521 - Finding Fairness in Non-monogamy
Equity and equality…what are they?
They might sound similar, but equity, equality, and fairness are different, and the distinction matters sometimes! Fairness and equality are concepts that most can agree are important in relationships, but it’s important to remember that equality isn’t always fair.
Equality means everyone is treated the same, regardless of individual differences.
Equity involves taking individual circumstances, challenges, and differences into account to provide everyone involved with what they need to be successful.
Equality isn’t always a bad thing though! Sometimes it’s the easiest solution and sometimes it’s the most appropriate thing to do. However, when we focus on equality, we sometimes start ignoring or disregarding the important circumstances or individual experience.
Fairness
As for fairness in relationship, there is a lot of evidence that suggests that perceived fairness is more valuable than a mathematical division of labor.
According to a 2019 study, “Gendered perceptions of fairness in housework and shared expenses: Implications for relationship satisfaction and sex frequency” by Gillespie, Peterson, and Lever, fairness can affect not only relationship quality, but also frequency of sex. This concept of fairness in a relationship also included financial unfairness in either direction, but when it came to housework, it only affected relationship quality if someone thought it was unfair to themself.
“Perceived ego unfairness in the division of shared expenses was the strongest predictor of relationship satisfaction. It was also a strong predictor of sex frequency, following only relationship length in relative importance. As such, perceived fairness regarding shared finances was a stronger predictor of relationship quality than perceived fairness in the division of housework.”
Gillespie, Peterson, and Lever
Equity with multiple partners
A lot of folks in the non-monogamous community have learned to question hierarchy, and although hierarchy is still common, there has been a recent drive in the community to treat all partners equally, which almost always leads to trouble.
We don’t have many (or any) social scripts to help us in these situations, but it can be helpful to look at parallels with friendships and family members:
Varying levels of closeness: Just as we have different types of friendships (close friends, acquaintances, activity partners), non-monogamous relationships can also involve different levels of intimacy, commitment, and involvement.
Individualized needs: Like with family members, different partners may have different needs and expectations. Some may desire more frequent contact, while others may prioritize independence.
Direct Meddling is Weird: At the same time, it would be uncomfortable for an old friend to try and control how much you hang out with someone new or to try and make rules to ensure they are still your “best” friend.
Remember that nobody is entitled to your time, affection, or money.
Consent is key: Just because you're in a relationship with someone doesn't mean they automatically have access to your resources, including your time, emotional energy, and finances.
Boundaries are healthy: It's okay to set limits on what you're willing to give or share. Communicating these boundaries clearly is essential for maintaining healthy relationships.
Relationships are reciprocal, not transactional: While give-and-take is important, healthy relationships are built on mutual respect and care, not a sense of entitlement or obligation.
Being fair doesn’t mean you won’t ever disappoint or hurt someone! It’s inevitable that there will be conflicting needs, and even with the best intentions, you can’t meet everyone’s needs or expectations simultaneously. Focus on intent and communication and strive to act with with fairness and integrity.
You also won’t always get what you want when you’re being fair. Compromise is essential to relationships, and focusing on the bigger picture can help you remember to consider the long-term relationship health versus immediate gratification. Understand that not everyone has the same ideas when it comes to what feels fair. And above else, be mindful if you’re in NRE with someone! It can be easy to undervalue or underestimate the importance of existing partnerships in the first 6-18 months with a new partner.
Practical takeaways
Some items that can help bolster the health and fairness of your relationships:
Regular check-ins: Schedule regular check-ins with each partner to discuss needs and expectations.
Boundaries: Be sure to check in with yourself about how you’re feeling and don’t be afraid to have some boundaries around how your time is spent.
Set Honest Expectations: It usually feels much worse to overpromise and then underdeliver on the amount of time and emotional investment you have to put into a new relationship. Work on communicating.
Shared calendar and communication tools: Shared calendars are great for convenience but can also lead to a more “by the numbers” form of fairness, or partners thinking they should always have access to you if you aren’t already booked. Be mindful of that and communicate about what feels good to you.
Community support: Seek out support groups or online communities for non-monogamous individuals to share experiences and learn from others, such as our Discord!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about the challenges of treating your partner or partners fairly, both in monogamous as well as polyamorous relationships. This is a frequent concern for people who want to avoid hierarchy in their non-monogamous relationships, but it's also often a hidden problem within individual romantic relationships, monogamous or otherwise. Today we will be looking both at fairness within the context of a single relationship as well as fairness as it relates to having multiple partners.
If you're interested in learning about our communication tools that we reference on this show all the time, you can check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships. You can get information about that at multiamory.com/book or pick it up at wherever you like to buy books. All right. Jumping into this, this was something that came up in our community Discord a little while ago, and I realized that we hadn't really done an episode devoted to this.
We did an episode about a year and a half or a year ago that was about, "You're not being fair." It was about fairness and aggressive fairness specifically that dealt a little bit with this. Then back in 2018 is the last time we did an episode specifically about equality and equity and fairness in relationships. I think it's a good time for us to go back through, visit some of this, see if anything's changed or if there's more concrete stuff we can put out there. We have a study to share, which I'm excited about, that did not exist yet when we made that previous episode on equity and equality.
Just to set the scene about what this episode is about, fairness and equality are concepts that I think most people can agree are important and valuable, especially among more politically liberal-leaning people. There have actually been some really interesting studies about how we relatively prioritize different types of values, I guess, and that liberal leaning people tend to value fairness and equality and then also assessing harm much more highly than others. That tends to be higher up there.
I think the people listening to this will probably agree, but here's the interesting part. I remember learning about that study and going, "Ha, I guess that makes sense," but fairness was also the highest of all of the traits measured on that initial test amongst people on the conservative side as well, just not by as much. It was like a little more balanced with the other concerns, but it was still highest there too.
