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

24:11Eve Rodsky: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 Fair Play 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 childcare 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 Succession.

24:43You and I should talk because I am obsessed with Succession. I get compared to Shiv Roy on the internet multiple times a day.

24:49Eve Rodsky: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 those beautiful eyes. You look a lot like her. Yes, yes, yes. 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, she's a daughter. I call her daughter of or son ofs. 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.

25:27Eve Rodsky:And that's been hard to sort of transition those succession 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 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.

26:06Eve Rodsky: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. so I could get 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 in this nails on a chalkboard communication style and Seth's communication style at that point was avoidance.

26:52Eve Rodsky: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.

27:32Eve Rodsky: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 Mahjong 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 for 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.

28:14Eve Rodsky:And he's telling me his home feels horrible to him already. And they're just married without kids. So I knew I was onto 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 resentometers at 10. Like I was at 10 Bs. So how do you move out of patterns? So typically, people probably like us would start with the easiest thing of boundary systems communication.

28:58Eve Rodsky: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 a 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.

29:43Eve Rodsky:So I was getting very inaccurate data. I would say, who's doing groceries in your house? We both do. Who's planning birthday celebrations for your kid? We both are. Who does dishes? We both do. What is happening here? Can I understand what is really happening in these households?

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32:44Women who are married to men or wanted to be partnered with them, Tori, And this is how we can solve for this, why you can have children. 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.

33:25They 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.

34:07And 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 Fair Play Excel spreadsheet, which was the should I do spreadsheet at the time, I started to write them on index cards and I realized you can have an amazing metaphor for holding cards.

34:47Because I wanted people to understand that when they hold the groceries card, they're not gonna 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. Nope, nope, nope. 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 gonna wait here till 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.

35:15Eve Rodsky:And that is the core of the Fair Play system. CPE, conception, planning, execution, stays with one person. You can always read 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 I am teaching men how to just be better people.

36:09And 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, my mom and I used to fight about this a lot when And I was starting to think about fair play because, again, she's a professor of social change. Right. And she would say, well, don't you want to write to men?

36:40And 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 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.

37:21And 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. And we just 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 taking they're reducing their hours more on average. That's the best demographic right now. There is something happening. But yes, in our generation, in 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 on the game changer role.

37:55And I will say that taking that game changer role was 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 gonna 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 gonna happen even in a divorce setting. So for me, what I realize now is that the key to my economic power and to my mental and physical health has been being in the boundary systems and communication practice with my partner.

38:36But 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.

39:13I'm so glad you think that you're handling extracurricular sports by bringing Zach 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?

39:44Eve Rodsky: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. him. He understood, okay, wow, that's a lot more work than just getting the kids in Little League Field.

40:23So that's how we started. We 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, fair play is a hundred 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.

41:00I don't care if they bring a uniform that's dirty, but just, you know, being on time. That started 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.

41:35I'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 since 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 1800 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 an extra character sports tori it was seth i see when we both get home from our work day that you have three hours after our kids go to bed to watch SportsCenter, 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.

42:44I 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, he was saying to me, like, well, my time is more valuable than your time because I get paid more for my time.

43:19And 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. Because I did unpaid labor. Right. Like, great. Okay. Then you need to pay me like you would 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.

44:05You can hire a housekeeper. You can hire a caregiver. Great. I'll bill you. But Tori, the hardest part about that in the Fair Play system, which you'll realize it was so beautiful to have the cards and the tools. And again, save all your money out there. You can find it online at Fair Play Life for free. 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.

44:40Help 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's still 50 cards, five zero, Tori, that can't be outsourced, not any conception, planning, your 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.

45:20A hundred percent. Yes. And childcare helpers is a card in the Fair Play system that has about 30 subtasks because of all those things you talked about. So you can look online, that alone has 30 subtasks. 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 the 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.

45:54I'm going to let you own extracurricular sports, but 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. 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 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?

46:37That 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 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, who I interviewed for the book, will tell you there's no such thing as multitasking. Women are not better at it. There's something called task switching. It's bad for all of us. And in fact, as one neuroscientist said to me, there's no neuroscience brain difference in how we task switch, 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.

47:29Again, they're not stupid. They're 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, fuck, fuck, fuck, resettometer communication style. But again, this is a practice, Tori.

48:01And 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 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 i 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.

49:05And so he has a Robinhood account. He's 11. And so we look back at his Robinhood account, you know, and 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. I mean, again, that is the hack. The hack is the 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.

