Couple Heartbreak

Source: Mohamed_hassan/Pixabay

Those of you reading this who are in a relationship may have noticed that, over time, each of you has tended to gravitate toward specific roles. For example, one person in a relationship often handles more financial responsibilities than the other; one person handles more household cleaning, and one person handles more household maintenance and repairs. Interestingly, it’s not just physical roles that can get separated in a relationship. Emotional roles can get split as well so that one person in the relationship becomes increasingly thought of as the more “emotional” person in the relationship while the other becomes increasingly seen as the more “rational” or “less emotional” partner.

Over time, as the amount of stress goes up and pressure to be more efficient in a relationship increases, particularly if the couples have children or demanding careers, this separation of roles tends to grow more pronounced to the point where the roles become even more polarized. For example, the person initially taking less responsibility for the household finances can become even more separated from the family finances to the point that he or she doesn’t know how much money is in the checking account.

In heterosexual couples, these roles have traditionally separated along gender lines, i.e., men have ended up in roles associated with finances, home maintenance, and repair, and women have ended up in roles associated with just about everything else involved with running the household and caring for the children. Same-sex couples struggle with the same problems of role polarization in their relationships; they’re just not related to gender roles.

In heterosexual couples, women have justifiably been most vocal about trization of roles being tilted in favor of men and the unfairness of being expected to work outside the home and then do more than their fair share of the work at home. While their objections have been heard by men who are responsive to the lack of equitability in their relationships, these complaints fall on deaf ears for many men because they recognize that they have it pretty good and are not very motivated to give that up. With those men, rather than trying to appeal to their sense of fairness, I’ve found speaking to their self-interest can be more effective.

When I work with families with young children who have gotten stuck in traditional gender roles, I strongly encourage the woman to go out of town for at least a weekend. Longer is better, but a weekend is usually long enough. I ask the woman not to prepare any meals in advance, not to arrange any babysitters or play dates, and not to answer her cell phone unless it is a true emergency. (“Where is the diaper cream?” is not an emergency.)

For the men, I tell them that they may be very uncomfortable at first but to hang in there because it will almost certainly get better, and I haven’t lost any kids (or dads, for that matter) in this experiment yet. The payoff for the men is that it will change their relationship with their kids forever. They are welcome to call a friend and ask for help; in fact, I encourage them to do that in order to build their resources for the future. The idea is to boost their confidence in their own competence.

When the moms come home, they are usually a little anxious about what they are going to find. The house is generally a little messier than they hoped, but they almost always find a very relaxed dad who connects with the kids in a way the mom always dreamed would happen. In fact, what often happens is that the dad asks her when she wants to go away again! By the way, this exercise can work just as well with same-sex couples with children, couples without any children, or any couple or family that wants to shake up the polarized role relationships they have gotten stuck in.

I’m not so naïve to think that this exercise will solve all of the role polarization problems in a relationship. Still, it can be a huge first step in showing couples that they can make real movement in getting unstuck and make significant movement toward the kind of relationship they both want.