Players must assume full responsibility for their cards, a strategy dubbed “C.P.E.” — Conception, Planning, Execution — that was designed to combat the male tendency to execute (pick up milk from the market when asked) but leave the conceiving (recognizing that your toddler only drinks 2 percent milk) and planning (monitoring the fridge to ensure the 2 percent doesn’t run out) to the female partner. In other words, as Rodsky told me, “Own. Your. Shit.” Partners also must agree to a Minimum Standard of Care (or “M.S.C.”) for tasks, meaning that even if the owner of the Garbage card is fine with empty pizza boxes piling up on the kitchen counter, he may still have to throw them out promptly.

often, several persistent challenges emerge. Implementing the practice is time-consuming and so is maintaining it. In fact, in all of my interviews, I failed to find a couple who followed the rules to a tee for longer than a few months. Just to get Fair Play off the ground, the initiator has to read the book, procure the cards, create an organizational system (I’ve seen everything from Google spreadsheets so detailed they resemble stock-portfolio trackers to oversize whiteboards dotted with custom Etsy chore magnets), then explain it all to a partner.

A woman recently polled one group to ask whether her spouse should be expected to pick up his own socks if she owned the Cleaning card. Another turned to the Fair Play community after a family member died, seeking advice on how to ask her partner to cover her chores while she grieved. All this time and effort falls overwhelmingly on women by design.

social movements start with the oppressed,” Rodsky says, because “people who want the status quo maintained” won’t push for change. As Rodsky recently said on a podcast, “You teach somebody something now because it will benefit your future hours.” But the prep work has pushed many women away because, as one Brooklyn mother put it, it’s “more than I can handle right now.”

Stories also abound of partners agreeing to cards only to quietly drop them. This sometimes leads to “chore chicken,” a resentment-fueled phenomenon in which Partner A refuses to pick up the slack on Partner B’s tasks, so the dirty dishes fester or shirts languish at the dry cleaners. Partner A silently rages because this isn’t how C.P.E is supposed to work.

Other spouses, when invited to play fair, have responded with “I get it. You want me to do more. But I don’t want to play a game. Just tell me what to do.” That’s what Paige Connell, 33, a Boston mom of four under 6, heard when she first showed her husband the deck. “But that places the burden right back on the woman,” she says. “I don’t want to be his project manager.”

The manner in which the “fewer cards” partner responds to the Fair Play system can serve as a barometer for the health of a relationship, says Jenny Cooke Malstrom, a marriage and family therapist in Seattle. Fair Play doesn’t cause divorce, she says, but it’s more likely to backfire in at-risk relationships where the baseline level of love and respect is already low. “To have your husband straight up say ‘This isn’t important’ makes what’s already implicitly happening explicit,” Malstrom says.

a 2017 Sex Roles study which suggested that the perception of fairness in family labor is a stronger predictor of maternal mental health than the actual division of labor. The study is the primary reason her system intentionally prioritizes feelings of equity over literal equality. Rodsky isn’t the only relationship expert to say that a 50/50 chore split isn’t realistic. Brené Brown famously went viral in a 2020 appearance on The Tim Ferriss Podcast, when she explained that the balance of responsibility in her marriage changes day to day depending on each partner’s mental and emotional capacity — and that constant responsibility trading is critical to supporting one another.

“It was never written to be prescriptive. My intention was to [help women] hold their boundaries in a different way. Any movement towards ‘I’m not going to live this way anymore,’ I consider a win.”

I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early. So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist, frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened.

Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies.

I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one?

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl.

Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on.

we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone.

She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one.

Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty?

There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan.

the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write.

I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing.