This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
How does a life spent studying gender equality translate to someone’s real relationship? In 2021, Joe Pinsker wondered if the gender scholars he’d interviewed for his stories were able to take what they knew home with them. He discovered that they seemed better than the average individual at avoiding common patterns in different-sex relationships.
But even all of their training couldn’t prevent some pesky norms from creeping in: “The women I interviewed tended to disproportionately handle the managerial elements of running a home, as well as their household’s ‘mental load’—the invisible logistical and emotional work of, among other things, keeping track of when kids need new clothes, planning family outings, and remembering to send birthday cards to loved ones,” Pinsker wrote. Today’s newsletter explores strategies to ensure an equal household—and why making that happen is so hard.
On Equal Partnership
The Gender Researcher’s Guide to an Equal Marriage
By Joe Pinsker
In their personal lives, sociologists attempt to ward off the same inequalities that they study at work. (From 2021)
A Smarter Way to Divide Chores?
By Joe Pinsker
Couples who share every task, rather than having their own separate to-do lists, tend to be more satisfied with their relationship. (From 2022)
Doomed to Be a Tradwife
By Olga Khazan
Can a marriage ever truly be equal?
Still Curious?
- “What I learned about equal partnership by studying dual-income couples”: “I studied more than 100 dual-income couples and found a few things in common among the ones who managed to create partnerships that felt truly equal,” Jennifer Petriglieri wrote in 2019.
- Masters of love: Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity, Emily Esfahani Smith wrote in 2014.
Other Diversions
- Boredom is the price we pay for meaning.
- Nine books to reset your view of the world
- When did literature get less dirty?
PS
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Mike M., 73, sent this photo of “sunset on Lake Springfield from the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Gardens,” taken one day after Lincoln’s birthday.
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Isabel