He’s Not Lazy. She’s Not Crazy.

The emotional math of equity and energy in high-functioning couples.

Photo by Leo_Visions 

In my couples therapy practice, the second shift is still the third rail.(1)

Miriam keeps the household running while Rich works long hours. When he gets home, he retreats: reading, exercising, sometimes sitting in the hot tub. He's spent and needs downtime, but Miriam feels abandoned from the moment he arrives.

Across town, Ariana walks in after a long day at the office. The kids are safe, dinner's started, and Mark has been working from home all day, wrangling the kids and managing the remodel. But the house is a mess and she feels like the only adult in the room. (2)

Even when both partners are doing a lot, something still feels off.

Here’s what I’ve learned, both as a couples therapist and a married person: fairness isn’t just about who does what. It’s about how the work feels, and how that feeling is or isn’t seen.

Some tasks deplete us more than others. One hour of deep-focus work might take more out of someone than two hours of errands. And some responsibilities—like tracking the school calendar, anticipating logistics, or holding a family’s emotional pulse—create friction when they require effort but remain invisible to the other partner.

It’s what I call the energy gap: the mismatch between how much energy a task demands and how much that effort is recognized or reciprocated. It’s what makes one partner feel like they’re barely holding things together while the other seems oddly relaxed. Or worse, oblivious. And it’s what leaves even “equal” partnerships vulnerable to chronic resentment: a modern echo of what Arlie Hochschild called the second shift. (3)

To be clear: these couples aren’t in crisis. They’re high-functioning, emotionally invested professionals with progressive values and too much on their plates. Many have read Fair Play, the system Eve Rodsky developed to help divide domestic labor more equitably. (4)

Today, many men are doing far more than their fathers did: showing up at school pickups, packing lunches, pushing strollers, cleaning bathrooms, reading bedtime stories. Time-use research shows that heterosexual couples now do roughly the same amount of total labor when paid and unpaid work are combined. (5, 6, 7)

Yet many women still describe carrying more of the mental load: the invisible work of holding the whole system in mind, tracking what needs to happen, and anticipating what comes next. (8, 9)

That’s the conflict I see in the therapy room, again and again: not just unequal labor, but unequal energy that is experienced and interpreted differently by each partner.

The Energy Gap

The energy gap is the mismatch between how much energy work takes and how that work is seen, valued, or shared. It creates tension between partners because when we experience work differently, we usually judge each other’s effort differently, too.

In many couples, it looks like this: women, even when completely drained, often keep going: cleaning the kitchen after bedtime, answering school emails, laying out clothes for the morning. Men are more likely to power down, trying to preserve what’s left of their sanity.

What’s maddening to many women is that their partner stops, even when so much is still undone. What frustrates many men is that their partner seems unable, or unwilling, to stop, even when it’s clear it can’t all get done.

Even in egalitarian households, cultural scripts still shape what “enough” looks like. For many men, stopping is self-care: a way to survive by lowering the bar. For many women, stopping is unrealistic: the work still has to get done.10

This is because women are often held to higher standards, socially and interpersonally, when it comes to caregiving and household order. A missed RSVP, a messy house, or a forgotten appointment is more likely to be seen as her failure, even in couples that try to share the load.

But the energy gap isn’t just about who does more or why. It’s about what’s visible. And often, men’s internal burdens don’t show up in the ledger of fairness, even when they shape the whole system.

How Men Experience the Load

We usually talk about mental load in terms of domestic labor: managing, tracking, and anticipating everything that keeps a household running. And in most relationships, and most public conversations, mental load is coded as female.

But men carry a mental load as well, usually in two forms. One is the strain of providing. Work pressure, financial planning, job insecurity, and the fear of failure can take up substantial emotional bandwidth. For men with lower or unstable incomes, just staying afloat can be like a full-time job: both the hours it takes to produce a livable income, and the load of carrying that stress. Many feel alone in this, especially when their sense of worth hinges on performing financially.

And for many men, the heavier load is who they’re expected to be.

The Strain of Modern Masculinity

The second form is harder to name: identity strain, you might call it. Many men feel stuck between competing demands: to be emotionally available but not needy, supportive but not passive, masculine but not rigid. They’re absorbing messages from all sides: partners, therapists, podcasts, male role models. Even men who see themselves as progressive can feel pulled in opposing directions, unsure what being “a good man” even means now.

When that confusion and pressure build, what looks to their partner like detachment may be emotional saturation. These men aren’t tuning out, they’re flooded. But because this kind of exhaustion doesn’t get counted, they feel like only their partner’s emotions matter.

Many men in my practice aren’t just tired, they’re bewildered. They watch their partner run themselves into the ground trying to meet an impossible standard. And their honest reaction is: No one should have to live like this.

But when they try to say that, it often lands wrong, heard not as concern but as criticism, and their experience gets dismissed. And in the emotionally charged conversation that follows, they can feel outgunned by their partner’s command of emotional storytelling.

