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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 –– most of which fall 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, is all about. 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.

You’ll learn:

• Why simply communicating the amount of work you’re doing may not be making a difference in your relationship

• Why women carry more of the mental and physical workload in typical heterosexual relationships

• How to talk to your partner about building more equitable systems at home, regardless of if you have kids or not

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Transcript:

Eve Rodsky:

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 are become the social safety net of our country.

Tori Dunlap:

Hi, financial feminists, welcome back to the show. Hello. Hello. I hope you’re having a lovely week. I hope as summer near a close you are… I think I’ve already said this on the show, but go out and do something fun. Touch some grass, pick some berries. I don’t know, do some summer activities. I still got to swim in the lake. That’s always my goal in the summer is get my butt in the lake, and if I’ve gotten my butt in a lake, I can officially be happy with my summer. So I just hope you’re soaking up this last bit and also staying cool and dry. Okay, today’s episode, we have talked a lot on this show and just a lot in feminist circles, about the emotional labor of women and also about how the economy is firmly on the backs of women.

I think we know this more than ever this summer with Barbie and Taylor Swift and Beyonce, literally saving the economy. So in our buying power, the things that we choose to support and give our money to, but also in the unpaid emotional labor, which is often called second shift labor. Second shift labor is defined as labor performed in the home outside of work. Our previous guest, Tiffany Dufu, would label this as non compensated work, right? We’re thinking about grocery shopping, prepping lunches or dinners, childcare, pet care, cleaning, managing finances, taking care of ailing family members. These tasks, of course, mostly fall on women, and I think it’s so important to not only talk about with your fellow women. Our podcast is 95% women listenership, but it’s very important to have these conversations with the men in your life. So please share this episode because our guest has literally made that her entire ethos and the mission of her work.

Eve Rodsky Rodsky transformed a blueberries breakdown into a catalyst for social change when she applied her Harvard trained background and 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 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. Speaking of someone who is now diving into her whole system of fair play, it is so transformative in a way that doesn’t feel naggy or blaming or “Men, how could you do this?” It’s truly just… it’s really incredible.

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. Usually I give you some stats here, but honestly we get into those and so much more in this episode. Not only was this just eyeopening for me when it comes to the true division of labor in the home and how that affects women mentally and financially, but it is incredibly actionable.

You can literally take parts of this episode and apply them in your relationship. I always encourage you to share the show, but especially this episode. If you are in a partnership, especially a partnership with a man, this is a great show. As you’re going on a drive, as you’re working around the house together, listen to this episode together and use it as a beautiful transition into a hopefully non-confrontational, but really use it as an invitation to have a conversation to make this a change in your relationship and in your life that benefits both of you. This episode is for anyone who has or wants kids, lives with a partner, wants to live with a partner. Basically, if you’re in any way planning to share your home or life with someone, this episode is for you. So let’s go ahead and get into it. But first a word from the companies that allow us to bring you all of this good free content.

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 sort of looked like it was like toilet paper that someone had wiped themselves on.

Tori Dunlap:

Oh, oh, that’s a visual.

Eve Rodsky:

That that’s really what it looked like. Yeah, it just was like 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 mm, and I rent too, so I’m like, “Ooh, I know there’s wallpaper that you can take down, but…

Eve Rodsky:

I know. You know what? It’s worth it. Just do one wall. You want to hear one last cool wallpaper story, is that when I was setting up my office, I found this wallpaper of… It’s this really cool sort of enchanted forest, sage green wallpaper that has a lot of white horses. Then what we decided, if, Tori Dunlap, you came to LA, 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’s 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 sort of 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 quote “a married single woman”?

Eve Rodsky:

Yeah, I think, Tori Dunlap, sort of like you, you probably look back in your life, and for
me, whether it’s financial feminist, for me, 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 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:

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 said like astronaut. 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. 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 the 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. 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 Dunlap, that I was smashing 10 years after that Elizabeth Warren orientation was peas for my toddler Zach. In that 10 years from 21 to 34, so I guess 13 years, my life had taken such a turn for the worse 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 moody 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. 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’ll 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, and that’s what the Financial Feminist is as well. I mean, you are teaching, Tori Dunlap, what I was listening to you 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.” 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.”

