Equally valuing both spouses’ time and contributions to the home
Do you ever find yourself left with no time to work on yourself and habits because you’re managing your household? One of the biggest obstacles to finding fulfillment and improving relationships is the lack of time.
We’ve been told that “women can have it all,” but to have it all, we find ourselves doing it all . . .
Research shows that regardless of whether women do paid-work in or out of the home, they manage the majority of household responsibilities.
To top it all off, research shows that housework is hugely undervalued both by the world and by our family members. (That includes the ways we undervalue our own contributions, too.)
This combo of too-little-time and too-little-value leads to discord and resentment.
In this week’s episode, I invited Eve Rodsky to help us work through these issues so we can have more fairness in housework and improve relationships (+ more time!) Eve spent over a decade studying the imbalance in time/value spent on housework and created a life-changing solution she calls the Fair Play system that solves so many of these problems.
In this episode, Eve teaches you how to restore fairness to the housework and how doing so will benefit every member of the family.
(Teaser: fairness isn’t about dividing the household tasks and responsibilities 50/50.)
It’s time to have more time, to feel more valued, and to improve your relationships, too. Listen in and learn how!
About a few other things…
Reclaim your creative power and rediscover who you actually are! If you’re ready to come back home to yourself, to be able to say that you know who you are and what matters to you, take my foundation course, “Finding Me.” It’s OK that you’ve lost parts of yourself along the way; but as you learn to anchor back into who you are and align your life to what matters to you, you’ll find that you have more strength, more fulfilment, and more creativity to bring to your important roles and responsibilities.
Sign up for the Go Getter Newsletter to get Progress Pointers in your inbox every Tuesday.
You can listen the episode below, or on Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, Youtube, Overcast, Stitcher, Pocketcasts, or search for “About Progress” wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show please share it, subscribe, and leave a review!!
SHOW NOTES
Eve’s Website, Instagram, Book
Podcast Sponsor: Coconu use code ‘ABOUTPROGRESS’ for 15% off
Foundational course, “Finding Me.”
Leave a rating and review for the podcast!
Join the Strive Hive, my monthly membership group
Lend your voice and experience + be featured on the show HERE
Join Monica on Facebook and Instagram
Songs Credit: Pleasant Pictures Music Club
TRANSCRIPT
Monica: Eve Rodsky, welcome to About Progress.
Eve: So nice to be here, Monica.
Monica: One of the things I loved that you shared about in the beginning of your book Fairplay was about this blueberry story, because I think all of us have a blueberry story where we are realizing that things are not, not the way they should be necessarily, but the way we want them to be. You know, we’re raised in a, in a positive society.
I think more than our moms were about women can do it all. I think our generation of women are sick of doing it. Yeah, we’re doing it all. And that’s your blueberry story. I’d love for you to share your own experience of realizing you were tired of doing it all, and what experience you had with realizing this is not the way I want to live my life anymore.
Eve: Yes, if you can unpack this day that started my Fairplay journey, which was 10 years ago. I am actually at my blueberries breakdown anniversary. So we’re celebrating it together around this time. Where I had just had my second son Ben, and I had a three-year-old Zack.
And I remember being in the car and I was racing to get my older son, Zach, at his toddler transition program, and I received this text ping from Seth that says, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries.” I can still conjure up the rage from seeing that text. My heart started pounding. I look around me. I had a breast pump and a diaper bag on the passenger seat of my car. I had gifts for a newborn baby to return in the backseat.
I had a client contract in my lap with a pen in between my legs. And this rage I had over feeling that Seth was defining me by my being his fulfiller of his smoothie needs, literally made me pull over and made me pull over, which we don’t do lightly in LA I’m from New York, but I live in LA now and we take traffic seriously.
So to pull over, to be late to pick up Zack, something had to be fundamentally wrong. And really what it was was this realization that nothing about my life, monica, was as I expected, as you said, nothing was what it was supposed to be. The career marriage combo. I thought I was going to have that I worked so hard to have wasn’t coming to fruition for me. I honestly, I didn’t even have a name anymore. I had sat in a circle you know, two months earlier with a teacher who said to me, these people around you look around, they’re going to be the best friends you ever have in your life. And looking down at my name tag, Monica, and it having “Zach’s mom” on it and thinking, how are these people going to be my best friends when they don’t even know my name?
