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If you’re exhausted from carrying the invisible labor at home, this episode will feel like a deep breath.
What is the Second Shift? And how is it harming women?
The second shift is defined as labor performed in the home outside of work –– things like grocery shopping or prepping dinner or lunches, childcare, pet care, cleaning, and managing finances –– of which most falls on women.
Whether you have children or not, labor in the home is not equal, which can cause strain and unmet expectations that can lead to resentment. There’s also this pesky myth that home-based tasks are somehow not “worth” as much as a typical hour of work, leading many women and men to devalue the time of their partner doing non-compensated work.
Building healthy relationships is what Eve Rodksy, author of the bestselling Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, is all about. In this special ‘best of’ episode, Eve joins to talk about how to build more equitable partnerships from the get-go to help women reclaim their time, build stronger relationships with their partners, and develop more equitable systems.
Key takeaways:
Recognize invisible labor as real work
Eve explains how women often end up as the “she-fault parent,” responsible for both physical and emotional labor at home, which leads to burnout, stalled careers, and a profound sense of erasure. She emphasizes that this unpaid work is not only personally draining but also has global economic consequences, amounting to trillions in unpaid labor annually. The household and emotional tasks women carry are not “helping” or extras—they’re essential, valuable labor.
Use breakdown moments as turning points
Her journey to creating Fair Play began after a breaking point moment when her husband texted, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries,” while she was juggling kids, work, and exhaustion. This moment crystallized the imbalance in her marriage and led her to research and document the invisible tasks women carry. When overwhelm peaks—see it as a signal to change the system, not just push harder.
Build equity with boundaries, systems, and communication
Equity doesn’t mean splitting everything 50/50—it means creating accountability and trust by clearly defining who owns what, respecting each other’s time, and practicing open dialogue.
Make the invisible visible
List out every task that takes more than two minutes, and assign full ownership (conception, planning, execution) to one person. Visibility plus ownership prevents defaulting back to one partner.
Let go of perfectionism and the multitasking myth
Stop believing it’s easier if you “just do it yourself.” Long-term equity only happens when you allow others to learn, make mistakes, and take full responsibility.
Treat communication as an intentional practice
Don’t just communicate transactionally about tasks—commit to improving how you talk, listen, and problem-solve together. Strong communication is the foundation for lasting relationship equity.
Notable quotes
“Women have been conditioned since birth to believe our time is infinite like sand, and that men’s time is finite like diamonds.”
“Communication for the rest of your life will be your most important practice—and you can get better at it.”
“Invisible work is the social safety net of our country. If you make it visible, society as we know it collapses.”
Eve’s Links:
Website: https://www.fairplaylife.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everodsky/?hl=en
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Meet Eve
Eve Rodsky transformed a “blueberries breakdown” into a catalyst for social change when she applied her Harvard-trained background in organizational management to ask the simple yet profound question: What would happen if we treated our homes as our most important organizations? Her New York Times
bestselling book and Reese’s Book Club Pick, Fair Play, a gamified life-management system that helps
partners rebalance their domestic workload and reimagine their relationship, has elevated the cultural
conversation about the value of unpaid labor and care. In her highly anticipated follow-up, Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World, Rodsky explores the cross-section between the science of creativity, productivity, and resilience. Described as the ‘antidote to physical, mental, and emotional burnout,’ Rodsky aims to inspire a new narrative around the equality of time and the individual right to personal time choice that influences sustainable and lasting change on a policy level. Rodsky’s work is backed by Hello Sunshine—Reese Witherspoon’s media company whose mission is to change the narrative for women through storytelling. Rodsky was born and raised by a single mom in New York City and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband Seth and their three children.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
This episode with Eve Rodsky will change the way you think about work, relationships, and your own time forever. Today we’re bringing back one of my absolute favorite conversations from the archives, my chat with Eve Rodsky. You might know her from her best-selling book, Fair Play, or her work helping women reclaim their time, their boundaries, and their creativity, and honestly, just like their partners more. In this episode, we dive into why women are often expected to carry the invisible labor at home, how that impacts our careers, our relationships, and our sense of self, and what we can actually do to start shifting the balance. This is especially if you are a woman in a relationship with a man and you are doing a lot of both actual labor as well as the emotional labor of the house, and it makes you want to scream.
We’re talking exactly today about how you can actually create a more equitable home and what you can do to start shifting that. Eve also shares how to create what she calls your unicorn space for the things that light you up outside of work and caregiving. So if you’ve ever felt like you’re doing it all and still somehow not doing enough, this conversation is going to feel like a deep breath. Let’s get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Eve Rodsky
Oh, yeah, this is wallpaper.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it. I have an interesting relationship with wallpaper because I grew up with the bad wallpaper that spent hours taking off.
Eve Rodsky
Totally. Yes, yes. I was so averse to wallpaper for that exact reason. We had this very, very small kitchen in my Stuyvesant Town apartment in the Lower East Side, and for some reason it had striped brown wallpaper that looked like it was like toilet paper that someone had wiped themselves on.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, oh, that’s a visual.
Eve Rodsky
So that’s really what it looked like. Yeah, it just was splotchy with white and brown. So yeah, so I’ve had to reclaim the wallpaper narrative.
Tori Dunlap:
I have seen so much cool wallpaper now where I’m like, and I rent too, so I’m like, ooh. I know there’s wallpaper that you can take down but-
Eve Rodsky
I know. I know. You know what? It’s worth it. Just do one wall. You want to hear the one last cool wallpaper story is that when I was setting up my office, I found this wallpaper of this really cool enchanted forest sage green wallpaper that has a lot of white horses. And so then what we decided, if Tori, you came to L.A., what I would do is invite you over to the office and we’ve kept a gold sharpie, and so we’ve asked everybody who has a book that’s been published who’s an author to create a little unicorn horn on one of these white horses and then sign the unicorn. So you get your own unicorn. It’s like you get your own star.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s so sweet. It’s the wallpaper author walk of fame.
Eve Rodsky
Exactly. Yep. So that’s what we created, a wallpaper author walk of fame.
Tori Dunlap:
I love that. That’s so sweet. We are so excited to have you. So excited to talk to you about your work. What brought you into the work of fair play and can you talk a little bit about your experience feeling like, “A married single woman”?
Eve Rodsky
Yeah. I think Tori, like you, you probably look back in your life. And for me, whether it’s financial feminist, for me it was, I did not set out to be an expert on the gender division of labor, right? I mean, I’m sure I can put words in your mouth that you probably feel the same way. But on our third grade, what do you want to be when you grow up board? I’m sure it did not say financial feminist or expert on the gender division of labor, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Five years ago. You would ask me five years ago, this was not part of the plan. So yep, totally.
Eve Rodsky
And of course the expertise that you have and that I gained over the years is the anchor to the plan, but as you said, it’s not part of the plan. I mean, in my third grade, what do you want to be when you grow up board? Probably you said like astronaut. And then interestingly, since I’m resolutely Gen X, I remember Elizabeth Warren. She was in law school, she was our orientation teacher and she asked us what we want to do with our law degree. And a lot of people focus on justice and litigation or arguing before the Supreme Court, but I legitimately think I said something like I was going to be president of United States and a senator from New York and continue to be a Knicks City dancer because that was my goal also at the time, to become a professional dancer. And so I think given also your audience too, or if I’m speaking to millennials or any Gen Z women, what I want to say is that I had really big dreams.
