The Pursuit Of Equality Is Ruining Your Marriage

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Nothing can disprove a belief in the interchangeability of the sexes like having children. When I had my first baby, I assumed my husband and I would split things as evenly as we could. I’d be breastfeeding, sure, but when it came to other tasks, the work would be 50-50. How idealistic I was.

Our baby was clingy and needy, as babies usually are. But the problem was that what he often wanted was not just to be held and rocked to sleep; it was to be held and rocked to sleep by mom—aka, me. I remember watching other fathers bounce fussy babies at church or on a plane and feeling defensive of my husband. He would like to be doing that too, I thought. But it just doesn’t work. (And here is where I add the disclaimer that he did often bounce our baby to sleep and was as involved as possible. But there are some things only moms can do.)

As much as we might like to be, people are not robots. We can’t organize our lives according to a theoretically optimal system without setting ourselves up for failure. Nothing puts that in such stark relief as a baby, who has no interest in holding his poops until dad is around so mom can skip a diaper change, or saving his latest bout of screaming for mom after dad has finally gotten him down to sleep. Babies want what they want, and they couldn’t care less about your so-called equality. 

This hasn’t stopped some parents from pursuing the elusive even distribution of work. A recent opinion column in the New York Times offers a solution: “The Secret to Marriage Equality Is Formula.”

“It’s time to explicitly tell parents-to-be, before they’re in the trenches, that the two worthwhile enterprises of exclusive breastfeeding and equal parenting are a zero-sum game — and that it can be utterly life-changing to choose the latter,” writer Nona Willis Aronowitz concludes. 

She’s correct that the two are mutually exclusive; there is no equality in baby feeding when one parent is literally sustaining a child and the other is just there for moral support and water bottle refills. But she’s wrong in her implication that equality should trump other considerations where children’s wellbeing is concerned.

The problem appears to be one of perspective. “The bonding effect” of breastfeeding her first child “was real,” Aronowitz writes, “but it also meant my ability to understand the contours of her needs deepened as Dom [her husband] became more and more sidelined. The resulting resentment nearly broke us as a couple. The unfair burden and sleep deprivation nearly broke me.”

I can attest to overwhelming effects of sleep deprivation, having just gotten my second child to sleep through the night in the past month. I chose to exclusively breastfeed him knowing my husband would be able to sleep mostly peacefully while I was waking hour after hour to resettle our baby. Instead of getting up throughout the night, my husband was changing diapers and spending hours walking our neighborhood in desperate attempts to get our baby to take his naps. Was it equal? No. Did I resent my husband for it? Well, only until I’d had my morning coffee.

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My husband and I have been married for almost six years, and if there’s one piece of advice I feel qualified to pass down, it’s that the pursuit of equality is a path to a miserable marriage. It’s best to think of the workload in your marriage swinging like a pendulum: Sometimes the wife does more while the husband does less and vice versa. Sometimes the duties just look different. When it comes to small children, their mother is biologically wired to take on a larger portion of their childcare. For the kids’ sake, and for the sake of avoiding resentment, that’s worth accepting.

Brené Brown, the researcher most well known for her TED Talk on vulnerability, calls the idea of a 50-50 marriage “one of the worst myth[s] in the world.” She and her husband have two kids together and have been married since 1994, so I’m guessing she knows what she’s talking about. 

“Strong, lasting relationships are rarely 50-50, because life does not work that way,” she said on her podcast in 2020. “Strong, lasting relationships happen when your partner or friend or whoever you’re in relationship with, can pony up that 80% when you are down to 20, and that your partner also knows that when things fall apart for her, and she only has 10% to give, you can show up with your 90, even if it’s for a limited amount of time.”

Equality in marriage sounds nice, but it’s an ideal not rooted in reality. Husbands and wives get sick or sleep-deprived, take high-pressure jobs, have high-needs children, struggle with mental health issues, and more. Sometimes one spouse will be doing more than the other. And holding yourself to an unrealistic ideal will necessarily result in resentment. 

This doesn’t mean you can’t communicate your needs to your spouse. Quite the opposite. If there are ways in which the workload seems unfair to you, and your partner is able to do more, then he or she should. What you want is a spouse who is willing to step up when you’re feeling down, not one who is hyperfocused on making sure you each wash the same number of dishes.

Marriage is a partnership, but it can’t—and shouldn’t—always be equal.

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