And that was the context for understanding that I couldn’t live like this anymore. It didn’t happen overnight, but I started to become conscious, conscious of the stress and overwhelm and the burden and the assumptions on me now that I had become a mother.
Monica: And like you said, it’s not overnight.
I think I relate in many ways, but I, I didn’t have a career. I actually chose to, to leave my career as a teacher and stay home with my kids. And I felt that exact same feeling of feeling lost and stuck. And you know, you, you have the circumstances you always wanted, but when it feels so different and your identity is so wrapped up in who you’re supposed to be and who you thought you wanted to be, but it’s not playing out well in your day to day life.
It is really hard to unpack. So I love that you’re saying it wasn’t like this overnight thing. Like you pull over, you’re like, oh, I’m going to fix this. And here’s how,
Eve: 10 years. It took me 10 years to unpack this. And that’s why I think, you know, your listeners give yourself some grace, right?
This has been a 10 year unpacking journey for me through writing and research. Literally uncovering every single article that’s ever been written about what they call the gender division of labor, the second shift, the mental load, emotional labor, invisible work. Women have been talking about ways to fix themselves for a hundred years.
How many freaking tools do we need just to exist, exist and to want the same thing. That our male counterparts have: the ability to choose how we use our time. And so that, that realization that this is so much bigger than blueberries, right? But that is why I really honestly felt like I had to devote my life to understanding that any equity we can fight for, we can bring forward, any happiness and meaning, joy, it’s going to come from addressing the fundamental unfairness of what we’ve done to women in the home.
Monica: This is honestly the biggest obstacle the women in my community face. We do a lot of identity work. We work on habits, we’re a personal development podcast. Right? So we do a lot of things like that. But, the biggest hurdle is always time. And the biggest part of that time is how spread thin we are within our own homes, whether we’re stay-at-home moms or we work outside the home, or we work inside the home, whatever combo it is.
And so this is where we need to focus. It starts in the home. If we want women to thrive, they need to thrive in the home with their responsibilities that are taking up their time. And I wanted to spend a little bit of time on, on one thing though.
And that’s the signs that things are not equitable in your home, and we’re not talking about 50/ 50. I don’t think it’s always so obvious that. Living this way in a way that is so imbalanced until you have those blueberry moments or other moments that are showing you. Oh, I don’t, I don’t like who I am anymore.
I’m resentful. I’m angry. I’m a shell of myself. I’m lost, I’m depressed, whatever it might be. I think you have a great way of helping women understand what this looks like. What are the signs that you need to work on having a fair play household?
Eve: Great question. And I would say, you know, don’t wait till you’re at Resent meter 10, right?
Don’t don’t wait till you’re at where I was, where I felt like the only solution was to as my friend said, well, you can, you know, just use three words to change your life. And I was like, okay, what are those three words? And she’s like: “court ordered custody.” And I was like, okay, yeah, yeah. I could leave my marriage.
And that would be an option, but I came out of a single mother household, Monica. And so I’d been really thinking about the toll that it took on us. When my father left and the extreme burnout and hardships, my mom had to endure as the mother of me and us and my brother is special needs and it, you know, in her fight for her place in the world and her unicorn space, which we will call it which is this idea of the space that we have to find meaning and purpose and happiness, the space that makes women come alive. That’s still extremely subversive because. The idea of spending time on ourselves is always frowned upon in any, any of our societies, especially the traditional ones.
But these are signs that you could benefit from these tools. One is how you, me, Monica, how we perceive our own time. And what I mean by that is if we don’t understand that our time is diamonds, that our time is equal to our male counterparts.
And this happens in non-hetero cisgender relationships as well. When maybe someone is the breadwinner and someone is a stay at home parent. So, but let’s focus on the women married to men right now because that’s where a lot of our gendered stereotypes come out of.
So you start seeing things society that say well breastfeeding is free. We are conditioned to believe our time is worth less than men’s time.
