EPISODE 35: Fine, I’ll Just Do It Myself: The Danger of Weaponized Incompetence

I think as women, there's a lot of pressure put on us, I think in particular on mothers, to do it all, to be able to take care of all of it and, you know, not need any help. Be so detail oriented. And I think it's hurting so many women. Hello and welcome to the Pillow Talks podcast. We're your hosts, Vanessa and Xander Marin. I'm a sex Therapist with over 20.

Years of experience, and I'm just a regular dude. We share the ups and downs in our relationship while giving you step by step techniques for improving yours.

Make sure you subscribe for your weekly double date full of totally doable sex tips, practical relationship advice, hilarious and honest stories of what really goes on behind closed bedroom doors, and so much more. It's the sex education you wish you'd had. We're starting today not with a song, not with a dance, but with a story. It's a cozy rainy day here in la. We've got the pugs in the studio with us. So if you hear the little pitter patter of raindrops or the loud lawnmower of a pug snore, then that's what we've got going on. But we have a story today from one of our Instagram followers. This rain has got me in the mood. I'm like, the tone has changed.

Yeah. Warm, cozy. I got a cup of tea. Now I just need a couch and a blanket.

Literally right behind you.

That's true.

Do you want to curl up over there?

I could. No, I will. I will sit here and look at my beautiful wife while we record our wonderful podcast. Wow.

Okay, what is it today? Okay, so here is what one of our Instagram followers sent over to us. My husband is awesome and I love him to pieces. However, in all caps, in all caps, he won't put away the baby's stuff because he claims he doesn't know where it goes. He hasn't changed a diaper or given a bath in five months because he says he's not good at it. I tell him diapers aren't that hard, so it would be difficult for him to mess that up. But he retaliates with saying that if they aren't so hard, then I shouldn't be so exhausted. I know he loves our baby, but sometimes he acts more like a babysitter than a dad. Today we are talking about weaponized incompetence. So what the hell is this kind of scary sounding phrase? It is when one partner pretends that they can't do a task so that the other partner will do it for them.

Or they play up their lack of knowledge of how to do something as a means of not needing to learn because their partner will do it for them.

Or they agree to do a task, but then they ask you so many little questions about each and every little step. Step of the task that you regret even having asked them to do it in the first place. Weaponized incompetence. It's a form of gaslighting. It's a form of manipulation. Your partner is trying to get you to do something that they want you to do without explicitly saying it.

And there's a whole range of shades of weaponizing competence or really how manipulative it is. It can be anywhere from someone truly not knowing how to do something and. And kind of innocently just not ever asking, how do I do this? In hopes that they won't really ever have to do it.

Yeah.

And it can range all the way to someone actually knowing how to do something or being really good at it and just really not wanting to do it and being like, I'm just going to pretend to do a really shitty job at this so that I don't get asked again.

Exactly. So there are some classic catchphrases of weaponized incompetence. So if you hear your partner saying any of these phrases, that's a sign that maybe there is some weaponized incompetence going on. I just don't know how to do it like you do.

You have a specific way you like this done?

I don't care about it as much as you do.

I just like how you do it.

Your expectations are too high.

You're just better at it.

Oh, those all pain me. They really pain me to hear. I don't like any of them.

Yeah, if you find yourself saying things like this, it's probably a good time to question why are you really saying this? Is it about your partner or is it actually about you not wanting to do something?

And then the classic catchphrase response to weaponized incompetence. So if you find yourself saying this phrase that could be a little clue that there's some weaponized incompetence going on, fine. I'll just do it myself then. So today we're going to get all into the nitty gritty of this. How weaponized incompetence shows up in relationships, the gender dynamics behind it. Because there's some really interesting stuff that comes up and most importantly, what to do if your partner is doing this.

But before we do any of that, I Am going to do my review of the week where I do my best to make a mild fool of myself trying to interpret emojis.

Are you doing some weaponized incompetence with your emoji game?

Oh, my God, I've been caught.

Are you pretending to be bad at emojis and secretly you're really good at it?

No, that's not true. I'm not good at emojis. But I will say the whole idea of me doing this is so that I could learn emojis. And I'm definitely getting a lot better. So we probably can't really keep up the guise of, like, where I make a fool of myself doing your emojis, because, spoiler alert, I am looking at this review, and I'm just a look ahead. I do suspect that the writer of this review actually misused an emoji.