I had big dreams and I thought I’d be smashing all of these ceilings, whether it was president, like I said, senator, Knicks City dancer. But really the only thing I can tell you, Tori, that I was smashing 10 years after that Elizabeth Warren orientation was peas for my toddler Zach. And in that 10 years from 21 to 34, so I guess 13 years, my life had taken such a turn for the worst in terms of my career stalling after my second son was born. My husband abandoning me thinking that I was, I talk about the “blueberries breakdown” where he sends me a text, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries.” He was looking at me as the fulfiller of his smoothie needs. And realizing that by the time my second son, Ben was born in 2011, that all of those big dreams looked like they had all passed me by.
Tori Dunlap:
I just took a huge sigh. Talk to me about that. Was it a feeling of identity loss for you? We’ve talked a lot on the show about this myth, of course, that women can have it all and then you try to have it all and you realize you can’t have it all. And you mentioned this blueberries moment. Talk to me more about that. What was the shift for you?
Eve Rodsky
I think the shift for me at that point, and a lot of people say we like to go dark to go light, so we’ll stay in the pain for a little bit and then I promise you this will get light. But I think to stay in the dark for a little bit, because I think it’s important because I am a ghost of your Christmas future out there. That’s what the financial feminist is as well, right? I mean, you are teaching Tori what I was listening to on one of your episodes. The beauty of what you’re saying, which is so similar to fair play, is like yes, there may be life-changing magic in organizing your junk drawer, but the real life-changing magic is in long-term planning. And so that’s I think where our messages really intersect beautifully. So for me, I did not have any of that long-term planning. All along the way in my life, I had this idea that three words would get me through, and those are really toxic words, and those words are figure it out.
And if you’re saying to yourself, I’m going to figure it out, then that is not where I want you. I want you to read the Financial Feminist. I want you to read Fair Play. There is beauty in not figuring it out. There’s beauty in long-term thinking and understanding and being able to plan. So because I didn’t do that, what ended up happening was because I didn’t have any tools. Remember this is 2011 when I had this blueberries breakdown where my husband sends me this, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries,” texts. And I’m sitting on the side of the road about to pick up my son from his toddler transition program with a breast pump and a diaper bag on the passenger seat of my car, gifts for newborn baby to return, and a client contract in my lap because I had actually been pushed out of the corporate workforce around that time after my second maternity leave.
So all this isolation and abandonment, that was the feeling. And in fact, Tori, now, all these years later, 12 years later, the word cloud of women in midlife, which is why I wrote Fair Play in my subsequent book, Find Your Unicorn Space, was that the word cloud that kept coming up that was highly troubling to me was that women feel a combination of overwhelm and erasure. Now, that’s a terrible combination. If you’re going to be erased, at least be erased with a tequila and a Caribbean destination. If you’re going to be like bye-bye like I’m gone, or if you’re going to feel overwhelmed, at least let it be towards something where you feel like you’re changing the world. But to have overwhelm and erasure together, it’s a really, really toxic combination.
And typically, like I said, when I got to the realization that I was not smashing my dreams or those gas ceilings, but that I was really smashing just peas, it was a combination of understanding that I had let assumptions about my life as opposed to structured decision-making take over, and so I was now in charge of everything for my family, which I didn’t know was statistically happening to all women in every country. In fact, it’s a UN sustainability goal. We have to eradicate the fact that women hold $1.9 trillion of unpaid labor a year. So that was happening in my marriage where I became the default parent, or as I call the she-fault parent, even though it can happen to people who are not married to men too.
And then on top of it, my workplace had abandoned me, as I said to you where they told me if I was going to come back from maternity leave, it would be without my direct reports. And I’d have to pump in a dark, basically a dark broom closet. And they said there was no outlet in that broom closet, so I’d have to bring a battery pack for that breast pump, so I quit. Now I say I’m forced out. And by the way, think about how this is affecting my financial life. By the way, I just lost my 401(k), I lost my possibility for promotion. I’m now doing all the unpaid labor, which of course is harder to get back into the workplace. So this is affecting my financial life as we’re talking, not realizing at the time. And then on top of that, our society, because we don’t have any federal paid leave and help with childcare, our society tells us to wait till our kids are in school and then you can begin your second phase of your life.
But I remember when my son entered school, the preschool teacher who I loved and invited us into parents’ day, told us all that this was our new community, these were the people we could rely on who’d know us better than anyone ever knew us, Tori. And then I looked down at my name tag and it says, Zach’s mom. And so then I thought to myself, these are the people who are going to know me better than anyone’s ever known me? They don’t even know my fucking name. So it was a combination of that erasure that all of a sudden I was Zach’s mom, plus the fact that I was being abandoned by my workplace, plus the fact that my partner was seeing me as the she-fault. That was the perfect storm that ultimately led to Fair Play.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. I have a million other questions for you. I have to ask the one that is on my mind immediately. I need you to either talk me off the ledge or push me off. Is the answer don’t have children?
Eve Rodsky
It’s one of the answers, for sure. Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Because I very candidly in my life, I am not ready to have children at this moment, but I am having the conversation of do I want this someday? And part of me is like maybe, maybe, and the other part of me is like, hell no. And then I hear something like this and I’m like, hell no. So I don’t know what my question is basically. I don’t know, is it don’t have children?
Eve Rodsky
Well, it’s for you. Yes. Well, I think again, this is why I’m so excited to be with you today because again, as the ghost of your Christmas future, it can be like the Christmas carol where you know what? We’re going to do things differently. Ebenezer Scrooge, he’s going to do things differently. If the Fair Play movement continues to take hold, you can have children. But this is the thing, right? There is two things that it’s going to require. It requires us as a society to remember that an hour holding our child’s hand in the pediatrician’s office is as valuable as an hour in the boardroom. That’s it. And because we’re not there yet-
Tori Dunlap:
And it’s also work, it is as much work to give a presentation in a boardroom as it is to handle a screaming toddler. I would argue screaming toddler is way, way harder.
Eve Rodsky
Yes, way harder. Way harder, right? It is work. And then the other thing I think is important is to remember that it can be worth it if you are interested. And by the way, this happens in same sex couples too. But if you’re interested in partnering with a man, it can be worth it if and only if we’re inviting that man into his full power in the home so that you, Tori, can stay out in your full power in the world. That is the only way that I will allow you to have children.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Eve Rodsky
Or again, look, there’s a lot of single parents out there. Let me shout out my mother, who was a single mother. She was not a single mother by choice. My father left her and my brother when she was pregnant with my brother, and he ended up having a lot of issues because of that. Why I need your listeners to become part of this culture movement is so then I can make things better for the people who don’t have the privilege of having a partner, right? To have the federal paid leave, to get us universal childcare, to get support systems back in place, to fight in the family law courts where I’ve testified twice now for single mothers whose partner says, “What do you do all day? You’re eating bonbons all day. I’m not going to pay child support.” And I literally read all of the Fair Play tasks and we’ll talk about those into the record. So what I’ll say to you is absolutely you can have children, and there’s a secret formula. And this is where we can get into the fun part of how the system came about. But these are the three things I’m going to need from you to remember if and when you want to have children.
We’re going to practice and we’re going to have you ready in a pattern of a secret formula. And the practice is boundaries, systems, and communication. When you have somebody in your life or if you want to partner with somebody in your life and have children with them, and you’re lucky again to have the privilege of a partner, then those are the three things that we have found. Again through 13 years now, 12 years now of beta testing Fair Play, having it being in 17 countries, having hundreds of thousands of people play, probably millions at this point, we know that that’s the secret formula. Boundaries, systems, and communication. And of course, we can break it down and we will, but I will tell you, yes, you can have them, and I promise you, when you practice that formula, things will be okay.