I think you could look for the self-talk. Now, if you’ve ever said one of these four things to yourself, you will benefit from this podcast. If you’ve ever said. I do more in the home because my husband makes more money than me. This podcast is for you. If you’ve ever said I do more in the home, because my job is more flexible. This is for you. If you’ve ever said I do more in the home, because in the time it takes me to tell him, her, they what to do, I should do it myself. This podcast is for you. If you’ve ever said to yourself, I’m a better multitasker. I’m wired differently for care. I know things, I see things in a way that my partner doesn’t, this podcast is for you. Because not one of those toxic time messages that you’ve said to yourself are true.
If you’ve said any of those things, You continue to listen on because what those things do is they start to make you believe your time is infinite like sand and your partner’s time should be guarded like a finite diamond. And then you get into a place where you are handling most or all of the unpaid labor of the home, because you think it’s your job because your partner brings home the money, or you think it’s your job because you’re a better multitasker, or you think is your job because no one else will do it. Or if you tell them they will do it wrong or you think it’s your job because your partners you know, you can find the time.
Well, I’m here to tell you that unless we’re Albert Einstein and we know how to mess with the space-time continuum, there’s actually no way to find time. There’s just different expectations over how women are supposed to use our time.
And I do remember that that was ultimately the breakthrough Monica that led Seth and me to the Fairplay journey. Didn’t mean it was perfect. It didn’t mean that we had to readjust, and start over with our practices during COVID. But what I remember thinking to myself was, this isn’t about blueberries.
This is about the fact that when Seth gets home from work, he has three hours or four hours to watch sports center, workout, finish a PowerPoint deck, go to sleep early, where I’m at up an hour later, two hours later, doing things in service of our household literally until my head hits the pillow. And you know what, Seth, I deserve as much time choice regardless of what our financial situation is.
I deserve as much time choice over how I use my day.
And if you get those four hours, I want those four hours. Okay. So we both can’t get those four hours because there’s so much we’re drowning in unpaid labor. Okay. Well then maybe you’re going to get three hours and I’m going to start getting one hour back and we’ll move to fairness. Doesn’t always have to be 50/50, but it was an understanding that my time is diamonds and I was going to fight for my time Monica.
And that took a lot of internal work to unravel all the conditioning that had been has been around for us. I actually happened to be on an airplane this week and I never read us weekly anymore, or any of those magazines because it’s just too toxic.
I’m too far along on my journey, but my friend was what you reading one. So I got, I just took a picture of it and I’ll read it to you. It’s about Olivia Munn and her boyfriend, John. They just had a baby apparently. And this is what I’m reading. “John goes back on tour in March and he’ll try to be with Olivia and the baby as much as he can.”
Next one was “neither of them have done this before, because they’re talking about their new baby, but they’re learning quick. Everything from feeding and napping time and changing diapers. John has been surprisingly very hands-on and actually helping out.”
This is his child. Uh, What do you mean “helping out?” He’s not Babysitting his child. What has society done to us that we can just read that? And if we don’t unpack it, we’re just fed those messages day after day after day. Since the moment we were born.
Monica: One of my friends said her husband said if he ever needed a boost in confidence, he could just take the kids to the park, you know?
Eve: Absolutely.
Monica: Just amount of praise. But he got from, from caring for his children. And yet we, we did that too. Like we act surprised.
Yeah,
Eve: we do. But that’s again, that’s being what I call CIYOO, complicit in your own oppression and it’s okay. It’s just about, we’re all complicit in our oppression because that’s what we’ve been trained to be.
So it’s not a bad thing. It’s just about understanding what happens when you bring it to consciousness. That it may not be perfect tomorrow, but that that you know, that there’s a different way. There’s actually a different way to do things that are an benefit. It doesn’t mean your partner is going to be miserable and saddled down with all of this hellish work. Taking care of your own kids is actually extremely meaningful for men. And I will say that my husband has become an incredibly different human, a better businessman, a more successful person, the more fair play cards. That’s our metaphor, right? That you hold the cards. There’s a hundred of them, the more cards he started to hold, the better his life became.
