On Imbalances in Roles

For most of my adult life I played the “helpless one” — pretending I couldn’t cook, load the dishwasher, or run the washing machine. Not because I couldn’t, but because it was convenient. Inside, a setting many of us know was talking: “I earn the money, I keep the family safe — the rest isn’t my zone.” It felt logical, even noble. And then I saw the full scale of the self-deception!

The question isn’t who cooks and who earns. We can hold many roles at once — what matters is how conscious, spoken, and mutual the tilts inside them are. Because otherwise, read literally, a man who gives no time to his wife or kids because of work, hobbies, friends is simply a bad husband or father.

We often live inside scripts we don’t remember choosing:
— the man “works,” and the woman is “by default” in charge of the children, the home, the schedules, the family medicine cabinet, the holidays, and the mood;
— a manager figures that because he “pays the salary,” he gets to be cold and rude — as if money bought him out of being human;
— a grown son keeps living like a guest in his parents’ house — “mom always managed, she’ll manage now too”;
— one partner pursues spiritual growth while the other handles all the “earthly” tasks, and while one “searches for meaning,” the other burns out.

Complementing each other is fine. But only up to the point where it turns into a deficit in one role and an overload in the other. Imbalance always arrives quietly — through unspoken expectations and invisible fatigue.

The most important question is who we see beside us: a function, or a living person? The whole notion of a “better half” always struck me as strange — it literally means each part is counted as incomplete from the start. I find the opposite logic far more interesting — to enter a relationship whole, and to meet not the empty spaces in each other but the abundance.

Yes, there’s delegation. Yes, each of us has our strengths. But the starting mental stance matters. You can say right away: “That’s not my responsibility.” Or you can say: “I’m part of this process.” Cook dinner together — and the home fills with warmth. Ask a colleague how his family is doing — and we’re more than just a job title.

Being engaged in every role doesn’t mean always doing everything together. It’s more about emotional presence than the physics of the task, though that matters too. It’s about belonging, respect, gratitude. About the question: “What does my partner feel when we’re missing from something we were meant to share?”

Here’s to all of us seeing the full spectrum of our roles in every relationship — and being tender in each one! 😎