Are you running the holidays or are the holidays running you? If you’ve ever felt like the personal assistant of your relationship—managing schedules, planning meals, and magically ensuring everyone’s holiday joy—this episode is for you. It’s so easy for couples to fall into that trap, where one person takes on the mental load while the other gets to enjoy the festivities. But here’s the good news: collaboration is possible! It just takes recognizing that we don’t all come into relationships with the same skills—and that’s okay.

We’ll talk about building skills together, letting go of gatekeeping tasks (yes, you can teach your partner to make the turkey), and relaxing our standards so good enough feels like magic. Plus, I’ll remind you to skip the comparison game and create your own authentic Love Space—quirks and all. You don’t need a Martha Stewart Christmas to have a meaningful one. Let’s collaborate, love, and celebrate in a way that works for you!

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

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Welcome to our love space today, things are getting busy and ramping up around my house and my work and my life with the holidays almost here, so I celebrate Christmas, and it is just zooming up on me. But also, you know, trying to get I guess it's ramping up to Christmas and then ramping down the end of the year, right? We're getting so close to the end of 2024

if you're listening to this as it drops. Welcome if you are listening to this in the future. Hello, future. You. So I've really been diving in and exploring with a lot of couples lately. And this usually happens kind of, you know, this time of year, but also, you know, can happen in any of our busy seasons, right? And by busy seasons, I don't necessarily mean like, holiday seasons all the time, or like summer break or things like that. It can just mean like, you know, sometimes we're in places like we're starting a new business, or we are changing jobs, or we have a baby on the way, we have a second baby on the way, we have a parent in law, or parents in law moving in or moving out, or anything like that, where, you know, we're not just in our day to day routine, and things are changing in Life. To me, that's a busy season, and I've been exploring with a lot of couples about how we can be better teamwork collaborators, right? Because, you know, that's my jam around here, how we can be really good teamwork collaborators, and not personal assistants. Because I think a lot of couples can really it's easy for us to get stuck in that bad habit of one person being a personal assistant in the relationship and taking on a lot of the mental load. And I know that we can start to get into, you know, just the over generalization of this is a gender roles problem and and so that there's nothing we can do about it, you know, which I think is partially true. But when we get stuck into those kind of ideas, right into those kind of theories, in just our everyday life, what I think it happens is that we're just in a theory tug of war, or now we feel that there is nothing that we can do personally to move forward, and that we are just stuck in gender roles or whatever have you. But this, you know, leaves out how complex and how dynamic your relationship is, right? The relationship you have is so is is not complicated. It is complex. You are two human beings that have come together from potentially different backgrounds, the different times of life, whatever may have you a different life experiences, and you are a dynamic growing connection, right? You're not stagnant, you're not static, you're not like, Hey, we got together, boop, now we're like this for the next 50 years, and we're the exact same people. No, you guys have your own relationship dynamic, and you guys are denying dynamic, growing, changing, wonderful human beings. And so by just stuffing everything into this as a gender role problem, I think it takes away from that, and it takes away from our own personal empowerment if we're just going to believe that the world is doing this to us. So let's get away from that idea. And you know, let's think about the fact that we can't change the world, right? So let's get away from the idea we can't change the world, but we can change our own personal behaviors, our own personal actions, our own personal thoughts and frameworks in, you know, our by personal, I mean like in ourselves and then also in our relationship dynamic, we can make those changes. We can make all of those changes today, right this moment, if we want. So what is, what does personal assisting end up looking like in a relationship? So I just quickly took some of the business terms. So because, you know, in business, I think we can think of personal assisting as that's the person who helps the boss be productive. So just by the personal assistant doing their job, keeping track of the schedule, taking on the mental load, all of those things, the boss person gets to enjoy their role gets to do everything that they need to do. And this is kind of where it differs from relationships, is that the boss person in a relationship tends to be the person who gets to sit back and do all the enjoyment, whereas the personal assisting person is taking on all of the work and project completion. And that's how it's a little bit of a