Relationship expert: The mental load moms carry, its impact on marriage & what to do about it

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0:40Visit HomeDepot.com, how doers get more done. Welcome back to another episode of Two Parents. Today we are joined by Dr. Morgan Cutlip. I always think anybody with doctor is like so impressive. Um, she is a relationship expert and an author of two books that we're going to talk about today. A Better Share. That's the most recent one. Yes. And then Loving Yourself Without Losing. No. Loving Your Kids Without Losing Yourself. Dang it. I like always regret the titling because it gets confusing. No, it doesn't get confusing. It makes total sense. Love Yourself Without Losing. Love Your Kids Without Losing Yourself.

1:19You've got to love your kids and not lose yourself, which every mom I feel like can identify with. Yeah. But we're really going to talk about the relationship expert part as two kids over here in a relationship. Exactly. Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. We're thrilled to have you. To kick things off, I'd love to hear, and I'm sure the listener would love to hear, the synopsis on each book. Could we go there? Or do we want to start with one? Okay, I'll give you a quick synopsis of my book for moms. But then let's move on to the relationship book and let's like spend time there.

1:57I like that. OK, that's great. OK, so Love Your Kids Without Losing Yourself is really it's a book about your relationship with yourself. So moms tend to really struggle with backburnering themselves after kids enter the picture. Women are sort of programmed to exist like this anyway. We put our needs last, prioritize our relationships at the expense of ourselves. and so moms get to a place where they have lived in this backburner place for so long that they tend to come out of it and be really almost disassociated or disconnected from themselves so the point of the book is it gives moms a simple five-step plan for staying connected to themselves and it has a model that it literally gives a model of your relationship with yourself so it doesn't take much time the advice is not like go get your nails done it's actually like five areas you check in with every single day.

2:51I call it a go mom yourself, which is like mother yourself, like you mother your kids. You check in with yourself every single day to sort of do a scan. How am I doing? What do I need to define it? And then eventually be able to take care of these things. So I'm trying to simplify for moms because we don't have a lot of time. We don't have a lot time I felt like I tried to whenever I had Tate I said okay I'm not gonna lose myself into mom motherhood and then I had her and I just said to Harrison the other day whenever we go out with our friends that don't have kids I say I have the hardest time talking to them because I cannot remember what I used to talk to people about before I had a baby I find myself talking about bedtime what she's eating her milestones and it consumes me and I we were going to a birthday party and I said I don't remember yeah and I just thought and I think I do a good job of not losing myself and yeah and then that came out of my mouth and I was like okay like there's that so I think it's a really you saying mother yourself like you mother your kids I thought if I gave myself five minutes of the attention I give our baby girl Tate yeah that'd be that'd be awesome you'd be good Yeah, it'd be great.

4:02It'd be, it's kind of a cool way to frame it. And I think, you know, early on in motherhood, not to go down this path too far, but early on in motherhood, we sort of have to lose ourselves in our kids. They demand it. And so it's not even about like, you can't do this, or you must have other interests. It's not about any of that stuff. It's that moms need to have a turn in the scheme of how they prioritize their relationships in life. so maybe you know tate's gonna come first for a while you know you're up at night you're breastfeeding you're doing all the things but but you cannot get so lost in this time that you don't remember how to return to you so it's just these little micro sort of shifts and adjustments we need to keep tabs on as moms is there a time amount of time you would put on it like you you give yourself away for five years or one year or i think you i think that it's possible to constantly be making shifts.

4:59So it's like in the very beginning, you're just in survival mode, trying to keep your head above water. So lose yourself. You're up at night, you know, maybe that first year, you're sort of lost in it. But then you need to check in and you need to make some adjustments. And so, okay, maybe my kids for the first five years are going to be primarily the ones who are prioritized. But how do I regularly make sure I'm staying connected to myself? Because if you enter, If you exit those five years and you've just put them at the top of the priority that entire time, you're going to have a really hard time even knowing where to begin with yourself.

