Achieving Equity in Relationships

What do you bring to the table? What do you bring to the relationship?

We all bring good and bad things into romantic relationships. We often talk about “baggage and red flags” which is very important to examine. We need to examine the concept of equity and how it differs from equality.

Equality= exactly equal. I.E. She cooks 1.5 meals a day, you cook exactly 1.5 meals a day. If this doesn’t happen one party is pulling more weight than the other. It is not equal.

We know that this is not possible to achieve. Men and women are different and have different general strengths and weaknesses.  You will not have across the board equality in a romantic relationship.

Equity= an overall sense of equal contributions from both parties. I.E. She cooks dinner, you cook breakfast, or she cooks, you clean the mess up. Task for task will not be equal but, it all averages out when looked at through the lens of total contribution.

Equity is very achievable, and I would say vital to achieve and when the feeling of equity in the relationship slips, a constructive conversation needs to happen, and action should follow to bring things back into balance. Look at this in a cross-spectrum format.

It’s not constrained to a simple division of labor of household upkeep duties. I use that only as an example in this article.

Best practice is having this conversation at the beginning of the relationship but, checking up regularly. The conversation revolves around two points:

Capacity: What can you reasonably expect with your partner’s knowledge, skills, and attributes to be brought to the relationship regularly?

Acceptance and genuine appreciation of the contributions.

The power couples we see in our circles almost always have this dynamic in plain sight. He makes the money; she runs the day-to-day operations with the kids. She does the laundry; he does other supporting tasks on top of the traditional dude tasks like lawn care or vehicle maintenance. There are joint tasks such as finances and family planning/scheduling where there can be a primary but a well informed and capable alternate in the form of the other partner.

It's my view that men should lead the charge to create this environment through collaborative leadership in their marriage. In other words, the man gladly assumes the head of the house roll and accepts all consequences of action and inaction. The man ultimately pulls the trigger on major decisions and sees them through. It’s not an argument of capability or lack thereof. It’s not a men are better thing.

It’s a men should lead thing. Many women end up leading most aspects of the family machine and deeply resent being forced to fill that role. I’m in no way saying that women cannot do that. I’m pointing out that many women don’t want to and are forced to out of necessity. If her dad was a great leader, you can expect that that will be her expectation of you. From a more traditional sense I’d argue that that is what men should be doing anyway.

The absence of equity in a relationship often breeds resentment which you can read about here:

https://helpformen.com/articles/resentment

You likely didn’t have this conversation at the beginning of your relationship. That’s of course not ideal but, it doesn’t mean that two reasonable people can’t sit down and level things out mid marriage. The conversation must be followed by action and a demonstration of congruence by both parties or it will only compound the resentment that’s already there. After the leveling has been done, resentment must be addressed.

Work towards achieving equity in your marriage and keeping it level. This is a concept all men and women should be able to get on board with.