Playing Fair
The majority of couples that come to sex therapy have concerns that actually originate outside of the bedroom. Resentment over division of household labor is a common barrier to regular, good enough sex. A client recommended Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much To Do (And More Life To Live) along with its companion deck of cards by Eve Rodsky. With its engaging approach to redistributing household responsibilities, Fair Play offers a refreshingly actionable way for couples to combat the imbalance that so often leads to resentment, burnout, and even relationship breakdowns. It is very heteronormative and traditional family-centric, so in general, she references women doing more of the emotional and physical labor to run a household while men need to step it up.
Rodsky’s book emerged from her personal experience with the "second shift"—the invisible labor that many women perform on top of their careers. From school pickups to household chores, Rodsky noticed a glaring disparity in how responsibilities were divided, particularly in dual-income households. Fair Play responds to this imbalance by introducing a practical, game-based system to help partners divide household tasks fairly.
The approach is simple yet revolutionary: Rodsky assigns each task a "card" that one partner takes full ownership of, rather than leaving it to be split haphazardly. This card system creates a structure to communicate expectations and deliberately assign tasks rather than tasks always falling to the same partner creating resentment which usually isn’t sexy.
It’s worth a read especially for parents. Many of the cards relate directly to child-specific tasks like bath time, medical appointments and school open houses. I wish she would have used more gender-neutral language. I have had several couples where the division of labor is unequal and the husband is doing more than his share, and of course, I have same-gender and non-binary couples. This framework creates a structure to start the conversation wherever you are in the process.