And that’s not an accident. This is good for both people because being meaningfully engaged in, in the caregiving of the people around you is really are as soon as it’s what our legacy is, it’s what our active legacy is.
Monica: You know, I feel like a lot of women, when they’re listening to this, they’re gonna have like, Is that hackles, is that the word?
It sounds right. But you know, the hackles go up, “but the home is important. What we do at home matters!” And they kind of get that, that inner oppression coming out where they’re like, you’re saying that it doesn’t matter. And it’s the exact opposite. And that’s what I loved about your book so much is it’s valuing the unpaid labor. It’s valuing the time.
Eve: Yeah. An hour holding a child’s hand in the pediatrician’s office is just as valuable as an hour in the boardroom. It is just as valuable or more valuable.
And the reason why that guides my work is because if we believe that as a society than men will do it. And it will free up women’s time and allow us to achieve economic security.
And that’s what I care about. I care about how we value, what we do, and the problem so far has been. We can pretend that we care about mothers as a whole, but you put your money where your mouth is. Unpaid labor is not part of our us GDP. Unpaid labor is a women’s issue. And the truth is that, you know, the dirty secret that we exposed during the pandemic is that women’s unpaid labor is actually the foundation of our society, right? We’ve built our society on the backs of the unpaid labor of women.
And, and, and then the toxic sort of messages of, well, if you’re so overwhelmed, get help. And so if you’re privileged enough to be able to get help than just you’re, we’re building the backs of unpaid labor of women, and then the undervalued labor of domestic workers.
Monica: Largely other women, other women, right?
Eve: So we got to break that cycle. And the way we do that is, you know, when we invite men to their full power in the home, we, as women can step out into our full power in the world.
Monica: Ah, so beautiful.
So Eve I want to talk about what Fairplay means because I I’m a bean counter. I’m one of seven children. And I was told that, I don’t know how many times growing up, “stop being a bean counter Monica.” I was just born with that brain to look for imbalance, you know, and I went into my marriage thinking that we would split things 50/ 50. I went into be a mom thinking, oh, Brad will get up just as much as I do at night.
But you know, you brought up breastfeeding. I breastfed my kids and I learned real quick that that was not possible. And I had to shift my perspective on fair play, not being like we 50/ 50 split every household responsibility that didn’t work for our family, with the structure that we had.
So how about you explain what fair play even means?
Absolutely. Fairplay is 100% not 50/ 50 because there was this weird time in the nineties where there was these books called equally shared parenting where they said things like, well, if you get up one night, you get up the next night. If you go to work one day, you get to go to work. The next day you make exactly the same salary. It’s just, it was mind-numbingly complicated and literally made no sense.
What happened to me after, as we said, the blueberries breakdown was a really interesting realization that like you I’m a bean counter or I believe in fairness and justice, I’m a lawyer.
And also by being a lawyer, you know, there’s this new term called “design thinking,” which I always laugh at because lawyers are really the only design thinkers for our society. I mean, we all can, but if you want to stop, have a car, stop design, a society where cars stop at a stop sign. Guess what you’re going to do.
You’re going to pass a law saying that they should stop at the stop sign. Right? So I’ve been thinking about designing societies since I was a little kid and wanted to be a lawyer.
And in that design, what I understood to be true is that, Like you said that the world should feel like there’s fairness, there’s justice.
I had been sold that bill of goods since I was a kid that girls could do whatever boys do. And that wasn’t playing out in my marriage. So I did what first, all type A women would do. Right. I opened up Excel and I started an Excel spreadsheet that was called the “shit I do.” And, you know, this is 10 years ago now, it allowed me to connect to a community of women to make me realize, I’m not alone.
I had a call for women all over the country. Again, this is early days of social media, but it was mainly through friends of friends of friends who started to help me populate a spreadsheet that I said, what do you do with your time that’s two minutes or more, that may be invisible to your partner or your kids?
And things started flooding in like, you know, making school lunches and taking kids to the dentist. But things, I didn’t even know Monica, like. A girl scout cookies ordering and sales, like that’s five hours. And then there was like, you know, application of sunscreen. I had put two minutes, but then this woman said to me, well, what about 30 minutes for the chase?