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, Seth, sends me this, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries” text. 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 a 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. In fact, Tori Dunlap, now all these years later, 12 years later, the word “cloud of women in midlife” which is why I wrote Fair Play and 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, 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. Typically, like I said, when I got to the realization that I was not smashing my dreams or those glass 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.

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 that 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 it “the she fault parent” even though it can happen to people who are not married to men too. 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 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.

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. 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 sort of 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 would know us better than anyone ever knew us, Tori Dunlap.

Then I looked down at my name tag and it says, “Zach’s mom.” 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.” And the other part of me is like, “Hell, no.” 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. 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’s way, way harder.

Eve Rodsky:

Yes, way harder. Way harder, it is work. Then the other thing I think is important is to remember that it can be worth it if you are interested. 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 Dunlap, can stay out and 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 is a single mother. She was not a single mother by choice. My father left her 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, 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.” 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. 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. 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. I think I’m a pretty good communicator. I am 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 Dunlap, I thought it looked like a list, because women had been making lists for hundreds of years, right?

Tori Dunlap:

Eve Rodsky, that’s funny you say that because that’s what I’m asking for basically. I’m like, “What the to-dos? What sort of things do I need to… what are the hacks, Eve Rodsky? What are the hacks, baby?”

Eve Rodsky:

Exactly. The hacks, right? It was sort of like a hack. 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 Dunlap, that look like you, these amazing women who are 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’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 cede to this pressure of not saying, “Oh, I’m turning off my phone.” But Eve Rodsky, “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 Dunlap, because this was 2011, right? This was 2012. I think literally we just had gotten iPads. I think that was was the first year of Instagram launching. So there was no Tori Dunlap 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 jellybean, 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 sort of 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 Dunlap, 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 Dunlap, same shit, different decade. Again, we’re going to get light, I promise. But the article in 1986, and I think this is important for the financial feminists 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. 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 interests of patriarchal systems. 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. 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.

So this all really does affect our finances. But the most interesting thing about that invisible work, Tori Dunlap, 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 like a 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 Dunlap, 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 US 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 and sales, making school lunches, planning birthday celebrations, being that magical vagina that buys gifts for in-laws at Christmas, planning holidays.

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. 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 like, “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. Step one for me was making the invisible visible and then crashing and burning when I realized I had a community of women, but that that list, which 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 burned, Tori Dunlap, 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. 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, through 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:

But 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, 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, paid leave first and childcare 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 Dunlap, 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 sort of look like her, by the way.

Tori Dunlap:

That’s what people tell me. And I’m not even made up when I have makeup on, we have the same face shape, Sarah Snook and I.

Eve Rodsky:

More than that. You have the most beautiful eyes, like almond eyes. You look a lot like her.

Tori Dunlap:

Oh, thank you.

Eve Rodsky:

Yes.

Tori Dunlap:

But it’s something literally on the daily, and I’m like, part of me’s like, “I’m very flattered.” And the other part of me is like, “That’s who I remind you of?” Anyway.

Eve Rodsky:

But by the way, why not, I mean, 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, and that’s been hard to transition those succession clients over into 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 sort of 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 Logan Roy will walk out of the room whenever his son speaks 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. So I had a point, Tori Dunlap, when Seth sent me back the pixelated, “I don’t want to see the ‘should I do’ spreadsheet,” I had a choice. There was the eat, pray, love narrative, which was very big back then. So I could… 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 it 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. Like, “Who doesn’t know how to fucking change a crib sheet?” Just that’s sort of 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’m trained in communication styles. That’s the biggest irony of all. So I could resign myself to doing it all, or, Tori Dunlap, I could get my in gear and become my own client, and so that’s what I did. 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. 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. So the two things I wrote on that whiteboard was boundaries, as I said, systems and communication. 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 Dunlap, even my Aunt Marian’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, and 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 you “fuck you,” your resentment, the bitterness, the muttering to sort of like US Weekly, those Buzzzz-o-Meters, like we’re Resent-O-Meter’s at 10. I was at 10 Bs. So how do you move out of patterns? Typically people, probably like us, would start with the easiest thing of boundary, systems and 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. 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.” Like 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 Dunlap, 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 world 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. “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’s 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. Yo
u will be governed by fear, by resentment, all those things 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.

