Financial Feminist - Stop Doing It All: Building Equity in Relationships with Eve Rodsky (Best Of)

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Save your seat inside Business Bootcamp! Your COMPLETE roadmap to go from idea to income: ⁠herfirst100k.com/business-bootcamp If you’re exhausted from carrying the invisible labor at home, this episode will feel like a deep breath. Today’s special best of episode features Eve Rodsky, who helps partners build more equitable relationships by helping bridge communication gaps and develop better systems in the home. In this conversation, she talks through her Fair Play Doctrine, offering exercises and conversation starters for couples to help get started in eradicating the labor disparity in their homes. Eve’s links: Website: https://www.fairplaylife.com/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everodsky/?hl=en Read transcripts, learn more about our guests and sponsors, and get more resources at https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/building-equitable-relationships/ Looking for accountability, live coaching, and deeper financial education? Check out our exclusive community! Join the $100K Club: https://herfirst100k.com/100k-pod   Our favorite travel and cash-back credit cards, plus other financial resources: https://herfirst100k.com/tools Not sure where to start on your financial journey? Take our FREE money personality quiz! https://herfirst100k.com/quiz Special thanks to our sponsors: Squarespace Go to www.squarespace.com/FFPOD to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Indeed Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com/FFPOD. Rocket Money Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com/FFPOD. Quince For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxe upgrades you deserve from Quince. Go to Quince.com/FFPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Netsuite If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, download the free e-book Navigating Global Trade: 3 Insights for Leaders at NetSuite.com/FFPOD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 bestselling 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 their sense of self and what we can actually do to start shifting the balance. This is especially if you were a woman in a relationship with a man and you're doing a lot of the

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 if 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. You know we love a good deal on this show. So I am giving you all of our incredible sponsors deals up front with a little more information on the rest of the

episode. This episode of Financial Feminist is sponsored in part by Squarespace, Rocket Money, NetSuite, and Indeed. Need a new website, whether it's a brand portfolio or store, Squarespace, makes it easy. Head over to Squarespace.com slash FFPod and use code FFPod for 10% off your first purchase. Stop paying for subscriptions you forgot about. Rocket Money finds and cancels them for you. Go to rocketmoney.com slash FFPod to take control of your finances. Running a growing business, NetSuite helps you manage it all in one place. Download the free CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash FFPod. Indeed is the number one job site and a global leader in job matching and hiring. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more

visibility at Indeed.com slash FFPod. Oh, yeah, this is wallpaper. I love it. I have an interesting relationship with wallpaper because I grew up with, like, the bad wallpaper that spent, you know, hours taking off. Totally. I, yes, yes. I was so averse to wallpaper for that exact reason. We had this very, very small kitchen in my side. I was in 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. Oh, oh, that's a visual. So 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, the wallpaper. narrative. 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. I know. I know. You know what's worth it. Just do one wall. You want to hear the cool, one last cool wallpaper story is that when I was setting up my office, I found this wallpaper of this really cool sort of enchanted forest, sage green wallpaper that has a lot of white horses. And so then what we decided, like 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 sort of get your own unicorn. It's like, you know, you get your own star. That's so sweet. It's the

wallpaper author walk of fame. Exactly. Yep. So that's what we created, a wallpaper author walk of 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 Fairplay? And can you talk a little bit about your experience feeling like, quote, a married single woman? Yeah. I think Tori sort of like you, you know, you probably look back in your life. And for me, whether it's financial feminist, for me, it was, you know, I did not set out to be an expert on the gender division of labor, right? I mean, I'm sure I can then, 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? Five years ago. You would ask me five years ago, this was not part of the plan. So, yep, totally. And of course, you know, 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 grew up board? It probably

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, you know, 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 Nick City dancer. because that was like my goal also at the time to become a professional dancer. And so I think given, you know, sort of also your audience to, 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, you know, ceilings, whether it was president, like I said, Senator, Nick City dancer. But really, the only thing I can tell you, Tori, that I was smashing, you know, 10 years after that Elizabeth Warren. orientation was like 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. I just took a huge sigh. Talk to me about that. Was it a feeling of identity loss for you? Was it, we've talked a lot on this show about this myth, of course, that women can have it all. And then you try to have it all and you realize, like, you can't have it all. And you mentioned this blueberries moment. Like, talk to me more about that. What was the shift for you? 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 go, 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, you know? And that's what the financial feminists is as well, right? I mean, you are teaching Tori what I was listening to you on one of your episodes, right? The beauty of what you're saying, which is so, similar to fair play is like, yes, there may be life-changing magic and 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 is 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 blueberry's breakdown where my husband, Seth, 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 in my car, gives 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. And in fact, Tori now, you know, 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 in like a Caribbean destination, you know, 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 to. 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 401k. 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 child care, our society tells us to wait to 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, you know, 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. 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 know 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. 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? It's one of the answers, for sure. Yeah. 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, like, I don't know what my question is, basically. I don't know. Is it, is it, don't have children? Well, it's for you. Yes. Well, I think, again, this is why I love, 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, you know, he's going to do things differently.