Right. So it became this beautiful exercise. And I finally sent it off to Seth one day, the 19 million megabytes spreadsheet that I made with this beautiful community of women across the world. And when he emails me back, he didn’t even give me the courtesy of, of a word.
He gave me like an old pixelated monkey emoji that’s covering it’s eyes. And I think that day . Was it very important day for me, because it was my realization that I should have known better as a lawyer and an organizational management specialist. I work my day job is I work for families that looked like the HBO show Succession.
And you should feel bad for me if you’re listening here. But I should’ve known better.
Lists alone don’t work. Yeah. I’ve been saying that for 10 years in my business context, when I facilitate for families systems, do. And so once I had that realization, I said, you know what? I can leave my marriage. I could resign myself to doing it all because I just did this amazing spreadsheet that didn’t work. Or I could remember that I could become my own client.
And that’s what fair play is about. It’s the answer to the question I asked 10 years ago that changed my life, which was “what if we started to treat our homes as our most important organizations?” And then I started to realize that if I could use all of these tactics, these systems, the design thinking, the law, to design a system based on 50 years of organizational management scholarship that, that uses that research and applies it to the home. I could possibly save my marriage and yes, you may, listeners may be out there saying, well, why is it on you to save your marriage? It should have been on Seth. It doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes the people who are most oppressed have to start taking agency in their own life to change it for themselves. And that’s what I decided to do. And fair play’s based on this ultimate second question. That was the follow-up to the first question, which is, if you treat your home as your most important organization, I started to ask people, Monica on the “shit I do” spreadsheet.
So I would ask people, well, who is in charge of the cultural enrichment of your family? Who decides you’re taking the kids to the museum? Well, we both do. Okay, well, who’s in charge of charity and community service? We both are. Who’s in charge of you know, knowing what’s happening in your family’s calendar? We both are. Who’s in charge of planning your kid’s birthday celebration? We both are.
So I was getting this mind numbing answer that I knew wasn’t true because all these women were also reporting extreme resentment and the men were reporting that they didn’t know what to do, that they couldn’t get anything right. So I was like, well, this is not helpful. And then I was able to unpack those answers that were not helpful in the science with the most important question I’ve asked in the 10 years, which is “How did mustard get in your refrigerator?”
And I asked that in 17 countries. Now we’re over like 10,000 people.
And the most common answer is became. What the Fairplay system is the most common answer for women married to men was I monitor the mustard. I see that my second son, Johnny, likes French’s yellow mustard with his protein. Otherwise he chokes.
In the business world, we call that conception. People get paid big bucks to notice and to address problems.
And then I would hear, oh yeah, and then I monitor the mustard for when it’s running low and I get stakeholder buy in for my family for what they need at the grocery store. They didn’t actually say stakeholder buy-in, but that’s a planning. That’s the planning stage. People also get paid big bucks for that.
And then I would hear, oh yeah. And then I send my husband to the store and he brings some spicy Dijon every time. And you want me to trust him with my living will, well, that’s not going to happen because the dude can’t even bring home the right type of mustard. And that was it.
Once I realized that that is the crux of it. When women hold conception and planning and men help out with execution, that is a complete and total organizational failure that is actually easily solvable. It is easily solvable with what I call the ownership mindset. When you keep the conception planning and execution together, even if it’s just one card out of the hundred.
So you start with that much unfairness, but your partner takes on one card with full CPE, it is life-changing. And I know that now from our data.
And that’s, that is it. That is fair play in a nutshell. And I I’m taking you through it to show you how I got to that research, but it’s been 10 years of research to understand that that organizational breakdown of women holding the conception and planning, whereas men are stepping in with execution leads to lowering of standards of fighting about the minimum standard of care, not understanding what it means to complete a task.
AKA, you know, with garbage does not mean putting a liner back in. So there is a new and different way to do it. And that’s what makes me so excited to still talk about this 10 years later.
I think the bean counter side of me was really good at thinking it was fair if I gave a list. Or if it was like the two dues, you know, divided. Here’s what you need to do. Here’s what I’m going to do, but you’re right. It’s so much more than that conceptual. Is that how you say it?
