The Simple Game Women Are Having Their Husbands Play So They Finally Understand The Mental Load
Jacob Lund | ShutterstockOnce upon a time, men worked, and women stayed home to cook, clean, and take care of the kids.
When I say “once upon a time,” I mean for a short period in the 1950s. Historically, women have always worked, but after World War II, America needed to get women out of the factories so men could have their jobs back. The government launched a nationwide propaganda campaign to convince us that women belonged in the home.
Now, even though most women have jobs and over a quarter of us earn more money than our husbands, we’re still doing the vast majority of domestic labor.
Statistically, women handle most (if not all) of the laundry, food shopping, cooking, cleaning, childcare, bills, planning, scheduling, and decorating. Men fix cars and do yardwork. While the wives overwhelmingly keep their homes and families running smoothly, the husbands are still culturally considered “the head of the household.”
Most of us juggle these never-ending tasks on top of our paid jobs, and it’s one of the primary reasons we’re reporting record levels of burnout. If this sounds like your dynamic with your partner, have I got a game for you.
This card game makes the mental load visible for husbands who don't get it
Kevin Malik / Pexels
The invisible load (also called the “mental load” or “cognitive labor”) is the unseen, exhausting, thankless effort it takes to keep a household running smoothly. For example, if you cooked dinner and your husband washed the dishes, he may think you divided the labor equally.
But who decided what to make? Who considered everyone’s food preferences and dietary restrictions? Who wrote the list, drove to the store, shopped, brought the food home, cleaned out the fridge, and put it away? Who made sure the sponge was clean, and the soap dispenser was full?
The invisible load is — well, mostly invisible, and that’s a huge part of the problem. This genius conversation deck turns all of those unseen tasks into visible, measurable, physical evidence.
Author Eve Rodsky created this conversation deck and named it after her New York Times bestselling book, Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). Basically, it’s designed to evenly distribute household responsibilities between partners — or, at the very least, prove how much stuff you tackle daily.
The deck contains 100 cards, each with its own task. These tasks include physical chores, like packing everyone’s suitcases for a vacation, feeding the pets, getting the dry cleaning, and cooking weekday meals, but they also include mental, emotional, and social tasks, like making holidays magical, policing your kids’ screen time, and maintaining friendships with other couples.
How to play the mental load game
- Set aside an hour for just you and your partner. Get some takeout, or pour yourselves a glass of wine.
- Go through all the cards and set aside those that don’t apply to your family.
- Claim the remaining cards based on which tasks each of you handles regularly.
- Compare piles to see who’s picking up the slack and who needs to help out more.
- Talk through each responsibility and redistribute the cards equally, agreeing to own the tasks in front of you moving forward.
“I’m a clinical psychologist who studies stress in families,” wrote one reviewer who called these cards a “valuable tool for reducing relationship stress and improving communication.”
“It’s been about a week since my husband and I went through this together, and SHEESH!” another reviewer commented. “Why didn’t we do this sooner??? My life has totally changed (for the better) since we shuffled and worked to reseal this deck of cards for our household responsibilities.”
Other people called it “brilliant” and “truly life-changing” — but not everyone’s happy.
“Clearly written from a place of pain from a woman’s perspective” and “completely diminishes the role of man in the household,” wrote one dude who was disappointed by the fact that there was “no breadwinner card” and said the author “could have benefited from a male input.”
Ah, yes, the very thing our culture has been missing for thousands of years: male input.
Who won’t the mental load game work for?
Sure enough, some women reported that when they played this game, their husbands got defensive, angry, and tried to downplay the importance of invisible household labor. One forum user wrote:
“After going through the cards, my pile was about 3x larger than his. We both work from home (he was just laid off), we have a 5-year-old (in daycare) and a 1-year-old (home with babysitters during the day), and I’m still nursing. My salary has been double his for the past 5 years. I think he had no idea I do half the things I do. I’m tired of taking on a disproportionate amount of the load.
He said to me, ‘Your pile is only bigger because you take on things that no one else cares about.’ When I asked him to explain, he said, 'No one cares about things like holidays or school spirit, so from now on, I am going on strike.'
At the very least, the Fair Play Deck will show you if your partner is open to listening and learning, or if he’s the type of guy who will claim, “The divorce came out of nowhere!”
Maria Cassano is a writer, editor, and journalist whose work has appeared on NBC, Bustle, CNN, The Daily Beast, Food & Wine, and Allure, among others. She's in the process of publishing her memoir.