If the fair play movement, you know, continues to take hold, you can have children. But this is the thing. Right? There's 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. 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. Like, I would argue, screaming toddlers way, way harder. Yes, way harder. Way harder. Right. It is work. And so 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 to you, but if you're interested in partnering with a man, it can be worth it if, if, and only if we're inviting that man into his full power in the home so that you, Tori, can stay out

and your full power in the world. That is the only way that I will allow you to have children. Totally. Or, you know, again, look, there's a lot of single parents out there. Let me shout out my mother, who is a single mother. 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 of 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 child care, to get support systems back in place, to fight in the family law courts where I've testified twice now for women, single mothers, whose partner says, what do you do all day? Or 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 will say to is absolutely you can have children. And there's a secret formula. And this is where we can get into the fun part of sort 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. So let's dive into that. This is a perfect, perfect opportunity. So I know what all of those things mean in theory, right? 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? 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, you know,

for hundreds of years, right? Eve, that's funny. You say that because that's what I'm asking for. I'm like, what is the to-does? What sort of things do I know? What are the hacks? You're like, what are the hacks, baby? Exactly. The hacks, right? It was sort of 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 and Fairplay, just these powerful women, Tori, 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 just starting to, it was a wake-up call to realize this was happening to other women. I talk about a march that I go on a rescue. cancer march, we're at noon. These powerful women won't come with me to lunch because their partners start 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, you know, 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. Like, I think literally we just had gotten iPads. I think that that was like the first, 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 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 like bins, you know, like how to put stuff in bins or whatever. It was like the early phases before Marie Condo of how to organize your home. That's not what I was looking for. I was looking for like an organizational system to take the assumptions off me and start putting some work onto Seth.

Or as my one friend said, what Fairplay 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, you know, do the kids DTE 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

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. 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 work. 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 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. 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 married 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 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. So it was the 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 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 in 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 boundaries. systems and communication. That's a list. And so I had to learn the hard way that that was not going to be enough. Okay. So let's take that second step because I'm wondering, to your friend Kate, like, do the kids need to eat? The fuck they do. Like, obviously, you fucking idiot, of course they need to eat. Like, what is your response to that in a way that one is not like,

you're fucking idiot. Oh, no duh. Well, that's what I said. Yes, for many years. Totally. I'm trying to figure out, like, what is the mature response to that that can actually lead to some sort of change just in your relationship, right? This larger conversation that, of course, have, right? It has to come with policy change. It has to come with, you know, paid leave, and it has to come with abortion access, and it has to come with all of these things, right? But at the very microcosm, like, 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? 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 Fairplace 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, you know, 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 success.

You and I should talk because I am obsessed with success. I get compared to Shiv Roy on the internet multiple times a day. Oh my God. Well, you sort of look like her, by the way. 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. More than that, you have the most, like, these beautiful eyes, like on the eyes.

You look a lot like her. 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. But by the way, why not? Right. I mean, again, I call her daughter of or son of's, but I'd rather you be the matriarch, you know. But what's been interesting about that work that I was doing at the time, right, because I was telling you that I quit my job or I was forced out and I ended up starting my own law firm, which I still have.

And that's been hard to sort of transition those accession 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. 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 like the, you know, 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 should I do spreadsheet. I had a choice. There was the eat, pray, love narrative, which was very big back then. But that's a privileged narrative, right? 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. You know, I can't fucking handle this. Like, I'm storming out. Like, who doesn't know how to fucking, you know, change a crib sheet? Like, just that's sort of where I was. And this nails on a chalkboard communication style. And Seth's communication 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 use for all my families, I use 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 Majan 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 by 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, right, 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 on to 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 will go from saying fuck you your resentment, the bitterness, the muttering to like sort of like us weekly, like those buzzometers like we're resentometer meters like I was at 10 B's. So 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 were 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

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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. 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 will 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 Fairplay Excel spreadsheet, which was the shit I do spreadsheet at the time, I started to write them an 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, nope, no. 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 until you tell me what to do, right? Yeah. We know it doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. 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 like, that's not my responsibility. So, like, how do you grapple with that, too, understanding, like, 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. A hundred percent. And I think that that's, but, you know, know, my mom and I used to fight about this a lot when I was starting to think about FairPlay because, again, she's a professor of social change, right? 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,

you know, the oppressors are typically the ones who have to change the systems, right? 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. 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. 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 and 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 is 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, right? 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 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 say 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, right? 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 extraricular sports by bringing Zach, you know, 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 practices 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. And also little Timmy has a peanut allergy. And I know that. So can't do peanut butter. Yes, and the peanut allergy, and then no peanut butter. This mom is vegan or this parent is vegan, this child is, you know, it's so complicated these days.

