The Fight About the Dishes Is Never About the Dishes
Every couple argues about responsibilities. But without getting the roles right, the responsibilities always break.
By Shawn Reddy
A few months before our second child arrived, Tawhiwhi and I sat down with a list of every job in our home and marked, honestly, who carries what.
We did it because we know ourselves.
In a heavy season, both of us are prone to the same quiet feeling: I’m the one carrying the weight here. A newborn was about to shift every load in the house. And we have learned that if you don’t choose the split on purpose, resentment chooses it for you.
“If you don’t choose the split on purpose, resentment chooses it for you.”
Working through that list, I saw something I had been missing.
Tawhiwhi was carrying a whole layer of little things I had never once seen. She was thinking about the kids and what they would need before anyone asked her to. None of it was on my radar, so none of it had ever been on my scoreboard.
If you have felt that same tension, I want to walk you through what we found. The research on the division of labour in marriage surprised us both.
And then I want to show you the part we rarely talk about. You can renegotiate the chores forever, but until you understand your role as a husband and wife, the responsibilities will always break.
You’re Both Telling the Truth
Pew Research asked parents in two-parent homes who carries more of the load.
Half of mums said they do. Only 32 percent of dads agreed, and more than half believed the split was basically even.
So one of them must be wrong. Actually, no.
When researchers track how couples really spend their time, the mums turn out to be closer to the truth. But the finding that got me was why the dads weren’t lying. The load is simply invisible to the person not carrying it.
And the invisible part is bigger than the visible part. Researchers at the University of Bath found that mothers carry roughly 71 percent of the cognitive load of a home.
Not the cooking and the cleaning. The thinking. Noticing what is running low. Remembering the appointment. Planning the week nobody else knows got planned. The gap is widest exactly where it cannot be seen.
Researchers at UC Berkeley found something else. What corrodes couples is not the amount of work at all. It is the sense of unfairness, and it wounds husbands and wives about equally.
Being unseen does something to a person. Day after day it says, you don’t matter here.
Fifty-Fifty Is the Wrong Target
Most couples try to fix the division of labour with maths. Split everything down the middle, keep it fair, keep the peace.
But you can split every task down the middle and still feel miles apart, because fairness was never really the goal.
The real question is not “is this equal?” It is “does this match our capacity right now, and did we choose it together?”
Capacity moves with the seasons.
Right now I am carrying more of our home, because Tawhiwhi is feeding our baby girl through the night. Protecting her rest in this season is part of loving her, not a favour I’m doing her.
A while back the season ran the other way. Work nearly buried me for the better part of a year, and Tawhiwhi ran the whole house, weekends included, so I could keep standing.
Newborns, illness, a hard stretch at work. The load is meant to move between you.
A heavy season carried by agreement feels completely different to a light one carried alone.
The Rulebook Nobody Wrote Down
So where does the split come from, if nobody chooses it?
Nobody sat us down after our wedding and said, now would be a good time to figure out who carries what. We were focused on the wedding, the honeymoon, finally living together. We assumed the rest would figure itself out.
So the jobs got assigned the way they do in most homes. By accident. By upbringing. By whoever did it once and got the job forever.
Most couples never discuss it. They dive in, and then resent each other when the system fails.
Underneath the accidents, we were each holding a rulebook written in our childhood homes.
In mine, my mum did most of the cooking, and her cooking was part of what made home feel like home. So without ever saying it out loud, I expected my wife would create that same atmosphere. I never examined that expectation. I just felt it.
We all do this. We bring the rules from our home and our culture into a new home that needs its own.
Building Something New
This is where scripture speaks first.
Genesis 2:24 says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”
I had always read leave and cleave as the moving-out verse. It is much bigger than that. You are leaving the culture and the assumptions you grew up in, and building something new together. Your own values, your own systems, your own small Eden.
In practice, that means naming everything that actually needs doing in your home, the visible jobs and the invisible thinking work. Then deciding together who is best placed for each one, by gifting and capacity, not by default and not by gender norms.
For us that meant renegotiating who cooks, more than once, as the seasons changed.
And here is what surprised us. When you go looking in the Bible for the job list, it is not there.
Scripture does not start with the chores. It starts with the role.
“Without getting the roles right, the responsibilities always break.”
God Defines the Role, Not the Chore Chart
Paul lays it out in Ephesians 5, beginning with the verse that so often gets skipped: “submitting to one another in the fear of God” (Ephesians 5:21).