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, get me the list. What do you want me to do there? I’ll call you with a FaceTime when I get there.” No, no, no. Just like, I don’t work for Tori Dunlap, there’s no way amazing Kristen is going into your office every day, Tori Dunlap, and saying to you, “Hey, Tori Dunlap, so what do you want me to do today? I’m just going to wait here till you tell me what to do.” Right?

Tori Dunlap:

Yeah.

Eve Rodsky:

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 Dunlap, 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.” 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 mommy’s 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 sort of grapple back and forth with the fact that the oppressors are typically the ones who have to change the systems, and so 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.

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 Dunlap, 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. 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.

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. 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 boundaries, 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 Dunlap, 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 peanut allergy, and then no peanut butter, this mom is vegan, or this parent is vegan, this child is. It’s so complicated these days. 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 Dunlap, just from that one ownership change in our household, I was getting about six hours of my week back of the 100 cards. Again, Fair Play is 100 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, and 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 becaus
e Tori Dunlap, as you said, it requires somebody to be a game changer. And it’s really hard to be a game changer, Tori Dunlap, 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. 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.

What I’m telling you is that the game changer in my marriage with Seth wasn’t, “You have to take on extracurricular sports,” Tori Dunlap. 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.”

It took a long time, Tori Dunlap, 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 have 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… Eve Rodskyry 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-

Eve Rodsky:

“You make more money because-

Tori Dunlap:

… “I do paid unpaid labor.” Right.

Eve Rodsky:

“Because I did unpaid labor.”

Tori Dunlap:

Right. Like, “Great, okay. Then you need to pay me like you would 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 Dunlap, 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.

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 100 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 going to help.” Help is with 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, 5-0, Tori Dunlap, that can’t be outsourced, not any conception planning or execution. 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. The emotional labor of doing that, of interviewing, of making sure if you background check them, if you’re like coordinating schedules with them. “Oh, she can’t make it this Friday. I need to find somebody else.”

Eve Rodsky:

100%, yes, and childcare helpers is a card in the Fair Play system that has about 30 sub-tasks because of all those things you talked about. So you can look online, that alone has 30 sub-tasks. The beauty of having that bigger conversation, Tori Dunlap, 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 sort of Gen Z, millennials say to me, “Well, in 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, what 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 will 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 at it. There’s something called task switching. It’s bad for all of us. 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 in 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.

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” Resent-O-Meter communication style. But again, this is a practice, Tori Dunlap, 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 as 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.

Eve Rodsky:

Patience.

Tori Dunlap:

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. My son, I was so excited, because I was like, “I’m talking to the Financial Feminist.” 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. We looked back at his Robinhood account on July 2nd, sort of 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 life-changing magic of long-term thinking, of understanding that you put the money in now, you put those small deposits in now and they pay off later. The consistent deposits, like you said, you talk about that consistency. One of my favorite surveys I did on social media was to ask 1,000 people randomly what their most important practice was, and I like to ask vague questions just to see what I get back. So mostly it was either a meditation practice, an exercise practice, Tori Dunlap, or some sort of religious practice. 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 of 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 Dunlap, 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.” 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 in 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. 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 Dunlap to get better at communicating with Tori Dunlap.” That’s what I want to hear. If I come into a relationship with Tori Dunlap and say, “I’m thinking not about just what I have to say to Tori Dunlap, but how do I… ” And then I say, “Oh, my God, 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 Dunlap 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. So if I’m asking her an important question at 6:30 PM, 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. Then I can say, “Tori Dunlap 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 Dunlap can have high cognition, low emotion conversations in the morning. 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 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 th
is journey to learn how to cook. And I love that, he’s taken this active ownership of “I want to learn.” 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. He kindly had this conversation with me. He’s like, “Tori Dunlap, 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.”

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.”

Tori Dunlap:

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?” I’m like, “Yeah, I still burn food.” 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, like, “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 is it 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 idea of carrying through your mistakes and what ownership actually means in a relationship, allowing that accountability and trust to rebuild, Tori Dunlap, 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 Rodsky, the green in the food that we agreed to can’t be a shamrock from the Lucky Charms marshmallows. You have to-

Tori Dunlap:

A green peanut M&M, yeah.