And on top of it, you know, 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 in Little League field. So that's how we started. to be 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, Fairplay's 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 like sunscreen, water bottle, and I don't care if they bring a uniform that's dirty, but just, you know, being on time. That starts 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, you know, 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 of their sports story. It was.

Seth, I see when we both get home from our workday that you have three hours after our kids go to bed to watch Sports Center, work out, 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,

saying to me, like, well, my time is more valuable than near 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 every single one of my hours should be in service of somebody other than me. 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. Yes, exactly. You make more money. Because I do unpaid labor. Right. Right. Like, great. Okay, then you need to pay me like you would. Exactly. 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. But Tori, the whole, hardest part about that in the fair play system, which you'll realize it's so beautiful to have the cards and the, you know, the tools. And again, save all your money out there. You can find it online at Fairplay Life for free. Well, we'll link it. 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 get 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, 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. 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 like coordinating schedules with them. Oh, she can't make it this Friday.

I need to find somebody else. 100%. Yes. And child care helpers is a card in the fair play system that has about 30 subtasks because of all those things you talked about. So you could look online. That alone has 30 subtas. So the beauty of having that bigger conversation, Tori, was that it wasn't, I'm going to teach

you to play this, be in this. system or to learn ownership. It was that I'm not, 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 stop, you know, 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 to me to tell him or 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, right? 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't 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 why interview 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 us. And in fact, as one neuroscientist said to me, there's no neuroscience brain difference in how we test which, 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, their 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 f fok, fok, fok, rosentometer communication style. But again, this is a practice, tory. 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, you're going to be in a good place. I mean, it's not the hack, but the hack is how I see it is like consistency. Consistency for sure. 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. Right. Right. No. And you got to invest in it similar. So, you know, 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 Robin Hood account. He's 11. And so we look back at his Robinite account, you know, in July 2nd, sort of he does his like half-year analysis and whatever. He made like 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. Like 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. You have, I mean, there's, again, that's, 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 in now and they pay off later, the consistent deposits, like you said, those, 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 and exercise practice, Tori, or some sort of 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 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, 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 pillows. So then I crossed out and Sharpie doesn't communicate about domestic life. And rodent all caps communicates about domestic life. Did that work? Did anything change? No, of course not. Yeah, okay. Of course, nothing, zero.

And she ends up just going back to doing the laundry and, you know, 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 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, right? That is an important thing for me to learn about you. And then I can say Tori is her best when she communicates in the morning. It's not manipulative. It's not, you know, 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. As a business owner and as a CEO, part of my job is to tell the future. Part of my job is to look into my non-existent business crystal ball and figure out what's coming next. Is a recession on the way? Is inflation going to keep going up? And until somebody invents an actual crystal ball where it's definitive, not just me making

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slash ffod. Indeed, sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. I'm hiring an assistant. We're hiring a marketing manager. And finding good people is a challenge. Finding not only good people who are able to do the job you need them to do, even more challenging. And that's where we have used Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is the site where you can stop struggling to get your job posts seen with sponsored jobs. Your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. And it makes a huge difference because according to Indeed data, sponsor jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. And in the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed data.

There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash FFPod. Just go to Indeed.com slash FF pod right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash FF pod. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Indeed is all you need. well and I think the other thing too I was trying to think of my I literally was going to write him 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 taking this like active ownership of like 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 was like, so, like, he kindly, he kindly had this conversation with me. He's like, Tori, I won't learn if you do it for me. Yeah. I love him. What's his name? I will not reveal his name. I'll tell you after. It's a private relationship. Okay, fine. All right, private. We'll just say thank you, Mr. Chef. Because that Mr. Chef is exactly. right. That is why Fairplay 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.

Right. Right. And that was the moment for me where I was like, oh, well, you know, I don't want it. 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 he got to let me burn food. And I'm like, oh, of course. But like, 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 like I have to learn it. And it was that moment for me where I know cerebrally like, yeah, I need to like let go of perfection. Like it's not going to be exactly how I would have done it and I might judge you for that and I got to work through that shit. But like 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. Like 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 like, A, you were saying before, like I don't have a 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. No, not only is 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 like 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 like carrying through your mistakes and what ownership actually means in a relationship allowing that accountability and trust to rebuild tory so you can trust eventually you'll have a meal on the table that has some minimum standard of care a green a carb or 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, it can, the green and the food that we agreed to can't be a shamrock from the Lucky Charms marshmallows. Like, you have to, the green we're talking about is a freaking. It's a vegetable, right. Exactly. So I was like, oh my God, you said green. You didn't say what type of rain. 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. So 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. And so I was excited that they wanted to, you know, 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, you know, sort of 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 the what we call in the fair play cards, again in the deck, where the sort of the home cards, the green ones. So like taking out the trash and cooking and the lawn maintenance, like 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. So one of the cards and magic, there's a suit called, 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, you know, as you can imagine, Santa, Lucky Lepricon, 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. 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 have been. She would have 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 have been the verbal assassin and said, you ruined our child's magic. Like, 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 sort of this fair play system, which requires that you carry through your mistake. So Ed actually owned it and said, my bad, like this was my responsibility. So once he owned it, because she said the typical way he would have done things

