Division of Household Chores

Dear Therapist,

My wife and I are struggling with household chores. I do my best to help—cooking, cleaning, managing the kids—but it never seems to be enough. She continues to say that she feels overwhelmed and at the end of the day, it all falls on her, no matter how much I do. It also feels like we’re keeping score—who did what and who did more. I’m frustrated and I want us to be a team like we used to be. How do we break out of this cycle?

Response:

Ah, the blessings and challenges of running a busy household. I presume that there are many different areas in both of your lives that you are trying to juggle. I also presume that unless you are in business together, this is probably the main shared responsibility. It makes sense that it can lead to tension.

I will divide up your question into two parts:

First that despite your efforts, your wife feels an imbalance, and second that you are stuck in the cycle of keeping score where no one wins.

To address the first part, couples often come into relationships with expectations about how things should run, because of what they grew up with. However, one person’s family of origin may have focused strongly on one area, while another person’s family prioritized something completely different. These expectations lead to frustration when they remain unnoticed. If either of you notice any feelings come up when your spouse does something around the house in a different way than you’d like it, use that as an alert to check in with yourself and identify if you have any expectations that may differ from your partner.

Mental Load

There are two parts of household chores: one is completing tasks, and one is the mental aspects of remembering to do it, asking for help with it, and planning when and how often it needs to be done. It can be that you are doing more physical chores, but less of the mental labor. If that is the case, I’d recommend you sitting down and having a conversation where you divide up household responsibilities- not by tasks, but by who is responsible for ensuring that the chores get completed. One great resource for having this conversation is Fair Play, which is a deck of cards that gamifies this discussion.

Emotional Needs

If despite trying the ideas mentioned above, you find that this issues continues to come up, it may be that your emotional needs are getting tied up in the conversations about the chores. If that is the case, it is helpful to understand what is happening under the surface as well.

I can imagine that it wouldn’t feel good to try and try and exert yourself to help, and feel like no matter how much you try, it isn’t enough. What comes up for you when you see that your wife is still overwhelmed despite your best efforts? How does it land internally when you help out while you have the feeling that it never seems to be enough? Equally importantly, what do you do when those thoughts or feelings come up for you? Do you work extra hard? Slow down in your efforts? Express those feelings verbally or non-verbally? Or simply shut down?

Similarly with your wife, what makes her feel like it falls on her? Overwhelm (like all feelings) ebbs and flows. What increases the overwhelm for her? How does your help and frustration about it not being enough impact her? And how does she respond in those moments?

Keeping Score

This leads me to the second part of your question, the fact that you both keep score. Keeping score is usually a symptom of feeling imbalance in the relationship, unacknowledged effort, or unmet expectations. From what you shared, all of those things seem to be playing a role in your situation. Like you said in your question, when couples start to keep score, it can feel like one person is the "judge" and the other is the "defendant," which creates distance instead of connection.

If you look at my list of questions to understand what is going on for each of you in the moment, you can see a theme- the chores are on the surface, and below it there can be a whole slew of emotions and needs. The goal in acknowledging and verbalizing the emotions is separating the emotions from the chores. There can and should be conversations around dividing up tasks, but it gets very hard to have productive conversations when tasks and emotional needs are conflated.

Mindset Shifts

In addition to this, there are several other mindset shifts that can help you as a couple move away from keeping score. Firstly, training your mind to move from defensive to curious will lower the intensity of tit-for-tat behavior. When you can remind yourself that you both care about each other and have each other’s best intentions in mind, you can start to be curious about your wife’s behavior instead of put on the defense.

It can also be helpful to remember that a goal in running a house is teamwork, not fairness. The goal is not 50/50; the goal is for each of you to work to your strengths and support each other.

Last, and most important, is gratitude! Noticing the ways your partner enhances your life on a regular basis (I believe partners should keep private journals where they regularly write small things that their spouse did that brought them joy) automatically takes the energy out of score keeping.

As you have experienced, navigating household responsibilities can be tricky. Through reminders that you both want the best for each other and having conversations with openness, curiosity, and appreciation, this challenge can be an opportunity to build greater connection and cultivate a stronger sense of teamwork.