Tori Dunlap:
So let’s dive into that. This is a perfect opportunity. So I know what all of those things mean in theory, right? I think I’m a pretty good communicator. I’m getting better at setting boundaries. I think especially for systems in my life before anybody else has touched them, great, I feel really good about that. Managing that with a partner in the anticipation of having children or at least having a equitable relationship before or in spite of children, what does that actually look like in practice?
Eve Rodsky
Well, I’ll tell you a little bit of an origin story because for me, for a long time, Tori, I thought it looked like a list because women have been making lists for hundreds of years, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Eve, that’s funny you say that because that’s what I’m asking for.
Eve Rodsky
Right, right. Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m like, what is the to-dos? What things do I need? What are the hacks? Eve, what are the hacks, baby?
Eve Rodsky
Exactly, the hacks, right? It was like a hack. And so I remember looking when I was at my lowest with Seth, and then also I talk about in the book in Fair Play, just these powerful women, Tori, that looked like you, these amazing women who were so empowered in using their voice, literally having lost their voice to their partners. It was the wake-up call to realize this was happening to other women. I talk about a march that I go on a breast cancer march where at noon these powerful women won’t come with me to lunch because their partners are texting them things like, “Where did you put Hudson’s soccer bag?” And, “What’s the address to the birthday party?” And, “When are you coming home from the parade?”
Or my favorite was my friend Kate, Kate’s husband that asked her, “Do the kids need to eat lunch?” But I think what was so hard about these moments in my life where I was watching these powerful women seed to this pressure of not saying, “Oh, I’m turning off my phone,” but, “Eve, I can’t go with you to lunch after this breast cancer march because I have to go bring a perfectly wrapped gift to a birthday party. I have to go find Hudson’s soccer bag or feed my kids lunch.” It was this realization that in a good way, Tori, because this was 2011, right? This was 2012, I think literally we just had gotten iPads. I think that was the first year of Instagram launching. So there was no Tori to tell me my life could look differently. There was no TikTok, there was nothing. There was just how to expect when you’re expecting, which told me my child was going to look like a jelly bean, but I had no idea what to expect.
And so when I realized my life is falling apart, and then I noticed these women who were so powerful and I saw that they didn’t have power in their relationships too, my first thing to do, like any Gen X type A woman, was to go to the literature because that’s what I was looking for. So there was no such thing as organization for the home. If you looked it up in 2011 on Amazon or in the library, you found bins, like how to put stuff in bins or whatever. It was like the early phases before Marie Kondo of how to organize your home. That’s not what I was looking for. I was looking for an organizational system to take the assumptions off me and start putting some work onto Seth. Or as my one friend said, what Fair Play taught her, was that she doesn’t have a magical vagina that whispers in her ear what her husband’s mother wants for Christmas.
So those assumptions, I was trying to move them over so that I didn’t have a magical vagina, but that Seth understood he could capably do the work of the home as well. So there was nothing like that out there. But I did find out, Tori, that this thing that I was suffering with and that Kate, do the kids need to eat lunch was suffering with, and all those women that day were suffering with has a name. So it turns out it’s been called the second shift. It’s been called emotional labor. It’s been called the mental load. But my favorite, favorite, favorite article was actually one I found from 1986, Tori, Same Shit, Different Decade. Again, we’re going to get light, I promise. But the article in 1986, and this gets, I think this is important for the financial feminist because it’s a lot of what you talk about.
In 1986, Arlene Kaplan Daniels argued that men own most things in this country. The ownership, the financial power, political power, which comes from financial power stays with men. And the more that women enter the workplace, the more that we could possibly get some of that financial power. So it’s very much in the interest of patriarchal systems. And again, I’m not blaming individual men. We’re all in the system that works for none of us, but it’s very much in the interest of patriarchal systems to keep women in the home. And if you’re not going to be in the home, so God forbid women have to enter the workplace, which they do because of income inequality, and we have entered the workplace, we’re still going to make sure that they get saddled with a motherhood penalty. We’re going to give them the assumption that they will be the ones taking care of kids.
And so what we can do with that is we can ask them to do more flexible work, the non-promotable tasks of the emotional labor of talking and mentoring people, writing the newsletters, we can pay them less. And so this all really does affect our finances. But the most interesting thing about that invisible work, Tori, was that she argued you can never make it visible because if you make it visible, then all of society collapses because we’re doing hundreds, millions of hours of unpaid labor. Women are, that become the social safety net of our country. So once that happened, I had this aha moment, and it was very much too big for my britches moment where somehow I thought I could solve all this myself, duh, it’s not that hard, by just making invisible work visible. I thought, wow, no one’s ever done this. So how fun would it be if I could open up an Excel sheet and just write down every single thing that I do that takes more than two minutes? That’s work.
As you said earlier about the pediatrician’s office. So over nine months, this is what saved me. What saved me is I found women like you, Tori, and I did it through snowball research because back then, again, it was harder to find surveys you could use. There was not AI. So I did it through early Facebook asking for women. Ultimately, I mirrored the U.S. census, and then I ended up in 17 countries over the last 10 years. But we found out what every woman does that takes more than two minutes from applying sunscreen, which is two minutes for the application, 30 minutes from the chase. Girl scout cookies, ordering in sales, making school lunches, planning birthday celebrations, being that magical vagina that buys gifts for in-laws at Christmas, planning holidays. And ultimately, I ended up with a 98 tab Excel spreadsheet, 2,000 items of invisible work that I ultimately titled the shit I do, the shit I do spreadsheet.
And that I will say, that did not end up solving my problems because when I sent it to Seth with no context, just, “Can’t wait to discuss,” I got no response from him except for a monkey emoji covering its eyes like the early pixelated version of, I don’t want to fucking see this. But I will say why it saved me, because it was the first time in my life in this phase of my life that was so, so hard that I realized I wasn’t alone. And that was the first step. So it was the step one for me was making invisible visible and then crashing and burning when I realized I had a community of women. But that list, which is I still today will tell you, is the best list of invisible work ever created and it’s now in the Fair Play cards. It’s on our website.
We’ll talk about where you can find it because you never have to do it again. But that list alone was not enough. And that’s when I crashed and burn, Tori, because after nine months of this project, I thought just by showing Seth everything I was doing, that would be enough. But again, that’s not boundary, systems, and communication, that’s a list. And so I had to learn the hard way that that was not going to be enough.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, so let’s take that second step because I’m wondering, should your friend Kate, do the kids need to eat? The fuck, they do. Obviously, you fucking idiot. Of course they need to eat. What is your response to that in a way that one is not like, you fucking idiot. Oh, no, duh.
Eve Rodsky
Well, that’s what I said. Yes, for many years.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally, I’m trying to figure out what is the mature response to that that can actually lead to some sort of change just in your relationship, this larger conversation that we’ll of course have. It has to come with policy change. It has to come with paid leave, and it has to come with abortion access, and it has to come with all of these things. But at the very microcosm, in our relationships, how do you start having that conversation, especially if you’re dating a man to the point where they understand and start doing something about it.
Eve Rodsky
Okay, well, that is the key, right? Because as we say, especially as activists, you have to breathe. It’s polluted air out there, but you still have to breathe, right? So we’re going to take agency in our own home, and that’s where actually Fair Play started. I was pretty surprised by myself because my mother’s a professor of social change, and so I always thought actually I was going to start inside out. Like paid leave first and child care first, but I was actually surprised. And actually it should not have surprised me because what I do for a living, my day job, Tori, is that I work for families that look like the HBO show Succession.
