Let’s say—purely hypothetically—that you are a single woman who spends many of your waking hours writing, reading, and thinking about gender inequality. And let’s say you would like to be dating someone male. You know what’s NOT a great opener for a first date? “Hi, I’m Allison, and I study the problems with hetero relationships.”
Then again, this particular conversation-starter proved to be an excellent screening mechanism back when I was on the dating market. Lucky for me, I found someone brave enough to stick around even after I regaled him with complaints about the patriarchy over drinks in a dark bar on Date #1.
Partly for my own curiosity, and partly because I thought readers might find it entertaining, I recently sat my partner Eric down for an interview. Below is a condensed and lightly edited version of our conversation. Read on to hear Eric spill the tea about what it’s like to be in a relationship with a gender and family scholar!
AD: First off, tell the people who you are—other than my partner.
EL: By day, I'm a management consultant focused on healthcare. By night/weekend, I love staying active and playing tennis, running, and biking. I grew up in Ohio and am still a midwesterner at heart - hence me being so friendly with strangers.
AD: Thinking back to the earliest days of our relationship—and I’m pretty sure we talked about this on our very first date—what do you remember thinking about what I told you of my research?
EL: I thought it was pretty cool.
AD: Good answer!
EL: I think what you do is so relatable, so applicable to everybody’s lives. It also became clear to me at an early stage, whenever we would go to any sort of party together, you were gonna be the center of attention. Because what you do is such an interesting cocktail topic.
AD: And did you expect or worry, early on, that my professional work would impact our relationship?
EL: No, not really, until you brought it to my attention.
AD: What do you mean?
EL: I just very distinctly remember that time where we were in your kitchen. Physically, you kind of cornered me—
AD: I have no memory of this!
EL: Oh, I do. You were like, “So listen…I just want you to know, if this is gonna be a long-term thing, your career isn’t necessarily going to take priority over mine.”
AD: I don’t think I made a declaration like that…
EL: You kind of did.
AD: I may edit this out.
EL: But I had been thinking about it a bit already, and I was fine with it. The way I would describe myself prior to meeting you is, I was always sympathetic to feminism, in a sort of abstract way agreeing with it and believing in it. But I almost never really had to confront the specific inequalities that present themselves to women very very practically. And definitely had devoted very little thought to how it would play out in my own relationship. But a quality I find attractive in women is intelligence and ambition. So I kind of knew whoever I ended up with long-term would be someone who had their own career, and their own ambitions, and I imagined that’s something we’d juggle. But I didn’t really think that hard about the ways that would be difficult. And me being an optimist in general, I guess I just assumed, we’ll work it out.
I kind of knew whoever I ended up with long-term would be someone who had their own ambitions.
AD: It’s continually struck me how much thought I’ve given to all these issues [related to gender, work, and family]. And I don’t think I’m unusual among my demographic. I’ll present something to you, like, “Here’s what I want, here’s what I don’t want.” And you’ll say, “I’ve never thought about that before.” Which is just continually amazing to me.
EL: It sounds kind of bad when you say it like that, but yeah. And I think many guys are in a similar position.
AD: So to summarize, you would consider yourself a feminist before meeting me, but thinking through what that actually meant, for you personally and in the context of your own relationship, was not something you had thought a lot about.
EL: And can I add, I still don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to not worry so much--although you can’t ignore it either. It goes back to the thing we’ve talked about, that just because lots of other people have issues in their relationships, it doesn’t mean you will. Yes, we’re all bound up in this society and its expectations, but we’re free agents as well. So I’m still optimistic that all these things don’t have to be so difficult for us personally - especially since you and I are aware of the broader issues we face.
AD: I think that’s a place we differ somewhat. Sociologists focus on how society structures and constrains our lives, so I think it’s hubristic to think that you’re going to be the exception to the rule. Not to say you don’t have any agency, but it’s prudent to think about what the norms are, because it’s an uphill battle not to fall into them. And you tend to trust that if we have good intentions, we’ll be different.
EL: I don’t think I’d go that far. It’s healthy and good to recognize the starting points we all come from and the contexts we’re all influenced by. But we still have a lot of agency. We 100% agree on the idea that recognizing the structures you operate within is a form of self-awareness. It helps you take action. We totally agree on that. Maybe where there’s some difference in perspective is how far along we sit on the spectrum of agency to—what’s the opposite of agency?
AD: Constraint?
EL: The spectrum of agency to constraint. You’d probably be more toward the constraint end, and I’d be more toward the agency end.
AD: Yeah. When we moved in together, what do you think we did well in figuring out a division of household labor?