Eve: Conception, planning, planning, and execution. Yeah.
Monica: Okay. So the, what you’re trying to encourage with fair play is it’s taking over a task in the home with full CPE.
So you both conceive of it. You’re tracking it. You’re planning on how to take care of it and you’re executing it instead of just being told, this is what you’re doing.
Eve: I’ll give you an example, a small example, because I think it’s, it’s a fun one. It’s a stay at home. Mom named Amy and Richard, and they decided to play fair play during the pandemic.
And what I love about this story Monica is that it’s small, but it sort of really encapsulates all to me of what the Fairplay principles are. So they decide to play fair play. It’s a metaphor. You can read the book and see what the cards are. We actually have cards to help you have discussions,and caution: if you use them like a list, they will become a list of don’t do that. But what they’re there for is to say, well, Hey, what do we want to do together? What motivation intentions do we want to set together as a family? Do we want to have a car? Hmm. That’s a question we should ask ourselves. Do we want to celebrate our child’s birthday? Okay, great. That’ll stay in the debt. Do we need to keep track of appointments? Okay, great. So a calendar, we need somebody who needs to be calendar keeper.
So the part, the part of Fairplay that’s most fun is when you build your deck together, it allows the resentments as you said, the bean counter mentality is stay away because you’re not here to count.
Who’s holding what cards or score. Keep in a minute Shia. You’re here to understand first holistically, what do we care about as a family? Because we don’t do that. We make assumptions. So fair play is to get to the opposite of assumptions.
So this couple starts playing. They decide to leave magical beans in their hand. And for them, they define it as lucky, Amy’s Irish. So they. Define his lucky leprechaun apparently. There, they, they decided not to do elf on the shelf, but they told me they were keeping in Santa and the Easter bunny and tooth fairy.
And then Richard tells me that he’s taking over the magical beans card. Okay. That’s what happens. So, Amy you know, says, okay, we’re going to do this. And the first time this scenario comes up, you can predict what’s going to happen. The tooth fairy doesn’t come for their child for their daughter.
And so before Fairplay, what Amy told me would have happened, this is the dynamic in their house. Before Fairplay, she would have said, you’ve ruined our child’s life. You’re the worst father that ever existed. You know, all the magic has gone. She would have started to use her verbal assassin language and, she calls herself a verbal assassin.
I have a tone issue. She’s more of the verbal assassin and. Richard told me, not only would he have heard that from Amy, but he would have blamed her for not reminding him to put the dollar under the pillow. That was their dynamic.
So then post fair play. What Amy reports is that Richard, the first thing he does is say, ” I messed up. That was my responsibility.” So there was no blame. So once she heard that, all of a sudden she said she was disarmed, she couldn’t get so mad and angry and loud. She just said, well, yeah, it was. And I’m sorry, we all, I guess we make mistakes, but you know, fair play is about caring through your mistakes. It’s your ownership mindset.
So what are you going to do? And she’s like, don’t tell me, just tell your daughter, she just sort of let it, let it go. Yeah. Richard tells me he emails toothfairy@gmail.com. He actually creepily gets a response. Someone responds to that email and says, I’m sorry, I couldn’t get your house. I’m overwhelmed with teeth. There’s a supply chain backup right now. So funny. He prints out the email. Shows it to his daughter and says, look, the two ferries is, is backed up. There’s a lot of supply chain issues. She’s going to pick up your tooth tonight. It looks like, but when she comes late, she brings double the money.
And now his daughter, he says, has been asking, is the tooth fairy going to come late so I can get double the money. It is such a beautiful story to me because that whole dynamic of that family is different just by understanding. That the, the lack of assumptions, the understanding who who’s doing what, customizing your defaults, but most importantly, allowing the space to make mistakes.
And that is what you know, I, I just, I love that couple. I mean, I love so many stories, but that one makes me really happy.
Monica: Here’s the thing, this is where, like we get to the point where I am overwhelmed, because like, this is it. This is right. This is what we need. I’m ready to be a change maker in my home. I’m ready to say things need to be different. I’m ready to put in the work, but where do I start? Like, what’s next?
