Try written to do lists. Crossing them off feels great.

Bonus tip: add “sexy time” (or whatever you all call it) to the list

I’m a man who had to do this. My partner was going through some pretty rough times in grad school, then left school, and had a lot of mental health work to go through. I was trying to be supportive, but we had to have a few conversations where I said that I didn’t find her exactly attractive in the moment because it felt like I was more of a guardian than a partner. It’s gotten a lot better since then, but it can be hard when your partner is going through hard times (or is just lazy, in some cases) and doesn’t see things as you do.

Everyone needs to put in effort. It doesn’t need to be symmetrical (meaning you don’t have to do all the same things), but it should be approximately equal in terms of effort in both the relationship and your living situation

Men have no idea just how exhausting it is to have to carry all of that weight. Well, some do, I’m sure. I haven’t met any, personally

When did this become about gender politics…?

But yikes.

Imagine the horror of I said the same statement but reversed the genders, and the stereotype.

I actually just listened to that episode yesterday, that whole show is pretty great (also, the one author’s other podcast - 5-4 (“a podcast about how much the supreme court sucks”) - is consistently amazing), but for anybody out there who doesn’t do podcasts and wants a summary,

tl;dl All the good ideas in it were stolen from other places and the author is a secret fundamentalist who thinks women need to get back in the kitchen and gay people need to get back in the closet. For example, [this Q & A article from 2013](web.archive.org/web/…/qa-my-child-is-gay/]

Q: “My son has recently told us that he is gay. I’m having a very hard time dealing with it. How can I help him with this and still show love?”

Gary Chapman: Disappointment is a common emotion when a parent hears one of their children indicate that he/she is gay. Men and women are made for each other—it is God’s design. Anything other than that is outside of that primary design of God. Now I’m not going to try explain all the ins and outs of homosexuality, but what I will say is this—we love our children no matter what. Express your disappointment and/or your lack of understanding, but make it clear that you love them and that you will continue to love them no matter what. I would also encourage you to ask your child to do some serious reading and/or talk to a counselor to try to understand him/herself better while continuing to affirm your love.

Also, from this review of the podcast

For the episode on the book, Shamshiri went back to the original ’90s text, which contains, among other debunked gender stereotypes, an assertion in the “Physical Touch” chapter that men want sex all the time, whereas women need emotional connection for intimacy to be satisfying. (Nowhere in Chapman’s books is any attention paid to the romantic dynamics of queer couples—at one point, Shamshiri jokes that such relationships are “like the female orgasm, not discussed or implied.”) In one chapter, a woman tells Chapman that her husband verbally berates her and refuses counseling. Chapman, in the 1992 version, suggests that the husband’s love language is physical touch and counsels the wife to start initiating sex frequently and more aggressively. When she balks because sex with him makes her feel used and unloved, he advises her to draw upon Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in order to gather strength. In the anecdote that appears in later editions, Shamshiri mentions, Chapman simply suggests that the wife be more physically affectionate in general. Although the sexual mandate is less explicit there, the idea that sex is a sacrifice that women must endure in heterosexual marriage persists.