Tori Dunlap:
You and I should talk because I am obsessed with Succession. I get compared to Shiv Roy on the internet multiple times a day.
Eve Rodsky
Oh, my God. Well, you look like her, by the way.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s what people tell me, and I’m not even made up.
Eve Rodsky
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
When I have makeup on, we have the same face shape, Sarah Snook and I.
Eve Rodsky
More than that, you have the most, those beautiful eyes like almond eyes.
Tori Dunlap:
Stop. Thank you.
Eve Rodsky
You look a lot like her.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you.
Eve Rodsky
Yes, yes.
Tori Dunlap:
But it is something literally on the daily, and I’m like, part of me is like I’m very flattered, and the other part of me is like, that’s who I remind you, anyway.
Eve Rodsky
But by the way, why not, right? Again, I call her daughter of or son of, but I’d rather you be the matriarch. But what’s been interesting about that work that I was doing at the time, because I was telling you that I quit my job where I was forced out and I ended up starting my own law firm, which I still have. That’s been hard to transition those Succession clients over to other people. But the beauty of the work that was my day job at the time is that I create these, as you said, grace and humor and generosity communication as opposed to fuck you as you hear the way Kendall Roy talks to his kids, or not Kendall, Logan Roy, which is very true, by the way. So families will work with me where the Logan Roy will walk out of the room whenever his son speaks, right? To the point where we’re talking and communicating as a family with grace and humor and generosity over the most complex financial decisions for family foundations and family businesses. That’s my niche. That’s what I do for a living as a lawyer.
And so I had a point, Tori, when Seth sent me back the pixelated, I don’t want to see the shit I do spreadsheet, I had a choice. There was the Eat, Pray, Love narrative, which was very big back then, so I could get, but that’s a privileged narrative. I mean, I had two kids at the time, so I wasn’t doing that. I wasn’t going to Eat, Pray, Love out of my marriage. So I could either resign myself to doing it all like you said, and just end up being that fucking muttering person that I had become like you fucking do it. I can’t fucking handle this. I’m storming out. Who doesn’t know how to fucking change a crib sheet? That’s where I was in this nails on a chalkboard communication style and Seth’s communications style at that point was avoidance.
I know this because I actually, I’m trained in communication styles. That’s the biggest irony of all. So I could resign myself to doing it all, or Tori, I could get my ass in gear and become my own client. And so that’s what I did. And so I put that formula, which I knew was a practice on the board, the same fucking formula I used for all my families. I used it for myself. I put two things on a whiteboard. And again, this wasn’t supposed to be a book or a movement or anything. This was just me helping Seth and me because I needed to get out of this pattern of my relationship. And so the two things I wrote on that whiteboard was boundaries, as I said, systems and communication. And then I wrote home equals organization because I realized that that was the missing piece, that people don’t treat their homes as if it’s their most important organization.
Tori, even my aunt Marion’s mahjong group has more clearly defined expectations in the home. You don’t bring snack to her fucking group twice, you get one warning sign. If you don’t bring snack for the second time, you’re out. But the home, men especially, were telling me that it’s a shit show. It’s decision fatigue. They’re waiting to decide who’s taking the dog out when it’s about to take a piss on the rug. And that was a man who works in systems management ironically, and doesn’t have kids yet. And he’s telling me his home feels horrible to him already, they’re just married without kids. So I knew I was onto something because I knew that systems, boundaries, and communications allow organizations to thrive. Now, the problem was how was I going to, where was it going to start, first of all, and how was I going to develop what I wanted to develop that you said, we’ll go from saying fuck you, your resentment, the bitterness, the muttering to like us weekly, those buzzometers like resentometers a 10. I was a 10Bs. How do you move out of patterns?
So typically, people probably like us would start with the easiest thing of boundary, systems, communication. And the easiest thing of those is systems. It’s the easiest place to start. It doesn’t mean you end there because we’ll talk about how important boundaries and communication are to implementing a system. But the beauty of a system is that I knew I could get men on board because my early beta testers were men who were in the military who are coaches who know they’re not going to put their point guard in for their center unless it’s like LeBron James or something. And so I started with systems, but the problem with the system, to develop a system, you need accurate data.
And we’ve now learned, and I didn’t know this was actually in science that had been studied, but I found in my own study too that men over report by at least one-third what they do and women under report by two-thirds. So I was getting very inaccurate data. I would say, who’s doing groceries in your house? We both do. Who’s planning birthday celebrations for your kid? We both are. Who does dishes? We both do. What is happening here? Can I understand what is really happening in these households? Women who are married to men or wanted to be partnered with them, Tori, and this is how we can solve for this, why you can have children. Because when you solve for this, it changes everything. Women were the one telling me that, oh, we both do groceries because I’m the one that notices our second son Johnny likes yellow mustard with his protein, otherwise, he chokes on it. He won’t eat it.
Ooh, okay. If I’m in my HBO show Succession worlds and we’re looking at how to put together governance, we call that conception. That’s a conception phase of project management. Then I would hear, oh yeah, and I’m the one who gets stakeholder buy-in for what everybody else needs for the grocery list. They didn’t say stakeholder buy-in, but that’s what I was listening for. And then I monitor the mustard for when it runs low. Ooh, okay, that’s planning. I know that phase. Oh, you both do it because Sean goes to the store to pick up the mustard. The French is yellow, and he brings home spicy Dijon every fucking time, and now you can’t trust him with your living will. Ding, ding, ding. That was the most important insight in this whole Fair Play journey because then I could write the two words that were missing from this organization, that was missing from literally almost every single home organization that I spoke to in the past 10 years in 17 countries.
And those two words are accountability and trust. If you lose accountability and trust in an organization, you’re done. You are done. You’ll be governed by fear, by resentment, all those things what we were talking about. You restore accountability and trust, like you were saying, to get out of that pattern, those communication patterns you’re talking about by ownership, by context and not control. And so that conception, planning, and execution insight, when you apply that to the Fair Play Excel spreadsheet, which was the shit I do spreadsheet at the time, I started to write them on index cards and I realized you can have an amazing metaphor for holding cards. Because I wanted people to understand that when they hold the groceries card, they’re not going to say, “Hey, give me the list. What do you want me to do there? I’ll call you with the FaceTime when I get there.”
Nope, nope, nope. Just like, I don’t work for Tori. There’s no way amazing Kristen is going into your office every day, Tori, and saying to you, “Hey, Tori, so what do you want me to do today? I’m just going to wait here till you tell me what to do.” We know it doesn’t work. So when you bring that ownership mindset to the home, everything changes. And that is the core of the Fair Play system. CPE, conception, planning, execution stays with one person. You can always re-deal, but once you do that in your relationship before kids, Tori, I’ll let you have as many kids as you want.
Tori Dunlap:
That is really, really helpful. I know for myself and others listening, I hear that and I’m like, okay, I’m going to start doing it. What happens if I receive friction? What happens if I, especially from my male partner, receive the like, “No, but I do a lot.” Or like, “Oh yeah, I’ll try,” and then it works for a while and then goes away? I also was thinking while you were explaining, I understand that in order for relationships to be the best that they can be, and if you have a problem, you need to communicate that problem. At the same time, this feels like I am teaching men how to just be better people, and that’s not my responsibility. So how do you grapple with that too? Understanding this is necessary to the relationship. And I also understand that unfortunately, men have traditionally not been conditioned to do this shit, and also this is not my fucking job to be their mommys, teachers, whatever you want to call it.