Emily: Some people still care about it regardless of where you lean on the political spectrum.
Dedeker: It's pretty human, right? That's baked into our psychology as I assume a protective mechanism, not just for ourselves but also for the group that over so many years we've learned that if we try to keep things relatively fair, that's not only good for me but it's good for everybody, which is good for survival.
Emily: Sure.
Jase: Sure, which in turn is good for me again. Clearly, when it comes to politics and things, what we think is fair can vary quite a bit, or how we think things should be fair can vary, but it is at least a thing people value. However, equality and fairness are not always the same thing. That's where we end up with this distinction between things being equal versus things being equitable that we'll dive into a little bit more here. Those terms, that equal and equitable, tend to come up most often when we're talking about larger political and societal issues like racism or income disparity or sexism.
For this episode, we're actually looking just at how these principles apply on the micro scale, on the personal scale within our relationships with our loved ones. Less about our relationship to everyone, everyone, but specifically within our close friends, our family, and our partners.
Emily: Let's talk about the difference between equality and equity because I do think that some people would probably think that those are the exact same thing, but they're not quite. Equality means treating everyone the same, regardless of their individual difference. For example, say you are at a dinner table with your grandparents, with maybe a teenage sister, for instance, and a three-year-old toddler. Equality means that everybody at the dinner table, regardless of how old you are or what it is that you're doing, if you're training for a marathon or if you're a young little baby, you still get the same amount of food. It's equal across every single person regardless of their specific individual situation that they have going on.
Equity means taking into account individual circumstances and challenges to provide everyone with what they need to succeed. Instead of that previous example, everyone is going to get enough food based on their age, their metabolism, their activity level, their appetite, et cetera. It would be really strange to give somebody who was training for a marathon as little food as you would give a three-year-old toddler, for instance.
Dedeker: I don't know, I've met some toddlers who can put it away.
Jase: That's true.
Emily: I suppose. I've met a lot of toddlers who just like to play with their food, just throw it around.
Dedeker: Mostly, I've met toddlers who will eat one bite and then play with the rest.
Emily: Exactly. They're like, "I'm done now."
Jase: They put it away on the floor and across the table and their face.
Dedeker: In their hair. Up the nose.
Jase: Yes, exactly.
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Jase: Up your nose. In your hair also.
Dedeker: This concept of equality is not always wrong. Sometimes it really is the simplest solution. I think anyone who's been parents to children will understand this, that it is just simpler if I make sure that you all get the same amount of dessert because I can't deal with any fights or competition about this. I know in school they always said that if you're bringing candy, you got to bring enough for everyone to have a piece. I think of this being, at least when I was growing up in school, was stuff like for Valentine's Day you got to bring a valentine for everyone in the class. For certain birthday parties, you got to invite everyone in the class.
Now I do think this is still up for debate. I think there's an argument to be made about what we're teaching kids around, I don't know, stuff like getting an invite. If they really don't want to invite someone that they don't like and-- it starts to get real messy real fast. Again, for the purposes of looking at our personal romantic relationships today, sometimes in certain situations equality just makes sense. However, hyperfocusing on equality can quickly lead us down this path of disregarding contextual circumstances, disregarding each individual's experience and needs and challenges and strengths and sometimes feeling like, "Oh this decision can't be questioned because it checks the box of equal."
People can fall into this trap of, "The way I'm going to fix this--" this is a thing hinges might do, "The way I'm going to fix this is just make sure, great, it's two nights a week with every partner or with both my partners, and it's for this amount of time. If I do a weekend trip with this one, I'm going to do a weekend trip with that one." Now maybe it happens to work out that that actually makes everyone happy, but there can definitely be this flattening and assuming that all time feels equal, all quality time is equal, all relationships are equal when often in reality that's not the case.
Now there is a lot of evidence to show that specifically perceived fairness in relationships is much more important to happiness and a sense of relationship satisfaction than things being mathematically equal.
Jase: Something we talked about the last time we went into this was this concept of if you're trying to balance the books by the numbers somehow, like you're trying to come up with some concrete way to define how we're splitting things within our relationship or how I am with other partners or whatever, that's where you can get into that aspect of saying like, "Oh, the math checks out here, so this is fair, this is equal. You can't complain about it because I've done the math. We have the spreadsheet here," or even if it's just a mental spreadsheet, "This is fair. You can't argue it because it's equal."
What we talked about before is that part of the equation there that is missing is all of the invisible costs or the invisible amounts of effort like the mental labor of keeping track of what chores need to get done at home or meal planning or remembering relatives' birthdays or those individual pieces of labor. Then I think in this episode, where I want us to take this is also into the realm of, even if it's not about extra hidden costs or anything, but about what each person actually needs and what things, even if they're putting the same amount of stuff in, like, the same amount of time or the same amount of chores or whatever, that each individual person, some of those are going to metaphorically cost more for them for whatever reason. For emotional or physical reasons.
Emily: All of those things that you just described were present in a relationship that I had where it was constantly discussed, like, "What is it that you're bringing to the table in this relationship, and does it equal as much as what I'm bringing?" for instance. Whether that be something monetary, for instance, or "You do more around the house, so that means that we're more equal in this way, or emotional labor, whatever.
It's really interesting when you get into that kind of granular question of what is fair, and do we need to be bringing exactly the same amount? How do you even decide what counts as more or less equal or what counts as something that gets you to this place of, "Oh, we're bringing the same amount to the table, so that means we're doing well in the relationship"? It's tough, and I struggled a lot with that because I was like, I think I'm bringing a lot, but then I'm being told that I should be doing more because this monetary element that my other partner brought was so much, therefore I need to be stepping up to the plate in a different or better or stronger way.
