Fair Play: Share the mental load, rebalance your relationship and transform your life

My husband and I fit into the category of husband and wife with two kids so the context of this book was great for us but I am not sure if it would fit other family set ups.We have really explored how to achieve more fair play in our household and shared family life. We read it a chapter at a time sharing the book and then discussing each area. We haven't played the card game yet but we wanted to find out the reasons why we both felt frustrated.If you are lucky enough to have a partner that is prepared to read then this is a great book.

This book is brilliant, well written in an easy to read way, contains the ideas that you see in the card pack you can get to go with it.This book really helps to reframe certain ways of thinking about time and value. It breaks down habitual responses that people have to housework and types of partnership.I initially saw this reviewed on TIkTok and I was not disappointed.I would recommend reading this to everyone with a partner or housemate to help shift things into better efficiency with responsibilities. 10/10 will be recommending to everyone I know.

The book constantly assumes you're a woman and sometimes seems more focused on talking about how husbands are useless rather than the actual advice.It's weird since in the first chapter she goes about saying how she thinks this will help all kinds of families and co-parents, but then goes through the rest of the book ignoring anything other than a heteronormative dysfunctional couple.The method and advice is AMAZING though, so if you can get past the previous stuff, it's really worth the read.

This book tells the truth about heterosexual male/female relationships. Most of them anyway. Some of the reviews give her flack but the fact is: most of the women I know are in relationships with man children who are selfish and don’t pull their weight. It’s a huge issue and congratulations to the author for her bravery in writing about it.

I liked the concept and mostly how it was explained. I bought this to work through with my wife however it quickly became apparent that the author was expecting to have a female only audience, and this shows in word choice at various points in the book. It’s great to start a positive conversation about life balance, but implementing the system ‘properly’ requires a level of administration that is challenging to incorporate smoothly into a busy family schedule. We’ll keep at our modified version of it and see how it goes. Worth a read, but not necessarily as a process to be followed ‘to the letter’.

Too long didn’t read (TLDR) summary:This book is poorly written with heteronormative, misogynistic biases cropping up on every page. The fact the cards are no longer free to download is a money grabbing corporate move. This is basically the agile project management framework but tweaked for project managing your partner whilst the author turns a profit from your misery. The re-deal meetings are basically sprint planning and retrospectives rolled into one. The cards are just a kanban board filled with S M L products that need delivering. The minimum standard of care is just a minimal viable product. Conception, planning and execution are literally modules in any project manager role. It’s not even hidden very well how much this appears plagiarised from the agile principles.The detail:I have just read through this book after seeing it recommended by several TikTok videos from those angry humans (like me) who are tired of being in a relationship with a selfish adult-baby.The first thing I have to point out is that this book is absolutely riddled with the authors biases. Lots of them. For example, it assumes you are an angry married heterosexual women who hates your husbands lack of initiative and help round the house whilst managing your two beautiful children. It doesn’t just do that once, it continually does it through the book. I could ignore it once or twice but eventually the biases are so bad it almost screams at you “I AM ANGRY AND MEN SUCK”. It literally calls you a women periodically through the book as if (ironically) the author couldn’t conceive that a man might be the one feeling imbalanced. It also became completely not relevant to me and my life in several key sections. I am a childless gay man in a relationship with another man. This book is SOLELY focused on the nuclear family. The writer does place a really short (and rubbish) caveat right at the beginning to say this applies to all family types and then goes on to write only about the heteronormative nuclear family and assumes you are female with children from that moment on. It goes beyond annoying and becomes impractical in several places.I was expecting this book to be well researched to an almost academic standard, professionally written as a minimum. I tell you now this book is crudely written like an agony aunt column in parts. It has expletives that are blanked out, which I generally don’t find offensive in life (I love a good swear!) but it just comes off as tacky in this book. Yes there are some parts of the writing that were warm, loving and funny. But overall the authors credibility was damaged for me by her style and her name dropping her friends books. There’s often talk of all these interviews and research the author did during beta testing etc., that’s almost cited as if it was done to some psychology research standard but I could see no evidence of it. It became annoying and displayed more biases.Now, the system and rules themselves. The theory; I really related to it. Because I’m a professional project manager and I know the agile framework when I see it anywhere. I’m not overly keen on what the author (rather immaturely) calls ‘unicorn space’ like a four year old naming her bedroom. But overall this boils down to basic agile project management but applied to your family life. I love the idea of the cards but there are some very deep flaws (some of which are intentional money grabs) with this product.The book tells you several times to download the cards from the website. You can’t do that now. Sure you can see the cards there if you interact on the website. But you can’t download them. Now you have to buy them. Normally I wouldn’t mind. But the author says all her ‘research’ has done the cards for us so we don’t have to. But they don’t work universally and will require some tweaking/additions. I guarantee you will find something missing or needing to be edited. So for example there is a card for “tidying up” but that doesn’t distinguish between deep cleaning your kitchen or the more easy daily hoovering the kitchen floor. Giving someone ‘tidying up’ and not breaking that down is just not acceptable. Even I, as the person who does the most household stuff, think it’s unfair to give all the tidying up to one person without splitting it up. So you’re paying for a deck that has no blank cards, no handy list to refer back to (the list is annoyingly in the book, it was cheap not to print it out for the separate card pack).A major flaw with the cards is that there’s nowhere to write down what you agree is the minimum standard of care for each card. If you and your partner agree 100 standards of care for the 100 cards, how on earth are you going to remember what you agreed for each one by the letter? You can’t. This introduces the potential for grey area where you and your partner recall different agreements for each card. Unless you write it down, it’s a trap waiting for you to fail. In agile terminology that’s called agreeing the scope of a product and preventing scope creep.The fact the product doesn’t give you advice on how/when to note down the MInimum Standard of care agreement for each card or provide a place i.e. the back of the (laminated) card would of been a sensible no brainier. I think this was a lazy oversight demonstrating poor product design and simultaneously a money grab, tacky.