Eve Rodsky:

“The green we’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 Play 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, sort of this accidental traditional role that we were talking about earlier, accidentally pulling back into the 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. She was sort of in a stay-at-home mom role, but wanted to start regaining some of her financial power, and so she had less time. So I was excited that they wanted to… and her partner is the best. We’ll call him Ed. He’s the best, best, best.

He wanted to learn, similar to Mr. Chef, about sort of what he could do that was completion but not perfection, like you said. One of the things that Ed had been so good at was what we call in the Fair Play cards, again in the deck where the home cards, the green ones, so taking out the trash and cooking, and the lawn maintenance, the things that you sort of see and you associate with the home. But he realized by looking and assessing the cards that he wasn’t doing enough sort of the emotional labor work. One of the cards in magic, there are 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 Dunlap. So it’s the second tooth. At least 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, 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 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 act
ually answers toothfairygmail.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 this 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 the shipping containers to take the teeth away.” Whatever she said, I don’t have the exact email but-

Tori Dunlap:

If it’s COVID, yeah, you have shipping issues.

Eve Rodsky:

It was COVID. I started to tear up. He prints out the email and he shares it with his daughter and he says, “Look what happened.” Then he added, which the tooth fairy-

Tori Dunlap:

Sometimes tooth fairies make mistakes.

Eve Rodsky:

… make mistakes too. Then he said, the best part, the pièces de résistance 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. 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 out in time or do I get double the money, because she’s coming late?” And guess what, he’s still the tooth fairy, Tori Dunlap. 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. 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. 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 Rodsky, 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 off, but I’m also like, “You know what? Okay, okay. There’s a path forward.”

Eve Rodsky:

Yes. Yes. Tori Dunlap, can I give you one last homework assignment?

Tori Dunlap:

Yes, please.

Eve Rodsky:

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:

100%, or 1,000%. 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, like, “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. We’ve had a lot of conversations about the distribution of that.

Eve Rodsky:

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.” Include me in the planning. This is not about going rogue.

Tori Dunlap:

The way we’re splitting it is I am planning everything, like the flights, the hotels, everything to get there. Then when we are there, it is his responsibility. That is the distribution.

Eve Rodsky:

Ooh. Okay, I love that distribution because there’s ownership mindset in it. You’re 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 Rodsky, 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 Dunlap‘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 in starting to tell each other your stories, and so that’s my homework assignment for you. 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. You pull 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 Dunlap, 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? So 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 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. Then I think shoe laces, 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 Dunlap 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:

Yeah, that loved her, exactly. 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, right? Or learning to tie your shoes, 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.

The point is that we come to everything with our own assumptions. I think that I would know… I know more about Tori Dunlap‘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. 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’s so… 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… I’ve never asked him, “How did you learn ride a bike?” I’ve never asked him that. He’s never asked me that. That would 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. 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 Rodsky, where can people find you, find your work, find the cards, find the materials. Tell us. Plug away.

Eve Rodsky:

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 the division of labor and a lot of the societal issues that we were talking about earlier. Then the Fair Play Life is at Instagram, and then of course my personal Instagram is Eve Rodsky 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 Dunlap.

Tori Dunlap:

Oh, that was so good.

Eve Rodsky:

Sorry, I know we went over, but you know what, you’ll edit-

Tori Dunlap:

No, that was truly-

Eve Rodsky:

… what you don’t need.

Tori Dunlap:

That was truly one of my favorite episodes we’ve ever done. I want to thank Eve Rodsky 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’ve started to dive into those with, as she lovingly calls him, Mr. Chef. It’s been really eyeopening 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 Rodsky‘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 u
s 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. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields, marketing and administration by Karina Patel, Sophia Cohen, Kahlil Dumas, Elizabeth McCumber, Beth Bowen, Amanda Leffew, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Kailyn Sprinkle, Sumaya Mulla-Carrillo, and Harvey Carlson. Research by Ariel Johnson. Audio Engineering by Austin Fields. 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 team and community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.