Eve Rodsky
A hundred percent. And I think that that’s, but my mom and I used to fight about this a lot when I was starting to think about Fair Play because again, she’s a professor of social change, and she would say, “Well, don’t you want to write to men?” And then we would grapple back and forth with the fact that the oppressors are typically the ones who have to change the systems, right? The oppressed are the ones who have to change the systems. The thing about Fair Play is that it’s a two-partner game. It’s a three-partner game. It’s a four-partner game. It’s a societal game. However, to enter the system, there has to be a game changer. And typically the game changer is the person who is not happy with the way things are. And typically it’s going to be a woman because again, sadly, that’s what society has conditioned us to do is to close our mouths and to be seen and not heard.
And so yes, of course it’s a burden. Of course, it’s a burden. The good news, I think is the collective burden is starting to lessen. We just saw this beautiful statistic that actually men in white-collar jobs are the ones who are asking most now for paternity leave, and they’re reducing their hours more on average. That’s the best demographic right now. There is something happening, but yes, in our generation, in our liminal state, Tori, before the Fair Play unpaid labor conversation becomes completely baked into the culture, we have to be the ones taking on the game changer role. And I will say that taking on that game changer role was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. Because yes, there was a lot of tension in that beginning part, but the other option, like I told you, was to leave my marriage and there was going to be a lot of friction and teaching.
And what I didn’t want was what my mom did, which was she had to remind my father when his custody days were, and he didn’t even show up for them. So Fair Play was still not going to happen even in a divorce setting. So for me, what I realize now is that the key to my economic power and to my mental and physical health has been being in the boundary, systems and communication practice with my partner. But to enter that practice for sure, it required me to say, “I’m not going to live like this anymore.” And I want to just tell you one thing about that’s because we did systems, or at least we got to touch on systems. And remember, this is a 101. I mean, this is 10 years later. This is a 101. So for people who are hearing this for the first time and they feel triggered by it, they should, because this is new ways of thinking. But the ownership mindset made sense to Seth.
But the reason why it wasn’t going to change, Tori, by just saying to Seth, “Here, extracurricular sports, I love you, Seth. You’re awesome. I’m so glad you think that you’re handling extracurricular sports by bringing Zach to the little league field. But did you know that the conception means I’m surveying his friends for what sports he wants to play, researching leagues. I’m on an 85 person text chain for what day practice is and for commuting him to practice. Do you know that I’m ordering equipment on Amazon and returning the equipment on Amazon? Do you know that I’m retrieving his birth certificate and scanning it into a 1985 portal that has never been used before without crashing? Do you know that I’m snack mom? And so I’m required once a season to bring snacks and water for 30 kids.”
Tori Dunlap:
And also little Timmy has a peanut allergy and I know that so can’t do peanut butter.
Eve Rodsky
Yes, and the peanut allergy and then no peanut butter. This mom is vegan or this parent is vegan, this child. It’s so complicated these days. And on top of it, we do a coach’s gift. So when Seth understood that because from a workplace perspective, he is very much an ownership mindset person, he understood, okay, wow, that’s a lot more work than just getting the kids to little league field. So that’s how we started. We started with extracurricular sports because he valued it. I valued it. And Tori, just from that one ownership change in our household, I was getting about six hours of my week back of the hundred cards. Again, Fair Play is a hundred cards that represent everything you need to do to run a household. 60 if you don’t have children, you add 40 if you do. So that’s where the scariness of having children came up in our beginning part of this podcast.
But I will say that that ownership piece, that systems piece of saying, I will step off you as long as you handle the ownership with a decent minimum standard of care, which we can talk about, which means sunscreen, water bottle. I don’t care if they bring a uniform that’s dirty, but just being on time, that started to change our relationship by itself. That was the systems. But it wasn’t enough because Tori, as you said, it requires somebody to be a game changer. And it’s really hard to be a game changer, Tori, when we’ve been conditioned since birth to believe that our time is infinite like sand, and that men’s time is finite like diamonds. So that’s the boundary I’m talking about here. I’m not talking about a boundary like shut off your phone after work. I’m talking about a boundary that’s very different than you may have ever heard.
I’m talking about a boundary that you believe your time is as important as the men in your life, as the men in your society. And because we see things literally since birth, we watch women enter male professions, that’s called occupational segregation. Salaries automatically come down. We watch health systems tell us that breastfeeding is free when it’s 1,800 hours a year. It’s a full-time job. So again, that’s one big, very, very practical thing I’ll say to you. One great thing about having kids is you do not have to breastfeed now, formula is amazing. It is an 1,800 hour a year job. Not sure I believe it was ever worth it for any of my kids, and I think it put us into a very bad pattern to start with. So that’s just an aside.”
“So what I’m telling you is that the game changer in my marriage with Seth wasn’t, you have to take on extra quick their sports, Tori. It was, “Seth, I see when we both get home from our work day that you have three hours after our kids go to bed to watch Sports Center, workout, check a PowerPoint deck where I’m doing things in service of our home literally until my head hits the pillow two hours after you go to bed, I will no longer live that way. We are a dual ambition household, and I believe that I deserve as much time choice over how I use my day as you have. Yes, I make less money than you, but my hours are just as important as your hours. I want equal time choice. It doesn’t have to be equal cards. That’s why it’s called Fair Play, not equal play, but I need you to believe that my time is as valuable as your time.” And it took a long time, Tori, for him really to understand that because for a while he was saying to me like, “Well, my time is more valuable than your time because I get paid more for my time.”
And so I had to keep saying, “Well, Seth, I’m talking about the fact that we just both get 24 hours in a day. I only get 24 hours in a day. You only get 24 hours in a day. And you believe because you get paid more money that I should have to be in service of every single one of my hours should be in service of somebody other than me.”
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and then I go to, “Okay, you make more money, great. You’re going to pay me for all of the domestic housekeeping or the caregiving.”
Eve Rodsky
Yes, exactly. You make more money-
Tori Dunlap:
Because I do unpaid labor.
Eve Rodsky
You make more money because I did unpaid labor.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Eve Rodsky
Because I did unpaid labor.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Great. Okay. Then you need to pay me like you would-
Eve Rodsky
Exactly.
Tori Dunlap:
… for somebody to come over to clean the house, for somebody to pick up the kids, for somebody to make… Okay, you can hire a private chef. You can hire a housekeeper. You can hire a caregiver. Great. I’ll bill you.
Eve Rodsky
But Tori, the hardest part about that in the Fair Play system, which you’ll realize and what’s so beautiful to have the cards and the tools, and again, save all your money out there. You can find it online at Fair Play Life for free.
Tori Dunlap:
We’ll link it. We’ll link it.
Eve Rodsky
Yeah, it’s free. You can link in the show notes. You don’t have to buy anything. You can go and see them. But when you see the hundred tasks, what you realize is that there’s about 50 tasks that are outsourceable because that was a very, very common toxic message that Seth kept saying to me, “Well, if you’re so overwhelmed, just get help.” Help is with the execution. You don’t get help with conception and planning. But even if you could get help with execution, which is fine, there are still 50 cards, five, zero, Tori, that can’t be outsourced, not any conception, planning, or execution. And what I mean by that is as much as you love Alexia, she’s not deciding whether your child’s adenoids are being taken out. As much as you love Alexia, she’s not writing the handwritten Christmas card to your in-laws, right? So there’s about 50 cards.
