How Scorekeeping Harms Relationships
What to do instead when you're frustrated by how little your partner does.
It’s been a rough start to the week over here — my 8-year-old spiked a fever of 104.6 yesterday, on what was supposed to be her first day of camp, and then we had a string of thunderstorms come through that caused a power outage. We got our generator working an hour and a half later, but as I’m writing this, we still have no power or internet. (My computer is connected to the two measly service bars I’m getting on my phone.) It’s a small miracle that this newsletter has arrived in your inbox!
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Today, I’m thrilled to be running a Q&A with the brilliant clinical psychologist and Brown University professor Yael Schonbrun. You may remember her from a Q&A I ran with her in November about her fantastic book Work, Parent, Thrive.
Yael has recently launched her own fantastic newsletter called Relational: The Art and Science of Connections, to which you should right this second subscribe. It’s so good. I read a recent newsletter of hers on how unhealthy it is when we make our relationships transactional — when we think about how much we’re giving versus how much our partner is giving, for instance, and when we start keeping score — and I thought the topic would resonate strongly with many of you.
[Edited to add:] This is a conversation about various ways to address the imbalance of mental labor in many relationships, but in no way am I intending to minimize the harmful effects of these pernicious imbalances. To read more about how pervasive these imbalances are, why women are typically saddled with far more domestic work than men are, and other ideas on what to do about it, be sure to check out these two previous newsletters:
So without further ado, here’s our conversation. I found it so helpful and insightful.
In a recent newsletter, Yael, you talked about a common grievance that you see in couples therapy, which is that one partner is perceiving themselves as giving more than the other — and then becoming resentful over that. How common is this? Do you see it more in couples with kids than couples without kids? And in heterosexual couples, is it typically the woman who's complaining, feeling like the constant giver?
It’s interesting — there hasn't been a whole lot of research on same-sex couples, but what research has been done shows that there is less of an imbalance in the give-and-take. There's more equality and fewer grievances.
There are often more grievances from the female partner in a heterosexual couple about unequal give-and-take. But what's interesting, at least clinically, is that it's often the case that both partners feel under-appreciated.
And yes, it’s often because of stressors — couples with young kids or other life stressors often get into this place of feeling overwhelmed and really taxed and depleted, and wishing that their partner could offer more.
It’s interesting that both halves of the couple often feel under-appreciated.
Yeah. In traditional heterosexual couples, there often is an imbalance in who's giving what — for example, the woman, the female partner, might be doing more household chores and more childcare and more emotional labor or mental labor. But it's often the case that the male partner will feel like their efforts are being undermined or criticized or just not seen at all. And so there is often the sense that even if there could be more balance, it actually wouldn't make the partner who's contributing less feel good. Or they've stopped contributing, because they feel like their efforts are really not welcomed.
Then there's this other piece that's related to bias, called the availability bias, which is that we're just more in touch with our own contributions and not the other person's — because we feel it, right? We know what it costs, we are well aware of what the efforts are. Whereas with our partner, if they're not narrating their contributions, we might accidentally not see them or not really be able to wrap their mind around what it costs them.
It makes total sense that we have this bias. I need to keep reminding myself that it exists.
Yeah, me too. That's the funny thing about a lot of these biases — you can know them and still fall prey to them, because they're just part of the way that our brains operate.
For me, I catch myself all the time feeling the injustice. And then I actively remind myself of all the things that my partner does. It can be helpful to just take note when you feel that sense of injustice — to more actively pursue this question of: What kinds of things might I be overlooking that my partner contributes?
In your newsletter you talk about how harmful it can be to fall into this pattern of monitoring equality and keeping score. Why? What does this do to relationships?
There's a really interesting body of research that compares what are called communal relationships to exchange relationships. Communal relationships are the ideal in close relationships. They're really defined by giving — that we are happy to be the friend who gives gifts or who listens to a story or the partner who remembers the birthday in a healthy close relationship. Whereas exchange relationships are defined by scorekeeping and being more transactional — “I'll give you a gift if you give me a gift for my birthday. I'll listen to your story if you listen to my story.”
Exchange relationships are okay in certain settings, but they tend not to work very well for close relationships. And, in fact, they erode warmth and giving. They can usually be a marker of loss of faith in a relationship — that we don't really trust our partner to give.
Part of why it's problematic is, again, that availability bias — you may not be seeing some of the things that your partner is giving and you might be overvaluing some of the things that you're giving. The other part of it is that your partner feels that sense of criticism. It’s a critical assessment and that doesn't invite a lot of giving.
I think the intention of scorekeeping is to make sure that things are even. The hope is that it'll invite more giving, but it doesn't because it creates this sense of defensiveness. And so for that reason, there are different strategies that are more useful than scorekeeping.
I imagine, too, when you're in that frame of mind of scorekeeping, then when your partner does do something kind or generous, you don't really appreciate because you’re just … I don’t know. Tallying it.
They’re still climbing out of the red.
Exactly!
And if you feel like you've given a lot, you tend not to be very generous in your assessment of what the other person has given. So it just creates this bad feeling and it's hard to climb out of the red from that position.
It sounds like it this mentality affects other aspects of the relationship too. Like it sort of permeates into intimacy and other areas.
It creates a distance between people — a lack of trust and faith and warmth and connectivity. It really makes you feel like business partners, not like life partners.