5:31What do I need? I don't even know what I need. What moves the needle for me anymore? I don't even know what I like. I don't even know who I am. So they get too far gone. The goal is to not get so far gone. Okay, that makes a lot of sense not to get too far gone. And I do feel like you're doing a good job at giving yourself the time and attention or being proactive about giving yourself time and attention, like the things that I observe, whether that's through you waking up and prioritizing journaling and prioritizing your workouts and prioritizing work and building something new. So it is a unique dynamic, at least from my perspective, where I see your full heart and mind and energy go into Tate, while on the other end like you that strong independent woman you were when we met like I haven't seen that fade at all as you you've found those those pillars um and you focused on on keeping them keeping them strong but I did find them in phases like you're saying sort of so for the first four months I completely I was in the complete newborn bubble right I mean you couldn't couldn't didn't wash my hair didn't work out didn't take a step right yes month four i said i gotta add something in so i added in like three workouts a week even if it was an hour of walking and then at month eight i decided okay i'm gonna try to work harder and now i'm trying i'm doing both but i did phase it back in yes for the like for the person listening i don't want them to think that like all of this just came naturally one day it's like for four months there was nothing no it was just surviving just surviving pajamas all day but you're doing exactly what i you did and you're doing exactly what i'm talking about which is that you have enough self-awareness to say okay i'm gonna little by little start to build momentum that keeps me connected to who i am and it's just kind of ironic because women and mothers especially self-sacrifice in order to really love the people in their life well but we can often get into a place where we do it so much that we then resent the people we're sacrificing for.

7:46And so we end up really sabotaging our relationships when we don't check in, make these shifts, and prioritize our own care. I think this can segue us to a better share, which is talking about relationships, because I always thought to myself, and I knew this because I am divorced, and we talk about that on here, but I've always said who you have kids with is one of the most important decisions you'll ever make. And then when you have the kid, you see that. And I do want to say the only reason I was able to even prioritize myself a little bit was he also found that important and really supported me and would say, I'll take her, you go.

8:27I never felt like I constantly had Tate, like that burden wasn't on me. I felt like it was 50-50. A lot of times the weekend's a good example. Saturdays, whichever day we want, one of us works out, the other one works out. And so it feels very 50-50, which is nice. um but well i don't know how this is going to come out but i fell in love with alex i didn't fall in love with tate's mom and so while it is of the utmost importance for me to while it is of the utmost importance to me for tate to have an amazing mom it's also of the utmost importance for me to be in love with Alex, the person I fell in love with.

9:16And in a partner, I'm not looking for Tate's mind. I'm looking for Alex. Did that make sense? There's versions of each other in there, I would think. But that's very wise. Okay. So have you ever seen those viral reels that talk about a child's happiness can be related to, I don't know the exact terminology, if it's correlated or related to the mother's level of happiness. You see any of these? Okay, there's all these. You'll see, like, it's like, you know, the B-roll in the text. But basically the gist is that the happier the mother, the happier the kids. But the piece that's really important is if the mother has a partner who really cares for her, the happier she's going to be.

10:00In turn, the happier the kids are going to be. And so taking care of the one who's doing so much of the caretaking is a very wise role to occupy. Prioritizing that is so important. And a lot of men kind of miss that. They go into parenthood mode and stop taking care of their partner. And that changes the relationship entirely. That makes a lot of sense.

10:25Dr Morgan Cutlip:It's like a layer deeper where I think maybe I could see how men could be like, she's got it. but in fact she's suffering a bit like mentally or you know or desperate for some form of validation like I always I didn't tell him this until we started prepping for you and I don't know I think it was a better share was the one I was reading it in but bait but in short I told him you don't know what you do for me when you say you're such a good mom you're doing such a good job because he's the one that sees me momming 24 7 right if if one of my friends says it to me and we're just at dinner it's like that's that's probably just a nice compliment you're giving somebody but when he says it it's the most powerful thing i could hear and it means so much to me and i just say thank you in the moment but for him to say that at 4 a.m is just like everything it's everything everything i um have said this in lots of different settings i said it once in an argument with my husband.

11:25I set it on stage to a room full of moms. But the role that the partner that usually, you know, if it's the husband, the partner, the man plays in his relationship with the mother is so key in big part because he is her primary source of feedback. If you think about like as Tate gets older and she's a toddler and you start getting into like any meltdowns or anything like that, like that is not a wonderful source of feedback. It's like, oh, I made her food and then she hated everything that I did you know but the partner is the main source of feedback they get the most raw view of everything and his words have the opportunity to really build her up or break her down and so it's such a powerful position to occupy that a lot of people sort of miss the opportunity to pour into the mothers and the women and each other really it It goes both ways.

12:17But it makes sense. It makes total sense. Two things come to mind right now. The first is the reason why I consistently tell you you're a good mother is because you're a very good mother. That's nice. Thank you. No, it's really sweet. Thank you. I see how much time and energy and effort you put in to giving her, our daughter, the best life that we can. I think the other side to it is you've done a very good job at communicating feedback without it being naggy. So letting me know what your needs are, but not doing it in a way that brings me down. Or seems... Yeah. Is that landing? that's okay okay let me zoom out for a sec yeah okay so for a better share I surveyed I think it was like 536 women and then I did interviews with men and women to make sure I was like conceptualizing things accurately I was getting both I wanted both sides of the story I wanted a book that men would read and would enjoy um and women said when it came to something called the mental load we can define it later but uh they want two main things they want number one initiative taking which is what you're doing by the way when you say hey why don't you go take some time for yourself like I've got this I bet you jump in and take initiative at home the other thing women said they want is uh appreciation and women want him to take initiative and him just to express Dress appreciation around the mental load.