Tori Dunlap:
And you have to find a person you trust, right? The emotional labor of doing that, of interviewing, of making sure if you background check them, if you’re coordinating schedules with them, oh, she can’t make it this Friday, I need to find somebody else.
Eve Rodsky
A hundred percent. Yes, and childcare helpers is a card in the Fair Play system that has about 30 subtasks because of all those things you talked about. So you can look online, that alone has 30 subtasks. So the beauty of having that bigger conversation, Tori, was that it wasn’t I’m going to teach you to be in the system or to learn ownership. It was that I’m getting time choice back and we’re going to do it in an efficient way, and I’m going to step off you. I’m going to step the fuck off you by… I’m not going to be in the conception and planning. I’m going to let you own meals. I’m going to let you own extracurricular sports. There will be mistakes along the way, but it required the courage to believe that my time was diamonds. And I will just say four more things that your generation still says that’s scaring me still. We have to retire four messages. One, I can’t have women still in Gen Z, millennials say to me, well, and the time it takes me to tell him, her, they what to do, I should do it myself.
I can’t hear that anymore. Because especially for financial feminists, which you know is that yes, you teach somebody something now because it will benefit your future hours. That is a short-term bias. That’s a short-term time bias. You don’t want to continue to repeat that task over and over again now because they’ll take away your future hours. So we know that. We can have women say that they’re better multitaskers. If I ever hear that word again, I’m going to take a scissor and just stab through it. Neuroscientists all over the world, including my favorite of who I interviewed for the book will tell you there’s no such thing as multitasking. Women are not better in it. There’s something called task switching. It’s bad for all of us.
And in fact, as one neuroscientist said to me, there’s no neuroscience brain difference in how we task switch, but there’s a cultural reason why we’ve convinced women that they’re better at wiping asses and doing dishes, because then I can get the tenure and golf time and you won’t even let me do it because you take pride in all these ridiculous, stupid tasks. Again, they’re not stupid. They’re work, they’re important. But this is where I was dealing with in 2011 where people weren’t seeing the value of holding that child’s hand in the pediatrician’s office. So that’s why we get back to the original thought of this podcast, which is that Seth had to be empowered to be invited into the home through ownership and through me sticking to a firm boundary, and then ultimately communication that came from being within a system which is much better than the nails on the chalkboard, fuck, fuck, fuck, resentometer communication style.
But again, this is a practice, Tori, and so I guess I wish I could give you a hack, but there’s no hacks except for to say that if you start practicing boundaries and understanding your time is diamonds, if you start practicing systems, understanding ownership, and then ultimately if you start understanding that communication is your most important practice, then you’re going to be in a good place.
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, it’s not the hack, but the hack is how I see it is consistency.
Eve Rodsky
Consistency, for sure.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. It’s being consistent. It is patience. And it’s also the understanding that if you want things to actually change and you want your relationship to be better, to your point, it’s not going to happen just because you just do it and do it all the time.
Eve Rodsky
Right. No, and you got to invest in it similar… So my son, I was so excited because I was like, I’m talking to the financial feminists, and we were talking about my middle son is very obsessed with investing and compounding. And he loves exponents and he can’t believe things compound the way they do. And so he has a Robinhood account, he’s 11. And so we look back at his Robinhood account on July 2nd. He does his half year analysis and whatever. He made 40 bucks or something. And so we kept saying, “Ben, that’s 40 bucks in your sleep.” And he’s like, “But it’s so hard to be patient. It’s so hard to be patient. You have to wait for this to compound.” And you keep saying 20 years or 30 years or 40 years. So again, whether it’s your financial life, whether it’s your relationship health, you have to invest in it. I mean, again, that is the hack.
The hack is the long life-changing magic of long-term thinking, of understanding that you put the money in now, you put those small deposits to now and they pay off later. The consistent deposits, like you said, you talk about that consistency. And so one of my favorite surveys I did on social media was to ask a thousand people randomly what their most important practice was. And I like to ask vague questions just to see what I get back. And so mostly it was either a meditation practice, an exercise practice, Tori, or some religious practice. And I was very happy because I wanted to be able to say this, that not one person out of the thousand said that communication was their most important practice. But if anybody takes anything out of this, if there’s one thing I want you to all take away, regardless of whether you’re partnered, regardless whether you ever will be partnered, communication for the rest of your life will be your most important practice, and you can get better at it. That’s the cool thing.
So Tori, I call this relational communication versus transactional communication. If you ask people why they communicate with their partner, well, there’s two answers. Typically, it’s either, “Well, I don’t communicate with my partner about domestic life. We tried that. It doesn’t work.” And then I used to believe that, and then I’d write down, doesn’t communicate about domestic life. And then one day this one woman said to me, “Oh yeah, I don’t communicate about domestic life.” And then 20 minutes, she says, every time her partner forgets to put laundry in the dryer, she’s been dumping it on his pillow. So then I crossed out and Sharpie, “Doesn’t communicate about domestic life,” and wrote in all caps, “Communicates about domestic life.”
Tori Dunlap:
Did that work? Did anything change?
Eve Rodsky
No, of course not.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Okay.
Eve Rodsky
Nothing. Zero. And she ended up just going back to doing the laundry, and again, just did not change. So that’s one, “I don’t communicate about domestic life.” Or two, it’s that, “I am talking to Sean or whatever, because I had to tell him to pick up Zach from school.” So either I would get, I don’t communicate or it’s transactional. I never heard anybody in my entire life as a mediator say, “I communicate with Tori to get better at communicating with Tori.” That’s what I want to hear. If I come into a relationship with Tori and say, “I’m thinking not about just what I have to say to Tori, but how do I…” And then I say, oh my God, whether it’s a work, again, this is why it’s a workplace hack. It could be a mahjong hack. It could be one for Fair Play.
Because ultimately, if I know that Tori is a better communicator in the morning because she checks her emails and does a time block in the afternoon, and she gets inundated by emails and then she wants to take a break. And so if I’m asking her an important question at 6:30 P.M., I’m going to get a curt response or she’s going to be annoyed. That is an important thing for me to learn about you. And then I could say, Tori is her best when she communicates in the morning. It’s not manipulative. People are like, well, isn’t that manipulating people? No. I know Tori can have high cognition, low emotion conversations in the morning. And that’s what we want to learn. We want to learn how to best communicate with people. And so I will say that we finally came full circle, that your time is diamonds. That’s boundaries. CPE is ownership, and communication is a practice. I feel like that, if you get that out of the 101, then you’ve gotten more than I think I’ve said in one full podcast about Fair Play ever.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and I think the other thing too, I was trying to think of my, I literally was going to write them down and then of course I didn’t. Consistency, patience, but also the letting go of it has to be perfect. Because I know I feel that where I have been on this journey with my partner, my partner is learning how to cook, I have become a very good cook because I’ve watched people and I’ve watched so much Food Network, and it’s something I love to do. And he’s on this journey to learn how to cook. And I love that. He’s taken this active ownership of I want to learn. And then what happened when he first started cooking is, I’m not proud of it, but I would step in and just do it for him. And he kindly had this conversation with me. He’s like, “Tori, I won’t learn if you do it for me.”
Eve Rodsky
Yeah, I love him. What’s his name?
Tori Dunlap:
I will not reveal his name. I’ll tell you after. It’s a private relationship.