Dedeker: This is so hard. There's something so subjective about it, ultimately. There can be an aspect to fairness, like the old pornography adage of little bit, like I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. I do think that sometimes happens in relationships where we can have some concrete sense of what might feel fair as far as division of labor or division of expenses or division of emotional labor in particular, but it's not always easy to create a balance sheet. Sometimes, even if you do create a balance sheet and it can look like it's balanced and fair, but not feel that way to one or both people in the relationship. Then it can also not feel balanced if life circumstances suddenly change.
This is making me think of the conversation that we had with Hadassah Damien back in episode 273, where we were talking with them about managing money, which is their area of expertise, and managing money with multiple partners. They talked about how we have to have a step beyond just, "How much are our expenses? How much do you make? How much do I make? Great. We'll split it 50/50 or 60/40 or 70/30, or whatever seems to make sense based on our relative incomes."
We have to go beyond and look into how much debt does each person have? What are the kind of things that each person wants to spend their money on? What are the things that each person is spending their money on that they have no choice but to spend their money on? Who's having to care for somebody else that--? We have to unfortunately have these longer conversations to look at the deeper and broader context. That means needing to have many conversations. I think often in situations like these talking about non-monogamy attention, domestic labor, they can be uncomfortable and charged conversations as well.
Jase: This is bringing up a few different memories of different experiences around fairness not being fair, or equalness not being fair. One is silly now. It was upsetting at the time, but I was a small child, maybe, I don't know, 9, 10, something like that.
Emily: Once upon a time, you were a small child.
Jase: Once upon a time. Yes. This was probably daycare or something like that. After school camp, I don't know what it was. Maybe I was even younger. We were out building sandcastles. There were a couple of groups of kids that were building sandcastles in little sandboxes. We were building ours and having a great time. Then the other kids building theirs built it, and then were like, Oh, that'd be cool to smash it," so they smashed their own sandcastle. Then one of them says out loud, "If ours get smashed, theirs get smashed." Then they came over and smashed our sand castle.
Dedeker: That was fair. It was a fair point, Jase.
Jase: It was equal and fair, right? I got mad at them, and I think I pushed the kid away. Then I got in trouble because the teachers just saw that part.
Dedeker: Oh no. Your childhood trauma.
Jase: Maybe I'll hold a little bit of bitterness because of that.
Emily: Yikes.
Jase: I do think that it was that interesting example of when we can use the wording of equality or the wording of fairness to do stuff that's not actually fair at all, that's actually shitty. Then on the other side, a different one is, I think this was my freshman year of college that I had a girlfriend, and at one point we had a little bit of conflict over basically about sex, that I didn't always want to have it as often as she did.
Dedeker: She smashed your sand castle? Metaphorically.
Jase: Then she smashed my sand castle, yes.
Emily: Whoa.
Jase: I forget if it was sex or if it was about spending the night, but something about one person wanting more from the other and the other. I was the one who was like, "No, I don't want to do that." That her response was, "That's not fair. You are getting what you want to not do the thing, and I'm not getting what I want, which is to do the thing." At the time, I was like, but in that situation, the person saying no should always get the priority there. Modern day, we're now like, oh yes, consent obviously. If people both aren't enthusiastic about it, then you don't do it. The default state is not doing a thing.
It did bring up that interesting question of in another way you could look at that of like, "Well, I don't want to do the dishes, so I'm not going to," but that's different. It's, again, it's like when we try to apply these general rules or little aphorisms or blanket statements. We can lose the thread a bit, and we can use them to justify stuff that isn't actually just, or isn't actually fair, or isn't kind. At the same time, just because we don't get what we want doesn't mean it's not fair. It's a much more nuanced conversation than I think a lot of us would like it to be because it would just be simpler if it's like, "Follow these rules, do these things, and then it's fine." That's always fair.
I do think it's one of the challenges that we do face on a more political-economic level where it's like those have to be spelled out in rules. It's less of a value judgment and so often there's ways to point out, but in this circumstance it's actually not fair, or in this other circumstance it's actually being abused or taken advantage of. If we're keeping this focused on our personal relationships, the good news is, this is an area where we can get nuanced, where we can take the time to have these conversations and go a little deeper.
Dedeker: Jase, you teased that there was new research that has emerged about fairness, equality, and equity since we last covered this topic.
Jase: Yes. Rather than look up a bunch of studies, because there are lots of studies about this within relationships, specifically within married relationships, but this one study I thought was a great starting point for discussion. This was a 2019 study titled Gendered Perceptions of Fairness in Housework and Shared Expenses: Implications for Relationship Satisfaction and Sex Frequency.
Dedeker: Wow.
Jase: This is by-
Dedeker: There's a lot there.
Emily: It's spicy charged.
Jase: By Gillespie, Peterson, and Lever. This was based off of a much larger survey of over 10,000 people. The larger study was actually much more than that, but they pared it down to around 10,000 people because they were looking for people who were living with a heterosexual partner. They eliminated-- because they specifically wanted to look at gender dynamics in heterosexual relationships, so for this one, they removed anyone who was bisexual or queer or living with a same-sex partner or people who are not living with their romantic partner. The average age of this was 43, and it covered the whole range of everyone from 18 up through 70s and 80s. Fairly robust data set.
In looking at this, there were a few hypotheses they wanted to test. There were more than this, but I just pulled out a few that I thought were especially interesting. This first one is, they have the hypothesis that household arrangements being perceived as unfair in terms of finances or housework would result in lower relationship quality than relationships where those were perceived as "mostly fair."
