According to couples’ therapist Elizabeth Earnshaw, LMFT, nowadays couples usually fall into one of two categories: complementary or symmetrical. Here’s what they both mean, plus whether one is more fair than the other. For example, in a traditional heterosexual relationship, the man would be the breadwinner in charge of earning and managing the money, while the woman would be the homemaker in charge of taking care of cooking, cleaning, and child care. “This means that both people are deciding to enter into relationships in which each person carries similar roles,” Earnshaw explains. “Both partners work; both partners vocally agree to help with child-rearing and home care, etc.” Symmetrical relationships are becoming more popular nowadays, particularly as more women are becoming breadwinners in their households and more attention has been given to the unequal division of housework that leaves women with a disproportionate amount of domestic responsibilities even as they work the same number of hours as their partners. “There is nothing superior about either relationship,” she says. “Successful relationships can be created out of both complementary and symmetrical relationships as long as both people in the relationship are in true agreement about the arrangement.” Problems arise, she says, when couples think they’re experiencing one type of relationship, when the reality is different, or when they can’t agree on which they want to be. “Many ‘modern’ couples aspire to be in a symmetrical relationships, where each person is doing most of the work equally,” she explains. “However, due to conditioning and lack of explicit conversations, they will often end up in complementary relationships. When this happens, it can lead to resentment and confusion. The same occurs in couples that state they would like a complementary relationship, when, in fact, one person truly wishes for a more symmetrical relationship.” The mental load refers to being the one in charge of managing who’s in charge of what, overseeing tasks to make sure they get done, reminding the other person to get their share of the tasks done, and being the person who has to plan everything. It disproportionately falls on women and has been linked1 to negative health consequences. In complementary relationships, Earnshaw notes that “couples could potentially find ‘fairness’ in [that] distribution of the mental load (i.e., women doing all of it).” In symmetrical relationships, couples often divide up household chores and child care equally—but they forget to account for this mental load, mostly because as a culture we’ve simply socialized women to automatically take up this role and socialized men to not even register this invisible labor their partners are doing for them. “There is a conscious agreement that things will be mostly equal,” Earnshaw explains, but “it doesn’t usually happen that way because women must learn to let the mental load muscle atrophy a bit, and men must learn to strengthen it.” And as time goes on, remember that people and relationships change, and that’s OK. “You might start a relationship believing that one relationship structure is best,” she says, “and later find that it doesn’t truly work for your lifestyle or fit within your values.” Once you identify both what kind of relationship you’re in and which you actually want, you can start the conversation with your partner to figure out how to get where you want to be. If fairness around the house is a problem in your relationship, here’s our full guide to sharing the housework equally.