and he admitted this was he would have 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 and for reminding him, him. And he said, oh, my God, I'm totally, I suck. I can't believe I forgot. She said, okay, well, then carry through your mistake. Yep. So guess what? He does. He tells us his daughter, he's emailing tooth fairy at gmail.com to be like, what the hell tooth fairy? What happened? She sees him emailing in the morning, like, you know, tooth fairy, 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 to fairy at gmail.com

whoever you are out there we love you if we can find you or someone can find you speaking of magic oh my goodness 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 to shipping containers to take the teeth away whatever she said i don't have the exact If it's COVID. If it's COVID, yeah, you have shipping issues. I was, I started to, like, 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 he said, and then he added, which the tooth fairy, sometimes tooth fairy mistakes.

Big mistakes too. And then he said the best part, the piece is a 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 like double the money and so she so from now on right this is now two years later his daughter whose teeth are falling out like crazy keeps saying is a tooth fairy coming on time or do i get double the money she's coming late and guess what he's still the tooth fairy tory 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 to carry through his mistake They have this incredible story now.

So I'm 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. You know, 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 two-fairy story, but it's also the beauty of what you said about the Mr. Chef's story. 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 yes yes tory can i give you one last homework assignment yes please so if you go on to the website and you just pick a card or again I will send you these cards however you do it do you have physical cards yes I'm going to send them to you oh cool okay 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 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. Okay weird question does it work if we're not living together 100% okay one thousand percent that's the time I beg you to start this yes because the

beauty you know why I think because you'll probably have like this many cards which means that you can actually like talk about them and it'll be amazing you know it'll be like travel and make small changes before you have to excavate it'll be like travel planning like who wants to plan the trip and the ownership of that really funny 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 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 you maybe next time you hold you the travel card, right? Include me in the planning. This is not about going road.

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. Okay. That's a great, 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 and get them to you before you. Oh, it's so nice. Thank you. 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, that 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.

This really does feel like a magic trick. Stop. Okay, great. Here we go. it's called informal education kids so this is how i want you to play so you pull any card out of the deck and then i want you to ask mr chef and you'll and you will ask you and this should be time limited like you know 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 right 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? So, like, I'll start with like writing a bike.

Did you learn to write a bike? Do you remember who taught you or tying your shoe or anything like that? Yeah. I'm realizing in a really cool way, it was actually both my parents. Like, I think it was, I have distant, I have very distinct memories of going, it was kind of dramatic me learning how to ride a bike. But we went to like an empty parking lot. It was my mom and my dad. And I think my dad was, like, riding along with me, but my mom was there for, like, encouragement and advice about how to get peddling. 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. I love that. And by the way, so what I learned about Tori that I didn't know about her

before, right, was that she lived in a home that sounded like, you know, there was two parents there that there was a father figure. Still together. Happily married. Yeah, that, that loved her. Exactly. And so what I could see, right, 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 show 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 you to me to write 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 assumptions. And I think that I would know, I know more about Tori's bike writing than I did about Seth's bike riding after being married to him for 10 years because we never talked about these stories. We never, 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. Well, and even very simply, like, I will learn something about Mr. Schiff. I will learn something about him that I probably I've never asked him how did you learn ride a bike like I've never asked him that he's never asked me that right like 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 I love that that's so helpful I love it I love it so that 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 tell each other your stories it's all about just learning about each other and being curious at this point. I love it. Eve, where can people find you, find your work, find the cards,

find the materials, tell us, plug away. 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 the division of labor, and a lot of the societal issues that we were talking about earlier. And then the Fair Play Life is Instagram. And then, of course, my personal Instagram is Eve Rodsky, but that's a more angry Instagram if you want to learn, you know about my personal feelings around Supreme Court cases and abortion access. We can always use a little more of that. Thank you for being here.

And thank you. Thank you for your work. Of course. Thank you, Tori. Oh, that was so good. Sorry, I know we went over, but you know, you'll edit. No, that was truly, 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 a, to actually, 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 like 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 Financial Feministpodcast.com. If you're confused about your personal

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