Ever notice how even the most ordinary things can feel a little extra special when you're doing them with the right person? While I've been soaking up the sunshine and enjoying more time with my partner, I’ve been thinking about just that. It’s funny how something like grocery shopping or making dinner—tasks that normally feel like chores—can become fun and meaningful when you’re doing them with someone you love. It’s made me appreciate those little moments, even the mundane ones, because we’re turning them into shared experiences. And it’s given us the perfect opportunity to rethink how we handle our household tasks—no more gatekeeping the chores!

Speaking of teamwork, it’s got me thinking about how key collaboration is in any relationship, especially when it comes to running the household. Why stick to those old rules of splitting chores down the middle when life is constantly changing? We’ve started swapping tasks depending on who has the time or energy, and honestly, it’s been a total game-changer. If you and your partner haven’t tried this yet, pour yourselves a coffee (or a glass of wine!) and make a list of everything that needs doing at home. You might be surprised how much there is—and how much better it feels when you’re tackling it as a team!

About the Host:

Meet Crystal, your relationship and social health coach. Crystal is the founder of Sparked Forever Relationship & Singles coaching. She started her journey supporting the neurodiverse community in navigating this, sometimes frustrating, neurotypical social world. Lessons and inspiration from her earlier work drives Crystal’s passion for bringing couples and singles together through acceptance, understanding and big picture thinking to grow vibrant relationships. Crystal understands that the foundation for our social health and well-being starts with making connections to others. When Crystal is not working with couples, she loves to be out on adventures with her partner and bonus kids or spending time connecting with friends over good food and fun music.

Links:

https://sparkedforever.com/

https://www.instagram.com/sparkedforever/

https://www.instagram.com/sparkitsocial/

https://www.tiktok.com/@sparked_forever

Thanks for listening!

Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page.

Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!

Subscribe to the podcast

If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

Leave us an Apple Podcasts review

Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.