14:11We can define it at some point. Why don't we define it now? Okay. Yeah, do it now. Define it now? Mm-hmm. Okay. All right, so I'll give you the 30 ,000-foot definition. Okay. The mental load is the seemingly never-ending running to-do list we carry around in our minds. It has two main components. The first is that the majority of the tasks involved in the mental load are invisible. So they're hard to explain. They're hard to hand off. If someone doesn't see it, then it's really hard to get them to understand why it's like weighing you down. The second aspect is it takes up cognitive real estate.

14:45So it crowds out space in your brain that can be given to other things like patience, regulating your emotions, getting in the mood for sex, creativity, all sorts of things. So a lot of times moms will be like, I have mom brain. It's like, or you've just crowded out, you know, you're full. Your brain is full and you've crowded out energy and space for some of these things. Yes. So everybody has a mental load. It's actually not on social media. It's a pretty volatile topic. But it's not just a women's issue. Everyone has one. Men have them. My kids are old enough. They've got one. But in home and family life, when you look at the research, it's predominantly carried by women.

15:26And so it becomes a major source of resentment and frustration in the relationship and a major source of the relationship slowly sort of eroding in closeness and connection. So I can get more in the weeds, but that's like the big overview of the mental load. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. These days, it feels like there's advice for everything. You should do cold plunges. You should do gratitude journals, screen detoxes. But how do you know what actually works for you? With the internet and information overload about mental health and wellness, it can be a struggle to know what's true and what actions to take these days.

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16:36It's convenient, too. You can join a session with a therapist at the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, you can switch therapists at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash two parents. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash two parents. Does the mental load grow? So it grows over time. It's like a balloon in your head. and let's say it's one size, but then if you don't have support or if you grow resentment or things like that, the balloon gets bigger and it crowds out more?

17:19Or no? It's just that we only have so much capacity to carry things around in our head. Okay. So like the researching, the planning, the ongoing calculations we're making on behalf of members of our family, sort of like all of this stuff takes up space. So if you've ever gotten to a place where you're at capacity, it's usually you're short you're irritable you sort of feel like you're spinning um you're just like at that moment where you're like i can't think about one more thing like don't pile on one more thing and so it a lot of women especially just operate constantly at that sort of revved high capacity because they don't ever reach a place where it feels empty they can't find rest because they're always feeling like they need to keep going.

18:05So is management of the mental load one of the most important things that you would say? Let me get the phrasing of this correctly. How important is management of the mental load to a happy relationship with couples? It's essential. So, okay, can I take you in the weeds on it? Is that okay? So when around the specific issue, what I see and where there was sort of like a gap in the current resources that exist on this topic is what I see is there's like this belief that maybe handling the mental load is a logistical issue, which it is. Like how you divvy up tasks, how you carry, you know, the weight of everything, who does what.

18:51But there's this other side of it, which is the emotional side of it, and also the ability to talk about it. so what I found is there's a lot of couples who the woman tends to be the initiator of the conversation she's really overwhelmed she's stressed out she's like how come my life has changed and his life really hasn't changed especially after kids how come I am carrying everything how come he doesn't see it how come he doesn't know about it and so she gets overwhelmed kind of like her vibe changes in the relationship a lot of times maybe a little bit more intense she comes to him to have the conversation he gets defensive or is well-meaning but he doesn't get it and she feels discouraged and so there's one of two things that will happen she'll feel discouraged and she'll be like i guess it's just on me and i'll continue to carry it and then begins the slow erosion of their connection or she gets louder and she tries to like coach him into more involvement and then she becomes the knack.

19:55So imagine eventually over time what that does for your sexual relationship. She's now trying to coach him into pulling him into participation. So now he feels like another child. That's not sexy. He has the nagging mother chasing him around, telling him what to do. He feels like he can never do anything right. Now he has the nagging mother. that's not sexy either so over time the disconnect grows the sexual relationship suffers and so the ability to talk about this topic and not have defensiveness come up but just to talk about it like a normal part of modern family life becomes incredibly important and explaining the mental load in a way that men really understand the nuance of it so if we go in the weeds i'll do that is incredibly important so they can take an active role in family life.