That is the foundation everything else stands on. Then come the roles. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her” (Ephesians 5:25).
Headship is not a throne. It is servant leadership. The husband’s call is to lay his life down for his wife, to seek her good ahead of his own.
And the wife’s call to submission is not the doormat our culture pictures. It is active, not passive. It is a strong woman bringing her strengths, gifts and voice to serve her husband in his call to lead.
Neither role is a ranking. Equal in value, different in function.
I understand why people bristle at this. But notice what it actually is. God gives us defined roles, not defined responsibilities. The roles are His to set. The responsibilities He leaves to us, to work out together.
If the word submission makes you picture the 1950s housewife, quiet and confined to the kitchen, that picture came from a decade, not from the Bible. The noble wife of Proverbs 31 trades, teaches, leads and manages the economy of her household. She is anything but passive.
And when you both know your role, the responsibilities finally become easy. They flow from the posture instead of a power struggle, two people serving each other instead of competing. The dishes go back to being logistics.
Roles never change. Seasons do, and so do the responsibilities.
Sin Bends the Role First
Sin does not start by distorting the chores. It distorts the role, and each role bends in two directions.
Headship gets pushed toward domination and dictating. Or it gets abandoned into passivity and checking out.
Submission gets pushed into silence, no voice and no opinion. Or it gets abandoned into control, running everything.
And the distortions feed each other. A passive husband leaves a gap his wife feels forced to fill, so she picks up the leading. A silenced wife lets a dominating husband keep dominating, unchallenged. Each one makes the other feel necessary.
When It Hits the Home
A distorted role gives you a distorted view of the responsibilities. This is where it lands in real life.
The dominating man does not carry more, he assigns more. The chores become commands. He exempts himself, because “I provide,” and his sense of meaning drifts out of the home. Providing becomes his only responsibility.
The passive man might do a chore when he is asked, but he never takes initiative and never carries the mental load. He is happy for his wife to make every decision, and quietly hands her the weight of those decisions too.
The quiet, silenced wife takes on everything. She does not feel free to challenge her husband, and burns out underneath the house she is holding up.
The dominating wife seizes all of it, because she has learned she cannot trust him to carry it. The wife who, as the saying goes, wears the pants.
Here is the uncomfortable part.
The dominating man paired with the quiet wife is what gets called the traditional marriage. The passive man paired with the dominating wife is what gets called the modern one. Both are distortions. Neither is the biblical picture.
And that is why you keep having the same fight. You are arguing about the dishes when neither of you knows what posture you are standing in.
The Holy Centre
God’s design is different roles that pull you both back to a holy centre. Submission that does not collapse into passivity. Headship that does not harden into domination.
When you live your God-given role, you pull your spouse back from the extremes.
The husband is neither dominating nor passive, but leading by laying his life down. The wife is neither silenced nor controlling, but bringing her full strength to serve his call to lead. And he cannot demand submission. She gives it freely, as a response to a man who lays his life down for her.
You end up balancing each other. In our house, when things get hard, I want to get moving and Tawhiwhi wants to pause. Neither of us is wrong. On its own, each instinct drifts to an extreme. Together, they steady each other.
Christ is the picture of both roles at once. Perfect headship, leading by laying down his life. Perfect submission, yielding to the will of the Father. When you are struggling in your role, that is where you look.
For us it has been a journey, not a switch. Understanding our roles the way the Bible defines them is what finally let us work together on the responsibilities, and keep renegotiating them through every season since.
Your Next Step
Start where we started, with the responsibilities out in the open.
We turned our list into a free guide: the couples responsibility checklist. It lists every job in a home, the visible ones and the invisible thinking work, so you can each mark what you actually carry, compare honestly, and re-choose the split together, so the division of labour in your marriage matches the season you are in.
→ Download the free couples responsibility checklist
We go much deeper on all of this on The Formational Show. The game we played to count up who actually does what in our house, and the full conversation on headship, submission and the holy centre.
→ Watch The Formational Show
And if what you are carrying feels bigger than the chore list, the free wellness check is a gentle 3 minute starting point that maps where the weight is really sitting. None of this replaces a good counsellor either. If the resentment in your home runs deep, walking with one is one of the wisest moves a couple can make. This work sits alongside that, never instead of it.
→ Take the free wellness check
You were not designed to be unseen in your own home. Neither is the person across the table.