different definition when we think about it outside of business, a collaborator, on the other hand, has competencies and skill sets where they are, have the ability to equally add ideas, solutions, supports, facilitation in their area of expertise. So let me say that. Again, a collaborator. As a collaborator, you have the skill set, you have the ability to add value to the Teamwork project in your area of expertise or background. And I think that's where couples fall apart on the teamwork collaboration, because not everyone right. I think that's how we fall into the bad habit of someone personal assisting, because not everyone has the skill set that we need for life to collaborate in all of our life positions. Okay, maybe that's how we were brought up. Maybe it's just the life experience we had. Who knows, but we may not have the skill set, and actually Libby Ward, who I love, to fall on Tiktok. I believe she's actually a fellow Canadian. She's under the handle diary of an honest mom on Tiktok. She has many posts about the fact that all the mental load often falls to the person who's the stay at home person, or maybe to the person who makes lesser money, or maybe a little bit the gender role person, maybe the person who's playing the more of the wife role. So that means that what happens is you, the person who ends up doing the personal assisting, ends up being responsible for all of the bosses, so not just the husband type person or the person who's not doing all the mental load work, but if there's children there for all of the people in the family, the personal assistant ends up being the person who is, you know, putting everything together and helping everyone else be productive, as in, like, you know, bringing everyone's Christmas joy and cheer, or bringing everyone's holiday cheer. That you have the responsibility when you're doing the personal assisting of being the person who's responsible for everyone's happiness and joy, and whether they enjoyed the family vacation, or whether they've had enough to do on summer vacation, or, like all of those things, right? And I think the reason that happens, and sometimes it falls to one person, is because maybe there's a lack of skills. It could be a lack of delegation, for sure, it could be a lack of sharing, but I think a lot of times it can be a lack of skills, and if there's a lack of skills, then we cannot collaborate, right? So if one person is like, and again, I'm just gonna, because of the time of year, I'm recording this, and what's on my brain, I'm gonna like, make it holiday themed. So you know, if one of us is not good at decorating or baking or organizing the family get together, or whatever you have, then what actually ends up happening is that the one person who does have the skills ends up taking over, right? And they end up not just taking over the physical skills of like, I have to do this and this and this and this and get it checked off the to do those, but they're also taking on the mental load of making sure that to do list gets checked off. So even if some delegation is happening, they are still having the brunt of taking that on when you are the personal assisting person. One of the first steps I help couples with when we are tackling this is the actual list of stuff that needs to be done. So this kind of goes back to, I think it was maybe last week's episode, one of, one of the December episodes about making that wish list for our holiday season, and what are the actual magical things that we want to do in order to make it through this. And I don't know if anyone has watched the Martha Stewart documentary, I know it's like, maybe like, if you're listening as this drops, it's probably a month or two old now, but I was just saying there the whole time thinking to myself like, girl, girl Martha, like, you know, I'm not going to stress myself now out over making all these handmade gingerbread cookies and, you know, making handmade bowls and everything like this. Because actually, what I've learned from that documentary is all of us who you know, kind of were growing up and seeing what it was like to be a homemaker in the 90s and the 2000s that we now all have a skewed vision that this was the kind of household we were supposed to be in. This is what you sold to us, that it would be delightful to make three kinds of turkeys for a family dinner. Oh my gosh, probably why we're all so exhausted now. And really, when she was doing that, she was actually filling the void. She was making three turkeys because she was in a disconnected marriage. Well, I'm not in a disconnected relationship. But I can tell you, actually, in my first marriage, that I would, I would stay up till three in the morning making handmade bows to put on all of the Christmas presents, because I was the only one wrapping Christmas presents. And, you know, I'm not much of or I am worn out, but I, at that time, I wasn't much of a planner, and I, you know, would wait till Christmas Eve to wrap all the presents. So now I'm staying up till three or four in the morning wrapping presents. And had to be up at six in the morning because I had to drive everyone around on Christmas Day, anywho, right, what, and I had that social pressure on me because I was watching someone who was so disconnected in their marriage as we. Have now found out from this documentary