It’s hard to keep things fair between parents – and maybe better not to even try

Fairness is often a core value in relationships, and it is hard to foresee how our understanding of it might change. There’s so much to organize and orchestrate, figuring out what you need to buy and what you definitely do not need to buy, learning to change a diaper while your baby tries to learn to turn around, preventing your baby from killing itself while not dying from a lack of sleep yourself, celebrating first burps, wiggles, and rolls while also taking photos and not sharing too many of them. For us, luckily, my own background as a facilitator and Anna’s as a lady boss provides a lot of experience in managing all that – and our love helps to plaster over the inevitable FAFOs and misunderstandings. I think communication is paramount and I wonder how couples did it Back When Men Didn’t Talk. It’s easy to feel that your partner is unfair to you. You are doing so much after all! And they don’t even see it! Yet probably, they do too and you don’t see it either.

What‘s behind this mystery is that the whole equation of fairness shifts. One way social scientists look at relationships is by the exchanges you have. What you want and what you give and what you get and so on. Good relationships from this point of view are those with many, fair exchanges—where what’s good and fair depends on each individual, mind you. It is certainly a simplifying perspective, but also a powerful one, given how central exchanges are to much of our lives. Looking at partnerships and parenting from this angle, I think that love ultimately breaks that logic, though. I understand love not as the pinnacle in exchanging more, but rather as not caring about the exchanges as exchanges. Two people can love each other without giving or getting much. Love then means that you are willing to ignore questions of fairness.

For us, I personally believe it helped a lot in the beginning to give each other a lot of leeway; to be willing to give without getting back, acknowledging that we might not fully understand yet what the other does for us, trusting that if they don’t it’ll be fine anyway. (All between the two of us. The baby doesn’t care about logic of fair exchanges anyway!) Yet if this alone sounds too selfless to you, you are right. The risk of this approach is that it mirrors too much more traditional ideas of fatherhood as a sacrifice, and that you then slide along the slippery slope of seeing yourself as a guardian towards behaving like a patriarch. There is hence a second part to it.

Not keeping a score is important. But so is to build a language about your needs and your ways of giving—and to use it a lot. It‘s what “setting boundaries” and “love languages” in therapy-speak wants to get at, only that general self-help advice is not only often cringe-worthy but also necessarily misses a lot of nuances. Between giving what you can and asking for what you need, defaulting to gratefulness instead of keeping score then makes many things a lot easier. It’s more fun for both of you to see your partner’s grocery run as a gift worth thanking them for, rather than simply their duty. Also because it might actually have been yours to do, this time. This way, love allows you to transcend keeping score. “Nice to have if you have it,” you might say. Yet maybe aspiring to overcome fairness like this does not require love as much as it is what love actually is. Love, after all, is actually a verb more than a noun.