Emily: Both finances and housework separately?
Jase: Yes. Basically, if you think those are unfair in your relationship, you're also probably going to report lower relationship quality.
Dedeker: This is just their hypothesis.
Jase: That's their hypothesis, yes. We'll get to which of these are true. Vote on your phones. The next hypothesis is that equity in shared expenses would be a greater predictor of relationship quality than equity in housework. For whatever reason, they had the hypothesis that if you feel like money's unfair in your relationship, that's going to hurt your relationship quality more than if you think there's unfairness in household chores.
Emily: It's interesting.
Jase: Interesting. Yes, I agree.
Emily: I'm a little surprised with that.
Jase: Again, hypothesis. We'll see if it holds up. The third hypothesis was that the effect of perceived fairness in these two areas on relationship quality would be different for men and for women. To clarify what they meant by this, one thing you need to know is that they identified two different types of unfairness. One that they called ego unfairness, which means I think this is unfair to me. The person filling out the survey felt like, "Yes, this deal works out against me. It's not fair to me." Ego unfairness.
The other one being partner unfairness, which is where they perceive that, yes, this is not fair, but I'm the one who has the advantage of it. That it's actually my partner who's treated a little bit unfairly in this arrangement, whether it's finances or housework. There are two hypotheses about why this would be different for men and women. The first is, when compared to housework arrangements perceived as mostly fair or unfair to their partner, we expect men who perceive the division of housework as ego unfair, so if they were doing more than their fair share, to report lower relationship quality than women who perceive that the housework is ego unfair to themselves.
Then on the flip side, that we expect women who perceive the division of shared expenses as unfair to them to report lower relationship quality than men who perceive the division of shared expenses as unfair to them.
Dedeker: This sounds like they're making their hypothesis that in heterosexual relationships, people will maybe naturally fall into some certain gender roles that expect women to take on more housework and men to take on more expenses but because that falls along these prescribed gender roles, maybe people are more tolerant of that than not.
Jase: Right. I think that's the hypothesis.
Dedeker: That men can tolerate covering more expenses because that's how they're socialized to be, and women can tolerate taking on more household labor because that's how they're socialized. At least that would be a little bit of my backfill in how they got to those hypotheses.
Jase: That's my guess as well. Actually, this full study is available online, the full text of it is available, which is nice. You can just search that title for the study if you want to read their whole intro and all of the preliminary research and stuff they did to come to these. Yes, I agree. I think it's based on those, what's been taught to us to be more normal, more tolerable, I guess. Those were the hypotheses. Do you have any predictions right now of which ones held up and which ones didn't?
Emily: I'm not going to lie, I feel like, yes, maybe people might expect women to be okay with doing more housework. I know in my heterosexual relationships that I've had, if my live-in male partner doesn't do as much housework over time, I tend to resent that. I tend to feel like, "Okay, you need to also be doing the dishes or picking things up around the house." That can't all fall on me, even if you do make more money than I do, for instance. Maybe I call bullshit on that one.
Jase: On that one. Okay.
Dedeker: I would agree on the bullshit call on that one. The expense-- I don't know. Again, anecdotal evidence, like the few women in heterosexual relationships that I have known or that I've worked with who are taking on more expenses are not as bothered by that.
Emily: Exactly.
Dedeker: At least from what I have seen.
Jase: You also question that one.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: I feel like sometimes that just happens. That is circumstance. Historically, men get paid more than women, but often nowadays, I definitely have quite a few friends who are women who make more than their male partners, and they're fine with it. It's a point of pride for them.
Dedeker: I've never met a woman who is upset by expenses falling more on her, if that makes sense for their financial arrangement. Unless the male partner is not not doing jack shit at home.
Emily: Exactly. Not working and-
Dedeker: Or not treating them well.
Emily: -they're chilling.
Dedeker: Yes. Then I've seen people get more upset about it.
Jase: One piece to keep in mind for all of this is that the survey was evaluating how they perceived the fairness of it. Not the equalness necessarily, but if I perceive this is a little unfair to me or a little unfair to my partner. We don't quite know what that means for each individual person, but I still think we get some very interesting results from if you feel like it's not fair, how does that affect your relationship?
Dedeker: Sure.
Jase: Let's get into the findings here. First hypothesis was that if these things, household arrangements or finances, are perceived as unfair, that relationship quality will be lower. Ding, ding, ding. Yes. That one did turn out to be validated by the results, but also, frequency of sex is lower. It was a little bit different for financial unfairness and housework.
For financial unfairness, if it's unfair in either direction, either you think it's unfair to you or you think it might be unfair to your partner, that correlated with lower quality of relationship, less sex.
However, for housework, it only affected it negatively if he felt like it was unfair to you. If you felt like, "Oh, I think the housework might be a little unfair to my partner," it didn't affect your reported quality of your relationship or your reported frequency of sex compared to the people who didn't report that, who said it was mostly fair.
Emily: Interesting.
Dedeker: Interesting.
Jase: It is interesting, though, that, yes, these things do have an effect, especially if you think it's unfair to yourself. A quote from this study says, "Perceived ego unfairness in the division of shared expenses was the strongest predictor of relationship satisfaction. It was also a strong predictor of sex frequency, following only relationship length in relative importance." The only better predictor was relationship length in terms of frequency of sex.
Emily: The longer you've been with a partner, probably the less sex you have, I'm assuming.
Jase: That was my guess. They didn't clarify in this quote. I'm sure you could dig through the actual numbers to find that, but it wasn't the focus of the study, so I didn't pull up those numbers. Yes, strong predictor of sex frequency, and as such, perceived fairness regarding shared finances was a stronger predictor of relationship quality than perceived fairness in the division of housework. It's like, so in general, finances had more of an effect than housework, and that specifically within finances, unfairness toward yourself, so ego unfairness, had the strongest effect on lower relationship quality and lower frequency of sex.
