An equal partnership means doing half the work

An equal partnership means making an equal contribution to The Grand Project – in our case, reproducing.

There are three types of household labour:

• Breadwinning – whatever you do to pay the bills
• Childcare – keeping the kids alive and functioning
• Household work – cooking, cleaning and all the admin it takes to keep things afloat

This pie is the burden of household labour, the total number of hours of work (broadly defined) each week. An equal partnership means doing dividing the pie in half, doing an equal amount of work each week – not necessarily splitting each piece equally. The flipside is having an equal amount of discretionary time for hobbies, side projects and down time.

Tee and I agreed to value all work equally, being equally committed to the shared project and all it entails. I.e. an hour of child care is just important as an hour in the office, although they may be demanding in different ways.

For me, this was a mindset adjustment. Before kids we were two individuals who shared a home. We had independent careers hustled at our own pace. If one had to surge at work, the other would pick up the slack at home – or maybe we’d let some housework go by the wayside. There wasn’t that much to do anyway. And it evened out over the year because our jobs were similar in hours and intensity.

Starting a family is a decision to permanently grow the pie, squeezing out discretionary time, particularly in the first few years. We are no longer two people who have to split chores, but a partnership running a family unit. We have to be more intentional about the pie.

Part of this project will be thinking about pie management. How do we reduce the size of the pie? Where should we cut the pie?

For now our plan is to take an iterative approach. What the pie looks like will evolve. The pie will grow and shrink. The pie will change in colour. And in different stages of life we will cut the pie differently. But I will always do half of the pie – no more, no less. That’s our commitment to each other. That’s an equal partnership.