So I really wanna dig into this a little bit because what do you feel like it looks like in practice to maintain emotional intimacy To have a strong relationship amid the daily demands of family life, like the hamster wheel tasks and, like, how do you do that? [laughs]

There are a lot of things to say here.

So I think one piece that's really important, it's a mindset piece, but it's having a clear understanding that, especially after kids, but just in life in general, your relationship is going to get incredibly imbalanced as you move through life together.

There is this momentum that picks up in our modern family lives that just pulls us away from ourselves as individuals, but also pulls us apart in our relationship.

And so when we understand, hey, our relationship's gonna regularly get sort of thrown off kilter, it normalizes the need to come in and make adjustments.

So adopting this belief that it is normal for my relationships to always need something, I think is really important for us to carry into our relationship all the time, our relationship with ourselves, but also after kids.

Because what I see happen a lot is that usually, I'm speaking generally, the woman takes on the role of managing the relationship, and when she approaches her partner to have a conversation around some things that need to change, there's a lot of defensiveness, a lot of resistance, instead of just this belief that, "Hey, life's busy.

While I have you today.

[laughs]

My hus- my husband is amazing at giving me short, to-the-point pieces of advice, although there are usually some pieces of truth in there, um, that I don't like the delivery, but if I really sit with the message, it can be helpful.

So I, I think there's a th- many things that we can do to protect ourselves.

So, uh, one of the things is we have to practice discernment and, and h- and what information we allow into our hearts and into our heads.

Uh, we, we are managers of ourselves.

We have agency.

Uh, in my first book, I talk about how we have a relationship with ourself, um, as mothers, as parents, and we are responsible for checking in with ourselves and, and seeing what we need, making adjustments.

Um-

What do you think men are missing when they, when they look at the woman in their life that they do love, and they, they, they fail to understand where she's at with all this?

You, you gave a great segue, because it, it is that sort of in-the-weeds definition, that Venn diagram that I, um, I have in my book.

It really came out of, um, I did interviews for my book with men and with women, and I remember sitting with this one woman.

She's like, "Can you just make a visual of the mental load? Because I cannot get my husband to understand it." And so that's how this came about.

But I think...

I'll explain what men are missing, but let me explain this visual really quickly.

Um, it essentially is a picture of the three types of energy that we draw from to carry out tasks that are involved in the invisible labor of home and family life.

I'm hop- I'm hoping you have an, I'm hoping you have an answer for this one 'cause no one else on the wor- in the world does.

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My kids melt down with me way more than they do my husband, so he can get away with things differently than I can.

And so I think that it's really important that we give a little bit of that space to our partners, release, we release some control.

I, I have actually, um, [lip smacks] when I talk about the mental load, I talk about it, you have to address it in two, two domains.

So there's within work that's required, um, to addressing the mental load, and then there's the between work, so like the actual conversations you're having with your partner.

And part of the within work is paying attention to how am I showing up when it comes to the mental load? What am I doing to shutting, to shut down more participation from my partner? Because we do that, and we don't mean to, but we do it.

And so, um, I have five behaviors that backfire that we often engage in, and one is micromanaging that you mentioned.

What, what do we do then?