Eve: Well, I think the first thing I would say is maybe listen to this once or twice, right. Really live with this understanding. I think what I always say is people want to jump right into action, which is so exciting.
And I love that this is becoming a cultural movement, but what I will say this is again, this took me 10 years to unlearn. You know, Monica also has had a lot of experience now working in the self-care space, right? This, these are practices. These are practices, right? I wish I could give you the matrix pill and say, if I give you the pill, everything will be fair tomorrow.
But I think what the most important thing I could say for where to start is start where you are. And if you’re in a place where you say, well, this could never work for me or my family, then what I would ask you to do is just live live with this. All you have to do is just live with this consciousness that we’re here for you, that we see you, that we think your work is valuable, that you deserve to have a name. Not just be “Zach’s mom” on a name tag that you deserve time for yourself, that you deserve a permission to be unavailable from your roles as a partner, parent, and or professional. That just because your partner is a monetary breadwinner, doesn’t mean that your time shouldn’t have boundaries and value. So that’s what I would say.
I would say, stay with us, be here with us live in some of this understanding because you’ll start to recognize this unfairness around you.
And then the next step, I would say, if you want to take self-talk to talking and communicating with somebody else, that is the next step. It’s recognizing that before you get to a place where you can quote unquote, play, you want to get in a place where you can practice.
And the most important practice, and this was really fun, Monica, I surveyed a thousand people on social media. Asking them what their most important practices. And you know, mainly I got self care practices which was good. I’m glad people are starting to understand those are important, but not one in the thousands says communication.
I did that on purpose because I wanted to be able to say this to you. I wanted to say I had the data that no one considers communication their most important practice, but I’m here to tell you that communication is your most important practice. It is not a means to an end. And the problem is that most communication we do feels like I will, “I had to tell him to get the toys off the floor to make the bed, or to get the kids out the door.” We look at communication like a means to an end where if we start to look at it as a practice, like exercise, there’s some days we do it shitty or like I, every day I do it shitty and maybe one day I’d go on like a 10 block run.
But the idea is that I’m trying and striving for something better for something that’s going to benefit me and the other person, my body in this case, but communication should be looked at like that. And so that’s what I would say. I would say, start with understanding how we talk to ourselves and then how we talk to others.
Monica: Hmm. I like how those are alliteration, there consciousness and communication. I mean, it really, it can, those two things alone can change everything. You know, at the end of the day, those who have read your book, which people need to do. I would say that’s actually the first step I would say, go read Eve’s book.
But those who have even gotten to this place, I think they’ll find maybe their cards. Aren’t 50 50, but the value of time is shifted in their marriage. So both sides feel like they are, they are guarding diamonds and they’re guarding each other’s diamonds instead of this infinite sand pit, the time that women seem to have.
Right. And, and that alone, I think can put you on the trajectory to longstanding fulfillment, growth, love in the marriage. And actually that’s where I love to end. What’s in it for the men? You know, we we’ve talked about this. Isn’t just for heteronormative marriages. Largely that’s where this comes up. So what’s on the other side of this for the men and for our families, for households.
Eve: Well, it’s funny cause I, the story was told to me now before the pandemic and Monica it still makes me tear up. It does. I can’t, I can’t, I haven’t even told you yet and I’m already tearing up, but one of my clients called me. And he’s like, I was really thinking about you at this funeral. And I was like, well, that’s good or bad that you think about me at funerals, and this is right before COVID and he had read my book, which I thought was so nice and sweet as a client. But he was at this funeral of this Titan of business in the Pacific Northwest.
He’s in the same circles. And he goes to this packed church, this funeral, and this man’ three daughters are in white and they go up to the podium, and they don’t give any context. They don’t say who they are. They just start reciting a poem. So the first daughter goes up and it’s this very silly sort of Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, green eggs and ham. I don’t like them to Mim type poem. And he’s like, the audience is a little confused and then the next daughter goes up and she recites another beautiful, silly, rhyming poem. And then the third daughter goes up and pulls her old piece of paper out and recites a poem. And then they all three lead and lean into the microphone and say, that was the poems our father wrote for us as a tooth fairy. Back to this tooth fair that keeps coming up. This magic of the connection. He said that after that no one could really top the speeches or talk about his business. It all felt not relevant because that’s what people were remembering and talking about. And, and it’s not just at the end of our lives, as I said earlier, the act of legacy . . . What’s in it for men is understanding that they are more than. Capital you’re more than just your breadwinner identity and that’s what we’ve done to so many men.