EL: I think that exercise we did up front, writing it all down, all the things that needed to get done, and then divvying it up. We did a card exercise, right?
AD: Yeah, we put all the different areas of responsibility on cards. And then we each identified the ones we enjoy doing and the ones we hate doing and compared our answers.
EL: Yeah, exactly. So, whether you use cards or do it another way, I think it was really helpful that we had an explicit planning session together from the beginning. I was surprised how naturally our preferences diverged in a complementary manner. I thought it would be much more contentious. But it turned out, most of the things—a few of these things neither of us is enthusiastic about doing, like I don’t love taking out the trash—
AD: But I hate it in a way that you don’t.
EL: Yeah. So I’d say for like 80, 75% of the chores, the things you hate are things I feel kind of neutral about, and vice versa.
AD: Yeah, I agree, it worked out nicely in that way.
EL: But one challenge we’ve run into sometimes is, life isn’t static. Things are always changing. We got a car, Covid happened, we got a puppy…So I think where we stumble sometimes, it’s often because something changed and we didn’t intentionally have a conversation about it. I don’t know, maybe one thing that would be helpful to think about going forward is how we could build in what we did up front on a regular basis.
AD: On another note, I know you’ve gotten interesting responses from friends and colleagues you’ve told about my research.
EL: I think my favorite was my friend, I told him for the first time on the phone about your research, and he was like:
“Oh, wow, man, you’re screwed!”
AD: What did you say to that?
EL: I don’t remember. I think I just laughed. He was like, “you’re really in for it.” More commonly I get a response like, “Oh boy, you better be on your A-game!”
AD: If a guy friend asked you for advice about how to make his relationship more equitable, what would you advise him?
EL: Well first, I kind of question the way you used the word “equitable.”
AD: You really want to parse this?
EL: I feel like the way you use the phrase comes loaded with unspoken, underlying assumptions about what that means, but it’s a lot from your point of view. Others might not define the word the same way.
AD: So let’s say, how to make his relationship feel more fair.
EL: Ok. I like “fair” better than “equitable,” even though I know fair means different things to different people. But I don’t like “equitable” because it implies a sort of quantitative exactness, and I don’t think what you’re talking about can be measured that way. “Fairness” conveys the inherent fuzziness and subjectiveness that I think gets at what you mean.
AD: Alright, noted. [Ed. note: I don’t fully agree with Eric’s assessment here, but for the sake of continuing the conversation I opted to move along.] Answer the question!
EL: Well, I think number one is, have an open, honest conversation about it. Be open, just start the conversation by asking how your partner feels. And then as the conversation continues, you can put your feelings on the table too. You want to be explicit in your common assumptions about what you’re prioritizing with your partner. You don’t have to be in a partnership where everything is 50/50 quote-unquote—which is also why I don’t like the word equitable.
AD: Okay, okay, just answer the question!
EL: Have open but hard conversations about what you’re both prioritizing and what your goals are together. Whose career in a given situation would be put first, and how you would balance different priorities. And then based on that, eventually have more tactical conversations, and write it down, how you’ll divide tasks and things like that. But I think it has to be grounded in common assumptions about how you’re going to weigh different priorities together.
It has to be grounded in common assumptions about how you’re going to weigh different priorities together.
AD: So you’re sort of saying, before you get to the nitty-gritty of who’s doing what, talk about the bigger picture of what matters.
EL: Yeah. I think for us, the starting point was that we wanted it to be 50/50. But not everybody needs to have that. What’s important is that both people are on the same page and aligned on what their common assumptions are. And then they can design their life on a tactical basis around that.
AD: Right. Anything else to add before I turn off the recorder?
EL: One more thing: I love your research, and I’m so proud of you. I can be your harshest critic, but I’m also your biggest fan. [Ed. note: Eric is one of several generous friends who edit this newsletter, and I always have to make the most changes in the weeks he’s reading. Sadly, he’s usually correct in his suggestions and nearly always makes me better.]
AD: That’s true. And I appreciate that.
Thanks for reading! If you’ve got an interesting relationship story that might be a good fit for TDD, give me a shout in the comments or via email (daminger@g.harvard.edu). I’d like to feature more couples’ stories in future newsletters.
Speaking of reader stories, R. had this to say about last week’s Dispatch, on the ways women—moms in particular—are often “held accountable” for domestic life:
“My mum has frequently commented that my brother-in-law is ‘so helpful’ in caring for his own son. And [I’ve heard] comments like ‘[So-and-so] is giving [my sister] a break’ when someone else is amusing my nephew at weekends…Even when both parents are around, my sister is the default parent.”
Le sigh.