Next, this hypothesis about men and women valuing income or housework inequality differently was not supported by the data. Not only that, but men who reported housework as being unfair to their partner actually reported lower relationship quality than women who said it was unfair to their partner.
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: It's like if the woman perceives her male partner is taking on an unfair amount of the household labor, she's still fine with the relationship. Her relationship quality scores still high.
Emily: That checks out. It's like, "You know what? Make him do something. Make him do some of those."
Dedeker: For once.
Emily: Yes. Exactly.
Jase: Versus the men who, and maybe this is just the men who are aware that it's unfair to their female partners, but that they had lower relationship quality results. It's interesting too with what both of you were saying of calling bullshit on that hypothesis was also that the results were kind of the opposite, at least in terms of housework there, that they were the opposite, almost more like you're saying of people reacting to the norm. Of being more okay with something that's the opposite of what we would've thought we'd be more tolerant of.
Yet when it came to frequency of sex, women who said that housework was unfair to their partner also reported less frequent sex compared to men who reported that the housework was unfair to their partner. It was like, for men, the relationship satisfaction's lower, but sex frequency stayed the same if it was unfair to their female partner.
Whereas for women, they reported not really a decrease in relationship satisfaction, but less sex if their male partner seemed to be taking on more of the work or an unfair amount of it. Who knows why? This surprised the researchers. They did not expect this. This was like, "We are not sure what to make of this. We need to do more research."
Dedeker: Well, but I could also see maybe a little bit of fuzziness here because the fact that this research is not specifically trying to measure what the actual balance is here, what the actual frequency of sex is, how these people are actually dividing labor. It's all about the perception of it, right?
Jase: Yes. It is all about the perception.
Emily: Perception of sex frequency might be different as well.
Dedeker: Also, the thing that you think would be easier to count, I've found-
Jase: Is actually hard.
Dedeker: -actually hard.
Emily: Absolutely. That's the thing. It's like, "Yes, I'm happy and satisfied with the amount of sex that we're having in the relationship," versus someone else who might be like, "No, I feel like we're not having enough. We should be having more." That's interesting. All of this is about perception, and that's such a subjective thing that I think that it's really difficult to even say, what is the reality here?
Jase: Sure.
Emily: The reality's all in our heads, our own personal reality.
Jase: The last piece I want to share about this before we move on is that when it came to shared expenses being unfair, that both men and women showed lower relationship quality with any kind of unfairness, whether that's against their partner or against themselves, but especially if they felt like it was unfair to themselves. In that case, it lowered it for both and no difference between it.
Overall, I thought this was really interesting that basically my takeaway from this whole study was that in general, unfairness, whichever of you it affects is going to negatively affect your relationship and probably make you have sex less. Again, it's not causing this, it's just a correlation, but I'm making a little bit of a jump here, a little bit of an assumption. It's not so much on the gender lines that we thought.
Not surprisingly, if it feels unfair to you, you're going to feel more bad about it than if you feel like it's unfair to your partner. Even then, you're going to feel a little less good about your relationship. The big takeaway is if we can try to create relationships where both of the people in it, regardless of gender or anything like that, like if we step away from this study, that if we can try to have relationships where the people in it feel that it's fair, in general, we're going to have more satisfied relationships and more sex if that's something we want to be having.
Emily: This can be apparent, I think, in a lot of different types of relationships, familial relationships or friendships as well. I think if you were the person who is always initiating going out with a friend, for example, that can start to feel unfair after a while. Even, okay, in a relationship we always go over to my house, for instance, and therefore I'm the one who has to pick up and do various things to make it tidy and ready for you to come over.
Jase: That's an interesting example, though, Em, because in certain situations, there's the opposite of like, "I'm always the one doing the hour and a half commute to you and you're not having to do that." Again, worth a conversation because how much that feels like a cost to each person might be different.
Emily: Absolutely, yes. That's a very, very good point. There's all of these little ways in which we can perceive fairness or perceive something to be unfair in our lives. Group projects at school, someone always proposing a date or creating date plans, for instance. Things like that. I've definitely been in relationships where that emotional labor has very much fallen on me, and it weighs heavily on you. Sometimes the other person might take that emotional labor for granted.
Jase: Something valuable here is if you have a partner who comes to you saying something doesn't feel fair, that that's the piece that's important to listen to, that they don't feel like it's fair. That's worth paying attention to. Not just, "Oh, but look at this. It is fair. Never mind. You don't have to worry about that." I do think having that conversation can help, because sometimes it's like, I think it's not fair, and then once I learn more about what you're doing or your experience, I go, "Oh, actually it is more fair than I thought. I didn't realize that." The feelings are the important part is what I took away from that study, too, which I think is key to how we can approach this in our relationships.
Dedeker: I know on the show I've talked a lot about the book by Eve Rodsky, Fair Play. I recommend it to everybody who shares especially any kind of domestic labor or shares a house space with anybody or is coparenting with anybody. I think that she's done a really, really good job of getting to the heart of that about how not only do we need to sit down and collaborate with somebody about finding a better system for managing shared labor, but it really is about getting to what actually feels fair as opposed to aiming for this perfect 50/50. Also that that can fluctuate and change depending on what's going on in life.
That it's good for us to avoid anyone feeling completely trapped or stuck with what types of labor that they take on and also trying to play to each person's strengths and what it is that they actually want to do, what are the things they find more tolerable or less tolerable. Being aware of things like what she calls daily grind type of task, the kind of things where it's like you have to do it every single day or else your house is going to fall apart or you're not going to be able to function. Traditionally, these are things like daily grind type of task tend to fall on women and femmes and about rebalancing that specifically.
