How Not to Keep Score

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My husband was leaving for a business trip. He bent down to kiss me. As I kissed him, I griped, “When you get back, you better pick up the slack with this new puppy.”

“What slack?” he said, taken aback.

“It’s just like I thought it would be when I said I didn’t want another dog. I’m the one doing nearly everything. I’m feeding the puppy. I’m walking the puppy. I’m playing with the puppy. I’m training the puppy. And I’m cleaning up the puppy’s poop and pee. This was not supposed to be my puppy.”

“What? I walked the puppy today,” he said proudly.

“How many times?” I sneered.

“Once,” he said, not as confidently.

“I walked her twice,” I said.

“How many times did you walk her yesterday?” I pressed.

And it went on like this, even though I knew better.

Conversations like this are rarely productive.

They’re not because my husband and I have different scoring systems. It doesn’t matter how much evidence I throw in his face. He’ll always feel as if he’s pulling his weight, even if I think he’s not.

Case in point: This past weekend, I spent an entire day being a mom, being a dog owner, and being a home Goddess. I got up at the crack of dawn to walk the puppy. I cleaned up the puppy’s accidents three or more times. I looked through macaroni and cheese recipes with my kid, had her pick one out, and went to the grocery store together to buy the ingredients. I paid bills. I straightened the house. I listened to my kid whine as we both walked the puppy at a nearby park.

I stopped the puppy from chewing on nearly everything in the house.

During all of this time, my husband was sleeping, off at work, running personal errands and watching television.

Around 6 pm I was in the kitchen making macaroni and cheese. I’d already boiled the elbows. I had all the ingredients measured out. I have the casserole dish ready and the oven pre-heated.

I had just poured the milk into a pan and started heating it when the husband came in and said, “You’re using THAT much cheese?”

“I’m following a recipe,” I said. “That’s what it calls for.”

He read the recipe. He obviously didn’t think I was capable of following a recipe without his help. He’s like that. I’ve written about how he’s a back seat cook, so this should not come as a surprise to you.

“You don’t have Gouda cheese,” he said.

“The store doesn’t sell pre shredded Gouda. I made some substitutions. It will be fine.”

He examined my cheese choices. He decided one of them wasn’t good enough. He put it back in the fridge and took out a container of pizza cheese instead.

As I said, he’s like this. I used to blow my top when he would do things like this. Now I just roll my eyes.

Sometimes I laugh, but not this time.

On this day I had a cold and the puppy had worn me out. So I was already grumpy by the time I boiled the first elbow.

He started adding cheese to the milk. That’s when I left the room. I am not a back seat cook.

Later he and our kid got in a fight over who was going to watch what on TV. She called him a lazy bum. He sent her to her room. Later when he asked her if she was sorry, she replied, “No, you are a lazy bum. All you do is watch TV.”

He said, “I am not lazy! I just worked hard cooking dinner and I find it really annoying when you call me lazy!” And he added more time to her room sentence.

I found his response interesting. My first thought was, “You cooked dinner?”

My second thought was, “You thought you were working hard when you were telling me how I should be cooking dinner and when you completed the last two steps of the recipe I’d already almost finished?”

I didn’t say any of this out loud. I just found it amusing.

For some time, my mind was quite busy with score keeping. I mentally added up all of the things I do around the house on a regular basis: 80 percent of the cleaning, 80 percent of the grocery shopping, 90 percent of the cooking, all of the bill paying and budgeting, all of the investing, all of the accounting, all of the mail sorting, most of the home organization, all of the kid’s medical appointments, most of the homework supervising, nearly all of the dog walking and all of the putting away of various things, especially laundry.

I thought about what he does: all of the yard work, all of the fixing of various broken things, most of the laundry, occasional cooking, occasional cleaning, some dog walking, some kid supervision.

My list is a lot longer than his list, isn’t it?

I also began tallying a different list of free time. Most days my husband had enough free time to hang out with his friends, ride his bike for hours, and camp out on the sofa while he watches motorized vehicles travel in circles on television.

On the other hand, I usually have just enough free time to squeeze in a 30-minute run and a 10- or 15-minute meditation if I’m lucky.

But this kind of score keeping isn’t helpful. It’s not because my husband has a similar list in his head and according to his list, he does more.

His list is wrong, of course, but that’s beside the point.

It’s pointless to argue about who does more because such an argument doesn’t get you anywhere. It doesn’t solve any problems and it doesn’t make anyone feel any better.

Sure it might lead to a fleeting feeling of superiority, but that’s about it.

What would have been much more productive for me to say to my husband as he was leaving on his trip was this, “I’m already exhausted and I’m sure I’m going to be even more so by the time you return. When you get back, can you schedule in more home time so you can help me find more me-time?”

That kind of question would have gotten me somewhere.

In any relationship, happiness never comes from keeping a mental tally of who does more of what. Happiness comes from asking for support when you need it, from letting go of the small stuff, and from championing your spouse when he wants an atta boy for cooking the last quarter of a meal.

I know this. I’ve known it for a long time. This led me to wonder why I regressed and started keeping score again this weekend.

I blame it on the puppy. During times when free time is plentiful, it’s easy not to keep score. It’s more tempting, however, when I feel stressed, tired, worn out, out of shape, or neglected. When I don’t have enough time to care for my own needs—to sleep, to exercise, to meditate—I get grumpy and I start keeping score.

Until we got this puppy, I had just enough time for me. Once the puppy came into my life, not so much.

It’s similar to sustenance. At a family meal, if there is plenty of food on the table, no one notices how much anyone else eats. On the other hand, if there is not a heck of a lot of food on the table, people start keeping score, saying things like, “Hey, you have a bigger scoop of ice cream than I have. Not fair!”

In the end, the solution isn’t about fighting over scarcity. It’s in finding a way to create abundance.

Score keeping is fighting over scarcity.

Problem solving is how you create abundance.

Do you keep score in your relationships? Have you overcome your need to keep score? How? Are there times when you think score keeping is necessary? Why or why not?

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