Eve Rodsky
Okay, fine. All right, private. We’ll just say thank you Mr. Chef because-
Tori Dunlap:
Mr. Chef.
Eve Rodsky
Mr. Chef is exactly right. That is why Fair Play became a love letter to men because I never heard from men, “I don’t want to change my dynamics.” What I heard was, “I can’t do anything right.”
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Right. And that was the moment for me where I was like, “Oh, well, I don’t want to have burnt food.” And he was like, “Did you burn food at some point?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I still burn food.” And he’s like, “Then you got to let me burn food.” And I’m like, “Oh, of course.” But I didn’t think about it. It was just like I know how to do it. Maybe he can learn from me while I’m doing it, but he’s like, “I have to do it. I have to do it and I have to burn the food sometimes and we’ll order pizza. Or you can make something after I burn the food, but I have to learn it.” And it was that moment for me where I know cerebrally, yeah, I need to let go of perfection. It’s not going to be exactly how I would’ve done it, and I might judge you for that and I got to work through that shit, but nothing’s going to change if I keep saying, “Oh, I’m the only one who can do it because it’s perfect.” It’s the same thing with entrepreneurship. There was many moments when I was hiring people, especially in the early days where it was like again, no, I’m just going to do it because A, like you were saying before, I don’t have the time or I don’t want to teach somebody, but also, no one can do it like me, so I just need to do it. And that’s not helpful.
Eve Rodsky
No. Not only it’s not helpful, but again, if you don’t believe me, you can read Dan Ariely’s work. He’s a behavioral economist and he actually says that’s a present value problem. Because again, you’re valuing your hours now to get it done fast over your future hours and that you never want to do that. You want to invest now. And that’s exactly what you’re saying. I’ll end on a two-minute story, I think, because something you just said about Mr. Chef made me think of this couple. I don’t always talk about them a lot because it’s a small story, but it has a Mr. Chef feel, which I love about him. And that that idea of carrying through your mistakes and what ownership actually means in a relationship, allowing that accountability and trust to rebuild, Tori, so you can trust eventually you’ll have a meal on the table that has some minimum standard of care, a green, a carb, a protein, or whatever you decide it is. Or as my husband says to me, where the minimum standard of care is reversed, “When you do food Eve, the green and the food that we agreed to can’t be a shamrock from the Lucky Charms marshmallows.”
Tori Dunlap:
A green peanut M&M’s.
Eve Rodsky
The green you’re talking about is a freaking vegetable.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s a vegetable, right.
Eve Rodsky
Exactly. So I was like, “Oh my God, you said green. You didn’t say what type of green.” But there was this couple who during COVID came into the Fair Place system, and I’ll call them Ed and Julie because I don’t want to give away their names like Mr. Chef. So they came into the system and Julie, she took, as we said, this accidental traditional role that we were talking about earlier, accidentally pulling back into unpaid labor because her partner got a job that required a lot of travel. So their dynamics didn’t always turn out the way they were supposed to. So she was in a stay at home mom role, but wanted to start regaining some of her financial power. And so she had less time. And so I was excited that they wanted to, and her partner is the best, so we’ll call him Ed.
He’s the best, best, best. And he wanted to learn similar to Mr. Chef about what he could do that was completion, but not perfection like you said. So one of the things that Ed had been so good at was what we call in the Fair Play cards, again in the deck were the home cards, the green ones. So taking out the trash and cooking and the lawn maintenance, like the things that you see and you associate with the home. But he realized by looking and assessing the cards that he wasn’t doing enough of the emotional labor work. So one of the cards in magic, they’re the four suits. There’s home, out, caregiving and magic. So the magic suit has things like thank you notes that we were talking about earlier or gifts. And one is called magical beings, which is as you can imagine, Santa, Lucky Leprechaun, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy.
So he decides that’s the one he wants to take on as one of the magic suits. So his wife Julie decides, okay, that’s fine. And then the first time that he’s holding this card with ownership, the Tooth Fairy doesn’t come, Tori. So it’s the second tooth. It wasn’t the first time, it was the second tooth for their daughter. She knew the Tooth Fairy had come before because it came for her first tooth. So what Julie said to me was, before Fair Play, this is what their dynamic would’ve been. She would’ve taken the card back and said, “Not only that, I will do it now from now on, I’m going to be Tooth Fairy again.” But then she would’ve been the verbal assassin and said, “You ruined our child’s magic. I can never trust you ever again. You fucking suck. I knew you couldn’t do it.”
But she didn’t do that because they were in the Fair Play system, which requires that you carry through your mistake. So Ed actually owned it and said, “My bad, this was my responsibility.” So once he owned it, because she said the typical way he would’ve done things and he admitted this was he would’ve blamed Julie for not reminding him to put the dollar under the pillow. He didn’t do that. The second he didn’t blame her for reminding him and he said, “Oh my God, totally, I suck. I can’t believe I forgot.” She said, “Okay, well then carry through your mistake.” So guess what? He does. He tells his daughter he’s emailing toothfairy@gmail.com to be like, “What the hell, Tooth Fairy? What happened?” She sees him emailing in the morning, like toothfairy@gmail.com. He throws the email out there in the world while she’s at school, he’s going to do the dollar that night or whatever. Creepily, he gets a response, somebody actually answers, toothfairy@gmail.com. Whoever you are out there, we love you. If we can find you or someone can find you.
Tori Dunlap:
Speaking of magic, oh my goodness.
Eve Rodsky
Somebody answers his email. She writes back, “There’s been a supply chain backlog,” or whatever she said. “I can’t get to all the teeth because we can’t get to shipping containers to take the teeth away.” Whatever she said. I don’t have the exact email.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s COVID. If it’s COVID, yeah, you have shipping issues.
Eve Rodsky
It was COVID. I start to tear up, he prints out the email. He prints out the email and he shares it with his daughter and he says, “Look what happened.” And then he added, which the tooth fairy-
Tori Dunlap:
Sometimes tooth fairy make mistakes.
Eve Rodsky
Make mistakes too. And then he said, the best part, the pieces of resistance that I love about this small story is he told me he said to his daughter that when the tooth fairy comes late, she charges interest or we can charge interest to her so she brings double the money. So from now on, this is now two years later, his daughter whose teeth are falling out like crazy, keeps saying, “Is the tooth fairy coming on time or do I get double the money because she’s coming late?” And guess what? He’s still the tooth fairy, Tori. So that to me, it’s a small, small story, but it reminds me of Mr. Chef in that by Julie giving Ed the chance to carry through his mistake, they have this incredible story now. So I said to her, “I’m so proud you didn’t take it back and do the verbal assassin thing. I’m so glad that Ed took the accountability and it’s small changes.”
But I’m telling you, once you build on those Mr. Chef changes, I trust you to get food on the plate. Yes. If it’s burnt, we’ll order pizza. Over time, you build more ownership wins, accountability and trust and communication stays there. And then by the time kids come around, you have this beautiful pattern of not doing everything right. We will all make mistakes, but you know at your check-in when your emotion is low, your cognition is high conversations, that practice we’re talking about, you can say to your partner, “Okay, what happened? You dropped the ball on the feeding card tonight. Dinner wasn’t on the table. You gave the shamrock as the green.” You can end up giving people feedback that’s not in the moment that they can hear. So I think that’s the beauty of my tooth fairy story, but it’s also the beauty of what you said about the Mr. Chef story.