I really enjoyed this book. I find the idea of turning the management of the household into a game that you both win very interesting. It can be a bit repetitive at times but still a very good read

We are a professional working couple with 2 under 4 and I saw this book recommended and I thought it would be a good idea to re balance the work load as I was constantly overwhelmed. It’s only really good if your partner doesn’t do much at all in the house and is extremely reflective and on board for change. I also feel like it was a bit derogatory towards men, it also didn’t account for same sex couples. In my experience sharing this with friends the man has never responded well to the book (which is an issue in itself.) There is no doubt there is a terrible divide in jobs in most households, with women doing so much more (typically) however this doesn’t really solve the problem. Treating your husband like a child doesn’t really work in my opinion. Save yourself some money and just divide jobs in the house. However I think there is great advice is about what the author explains is CPE which means if you’re responsible for a job then you have to conceive the idea, plan it and then execute it. I think that really helps the overwhelm but apart from that, not a good balanced book for couples who are looking for help.

Great book! Very informative. Helped have real conversation with my husband regarding splitting house work. Would recommend to any couple. Makes for a great gift.

The media could not be loaded. Everyone especially if you are a woman in a relationship- needs to read this book to more fairly bring equity into your relationship. Typically, in most household’s in a marriage of a woman, and a man, the woman ends up, holding a vast majority of the mental labour. This book helps to name it, explain it, and help more fairly split up the mental load.I think every single person who’s in a relationship where you live in the same household should be required to read this book.

My wife shared with me a podcast where Eve Rodsky was a guest. We both got hooked into that episode, we looked into the cards game, I bought the book so we could have it at home and rebalance our relationship specially when big changes happen (marriage, kids, pets, renovations, new jobs, etc).Reading the book was such as disappointment in comparison. The podcast was all hype, the cards game is awesome to have conversations, the book was written for people that need a smack on the back of the head with the book itself to wake up from a fever dream in barbieland. I don't know who needs this book, I'm sure there will be people that haven't evolved all the way to adulthood and will need everything spelled out for them about how an adult relationship is supposed to work. Unless you feel like you are partnering a child, skip the book. Listen to the podcast maybe even buy the card game. Skip the torture of the reading.

Eve takes the edge off sensitive topics and family chores and emotional struggles as you are both building your family life. This fair play game teaches you to correctly evaluate each ones involvement in the household and family management.Very often women underestimate the amount of time they sacrifice for the family and how detrimental that is actually on the pong term. Thank you for coining the term Unicorn Time … i take it! 💓

Making the invisible visible is a great gift of this book. Not just the hidden work of a household but the assumptions and patterns in a relationship nobody explicitly agreed to. I’m looking forward to exploring, identifying and changing what’s been assumed and unsaid. Might update this review as a result.