I think she does a really, really good job specifically in this domestic labor arena, although she does acknowledge and includes things like who's doing the labor of contraception if you're in a sexual relationship. If there's a risk of pregnancy, for instance, who's doing the labor of those things, like Emily mentioned, like date planning? Who's doing the labor of managing, I don't know, your frequent flyer miles or your coupons or stuff like that? She does branch outside of just who's doing the dishes. I really do recommend it.
Jase: It's a great starting place and it's all done with cards. There's like little playing cards. They're smaller than playing cards, but little cards that you go through and pick out the ones that are not relevant to you and set them aside, but then you have this visual way of looking at what are the tasks you have this week? What do I have this week? Adjusting it again till it feels good. Not like, "Oh, you have 20 cards, I have 20 cards," but realizing some are bigger, like those daily grind things are every day. Whereas others, it's like, yes, this is a chore, but you only have to do it once a month or once a week or something like that and helps you to see that and realize.
It's definitely been helpful. Actually, Dedeker and I were just talking about revisiting this, since we did it quite a bit during the pandemic, I think, when we were stuck at home figuring those things out. We would do it every week where we'd reshuffle those things. Then we've found balances that worked, but realizing like, actually maybe it'd be worth looking at that again to just get a sense of how we want to handle different household chores and cleaning and other administrative tasks and things like that.
Now we're going to go on to the section on multiple partners and polyamory. This is a different way of approaching equality and equity. It's worth looking at this a little bit differently and the different concerns that show up when you're trying to treat multiple partners equally rather than just finding equity and balance within one particular relationship. Many people within the polyamory and non-monogamy world seems like pretty quickly they learn that you should question hierarchy.
Hierarchy was much more common in the earlier days of polyamory becoming a term online. It's still common in other forms of non-monogamy quite a bit, like in the swinging world, that's a little bit more built into the way things go usually, although there's also been work within that community to question some of the troublesome parts of hierarchy there while acknowledging that that's still a fundamental principle of the couple within that.
However, we've also seen this rise of people trying to do what's often called egalitarian polyamory, which is sometimes synonymous with non-hierarchical polyamory or non-hierarchical egalitarian polyamory as being this gold standard of what you should be trying to do. We've often seen that swing too hard into this trying to treat all your partners equally, which almost always leads to people being more upset and being unhappy with it.
Emily: We don't really have a lot of research or social scripts to help us out with this question of hierarchy and non-hierarchy and equity and equality within non-monogamous relationships. That can maybe sometimes be a good thing, though, because we don't have all of this baggage that is placed on us about the ways in which we should conduct our relationships. I do think any relationship script that we have out there is still going to potentially come into play and we have to fight against those norms.
If we have lived in a monogamous world, which I think mostly we have, we still have a lot of that baggage potentially that we have to deal with, but it's something to be aware of and maybe be thankful for that we can write our own rules when it comes to the relationships that we have and that we want. With friends and family, there are definitely parallels here. You have varying levels of closeness with certain members of your family or certain friends that you have. You might have really close friends that you see on a weekly basis or even maybe a daily basis. You might have people who are activity partners for certain things, like you play a game with them once a week or a couple times a month or something, and that's really the only time that you see them.
You might just have casual acquaintances that you see at a party or at work, something along those lines. You're not going to necessarily spend as much time with each of those people. It's not going to be equal, and that's okay. With non-monogamy, you can also have various levels of intimacy or commitment, involvement, things like that. Again, if you live with a person, chances are you're going to be seeing them the most or more often than somebody who just entered into the picture that perhaps you only see once a week, for instance, or even somebody who lives in a completely different area than you that you're simply just not going to be able to be as proximal to.
Jase: I think even within the same category of these are my close friends, I still don't hang out with all of my close friends the same amount all the time. It might ebb and flow. It might vary. Also there's just some close friends that I spend more time with and other close friends I may correspond with more online. Just the point is that it varies and that that's natural and normal with friends, and I think most of us wouldn't question that. It would feel weird, I think, to try to spend an equal amount of effort or time with all of your friends, even just with the ones you consider close friends. I feel like that would seem a little less natural. Yet when it comes to polyamory, sometimes there can be pressure to feel like you have to do that.
Dedeker: Like with family members and with friends, everybody has individualized needs. That different partners have different needs, different expectations. Some people may desire more frequent contact, they may desire a more entangled relationship. Other peoples may prioritize independence more. We do run a risk that it can be easy to head into relationships sometimes projecting what we think the other person needs onto them or projecting what we think we would need in this particular situation onto the other person, or projecting what we think our value system or what that one book about non-monogamy says that this other person is going to need.
I think it is really important for us to head into relationships really with our ears and eyes and hearts open to actually get curious and understand about what this other person truly desires from us in the way that we show up.
Jase: Also at the same time, when we think about our friend's other friends, the idea of directly meddling in that would be weird. That's not to say it doesn't ever happen. There are certain times where it's like, "Oh, I'm jealous that my best friend is hanging out with this new person, so maybe I'll try to sabotage that or something." I think most of us would look at that as like, "Yes, that was a shitty thing to do."
I think when it comes to relationships, sometimes we, I guess, don't judge that as harshly or might think, "Oh, it's more understandable that they would react defensively to try to protect their relationship." I think definitely within friends, it would seem weird if one of your friends tried to make rules or needed this constant assurance that they're still your best friend. Again, it does happen sometimes, but I think more of us would agree that that would be weird behavior. We don't want to be directly meddling in the relationships our partners have with other people because, again, that's unfair to think that we should have more power over that person, I would say at least.