Welcome to our love space today. It's great to have you here listening from near and far, and I've been really lucky today enjoying a sunny day. You know, it's not always sunny in the fall here, so it's always nice when that happens. And I also actually am getting to luck out lately that my partner, my love of life, has a slightly slower work schedule now, which means, you know, after work times, we get to spend a little bit more time chilling and relaxing. And, you know, doing some of those simple things together that we can often take for granted or not even realize, other things we can do together with other people, you know, and that could even be something like making dinner together, or grocery shopping. I mean, grocery shopping, I just can't get I love it, but I can get so overwhelmed with it, it's really weird, and it starts to turn into, like, a whole big task monster for me and and having my partner come with me and like just, we can have a meander around the store and get inspired about what to eat. You know, me, I'm always talking about food, and I get inspired to what to eat. And I don't have to carry it all the way out of my car by myself. I don't have to carry it in the house by myself out and have to always push the card around by myself. I can get some second opinions on things. I just it just really feels that my cup is just the best, and I really love it and appreciate it when he's able to do that. And this got me thinking about how sometimes we can make the mistake of gatekeeping, you know, in relationships, especially around weird, odd things like chores, or, you know, the way we think something should be done in the household management and that there's only one way to do it. And that really made me, you know, start to really piece together that idea of, you know, and I always throw the word around here, of that T of having teamwork and collaboration, rather than just, you know, two people working together on separate parts. So as you know, I love to say that our relationships need to be teamwork, collaborations. And the reason that I use both these words together is because they kind of get at one thing, but from a slightly different way. So I'll just read you the two definitions. So teamwork, according to the Cambridge dictionary, on online it defines teamwork as the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing. Okay, perfect and collaboration as the combined actions of a group of people working together effectively to achieve a goal. So it's not only about two people being in a situation together and working on a common goal, but it's also about combining our actions together to create an outcome, right? I love this combining piece. I think it's really just so important and and I know that, like I understand we all have really busy lives. I understand that, but just think of this idea many of us can get stuck in that, in those negative thought patterns, especially for doing a bit of gatekeeping on certain chores, like maybe no one can do the groceries except for us, or no one knows how to do the laundry in the correct way except for us. And so and many of us can get stuck in these negative thought patterns, especially if we have busy lives and we're feeling stressed out, and we start to think thoughts about or question how much actual effort and energy that our partner is putting in right we can start to feel that because we have so much on our plates that we're doing all the work. And that could be, I mean, for some of for some of you guys out there, maybe that is true, but I think a lot of times it can be more of a perception piece about how much work each person is doing, and there's a lot of focus right now, I know on mental load, right on all the social media platforms and how we need to rewrite gender roles, etc. But again, here I'm going to bring this out to a big picture idea for you, because it's not necessarily or like, we don't need to get caught up in all that. We don't need to get caught up in the mental load and the, you know, gender role politics and all of that. We can actually pull it out to a big picture idea, okay? And then you get to fill in the details of how it's going to work, right? How your teamwork, collaboration, group project is going to work in your relationship, in your household, and we don't have to wait for society and for the media and for culture to tell us who should be doing what around the house. We don't need to you guys can actually decide for yourself. Amazing, right? Who knew? Who knew that you could not? Decide how to run your own house yourself. You don't actually have to listen to anything on the media. Okay? So I think again, it's going to be simple. It's going to be simple, but it's going to surprise you how a reframe like this is actually going to change your day to day and make it feel smoother and more flowy, and just like you want to be there more, and that's where we should want to be, right? We have this life. We should want to be in it. We should be just like, oh, how do I get to the next day and the next day and the next day? Because do you know what one day you run out of days, and there is no next day. So, so we were just here waiting until that final last day. No, that sounds horrible. Let's not do that. I don't want any of you guys to do that out there. So we're going to make this example particularly for this house management topic about making it into a teamwork, collaboration. But really, you could adjust these ideas for many, many of the kind of, I guess, what would you call them, like Organizational Behavior things in your household, but anywho. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to get rid of our old school thought that we need to divide the chores around the house like here's my list of five things, here's your list of eight things, and that that is what we do until the day we die. Throw that out. That's silly, that's archaic, as we probably know, right? And that's probably where people get like, why we need to rewrite the gender dynamics in a household potentially, right is because we do have a lot of these old school, weird beliefs that we've picked up along the way, and maybe those worked when one person gets to stay home and house management is their full time job 100% but when that is not the case for many people nowadays, then we need to change it up. So first we're going to throw out that idea right, right? We don't. We could each have three chores, right? And then maybe we do five together, or maybe we each do pieces of all of them. I don't know, but we're going to throw out the idea that we're just dividing it in like a Pharisees list, because, you know, life is not always fair, and our our work dynamics change. Like, I know my job is like, well, it's not actually very seasonal, but my partner's job is a little bit more seasonal. Has it's more ups and downs. And I was actually saying my job has more of its ups and downs too, right? Because, you know, people will want to work on, want to work on the relationships at certain times a year, more than other times a year. It's kind of odd, but it is true. So anywho, so there's going to be those ebbs and flows about who has the energy and who has the time and who has the capacity. Now, some other people, you work same, see sames, these all the time. And so, you know it's going to be, it could still change, right? Okay, so we're going to throw out that idea that things are set in stone. We have to divide it 100% even otherwise, if it's not even it's no good. Okay, we're getting rid of that, and we can also, we're going to also remember that we can switch our chores every day, every week, every month, every year. Again, this is a detail right about whether like but I would say throw away the idea that, hey, these are your five chores for lifetimes, and these are my five and never will we do anything else. Now, let's throw that rule out. But again, how often you want to switch or change chores? Do we change them all today? Are our chores in a package deal, and these five chores always go together and we switch chore packages. I don't know that's a detail that you get to fill in in your relationship. That's how you're going to make it work for you. Okay, so the big picture is, again, just to reiterate, the big picture is that there are actually no rules about who should do what chores, or that they need to be done independently, right? We can do them together. So not only are we collaborating on this plan to work with each other, but we're also collaborating maybe on the individual chore itself. Maybe we're working together in the moment, right? So, and there's also no rule that we need to commit to that chore for the rest of our lives. Okay? Perfect. The next piece is that you is that you need to have a super clear understanding of what all the pieces of house management actually are. And you might be thinking right now, well, Crystal, there's, I can tell you there's seven chores, and I do five of them, and the other person does too, but I can probably tell you that actually, rather than seven tours, there's probably actually 27 or 37 or 97 I don't know, depends how small. I guess you want to break your chores into pieces, but there's probably many, many more things that are actually needing to be done on a regular basis than you're thinking about. So if you're not realizing the existence of all these other little pieces