We put them in these boxes and men have been defined in such small boxes for so long too, that the idea of caring for a child is not something we even expect.
It’s demeaning, it’s sad. It’s demoralizing. Men deserve a chance to understand their role in their home. That’s what psychological safety really is in the workplace and at home, this idea that, you know, your role, you know, how you fit in. And when you do, it is magical, it leads to such beautiful things.
And another man said to me that he was taking his child to. To Michael’s and he’s like, you know, you should check out the store. It’s really cool. It has lots of crafts. And I was like, oh yeah, I’ve heard of that store. He was taking his son to Michael’s for the first time to help him with a Popsicle stick jewelry box. And he hadn’t done it before, but it was inspired by Fairplay.
And he said to me that the benefit was his son started crying to him in the car because his mother-in-law was dying. And the truth is. I want to ask you if you’re women listening, would you report to somebody else that your child cried to you today? I’ll tell you. I went in because my children cry to me every day.
It’s not the special, but I believe he told me that story because he probably hadn’t had experience like that where his son opened up to him alone with a vulnerability about something he was sad about. That type of connection, it cannot be taken away from us and it’s what we’re going to be remembered for.
So we want to that’s what’s in it for men. It is high stakes.
And the last thing I will say is literally it’s linked to men’s longevity. Hmm, men who are in healthy relationships at 50 we’re the ones who were most likely to be alive at 80. As women, we have a lot of other things linked around longevity. For men, it’s the quality of their primary relationship in their life, their partner.
Monica: I’ve heard you say this phrase and it was something that jumped out to me so much that I think it’s one of those ingrained phrases now is housework is humanity. And, you know, we as women, I think we have so much of that housework that we’re missing out on the humanity. And it’s felt like the men have been missing out on the housework, which connects them with humanity.
And to me, the fair play. That’s what it’s about. It’s about trying to distribute both. So both partners can experience the true fulfillment and what life is really about the humanity that is in our own households, together.
So I just want to thank you. Well, I read 80 books last year and you’re like tops the chart for me and, and both how good it felt to be connected to other women across the world. Like you said, many times who have found themselves in the same position. But also, it felt good to have so many practical ways to move forward with it because it felt like this weird, otherworldly, meta problem that was hard to pin down.
And you did it, Eve, you somehow did it. And I’m just so inspired by you. The work that you’re doing. And I can’t wait for what’s next. I can’t leave you without saying like, show us the book and they won’t see it, but the new book is out.
Eve: Well, what’s fun about this is there’s actually a coloring page in it, so you can color my daughter, colored it in for me. It’s all devoted to the understanding that the antidote to burnout is, is sadly not a walk around the block or even a drink with a friend, it’s being interested in your own life. And it’s a whole book devoted to that, to claiming leveling anything and everything that makes you come alive.
Living in an abandon in those moments, recognizing that, you know, I’m not a big, inspirational quotes person, but I will say, you know, Quote that you know, life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s learning to dance in the rain. Only if you’re not drowning, though, we do need umbrellas. And this book it’s called Find Your Unicorn Space is about those umbrellas.
The things that can’t be taken away from us. And I will say like this podcast for you, whether you make a dollar from it or a billion dollars, the secret formula that I talk about in unicorn space, which is a combination of curiosity, and so in other stories like you do so well, plus connection you share with the world.
And then the last thing was just so important: completion. No matter how it goes well, or doesn’t go, well, your, your guests veers off you, you edit this and you put it out in the world. That that formula is, is what we all deserve to have because it is linked to our mental and physical health.
And so keep doing it, keep doing it. It’s an inspiration to others.
Monica: Thank you Eve. And I’m going to set everyone your way. We’ll, we’ll link to everything Eve. But I appreciate your time so much .
Eve: Talk to you soon.