So how do you help couples when at least one partner is in this scorekeeping mentality?
Recently I read
‘s book Give and Take. He doesn't talk that much about intimate relationships, but he talks a lot about relationships in general, and how success is really driven by being more of a giver. But a particular kind of giver — not like The Giving Tree kind of giver where you give away everything. He defines a kind of giving that he calls being “otherish,” which is defined by caring about benefiting others, but also retaining your own ambitious goals that are driven by your interests. So people who can do this otherish kind of giving tend to be willing to give more than they receive, but they still keep their own interests in mind. And those interests serve as a guide for choosing how much to give.What that suggests is to be clear on your values — what kind of a giver can you be? — and to really tie your values to context. So you might be a different kind of giver with somebody who's really a taker, versus the kind of giver that you're going to be with somebody who tends to be more mutual. It's more about what you're willing to give and less about scorekeeping.
So it seems like you focus more on yourself, rather than what your partner or friend is doing.
That's exactly right. You hold the outcome lightly of what you're gonna get back. Your hope is that it'll contribute to mutual giving, but you can also decide to be okay with giving in a particular way regardless of what you receive in return. I can give an example if that's helpful.
That would be great.
So this comes up a lot in therapy — the friend who never reaches out, but only receives the call. You can decide that you want to sustain that kind of friendship, but recognize that that other person doesn't reach out as much as you do. Ask yourself: How often do I feel comfortable reaching out? Because maybe when we talk, it's really nice, they seem receptive. It's a warm relationship with a lot of history. But I also don't want to be the one who is reaching out all the time. So I might say, "I'll call on birthdays and holidays, but limit my calls to those times of year for the time being.”
That kind of gets to the second point, which is, if you are so inclined, you can also set approach goals together with that person. For example: “I really want to nurture a closer relationship, but I do feel like I tend to call you more than you call me. I wonder if there's a way that we can build more mutual reaching out, because I think that would foster more connectedness between the two of us.”
This feeds into research that I think is really interesting that suggests that setting approach goals is more helpful to givers, receivers, and the relationships as a whole than setting avoidance goals like “I don't want to fight with you” or “I don't want to lose contact.” An approach goal would be “having more fun together, being closer, sharing more intimate details with one another.”
This also makes me think about the fact that people can have reasons for, say, not reaching out that we might not be considering. I might think “they aren’t calling because they don’t care about me,” but maybe they’re not reaching out because they know I’m busy and they don’t want to be a burden.
You don't really know, on the inside, what's driving their giving, or their lack of giving. So this can be a prompt to have a conversation like, “Hey, I'm noticing that there is some imbalance. What is that about? And what kind of a relationship would you like to foster? I would like to foster this kind of relationship” — to clarify that.
If it’s a case where they really don’t give much, you can ask yourself: What kind of a friend or partner do I want to be if this person really isn't willing to do much on their side? Once you give a lot and the other person really isn't giving anything, and you have clarified that and you have tried to set approach goals, it may not feel very good if you continue to give generously if it's really only going in one direction. And so again, you can still decide to give, but it's helpful to really be clear on your values. And to be clear on what the context is.
These specific examples are so helpful. Can you also give an example of what you would tell a couple where one partner comes in and says “My partner just doesn't do anything to help with the kids during the week?”
I always suggest starting with curiosity. We sometimes don't have a full understanding of what's going on on the other side. And it's really easy when we're feeling exploited to vilify the other person, but there's almost always, at least in my experience, more complexity to it.
If you start with that open curiosity, and really try to curb any criticism that you have, it might sound something like, “Hey, I have been really upset. I'm sure you've been able to detect this. But I do want to understand what's going on. It doesn't seem like you've been helping out much lately. I think you can see how tired and depleted I am. I think you can see how frustrated I am. Can you help me understand what's going on in terms of what's driving your contributions or your lack of contributions? Because I know that you're a good person, I know that you care, but it doesn't really seem like you're offering much these days.” You can infuse some positivity — some benefit of the doubt — but really call out, “Hey, I'm seeing this thing that isn't working for me, but I don't understand it.”
How does this idea of not keeping score square with Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play approach, where she recommends making all the work visible and dividing tasks up in a way that feels fair? That could seem like a form of scorekeeping.
I think it’s actually not a keeping-score approach. What she has people do is go through these cards and divvy them up. But it's not like it needs to be even — it needs to be, as you said, fair. Part of what is so powerful about her approach is that one person owns the card and then the other person is not supposed to ask about it. They're not supposed to check in on it. It's sort of off limits to score keep and track.
So by that nature, it's taking you away from scorekeeping and back into more trust — having more trust in the other person to do their part. And you focus on your part. You focus on what you're contributing to the relationship or to the running of the household. It's so clean in that way. And then it also just helps people to not be in one another’s space and to not be tracking one another's contributions.
So it really is about taking ownership of the things that you want to be doing, as you've already said, and then trusting your partner to be doing the things that they have agreed to do. Is there anything else that you would want to say that you haven’t had a chance to say yet?
It is very normal to feel like you give more than you receive. That's just what it is to be in a relationship. And actually, that's okay — as long as you feel like it generally comes out in the wash and you're not feeling totally exploited.
And now for this week’s ….
Today I’m commenting on this Instagram post from Parentnormal, which has more than 36,000 likes:
Here are my thoughts.