I explain, as calmly as I can, that mothers have a particular pet peeve about feeling judged and inadequate, especially when the hundred things they do with smooth efficiency pass without comment.

This rather amazing finding surprised even the Pew researchers, who said that in seventeen years of polling, no item on the list has risen in importance nearly as much. In other words, this issue is about more than laundry: it’s a direct depiction of the sense of fairness, or unfairness, that exists within a relationship. It touches on so many

women do countless invisible tasks. This is the time-gobbling labor that will likely never show up on any sort of time use study. One is “kin work,” which Smock defines to me as “giving emotional support to relatives, buying presents and sending cards, handling holiday celebrations, things like that.”

“Yes. You are. And it may get results, intermittently. That’s the seduction of the dark path.” He fastens his unblinking gaze on me. “But the idea that you can haul off and be abusive to your partner and somehow get a pass, that you can’t control it, or whatever you tell yourself to rationalize it, is nuts. Also, your whole ‘angry victim’ role is

But equality, as Lean In’s Sheryl Sandberg has stated, is not a zero-sum game. Beyond the most immediate and obvious benefit—that I will cease being, as Real memorably put it, a “raving lunatic”—there are so many others. A Cornell study found that couples with young kids who split housework more evenly reported better and more frequent sex than

“stalled revolution,” and it still holds true: while the lives of women, who now make up almost half of the US labor force, have radically changed, the behavior of their mates has not changed quite as much.

I explain that Tom and I don’t want to waste our waning years together enmeshed in a petty war. “You get to be in midlife, and you realize your time is finite,” I say, dispensing my trademark oldest-sibling wisdom with a world-weary air. Patrick gawps

There’s a world of difference between assertively standing up for yourself and aggressively putting him down. As crazy at it might seem, arguing or complaining can actually feel safer to most of us than simply and directly making a request. So,

Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, explains to me that couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats. This dynamic has arisen, she says, because men have less to gain by changing their behavior, while women are more likely to want to alter the