Increased organisation could share the domestic load more evenly, but even the most practical couples appear to draw the line at corporate jargon
(Image credit: Maskot / Getty Images)
By Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK
published
in In-the-spotlight
Power lunches, weekly feedback meetings and financial integration – these might not sound particularly romantic but some couples believe that running their relationship like a company is the key to domestic bliss.
Modern technology offers endless ways to organise our lives but is managing your marriage like a company the key to solving problems or enabling them?
'Repulsed and inadequate'
"I can see why families are increasingly using business principles at home", wrote Genevieve Roberts for the i news site. My family maintains a joint diary and I don't know how I'd "cope" without "sports days, school trips and end-of-year-shows blocked out". In fact, the increased organisation and efficiency of the shared calendar inspired me "to try 'biz-nifying' our home life further", including a "regular scheduled family meeting".
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There is a limit, though. "While we might incorporate more business techniques at home", my husband and I "share a loathing of corporate jargon" so "we're safe from doubling down on housework and circling back on DIY".
After a decade of marriage, Sarah Wheeler and her husband "committed, after years of some combination of neglect and resistance", to "better manage our family", she wrote for Romper. And "even though that phrase gives me visions of PowerPoint presentations and leaves me feeling simultaneously repulsed and inadequate", I have to admit "the project of our family was in need of some regular power lunches".
Having spoken to other couples, she found some were making a success of it. A weekly meeting is an option that more couples are taking up, as one woman told Wheeler. "If I get frustrated with something, instead of getting snappy, I just go, 'I'll just bring that up on Monday'", she said.
'Ah, privileges…'
One supposed advantage of taking a business-like attitude to private life is that getting domestic chores organised in black and white could be useful in tackling gender disparity in the home. In Spain, for instance, the government has developed a free app to log how much time each household or family member spends on chores. The app is "designed to shed light" on the "mental load" that's "overwhelmingly" carried by women when it comes to household maintenance, and to encourage men to do more, said The Guardian.
"We think this is an exercise that could be used at home to share the chores out between sons, daughter, fathers, mothers, or between flatmates or life partners," said Spain's secretary of state for equality, Ángela Rodríguez, "because the division of those tasks is sometimes unequal".
Following criticism of the plan from some quarters, she responded to critics of the plan on social media. "Ah, privileges", she wrote, adding that what people were "really annoyed about" was "the possibility of having to start doing their bit at home".
There are other ways that marriage can learn from the world of business, wrote Arthur C. Brooks for The Atlantic. Husbands and wives hoping for a "durable romantic partnership" could benefit "by looking at "the characteristics of a merger".
In a corporate merger, "there must be financial integration" and similarly, "maintaining separate finances lowers the chances of success" in marriage. There is "rarely" a "50–50" relationship between merged companies because "the partner firms have different strengths and weaknesses" and this should also be the case in relationships. Of course, "even the most bountiful, free-giving spouse will come to resent someone who is a taker", said Brooks. The solution? "Defy math: Make it 100-100."
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Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK
Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.
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