We've looked a little bit at this, how do we treat people fairly and equitably, but at the same time, there's that flip side that I mentioned earlier in my story about, "Well, it's not fair because I want to have sex and you don't and you're getting what you want. That's not fair." I think a key principle here is that nobody is entitled to your time or affection or money, I guess, except in the case of a child support payment or alimony.
Dedeker: Legal financial agreements.
Jase: Maybe then they're legally entitled to some of your money. Yes.
Emily: Then they are.
Jase: Just in terms of your relationships that if we look at it in the framework of consent, that just because you're in a relationship with someone doesn't mean they automatically have access to all of your resources, like your time, your emotional energy, your finances, your physical body, any of those things. Even though they might not like that, doesn't mean that that's wrong of you to actually be clear about the things that you don't want or the things that you don't want to do or the resources you don't want to give or don't feel like you can give.
Emily: It's super healthy to have boundaries and set limits on what you're willing to give or share. Definitely communicate these boundaries. That's extremely essential for maintaining healthy relationships. Ideally relationships are reciprocal. They're not transactional. Give and take absolutely is important, but healthy relationships are built on mutual respect and care, not this sense of entitlement or obligation.
I think we often get into relationships and after a period of time just expect that our partners should be Uber giving in various ways and we question why is it that they aren't? I think these are just conversations that we all have to have because not everybody has the same level of what it is that they feel like is okay to give versus what another person might think. Somebody may think, "Okay, because I'm with you or I live with you, therefore that means that I should have access to your money or your time in a specific way," but another partner may not agree with that. These conversations are really important to have.
Dedeker: Related to that, being fair with multiple partners doesn't mean that you're going to be able to 100% avoid ever disappointing someone or hurting somebody's feelings. Doesn't mean that you should aim to do that necessarily, but it does happen. It happens in monogamous relationships, too, because conflicting needs and desires and wants are pretty much inevitable. Even with our best intentions, there's going to be times where you can't meet everybody's needs or expectations simultaneously.
Learning to navigate not just disappointment but negotiation is a crucial relationship skill, especially crucial when it comes to having multiple partners. Now, do I think that this is a skill that is very unique and special to non-monogamous people? Maybe a little bit, but we do this all the time in life because we're talking about our family relationships, our friend relationships, our work relationships. We all have multiple priorities, and we all have to navigate what happens when those priorities sometimes clash, and it's not always clear. This is just a human life and human relationship skill.
As long as you're focusing on your intent and able to communicate that, if you're striving to act with fairness and integrity in a way that matches your values, if you're able to communicate openly and honestly, if you're able to communicate proactively, that means negotiating things like holidays way in advance and having already thought about the different possible solutions or the ways that it could impact different people, like trying to take into account different individuals' context and circumstances, then yes, sometimes be willing to apologize and make amends if you have to disappoint somebody.
I don't mean to build this up like you're going to be constantly hurting people's feelings left and right or that that's just a necessary part, but little things like, "Sorry, I'm not going to have the time to be able to go to this particular event with you because I'm booked on this night with somebody else. I know this event is really important to you, and so these are the ways that I want to be able to make amends or make it up to you or something like that." Stuff like that.
On the flip side, being fair doesn't always mean you get what you want all the time. Compromise and negotiation is essential here and we're always trying to find that balance between individual needs, the needs of the relationship as a whole. Sometimes this means a little bit of sacrifice, a little bit of letting go of your own desires, being able to focus on the bigger picture, being able to focus on the whole ecosystem.
Now I do think sometimes people think that this is only really relevant in kitchen table polyamory where we're all coming to the kitchen table to negotiate things, but this can be true in parallel polyamory too, or anywhere that you fall in that particular spectrum of entwinement that we can look at the bigger picture. While we don't necessarily have to have a big group identity together, we can still understand how sometimes compromise is helpful for the overall average happiness and satisfaction and ability to find more happiness and satisfaction of everyone involved.
Jase: I like that.
Dedeker: I don't know, these things end up getting tricky. Of course, I can also think of six billion counter examples where it is important to be selfish and stand up for your needs and things like that. Sometimes this is hard to generalize.
Jase: I think that a piece of this about being fair doesn't always mean getting what you want. Another piece that can be difficult when our emotions are involved is realizing that when it comes to our chosen relationships, that they're always opt-in. That this isn't something that you are entitled to, and it's not something that's like, "Oh, well, if I want this thing, I should have access to it."
For example, if there is something that you really want for you to feel valued in your relationship, you need this thing. Maybe your partner gave that to you for a while, but at a certain point they're like, "Look, I just don't want to," whether that's, "I don't feel like I want to have sex with you anymore," or "Maybe just not very much," or "I'm not sure that's what I want," or "I definitely don't want to have kids and I know that's something that you do want," and maybe even, "That's something I've done with another partner, but I don't want to do with you. I've already got those kids, I don't want more." Whatever it is.
There can be these things where it's like, "No, but I need that in order to be happy in a relationship." That doesn't mean well, because they need that, you've got to compromise on your boundaries and you have to do that because relationships are opt in. There is a little bit of this. If you can communicate as honestly and compassionately as possible about what your boundaries are, that they're fully entitled to go, "I'm really sad about this, this hurts a lot, but that's not going to work for me." That's okay if that's the case.
I think where we can get into trouble is when we start to think of our partners as a public utility or something that ideally we should all be entitled to within a society, like medical care, food, and things like that, which even those are not there yet but they should be. With our individual relationships, it's not the same. This is a thing you're opting into at all times with this person, even if we don't think of it that way on a daily basis.