that this is this is what they were filling their time up with. This is what they were doing as their love language. This is what they were putting up as their facade to try to make things okay in their relationship. Instead of putting energy into really solving the problems in the relationship, right into being connected, into being a comfortable amount of functional, right? Into collaborating with their lol. And that's what I want for you guys. I want you to put your energy into being connected to being comfortably functional. We don't need to have handmade Christmas bowls on every Christmas. We don't need even store bought Christmas bowls, to tell you the truth. And you know, collaborating with your LOL, right, making the choices that are good for you based on the love and the connection you have for each other and the love you have for life, and not about fear. Okay, so that's really what I help couples. We come up with that wish list first, no matter what busy season it is in their life, we come up with that wish list of what is actually important to everyone. And you know, maybe what the importance is behind it, because communicating that importance helps everyone understand why it gets on the list, or why someone's brain can get stuck on that it may be important. The next step that we usually go through is who has the skills for each of these activities, these to do's these things that need to be done in even who has the skill set to take on the mental load for them. And then, how can it be divided up? How can we work on it together? Right? Because not everything always needs to be divided up and delegated, right? It could be, and I've talked about this many times before, not you know, we could be making dinner together, right? We could be working on the family meal together. It doesn't have to be you're making the family meal and I'm cleaning. We can work on all the tasks together as a full team. Some people prefer and maybe sometimes because of timeline wise, like, we only have four hours to throw this together. So maybe some person, one person has to clean and one person has to do the cooking. I don't know what's on your to do list. Maybe this will bring to light. And this often brings to light. I love this. This makes so many aha moments of the fact that we actually have some skill deficits, and that means that we actually need, maybe not right, if we're in a crisis moment and right, and you're coming to me for your weekly session, you're like, oh my gosh, we have two weeks to get to this finish line. What are we going to do now? Then we don't have time for this step. We might, but we usually don't. But this actually gives us some aha moments. Gives us some eye some eye opening moments about what skill sets people need to learn for the future. So if there is one, only one person who can cook in the house. Maybe that skill set needs to be developed with the other person, right? If there's only one person who knows how to do something, maybe that skill set needs to be developed in the other person, right? If I'm the only one who knows how to do the taxes, or I'm the only one who knows how to mow the lawn, or I'm the only one who knows how to do the recycling, or I'm the only one who knows how to do, you know, right sign on all the Christmas cards.

Design The Christmas card on, you know, Shutterfly, wherever you're doing it. You know, if you're the only person who has that skill set, you can pass that skill set on. Okay, now, like I was saying, if we're rushing to it, uh, you know, a certain deadline, we might not have time to do that right now, but when we have time to do that, that needs to be done. We need to pass that skill set on now. Remember that skills are not fixed, right? Your skills and your abilities are not fixed. You may have some talents and some natural abilities, but there's many, many things we can develop as humans to at least an okay or a good level Okay, as typically functioning adults, we have the power to do that, and we can do it, and we should want to do it in order to be a teamwork collaborator with our partner. Okay, so and again, if we realize, if we have these little eye opening moments, and we realize skills need to be taught, we can make a little plan, a little plan to put aside of when we're going to do that, that's a very important thing to do, is not to just be like, Oh yeah, we're missing this person's missing this. This person's missing this. Okay, well, nice to know. No, be like, hey, actually, in, you know, January, in June, in September, and next week, whenever we have a chance to do next time there's a big family dinner coming up, I'm going to show you how to make the turkey. We're going to make it together, right? Or or whatever. We're going to watch some YouTubes on it, right? We're going to watch some YouTube videos and figure out how to do this. Maybe we both realize we don't really have this skill, and that's why it's such a disaster. All right, let's YouTube it. Let's learn the skill. Okay, now that's just our first layer of this. Our second layer of figuring out how to be teamwork, collaborators. Besides having this physical, concrete skill set of I can make this. Do this. Check this off the to do list. The other big. Big skill that we need as humans in this kind of teamwork, collaboration I find in most couples, is the