that are falling into the week, they'll they're going to add up. They could be accident. Mentally falling onto one person, depending where they're adding up. So this is your first, your first little challenge part, your first little step is that you are actually going to you could even, you know, have a little bit of a two for here, because, you know, I love my two for ones, you could have a little romantic wine in a nappy, or a little coffee and a donut or a little whatever you like to do, to kind of relax and be in like a cozy little space together where you can do some writing. Okay? And I want you to brainstorm. It's going to be a romantic, wine happy brainstorming session, right? Which is so great because you're getting to spend quality time and you're getting to grow your collaborative teamwork skills, wonderful. And maybe because you're going outside your comfort zone with doing a brainstorm together or making a list together, then you're getting a bit of vulnerability in there, right? Oh, my goodness, like a three for one. Okay, it's perfect. I love these. Okay, so, or you can also, you gotta have your little brainstorm, okay? And you're going to write out all of the chores you think you exist. You can also, I mean, you can put your brainstorm on the fridge. You can also make it more of a list. And then when it's up on your fridge, as things come up, if things are coming up that aren't on the list, then you're going to add them to the list, right? And that's going to give you a really clear picture of what you actually what is actually required for house management. Okay? So then back to our expectations. I know we've been talking about those a lot lately. And you know, we're going to talk about our expectations for this list of chores. So we're going to really want to think about what is our gold standard for each of these chores, or, like, you know, maybe not each of them, but kind of the bigger ones, or the ones that maybe have a standard, and what's the minimal standard for it. So for example, you know, say something like cleaning the bathroom, there might be an amount of clean it needs to be when you guys are both just there having a busy week, and an amount of clean it needs to be when you're having guests coming over, or maybe those in laws that we were chatting about last episode, right? So when those people are coming over, don't we don't have to stress ourselves with perfection when it's not needed. Okay? So please don't be like, No, all of my chores and errands, I have one goal standard, no, because that's like, just silly, and you're putting too much, too many rules and expectations on yourself for no reason, right? So, and just like, if we're thinking about the studies about teamwork. I mean, they unfortunately, come mostly from business literature, but one of their big things is that teamwork is actually really great. It boosts a lot of, you know, morale, and actually makes people more creative when they get to collaborate with other people who have different skill sets than them. So that is great. So remember we talked about the people gatekeeping because you're like, ah, only I can do the groceries in the best way possible, or only I can make the bed in the way it's supposed to be made. Is actually the more you start to be flexible and let in other people's strengths and other people's perspectives, the more creative and the more fulfilled that you start to be in your own work and or, you know, house management chores, right? Not so some of you are gonna be like, I'm never gonna be fulfilled by those. But it's actually true, because you will feel that you're working towards a common goal. And that's what this literature says, is that if we don't have a clear understanding of what our objectives and our goals are, that we won't have a direction, we won't be able to gage how things are going or if things need to be tweaked, or if we're on the right track, and so then we'll just fall into our old habits, right? We'll just fall into doing what we think we should do, or what we've always done, and then we're back in the blahs, right? So let's not do that. Let's make sure we have a clear understanding of where we're going, a clear understand for goals, because then we also know what we can celebrate. Okay, so we're going to make a plan of who is going to do what, and what this could look like. And again, it can be every like anything from we do every chore and Aaron together, and nothing will be done independently. Now it's all going to be collaboration every single moment, two right? So he washes the dishes, I dry them, I put the laundry into the washing machine, in the dryer, and he folds it, you know, he preps the ingredients for the recipe. I put it together, right? All the way from that to hey, here's your list, and here's mine, and I'll see you next week. Now, you know, you know me, and you know I'm going to be a bit dissuade you from doing it that way, right, where you guys just kind of get your roommate lists and then walk the other way. But I encourage you to have something in between and at least a few chores that you are doing jointly or together, because when. You have time, right? When you have time to go grocery shopping