The Co-Ownership Problem

If the energy gap explains why fairness feels out of balance, co-ownership is what can begin to restore it.

Take Ariana and Mark. On paper, the work is split: he works all day while managing the kids and overseeing the remodel. But Ariana still feels like she's holding the whole system in her head: tracking school forms, remembering birthdays, nudging everything into motion.

The kids get picked up, often after a reminder. Groceries appear, once she flags the list. It’s not the labor itself that drains her: it’s the sense of managerial overhead, of always being the one who sees what’s missing.

What she wants isn’t just help. It’s shared mental investment. A sense that they’re running the system together, not that she’s the default parent and he’s the helpful backup.

But Mark doesn’t experience it that way. From his perspective, she’s mistaking correlation for causation: yes, she often reminds him, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have done it himself. He sees himself as a competent partner, not an intern awaiting instructions. When she tracks every detail and flags every task, it feels like unnecessary and unwelcome micromanagement.

The men I work with don’t want to be managed. They want to collaborate. But that requires something deeper: a shared vision of how the family runs and what enough looks like. And that’s where many couples get stuck.

The Work

When couples get to me, they've usually tried the standard fixes: Google calendars, checklists, chore swaps. Many have used Fair Play, which can be a powerful first step, but it’s not nearly enough.

Tools like that help make the invisible visible. Not just chores, but the cognitive and emotional effort it takes to keep a household running. The mental load. It’s not that men never carry this burden, but it’s unevenly distributed, and the fallout for dropping it rarely lands equally.

But that's just the starting point. Systems like Fair Play can rebalance the task list, but they can’t explain why certain responsibilities feel so charged, or why compromises that look fair on paper still leave both partners dissatisfied. They don’t reach the deeper layers: the meaning we attach to different kinds of effort, the way we interpret each other’s limits, or the identity questions stirred by who does what.

And they rarely account for the full context. Most couples don’t carry identical loads in paid work, and even when they do, the intensity or emotional toll can differ. And beneath it all, they’re navigating a cultural and economic system that assumes someone will always be available for duty.

That means the next step is getting all the work on the table. Not just the chores, but the full paid workload, the mental load, the invisible labor, and the cultural or personal meaning tied to all of it. This is where the conversation stops being about the dishes and starts being about something deeper: gendered scripts, childhood blueprints, family values, and unspoken ideas about what it means to be a good partner, parent, or provider.

It begins with curiosity. What does this task mean to you? What am I missing about your experience? For many women, part of what needs to be seen is the weight of the invisible: the quiet vigilance, the unspoken expectations, the feeling that she’s still expected to catch whatever gets missed.

It's the old truth: when you pick a partner, you pick a set of problems. The work becomes seeing your partner clearly, understanding where they're coming from, and believing in their lived experience. If you can do that, deeper compromise becomes possible. Not the kind where each person gives too much and resents it, but the kind where both partners name their core needs, share where they're flexible and inflexible, and create a shared path forward.

In sum, fairness isn’t a math problem. It’s a meaning problem to be explored, witnessed, and reshaped in good faith. With humor when you can. With compassion when it’s hard. And with a shared belief that your partner’s experience is real, even when it doesn’t match your own.

1 The couples in my practice are primarily urban Californians with advanced degrees, high household incomes, diverse ethnicities, and progressive values. The dynamics described here reflect the challenges that tend to emerge in this demographic context.

2 These vignettes are based on real cases in my couples therapy practice. Names, demographics, and other identifying information have been changed to protect confidentiality.

3 Hochschild, A. R., & Machung, A. (1989). The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home. Viking.

4 Rodsky, E. (2019). Fair Play: A game-changing solution for when you have too much to do (and more life to live). G.P. Putnam's Sons.

5 Barigozzi, F., Creel, J., & Zago, A. (2025). Mental load and gender: Measuring the invisible work of household management. Journal of Economic Psychology, 98, 102573.

6 Gershuny, J. (2021). Gender convergence in domestic labor: A cross-national time-use analysis. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 52(3), 317--339.

7 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023). American Time Use Survey — 2022 Results. U.S. Department of Labor.

8 Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609--633.

9 Reich-Stiebert, N., Froehlich, L., & Voltmer, J.-B. (2023). Gendered mental labor: A systematic literature review on the cognitive dimension of unpaid work within the household and childcare. Sex Roles, 88(11--12), 475--494.

10 Same-sex couples can offer a clarifying view of these dynamics, where traditional gender scripts aren’t the default. Without a built-in “mom” or “breadwinner” role, partners can still fall into patterns: one becomes the planner, the emotional thermostat, the keeper of the system; the other feels perpetually behind, subtly criticized, or unsure why their efforts don’t quite count. In these relationships, it’s still about perception: what enough feels like, what care looks like, and how certain kinds of labor can go unseen by the one not doing them.