have probably improved on this some but as a woman in a relationship with a man, I don’t think I’m in a good place to judge whether this would be enough to feel comfortable for someone in any other kind of relationship, which is too bad because I think it has a lot of other things going for it. Both my partner and I and I think the author are white, so I’d guess that like anything by white people, there are some white supremacist aspects of it, though I didn’t see anything that immediately jumped out.
For us, we’ve had a strong, fairly balanced relationship a long time and I think we’re still getting huge amounts of benefits from the approach described in Fair Play. The goal of the game is to ensure both people have time for self-care, adult friendships and what she calls “unicorn time” which is something you’re passionate about and that excites you and involves sharing with others, education and learning, or whatnot. She says basically that a yoga class doesn’t count unless you’re interested in teaching yoga and doing that level of engagement and training, as an example. Cooking dinner doesn’t count even if you enjoy it, but taking cooking classes and cooking elaborate things for fun might. This is accomplished by taking an inventory of everything that needs to be done for the household and splitting it up according to preferences and availability but with an eye toward ensuring that both partners get fairly equal unicorn time as well as as much self-care and adult friendships as they need, and that someone is planning and executing fun things for the couple to do as well. She has already done the work of making cards that should hit most/all of the things, but we made some adjustments in terms of how things were grouped and what was included to fit our family.
The major central part of this is the assertion that each person takes a card (task) and takes on all aspects of that task from conception to execution including planning. For example, if you’re on household products, you need to be paying attention to things that are running low, making a plan to refill/repurchase them, making those purchase decisions, and then making sure those things get into the house and loaded where they need to go. As a couple, you agree on the minimum acceptable standard for each of these things so that the person not doing the task can trust that they’ll never be in a position of having no TP within reach even if they never think about TP ever again. You also plan to have regular check-ins where you might pass some cards back and forth (so no one is stuck doing all the dishes to the end of time if they don’t want to) and also talk about what is and isn’t working (preferably over tacos and drinks?). This is also a place to bring up some of those little things that are not working well. It’s like a project management meeting so supposed to feel a bit more natural to give suggestions and thoughts.
As someone who tends to overthink and be constantly thinking about optimizing things, this has been amazing because it’s helped me put things off limits for optimizing. I’m not in charge of home maintenance in my house right now so I’m not thinking about how to make that more efficient.
Obviously parents of small children, parenting in a pandemic, people who are working multiple jobs to make ends meet are working with less time and more stress and needs than normal. There isn’t a crisis schooling card in the deck! I think though that either way it can be helpful to take an eyes open, us together against that problem approach. One of the most important, first steps in the game is to together identify some cards that you can let go of and not be trying to do at all.
The conversations about what’s important to us, what we’re hoping for out of things, and how we want things to look have been really a lot more fun and interesting than I expected. The process itself has had a lot more value than I thought beyond the outcome of having things I don’t have to think about. There were a lot of things that one of us was mostly doing and it’s improved things on both sides to completely let those things go instead of being 5% involved. The things we were splitting more was a bigger shift with bigger rewards so far. We aren’t done sorting things out that happen less frequently so there’s even more to come.
It’s helped us to think of time for us as a couple as an essential thing for keeping our house going (along with buying TP) and to have one person who is in charge of scheduling time together and making a plan. It’s really hard to get the energy to do anything after bedtime if we haven’t planned it, but if we have, we can put together little game nights with special snacks or things like that more easily. We also have childcare again (for now at least) and we go on lunch dates a bit which has been super nice.
I don’t know if this would in particular be helpful for you @meerkat but I thought I’d share here in case it would help anyone else. Sorry it turned into a novel!
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Thank you for sharing Fair Play. I love this! I am going to borrow both her books. 
Yes, thank you for sharing! I meant to comment earlier when I was on a real keyboard. I got the ebook and Libby tells me I’m 28% of the way through. I had been intending to have a conversation about chores once we got a couple weeks into the school year anyway so this will be helpful.
I do feel kind of hesitant to have Mr. Meer actually read through the book, especially Part I since it seems to be covering material we’ve already read in parenting books - “We started off equal and then had kids and now everything is terrible and out of whack, my husband does barely anything”. I imagine if I were a husband I’d be very turned off by that. @nickybecky1 I’m curious what your husband thought about it?
I’m starting to get into Part II with the cards and game part of it, I think that section will probably be better. I hope our printer is up to it out, it’s always a gamble on if it’ll print anything out right the first time.
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Let me know if the book is useful if I skip this bit, because that’s not how my experience of becoming parents went and it might turn me off otherwise useful info.
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My husband didn’t read the book at all and I think it’s probably unnecessary though thee second part with the explanation of the game could be helpful. I also found the tone of the book off putting but the system itself has been awesome for us.
You can now purchase the cards as a game set that probably comes with all the necessary instructions but none of the weird stereotyping or worrying about printing! (@meerkat) ETA:
I think the book is aimed at couples where it did go really uneven after kids but I also don’t identify with that at all and we still found it totally valuable. I think my husband wasn’t too sure about it at the beginning but has found the conversations it’s sparked really valuable and I keep overhearing him extolling it’s virtues to people. We are about to combine households with my family for a couple of weeks and they’re already stressing me out and he suggested we discuss this with them in the context of - can you just plan everything for this aspect without asking my opinion 8000 times and then I’ll take care of xyz?