Tori Dunlap:
Eve, wow. One of my favorite episodes I think we’ve ever recorded. I am at the same time, teary and also just, I’m literally calling him after and just being like, “All right, here’s how we’re going to do this.” I think this is going to be really helpful. So amazingly weirdly life-affirming, at the same time I’m pissed off, but I’m also like, you know what? Okay. Okay. There’s a path forward.
Eve Rodsky
Yes. Yes. Tori, can I give you one last homework assignment?
Tori Dunlap:
Yes, please.
Eve Rodsky
So if you go onto the website and you just pick a card, or again, I will send you these cards, however you do it.
Tori Dunlap:
Do you have physical cards?
Eve Rodsky
Yes. I’m going to send them to you.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, cool. Okay.
Eve Rodsky
So I’m going to send them to you because what I want you and Mr. Chef to do, which anyone can do, like I said, you go on the website, just pick one or you can use the cards to do this, but I’m going to send these to you.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. Weird question. Does it work if we’re not living together?
Eve Rodsky
A hundred percent.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, cool.
Eve Rodsky
1000%. That’s the time I beg you to start this. Yes, because the beauty, you know why?
Tori Dunlap:
That’s what I figured.
Eve Rodsky
Because you’ll probably have this many cards, which means you can actually talk about them and it’ll be amazing. It’ll be like travel-
Tori Dunlap:
And make small changes before you have to excavate.
Eve Rodsky
Exactly. It’ll be like travel planning, who wants to plan the trip and the ownership of that.
Tori Dunlap:
Really funny you said, we’re going to Europe in two days and I’ve planned this entire trip, which is a conversation we have had.
Eve Rodsky
Okay. Okay.
Tori Dunlap:
We’ve had a lot of conversations about the distribution of that.
Eve Rodsky
I love it. I love it. You know what, by the way, you held the card for this trip. So next time what I would say to Mr. Chef is maybe next time you hold the travel card, right, include me in the planning. This is not about going world.
Tori Dunlap:
The way we’re splitting it is I am planning everything like the flights, the hotels, everything to get there. And then when we are there, it is his responsibility. That is the distribution.
Eve Rodsky
Cool. Okay. That’s a great, I love that distribution because there’s ownership mindset in it. You are already doing ownership mindset. You’re not saying, I’m planning my ticket and then he’s going to execute by calling the travel agent to book it. No, no. Those are the disasters of the conception, planning, execution, breakup. I love that you already put the ownership mindset in. I’m in charge of booking, I’m in charge of tickets, I’m in charge of hotels. You have ownership over our daily plans. That’s a beautiful Fair Play mindset. So while you’re on the plane, so that’s why I said I want to FedEx these to you to get them to you before you-
Tori Dunlap:
That’s so nice. Eve, thank you.
Eve Rodsky
Make sure, please, Kristen, I’m giving you a random assignment of a task. It’s not very Fair Play. If you could just send me Tori’s address or the best place to send it. But on the plane, what you can do or just take a couple with you, start telling each other your stories. Because you’re not holding a lot of cards yet, you can do some real beauty and starting to tell each other your stories. And so that’s my homework assignment for you. And so let’s do a 30-second exercise where I can show you how it works. So just tell me when to stop and I’m just going to just pull a card.
Tori Dunlap:
This really does feel like a magic trick. Stop.
Eve Rodsky
Okay, great. Here we go. It’s called informal education kids. So this is how I want you to play. So you pull out any card out of the deck, and then I want you to ask Mr. Chef, and he will ask you, and this should be time limited, like two minutes each. Or you know what, if you’re on the plane and you want to do it longer with a glass of wine, it could be 30 minutes each. But I want you to tell me, Tori, what do you remember growing up about things that you learned that were not through school? So what I mean is who taught you to ride a bike? Do you remember learning to tie your shoes? Do you remember any other things that you learned and who taught you? I’ll start with riding a bike. Did you learn to ride a bike? Do you remember who taught you? Or tying your shoe or anything like that?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I’m realizing in a really cool way. It was actually both my parents. I think it was, I have very distinct memories of going, it was kind of dramatic me learning how to ride a bike. But we went to an empty parking lot. It was my mom and my dad, and I think my dad was riding along with me, but my mom was there for encouragement and advice about how to get pedaling. And then I think shoelaces probably my mom took the lead on that one. But I do remember my dad being there too, with those specific examples, it feels pretty equitable.
Eve Rodsky
I love that. And by the way, so what I learned about Tori that I didn’t know about her before was that she lived in a home that sounded like there was two parents there, that there was a father figure.
Tori Dunlap:
Still together, happily married.
Eve Rodsky
That loved her. Exactly. And so what I could see is that if you don’t talk about it, you would either expect that your partner would show up for bike riding the way you would, or learning to tie shoe that you’d all do things together. And maybe like me, your partner, I had to learn to ride a bike myself because no one reminded me to ride a bike. So I learned at my friend’s house because her parents helped me because my parents were never around. So there’s pain in that. So maybe I don’t even want to deal with riding a bike. So the point is that we come to everything with our own assumptions. And I think that I would know, I know more about Tori’s bike riding than I did about Seth’s bike riding after being married to him for 10 years because we never talked about these stories. And there’s just such beauty because when it comes up later, way later, you’re investing in these conversations so that you know, oh, this could be a possible trigger point because it was so different for us. Or this will be fun because, it should be fun because it’s both the same.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and even very simply, I will learn something about Mr. Chef. I will learn something about him that… I’ve never asked him, how did you learn ride a bike? I’ve never asked him that. He’s never asked me that. Right? That will be a beautiful moment for me to learn something about this person that I love very much, that I’m always trying to figure out more things about. So that would be really helpful. I love… That’s so helpful.
Eve Rodsky
I love it. I love it. So that’s the game. It’s fun. I would say do it on the plane, do it with a couple cards, and just tell each other your stories. It’s all about just learning about each other and being curious at this point.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it. Eve, where can people find you, find your work, find the cards, find the materials? Tell us, plug away.
Eve Rodsky
So the best place I’d say is just the Fair Play Life website because we keep it updated with a lot of science. And our newsletter has all the new science around all these issues, couples, relationships, and division of labor and a lot of the societal issues that we were talking about earlier. And then the Fair Play Life is the Instagram. And then of course my personal Instagram is Eve Rodsky, but that’s a more angry Instagram. If you want to learn about my personal feelings around Supreme Court cases and abortion access.
Tori Dunlap:
We can always use a little more of that. Thank you for being here and thank you. Thank you for your work.
Eve Rodsky
Of course. Thank you, Tori.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, that was so good.
Eve Rodsky
Sorry. I know we went over, but you know you’ll edit out what you don’t need.
Tori Dunlap:
No, that was truly one of my favorite episodes we’ve ever done. I want to thank Eve so much for joining us. She literally, after this episode, we wrapped up recording. She sent actually two decks of her Fair Play cards. And yeah, I started to dive into those with, as she lovingly calls him Mr. Chef. And it’s been really eye-opening both for me and it’s truly brought us closer together because we’re starting to have conversations just about our relationship and dynamics. And so again, it doesn’t feel in any way confrontational or scary because we’re just having these beautiful conversations, getting to know each other better. Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space are available wherever you get your books. Again, I highly recommend them. And for more information about Eve’s work, you can go to our show notes. I appreciate your support. As always, financial feminists, you know the drill, subscribe, share the show, leave a review, leave us a voicemail if you haven’t already. It allows us to continue doing this free show for you all and producing the best content possible. So we appreciate your support. We hope you have a great day, a great week, a great end to summer, and I will talk to you soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist a Her First $100K podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