together, or to do some garden work together, or to do some house tagging for the guests together, you both get to see the amount of effort and energy that everyone is putting into this project of house management, right? You get to, it's really easy when we come home to for us to jump to conclusions about how much effort or energy, or, you know, detail, my brain's totally slipped there, how much detail someone has put into a detail orientation, yeah, that someone has put into their care for, you know, doing this particular errand or chore, it's so easy to jump to conclusions about when we see, you know, a little spot or a little something that's missed, to start thinking that they just didn't do anything at all, or that they just didn't care about doing a good job. And now we're in that negative thought loop, and now we're having a negative interaction about the house management again, right? So when you guys can kind of do some of those chores together, it actually changes your perspective on how much time and energy and effort the person probably does regularly put into those tasks, right? And it's also nice to both be using that same kind of energy at the same time, right? Then you can both have some rest and some fun energy at the same time, or, you know, whatever it's going to be, because it does kind of suck when one person is relaxing while you are the person doing the cleaning, right? Or you are the person who has to do your house management now, because the other person can do it later, right? It kind of does throw off the dynamic a bit. Again, that's more of a detail about what's important to the dynamics in your relationship. You may not care. I get quite a bit of FOMO about being able to relax, um, or like, oh, I won't get my relaxing time. And so the other nice piece about reframing house management into a teamwork, collaboration project is that it becomes an open conversation. It becomes something that is never set in stone, and it can be revisited whenever it needs to be tweaked. Then our communication, and our conversations around house management become positively based, rather than about criticism, rather than about comparisons between who does more. It's not about who is wrong or right or who does more or less, it becomes focused on how we run the house in a way that makes it a wonderful, comfortable space, right? A lot, a wonderful, comfortable, love space to live in, right? And in an effective in the most effective way possible, or in an efficient way possible, right? And it might not be effect efficient or effective right at the start, because there's so many pieces we're putting in here. But if you start practicing your collaboration in this zone, you are going to notice the benefits of it in other pieces of your relationship. It is going to flow out and support other areas. It's going to help you in your communication during hard conversations. It's going to help you with opening up about other expectations, right? It's going to foster more collaboration, you know, even in intimacy, Oh, right. Because if you really think about it, physical intimacy is, is really it's a collaborative Teamwork project with a common goal. So there you go, and the last piece that you will need for this. And again, this comes out to the business research, but I think it is so applicable and beneficial for your relationships is that if you have some sort of reward, some sort of benefit for you, know, going outside of your comfort zone and trying this reframe, right, and trying to tweak and trying to be vulnerable with each other, so some sort of it can be whatever you want, but some sort of celebration or treat or or something, once you've hit some sort of success, and you get to this would be one of your objectives. This would be one of the things you can put in place. Is how you're going to gage success, right? So even if it's like a hey, we tried the new chore schedule this week, and we check checked off eight out of 10 things, great. Then It's movie night, or great it's a pop in down at the new brewery down the street, or whatever is going to be your reward for going outside of your comfort zone together and trying something new. So remember that you need to throw out any of these silly old rules, right and expectations we have about how house management is done, then we need our clear understanding of what needs to be done and what the standards are. Then we're going to try out this new schedule, this new plan, we're going to reward ourselves as a couple for our amazing work, and then we're going to tweak whatever details aren't working right working as a collaborative team. You know, this is an ongoing Teamwork project, just like our relationship, right? We're going to keep tweaking working as our collaborative team is is really going to highlight. You're going to find that it's going to highlight for the both of you,

you know, how much energy you put into the relationship and all. Also that you both matter, that you're both important, wonderful pieces that are needed in this relationship. It's going to be an opportunity for you to communicate in a positive way in something that was maybe negative before is going to support you to stay sparked.