Make it Work: Managing Your Household as a Team

I’ve led several workshops over the years for couples who struggle to manage household responsibilities and still feel like a solid, united, team. I created the reflection guide below to help participants meet the following learning goals:

1. How to get clear about what you think, feel, and need.

2. How to equally share household management responsibilities.

3. Setting healthy boundaries- with care.

4. Staying passionately and intimately connected while managing a full life and home.

Use the questionnaire below to assess the split of responsibilities in your home and in your relationship and determine ways to improve effectiveness and teamwork.

Terms:

Household management strategy- this is the term I use to talk about the overall set of systems you use to manage a home or household. This can include apps, calendars, schedules, task lists, meetings, call lists, and more. It might also be the way you (and others) carry decision-making authority and weigh each other’s input when making plans or changes.

Household management includes the answers to all of the following:

• Who does what task? Who’s physical effort is used? Who’s time is used? Who’s emotional energy is used? Who finances the task?
• Who manages ongoing tasks? Who manages one-time tasks or irregular tasks?
• Who sets the standard for task completion? Who sets the standard for task frequency?
• Who manages the information related to the task?
• How do you know when the system is working? How do you know when it needs adjustment?

Many of us manage projects and programs in our work life, but some of us cannot transfer those skills to our household without this guide to make the shift.

Clarifying your default settings

So look, most of us learned a LOT about what to expect in our households from our early life environments and relationships. But most of us never stop and consider the fact that those norms and expectations were set in households VERY DIFFERENT form the ones our partners’ grew up in.

Most couples are two individuals with differing household norms with little awareness of those differences until resentment, bitterness and damaging conflicts start to occur.

Use the reflections below to clarify some of the norms and expectations you might have formed early on and which you hope to carry forward in your present household.

Which of my personal values are enacted through my household management strategy?

What are my triggers, tension points, or concerns in managing a home with a partner? When do I feel stressed?

What did I learn growing up about managing a home and life? What was modeled for me?

How do my current practices align with and/or differ from those lessons from my earlier life?

How will I know when our household management needs adjustment? What evidence demonstrates a need for change? How will my body tell me something is off?

How will I know when our household management is balanced? What are my measures of success? How will I know we’re moving in the right direction?

Once you have a better sense of the defaults you’re bringing to the household management strategy you are better equipped to discuss them with a partner. You can also bring these to a session with your couples therapist to inform a conversation about household management.

Managing the multiple responsibilities involved in living together is a common stressor for couples. Beginning an open and aware conversation about them sets you and your loved one on a path for connection around these responsibility sharing- instead of heading you towards break up.

Dr. Gina Senarighi, PhD, CPC is a couples’ therapist turned relationship coach, retreat leader, and author specializing in intimacy, authenticity, shame-resilience, and connected communication for diverse relationships.

For seventeen years she’s supported hundreds of clients creating fulfilling integrity-based relationships according to their own rules. She’s developed a solid framework based in neuroscience, nonviolent communication, and positive psychology research that has transformed diverse relationships around the world.

In 2020, she published her first book, Love More Fight Less, A Communication Workbook for Every Couple with Penguin Random House. She earned her Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy in 2010 from Saybrook University, after undergraduate and graduate degrees in Education from the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University. In 2019 she completed her Ph.D. in Spiritual Studies and Pastoral Counseling.

Gina was named Portland’s Best Life Coach in 2019 and has taught psychology courses, communication workshops, couples intimacy retreats, and guest lectured on alternative relationships and sex-positive therapy at universities across the US. Students love her no-nonsense presentation style.

Her podcast, Swoon has helped over 10,000 listeners build a more compassionate, creative, confident, and fulfilled society. Gina offers practical, proven skills to transform relationships in deeply meaningful ways.