49:47The consistent deposits, like you said, you talked 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, an 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.

50:30And 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,

50:54Eve Rodsky: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'd been dumping it on his pillow. So then I crossed out and Sharpie doesn't communicate about domestic life and wrote in all caps, communicates about domestic life. Did that work? Did anything change? No, of course not. Yeah, okay. Nothing, zero. And she ended 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.

51:33So 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 at 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, for fair play. Because ultimately, if I know that Tori is a better communicator in the morning, because she's being, 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.

52:12And so if I'm asking her an important question at 6.30 PM, 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.

52:50I 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.

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54:03Well, and I think the other thing too, I was trying to think of my, I literally was going to write them down. And then of course I didn't consistency, patience, but also the letting go of it has to be perfect. Cause I know I feel that where I, 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 taken 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.

54:37And he was like, so 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, 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. it. We'll just say thank you, Mr. Chef. Mr. Chef is exactly right. That is why Fair Play 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.

55:14I 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 you 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.

55:43Like, 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, like you were saying before, like I don't have the 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.

56:11No, not only is it 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 idea of like carrying through your mistakes and what ownership actually means in a relationship, allowing that accountability and trust to rebuild, Tori.

56:50So you can trust eventually you'll have a meal on the table that has some minimum standard of care, a green, a carb, a 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, the green and the food that we agreed to can't be a shamrock from the Lucky Charms marshmallows. Like you have to agree. It's a freaking vegetable. Right. Exactly. So I was like, oh, my God, you said green. You didn't say what type of green. 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.

57:29Chef. So they came into the system. And Julie, she took, as we said, sort of this accidental traditional role that we were 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.

58:12So 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 in 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.

58:48And one is called magical beings, which is, you know, as you can imagine, Santa, lucky leprechaun, 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.

59:58So 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 for reminding 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 his daughter, he's emailing tooth fairy at gmail.com to be like, what the hell tooth fairy? What happened?

1:00:35She 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 toothferry 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 email.

1:01:14If 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's, and then he added, which the tooth fairy. Sometimes tooth fairies make mistakes. Make mistakes too. And then he said the best part, the pieces of 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 the tooth fairy coming out in 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.

1:02:11They 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?

1:02:53You dropped the ball on the feeding card tonight. 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 Tooth Fairy story, but it's also the beauty of what you said about the Mr. Chef 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.

1:03:27At the same time, I'm pissed off, but I'm also like, you know what? Okay. Okay. There's a path forward. Yes. Yes. Tori, 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, you can 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.

1:03:57Weird question. Does it work if we're not living together? A hundred percent. Okay. One thousand percent. that's the time I beg you to start this yes because the beauty you know why did I fake 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 you said 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 the distribution of that.

1:04:32I 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. Schaff is maybe next time you hold the travel card, right? Include me in the planning. This is not about going wrong. 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 are 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.

1:05:06No, no, that, that, 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, we can, I want to FedEx these to you and get them to you before are 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.

1:05:38Um, 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, my homework assignment for you. And so let's do a 30 second exercise where I can show you how it works. So just, 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.

1:06:16Chef and you'll, and he 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. 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 riding a bike. Did you learn to ride a bike? Do you remember who taught you or tying your shoe or anything like that?

1:06:49Yeah. I'm realizing in a really cool way, it was actually both my parents. I have very distinct memories of going. It was kind of dramatic, me learning how to ride a bike. But we went to an empty parking lot. It was my mom and my dad. And I think my dad was riding along with me, but my mom was there for encouragement and advice about how to get pedaling. 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, and, and by the way, so what I learned about Tori that I didn't know about her before, right.

1:07:26Was that she lived in a home that sounded like, you know, there was two parents there that there, 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 tell you 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 me to ride a bike. So I learned at my friend's house because her parents helped me because my parents were never around.

1:07:58So 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 own assumptions. And I think that I would know, I know more about Tori's bike riding 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 this could be a possible trigger point because it was so different for us or this will be fun because it's so it should be fun because it's both the same well and even very simply like i will learn something about mr chef 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.

1:08:47So that would be really helpful. I love 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 of 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.

1:09:23And 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 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 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 what 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.

1:10:00She sent a... 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.

1:10:34I 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.

1:10:57Thank 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 financialfeministpodcast.com. If you're confused about your personal finances and you're wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com slash quiz for a free personalized money plan. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Shortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and operations by Karina Patel and Amanda LeFew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100k.

1:11:49A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.

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