We are already discussing how we’d like to use this as a family as our kiddo gets older to involve him in being able to take ownership over tasks, trade out things that he doesn’t like to take turns, etc. I remember how much I hated the way my parents decided when and how chores got done and there was a lot of arguing about whose turn something was that I think this might work pretty well for. It also makes sense to have fewer chores during school but then to redeal so kiddo is doing more on summer breaks for example and I like the framing that it’s about everyone contributing to the family but we can work through how to do that together. We will see - there’s a LONG time before we are there.
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Sounds like I’ll look into just the game itself then! Thank you!
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@nickybecky1 Did you buy the cards or just talk it out or what? I thought there was a printable in my ebook but no. I did see that there’s a listing of the different cards on her website but it’s not printable.
In case anyone’s interested, my library’s ebook also had an excerpt from her next book about Unicorn Space and it mentions the pandemic and how everyone’s world shrunk when it hit but women especially were taking on more of the household burden (e.g. making sure the kids were on their seven different zoom calls per day on their school issued ipads and what are all the passwords again). Looks like that will be coming out at the very end of this year.
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@meerkat actually I looked through the cards that they have on the website and copy pasted into Trello cards that we then sorted…we don’t have a printer. I considered buying the cards but they’re back ordered.
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Bumping this up cause I know there’s a bunch of Holderness Family fans on this forum, they were on The Amazing Race and even though I don’t really watch this kind of reality tv I’m enjoying hearing their recap podcast/video and they mentioned one part where Penn got stuck on a clue thing, overthinking it when he should have kept going back to Kim and they could keep going, then he got really mad at himself and she supported him through it. CBS has a two minute clip here where you can see it.
Can I just say I wish I had more examples like this that I viewed as an adult in a serious relationship? Of how to deal with something when one or both you are in the weeds with feelings and stress? I never saw my parents fight really, anything was just discussed to death and I almost never saw them as worked up as Penn is in this clip. Also Kim and Penn have a marriage book which I have not read but I just mention that to say that they’ve obviously put a lot of work into their relationship to have a strong foundation, this didn’t just happen but it can still be taken as a good example I think.
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Uh, also despite my interest in the Fair Play book above I still haven’t done the game with Mr. Meer because setting up the game and card initially is work and I keep putting it off till “later”. Which, um, yeah. 
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Haha oh man. Watching that clip there were things that made me tense up. Like I could see in her face that she was trying to move past her annoyance at moments and keep it cool. And she did, ofc, but it was hard I’m sure for her.
And then she kept reassuring and he felt a little dismissed so he reached out for contact and she had to snap out of the automatic reassurance and do some more connection to make him feel safe, eye contact, tone changes.
Haha idk. It stressed me out because it felt like anyone taking a slightly wrong step and it becomes a fight. But I really did appreciate that the husband had a good sense of humor after the fact and they could just chuckle together!!
It feels a little tough for me I think because I feel like I’m always the emotions regulator for everyone else all the time and it is exhausting.
Thanks for sharing 
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Oh it definitely could have become a fight so easily, I think that’s part of what interested me about it. And if this was the pattern all the time that’s not great, I do hope he regulates her when she’s stressing. I did have to call out Mr. Meer on that years ago when he was in a job he hated, I’m sure I didn’t do that on the best way but I had to tell him that I got to have bad days at work too, he didn’t get to have 100% of the bad days and me being the sympathetic ear.
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I feel like my partner is bad at communication and expressing emotions. Is there even a fix for that. I feel like couples counseling allows us to work things out in a way that is not charged, but it’s not the same thing as practicing communication that works.
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There are two fixes that I know of, neither are easy
- he recognizes the problem and independtly seeks help to learn to communicate better with partners. Hopefully this doesn’t take so long that you no longer have time or space for his new growth
- you take on the burden of the communication and emotions and free him from operating in an arena that he isn’t happy to be in. It’s a lot easier for him but a lot of work and maybe lonely for you. There could be retro vibes that you don’t like and don’t want passed down to your children.
Maybe couples counseling can get you through. For how long?
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I guess my concern is conveying that it’s only his communication that is the problem and that I am the one with superior communication.
For sure, I feel that way HA. But he also deserves dignity.
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Mr. Meer improved after some counseling on his own- not like totally fixed, but improved.
The biggest thing that’s helped us is making time to do lunch dates since Kiddo went back to school. We try to do every couple weeks but we didn’t do one in January, usually we get take out and go to a nearby green space with a picnic blanket. It’s been really good for getting out of our usual space/mindset and I can directly ask questions about Feelings without him feeling defensive, and I also try to remember to share things I’ve had rattling around in my brain but haven’t said out loud. Like I could use that to say “I feel like I’ve been found the emotional heavy lifting in our house and that’s not great for out relationship and I want it to change.”
We take turns on who picks the outing, most of them have been picnics due to weather here but we also did mock tails and (post conversation) best two out of three on Mario Kart. You can also just go for a walk around the neighborhood.
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Couples and family counseling specifically is meant to teach communication skills in every modality breakdown I’ve seen.
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