20:49In situations when someone's mental load is reaching its capacity, what is the most effective way for them to bring it up to their partner so it is heard and change is taken? I really like that you asked that question. Thank you. Okay, so I said on social media, for example, This topic is pretty volatile. It's really hostile, predominantly toward men. And I think that is missing the massive point because at the end of the day, what women are sort of asking for around the mental load is for men to do things differently. So when you come at it in a way that attacks men, I mean, quite frankly, just criticism is not the great starting place for change.

21:39So we have to bring men into the conversation and we have to have the willingness to hear their perspective and to like make space for that. So that is sort of the mentality that I come out the mental load conversation with. So if you're going to your partner, you're going to have this conversation. Your highest chance of success for the conversation going well means you want to position the mental load as the enemy. It is the shared enemy in your relationship. Love it. and it's you two against the mental load. And honestly, it's not untrue. Like I know that there are partners who are really difficult.

22:16I know there are jerks out there, both men and women. Like, you know, it goes both ways. But for the most part, modern family life is absolutely relentless for just like the average family. We have this pressure to be productive. We are always on the go. We have the distraction of our devices. We have way more to do than two people can realistically handle. So if you have no support, it's way too much so when you when you enter into the conversation if I scripted it I'd say something like this hey is now a good time to talk kind of want to like make sure it's good time as you've probably noticed I've been really stressed out maybe you feel just like my energy is more intense I'm a little bit shorter I have less patience and I'd like to talk about what what I think is going on there's something called the mental load can kind of define it like I already did.

23:06And it's basically the amount of responsibilities that are on our plates as a modern family. And it is way too much for us to handle. But what I do know is that how we're approaching it right now is kind of leaving me in a bad place. And I want to show up better in our relationship and in our family. So can we talk about ways we can make some changes around this in our relationship? I love positioning, like, because you're not attacking him, you're attacking the mental load yes it's cool yeah i think that so that all collectively makes a lot of sense to me i think that um a couple things that i've noticed on when our conversations go yeah best and when they go worse and i think one of the really challenging things is like when you're in the heat of the moment is often when you want to bring this stuff up and that's when emotions are elevated on both sides and I find any time that either of us are collectively bringing things up in the heat of the moment it is our least productive conversation for sure totally unfortunately though on the other side and this is not just in our relationships I think this is general life when often enough time will pass that you're kind of in a good flow and you don't want to disrupt that flow by bringing something negative in so finding that right time to bring that conversation up i've noticed in theory is a lot easier than it is in reality like if if if we go and we wake up in the morning and it's like that's the first thing i'm hearing my receptivity levels and actually i'd say vice versa if i try and bring something up to alex before she journals it is not it's just like generally not going to be heard at a very effective rate no i'm not i you can't really disrupt my wheelhouse before i've had a time to to dump out yes in the journal verse if i bring it up in our kind of mid-morning walk or afternoon walk prime time um during movement I can hear you.

25:26Yes. It feels like there's a really healthy back and forth. And so I think just kind of speaking aloud from our end, I think what I've seen work the best is finding the right safe spaces to bring up challenging conversations. I have like so many responses. Okay. What you're hitting on is so true, which is that if you bring it up in the heat of the moment, it's not going to go well. if you wait till nobody wants to mess it up when it's going well. So it's really hard. So one is you always want to strike when the iron is cold. So you do not ever want to have this conversation in the heat of the moment.

26:05It just will not go well. And if you must, a lot of times women, especially when they bring this up, are mustering up all this energy and courage to have the conversation because women, like another thing that you guys were saying that's so great is how you clearly articulate what you need. A lot of women don't do that. So if they come to this conversation, they muster up all this energy and it doesn't go well, then they're likely to not enter it again. So don't do it when things are volatile. You're arguing. It's not going well. I write in the book. I have a section that is I think it's called Can We Talk?

26:40And how these three words are just like programmed in our brain to stir up anxiety. Because when we're dating, can we talk means we're going to break up. Totally. So then in marriage or in a committed relationship, it's like, can we talk? Like, what's the matter? Kind of have this belief that relationships, a lot of people do, that they just sort of run themselves. And if you talk about it, it means something is wrong. Rather than normalizing that life is just going to regularly come in between the two of you. It's going to be busy. It's going to mess you up. You're going to get out of balance.

27:11So you're going to have to talk about your relationship. My book culminates with a meeting. It's called The Share Meeting. a given agenda, talk every single week, a short amount of time, check in on the mental load and start to normalize that you talk about your relationship. You'll get better at it and you'll naturally be sharing the load because now you're both invested in talking about the relationship and what's on each other's plates. Because a lot of times women, we talked about that post before we hit record, a lot of times women are carrying the responsibility for even managing the relationship.