skill of letting go. Okay? And it comes into a couple different areas of where we need to let go. So one is we need to not gatekeep. We need to let go of the idea that knowing how to do certain things in house management, or certain things in financial management, or certain things in our couple dynamic gives us a certain amount of power. Okay, we need to let go of that, because that creates a power imbalance where you have one person, and I have seen this quite a lot, we have one person who's like gatekeeping many of the house management tasks or gatekeeping, some of the financial tasks, just to have that other person be dependent on them for those things, but is then communicating that they are entirely unhappy being the sole person in charge. So if you are gatekeeping, then don't expect collaboration. That's going to shut it down right away. But I would also say, don't expect the right to complain about that you're the only person who does it if you are gatekeeping. And the other piece that goes with gatekeeping, besides, you know, holding on to that control is an or, or the letting go piece, kind of a mixture of the two. Is we need to let go, and we've talked about this in previous episodes. We need to let go a bit of the standard to which things need to be done. I think this might have come up in the in laws episode, or maybe the shared values episode back. Those will be back in September, I think so. Take a take a peek at those. But you know, whether it's, you know, we're thinking about the fact that things need to look perfect, or they need to be done to a certain standard, some of that we need to let go. When someone is learning a new skill, they are in the learning mode, and we have to understand that they may have a different perspective. They may do something differently than us, but the if the end product is similar, is okay, is pretty good, is passable, as they're learning and as we're growing together, we can let go of our own personal standard for that thing, and we can be flexible as they learn and develop their own thing. And some things are just going to be different. Sometimes it's just going to feel different when going to feel different when one person makes the bed versus the other person. Now, again, if you are having a little stuck brain on exactly how the bed needs to be made, and you're going to take on that responsibility, then you also have to take on the responsibility that you don't get to hold it as a power piece or a guilt piece or a control piece over anyone that's really important, that will be that will get you on that path of resentment, which nobody wants. So let's not go down that path. The other piece that we need to let go of is comparison in our relationship. So whether that's to Martha Stewart, I guess no one's wanting really. I mean, I guess we, probably a lot of us would feel good comparing our relationships to what we now find out in the documentary, but no comparing ourselves to that Martha Stewart ideal of like, Oh, there's the perfect couple, and we need to keep up with the Joneses kind of thing, right? Or over comparing ourselves to social media and kind of what we see on there, right? Because, again, we all know this. We all know that we're only seeing the best of people's lives on social media a lot of the time, or we're only seeing the most dramatic parts of the most inspiring parts of the most whatever, right? We're not seeing the mundane. We're not seeing the routine. We're not seeing how they problem solve. We're not seeing where life takes them. Okay, so comparing ourselves and our life experiences to other like sometimes it's good, but when we are doing it all the time, and nowadays we're through social media and the internet, having so much information that we can consume coming at us, we have so much that we can compare ourselves to and judge ourselves against, and we need to let go of that, right? So, so that is going to actually steal our happiness, rather than being like, Hey, this is a helpful thing to compare, and I will want to bring myself up to that, no, a lot of times, it just steals our happiness and makes us feel not as worthwhile, not as valued, right? We look, we lower our own self value when we over compare, and when we are constantly over comparing, and that's why, you know, we are all so different and so unique in our dynamics, and our relationships are so unique, and that's why I love doing what I do here is to give you guys the big picture and let you fill in your details about however your love quirks in your own relationship, right? Because we are all different, our love quirks in all different ways, right? Our lives are different. Our loves are different, right? Who we think is handsome and beautiful and who we want to touch and kiss, that's all different for each of us, and so we should be filling in our details, our expectations, our shared values as they mean the most to us. Yes, right? That's what's really going to make us the most authentic couple. That's what's going to bring you the most authentic love, the most authentic connection, the most meaningful you know, way to live life as a couple in love, that's what is going to bring you the most. So don't compare. Don't compare. Do let go. Do share with your partner. Do collaborate together. Do learn these new skills together, and you'll be sparked.