Emily: I do think that's the beauty of non-monogamy is that you get the opportunity to do different things with different people, especially in the case of kids that you just talked about, Jase, or even cohabiting, for instance. If one partner doesn't want to, there's a potential that another one might, and that's quite lovely to get that opportunity to, "If I can't fulfill this need for you, it might be fulfilled by somebody else." That's awesome. There is the dreaded NRE aspect to all of this.
Dedeker: Is it dreaded?
Emily: Well, I think it can be at times because it can wreak havoc on your relationships. We don't need to treat everyone the same, but it is easy to let our feelings and thoughts get ahead of us when we're in the throes of newly falling in love with someone or starting a new sexual connection because the chemicals in our brain and body are just going haywire. It's really important to be especially mindful during the first 6 to 18 months of a relationship not to undervalue or underestimate the importance of your existing relationships, and that includes your friendships.
I've definitely been in connections where I want to see that person all the time and that means my friendships also, unfortunately, suffer because I'm not prioritizing them as well. Then in your existing romantic relationships, that can be really, really challenging to be on the receiving end of that. Just be aware. Of course, absolute equality is not necessarily a goal that we should strive for, but be understanding, be kind to the people that are already in your life.
Dedeker: The nightmare scenario that I unfortunately see play out a number of times is the person who newly opens up their relationship and while their partner still has their head spinning and they're reeling and they're like, "What?" they've already found a new partner and fallen into NRE. Then also they've already often been consuming a lot of non-monogamy resources that are really pushing being non-hierarchical. Then they're immediately pushing for like, "Hey, this person I've been dating for two weeks now, I want to be non-hierarchical with them."
These are like the Paulie Hell stories, but that's often how I see these things play out is people move really, really fast in that particular direction. It comes from maybe a good place of wanting to be fair and wanting to be equal but just chill. That's Dedeker Winston's advice. Just chill. Cool your jets for two seconds.
Jase: Cool your jets. That's a good one. We should bring that back into more common rotation.
Dedeker: Just tattoo that one.
Jase: Cool your jets. I love that. Then it'd be a tattoo of some jets with NRE written on them. That'd be good.
Emily: That'd be good. Cool then.
Jase: To finish off this episode, just to reiterate some of the practical takeaways that we've been talking about, the first one is regular check-ins. Having some kind of regular time where you check in about the fairness within your relationships or with other partners as well. The point of this one being regular, so it's not just we check in on it once, we set it and forget it. It's like, "Let's come back and reevaluate this." With the Fair Play book, it's something that she, I think, initially suggests you do every week, where you reevaluate the division of things so that you can continue to tweak and try different things and learn, how does it feel now?
Dedeker: Make sure no one gets just stuck with certain tasks if that's not-- unless they really want to be stuck with a particular task.
Jase: That's led to some really interesting discussions. I know with myself and Dedeker when it comes to chores, sometimes this realization of like, "I always really hate when I have to do this one. This one feels heavier than these other ones." "Cleaning this room," for example, "feels heavier than this other one." The other person might go, "Oh, for me it's this other room." Then it's like, "Oh, cool. We discovered something that we can find where this is okay for each of us."
On that note, talking about boundaries, which we've just talked about a lot here of checking in with yourself about how you're feeling and don't be afraid to have some boundaries around what it is you are willing to give and able to give while maintaining your own health and wellbeing. Then along with that, setting honest expectations. I think that it generally feels much worse to overpromise and then underdeliver on the amount of time and emotional investment that you have to put into a new relationship. Working on communicating, if anything, on the more conservative side of underpromising how much you might be available so that you're not setting up one expectation just to change it.
That you can be more sustainable in the way you approach things, and realizing that that all of it is an ongoing longer term thing when it comes to relationships.
Dedeker: Of course, we're going to recommend using your shared calendars and communication tools, but of course, with a caveat that shared calendars are great for the convenience of planning, it can also lead to a more by-the-numbers form of fairness or things like people using it like a tracking system to have a sense of like, "Well, how many dates is this other partner getting? Am I getting the same number of dates?" This has happened to me before, partners seeing, "Oh, well, you have all this free time. I should get some of that free time."
Sometimes people can get just a little too much up in your business of maybe feeling entitled to your time. Just be mindful of that. You don't have to jump right away into sharing a calendar with somebody if you're not ready to.
Jase: I tend to be pretty slow to share a calendar, I'll say.
Dedeker: Yes, me too. Just communicate.
Emily: You share it with both of us.
Dedeker: It's true.
Jase: Yes, but this is a long term relationship with both of you.
Emily: True.
Dedeker: Of course, seeking community support, especially around these non-monogamy-specific issues, support groups, online communities, if you can find some healthy ones. Of course, we're always going to plug our own Discord and Facebook groups because this is something that could be highly subjective and individual and a lot of people have come up with really wonderful creative solutions for figuring out how to make things feel fair and equitable in their relationship. It's not just us who are the authority on this. Go seek out as many different experiences and stories from people as you can because that's going to help give you ideas about how to tweak and come up with clever, creative solutions for this.
Jase: Well, thank you all for joining us on this exploration of equality and equity and fairness in relationships. We would love to hear from all of you. We have an amazing episode discussion channel in our Discord server, and then we're also posting our question of the week on our Instagram stories at multiamory_podcast. Our question of the week this week is, are there any parts of your relationships that are unequal but still feel fair? Very curious to hear what people have to say about that. The best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is in that episode discussion channel in the thread for this episode, which is on our Discord server, or you can post about it in our private Facebook group. You can get access to those groups and join our amazing community by going to multiamory.com/join, or you can choose your own price to pay.
In addition, you can share with us publicly on Instagram at multiamory_podcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Emily Matlack, Dedeker Winston, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh & Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.