27:44So it shares that immediately when you schedule this time. I think we have like a, it's like making, now taking that and kind of talking through the dynamics of our relationship. So on the, the scheduled meeting times, um, Alex and I aren't, aren't scheduled, scheduled people. we're very bad at that and i think if we ever tried to do that we would probably get it the first week and then the second week have a fight about how one of us one of us is doing it one of us isn't i think what we've naturally defaulted to which i think has worked really well is what i was referring to earlier which is like we have this these we live right by a lake and we walk around that lake we walk around that like probably three times a week plus minus and so there's this like built-in um neutral space to where we have a a wide array of conversations of meaningful deep conversations not just about our relationship but around work around friendships around family and and so on and so forth so i feel like we've been reflecting on our relationship we've kind of developed that de facto um or our version of that of that weekly meeting you were going to say something well i just wanted to say for the listener who i because i i'm having this sort of vision in my head of the person listening and like we are saying we get we go on our lake walk yeah which is great yeah but what we don't have which i think a lot of couples have is the husband's at work all day from nine to five and let's say the the wife is at home and then he hits the door he's exhausted but she's also exhausted because she's been with the three kids all day and then they have their like maybe scheduled time to talk about it I think it could be really overwhelming so do you have suggestions around like that dynamic that's very different than our dynamic but a lot of people's reality yes great call out yes so I'll say just a couple things um the relationship meeting for some people will like not fit for them like I'm not a very scheduled person.

30:02So my husband and I have more of like, we have a rhythm, or we naturally do these check ins, it's just integrated into our life, and we're good at it. But like you guys in your walks, but a lot of people won't do it. Or they're so disconnected that it's just never going to happen. So I guess I'm going to push a little bit that even the people who are exhausted, you know, he comes home, he's tired, she's tired from being with the kids all day, they have three kids, one day a week, take 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes and schedule it. I liken it to like learning a new skill or learning mechanics in a sport.

30:40Like my son plays baseball. So when he plays baseball, he's refining his swing. He's going to step to the plate hundreds and thousands of times and practice that swing. And it's going to be mechanical and he's going to be awkward. And eventually it's going to become automatic. So for those couples who are in a really bad spot, You're not going to want to do it. You're not going to want to do it. You're going to be tired. You're going to be like, this is weird. Like, why are we scheduled? What are we in a business? And kind of, I mean, family is a business. Yeah, yes. And your relationship is so important that you have to get back on a path of repair and connection.

31:15And so schedule it, practice it, be awkward about it. And how, use a framework though, like try to use an agenda if you can. Use chat, GBT, grab my book, whatever you got to do, have an agenda so you stay on track and you don't get in the weeds and end up in an argument. But schedule it until it eventually becomes automatic and a natural rhythm you can incorporate in your relationship. But sometimes this is the only way couples can find that time to get together. I think that, like, and I could see how in the moment you'd make a lot of excuses. Like, I'm supposed to have this check-in, but I would really rather just sit and veg out.

31:51But there's nothing more important than prioritizing it. Yes. which makes I think a lot of sense okay so for the for the busy people that's you just it this is like so important so you just prioritize it and it can be 20 minutes so I think that's like really probably good for the listener to hear yeah and I think just to be clear about what this time looks like this is not a time where you're going to be like I wanted to talk to you about what you said to me this morning when you left and I've been like ruminating on it all day it's not for that it's like for the mental load it looks a little different but if it's just a general relationship check it's like i just want to check in how is there anything you need that i'm not doing for you now you take turns doing that um where can we build in some time to connect and get to like actually have good conversation this week it's like you're checking in on the connections of your relationship and then you always schedule your next meeting or else it won't happen on both calendars and you always end with some sort of like affectionate response so whether it's a hug or a kiss or an expression of appreciation.

32:50Oh, okay. And keep it short. Keep it short. People get into trouble if it goes too long. I believe that. Feeling better in your own body shouldn't be a full-time job. That's why HERS makes it easier to get started and stick with it, backed by expert-guided online care that puts your weight loss goals first. HERS is transforming women's health care by providing access to affordable weight loss treatment plans. They connect you with a medical provider who will work with you to determine the best treatment for you. If prescribed, you get medication as part of a doctor-developed weight loss program complete with ongoing care, check-ins, dosage, and medication adjustments and access to 24-7 online support at no additional cost.

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34:21And he said, what was it? When she, the thing that kept coming up was when she lists all that she does, it sounds as if I do nothing. Totally.