Ooh, wow. Now he's getting cocky.

Yes, I am a budding emoji master.

So the thing is, if you haven't ever heard us talk about this, we have said, put in your reviews like a complicated emoji for Xander to read. But I will say a lot of people are using the faces. There's a lot of random emojis, totally weird food stuff and, like, household objects and ran. I mean, there's like the crystal ball. There's like random stuff like that.

So I think, like, I wouldn't understand the crystal ball.

I'm just trying to think of example of, like, obviously you would know that one, but, like, we've seen some other strange ones. Like, what is that? Dig deeper, guys. Dig deeper. But also, this would be the worst form of weaponized incompetence because you're still having to read the review of the week every week. You're not getting out of any work?

No, I'm not getting out of anything. In fact, I have to talk longer and make more of a fool of myself. But I digress. We'll continue.

Okay, what is it?

All right. My new favorite podcast. Vanessa and Xander are so relatable and make the concept of sex and sexual communication so comfortable. Before, talking with my partner about what I wanted made me feel. Now this person has entered the tipsy emoji. I know this because we had this a couple times ago, and it's a confusing emoji. It is an impossible looking face to actually make.

And how do you describe it?

I mean, it's just like a weird, squiggly mouth that's, like going in a number of different directions. Sunken, sort of a sunken eye. And eyebrow and a red face. I think, honestly, I think I would say if I just saw that, I'd be like, oh, maybe it's like an awkward face or something like that. Queasy. Like, I feel a little. I feel a little, like, sick to my stomach, but, like, my face isn't green and my tongue isn't out, maybe.

Do you usually put your tongue out when you're sick to your stomach?

No, but I think, like, in emojis is like, yuck, I don't know. So this person, I think, is trying to say that before talking with my partner about what I wanted made me feel queasy, but now I feel confident and empowered.

Wonderful.

Wonderful. I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, but this one is worth it.

Oh, that is a great review. Thank you so much for that. We really genuinely do appreciate your reviews so much. It means a lot to us to get to read a great one. And seriously, we cannot tell you how far this goes and helping the podcast grow, helping us reach new people. So thank you, thank you, thank you for leaving a review. And if you haven't heard us talk about it yet, we also do a giveaway with our review of the week. So how it works is that you leave a quick little review in Apple podcasts every week going forward for life. You are entered into our giveaway. We pick a winner to be the review of the week. If you get picked, then you get to DM us on Instagram, remind us that you're the review winner, and share your question. Tell us what your situation is, and we will send you back a personalized coaching session answering your question, giving you some of our best advice. That's just our little way of saying thank you for taking the time to leave a review.

Or you can just send me a bunch of emojis if you don't actually have a question, and I'll try to muddle my way through them.

Xander will make a recording of himself just for you, going through and trying to describe all the emojis and, you.

Know, just setting expectations in advance. It probably won't be very good.

You imagine, like, the person's partner walking in and be like, what are you watching? Yeah, like, it's my prize.

I won. I won this. Isn't it great?

Okay, so let's get into it. As always, we turn to our trusty Instagram audience to ask them some questions about weaponized incompetence. So first we asked, have you ever experienced this in your relationship? And 55% of people said, Yes. A lot of people had questions about what it was. So I think that number may have been a bit higher if we had led with the description of what it is first. But we also little heteronormative alert. We wanted to know in male female relationships, which partner is the one to display weaponized incompetence more often than the other? We found not a big surprise, but still a pretty huge number. 85% of people said that it's the male in a male, female relationship that displays weaponized incompetence.

Quick sidebar. I'm curious, do you think in non hetero relationships that there is more, less or the same weaponized incompetence?

That's a really good question. I don't know. There are so many gender dynamics that get wrapped up in this that I would venture to guess that overall same sex relationships have less weaponized incompetence than mixed gender relationships. I don't know. Maybe. Would male, male relationships have a little bit more than female? Female? This would be a really good research to do. I'd be super, super curious.

Yeah, this, this would be. This would be great research. I bet you that it would maybe be slightly less in non hetero relationships.

We also asked, where do you see this the most? Like, what area of your relationship does weaponized incompetence come into play? And there were a couple answers that popped out over the other one. So I think far and away the number one thing, finding things. So this was like a classic response that one woman sent over. She said he has lived in this house nine years and he still doesn't know where things are in the kitchen. This is something that comes up in our relationship all the time. Xander is notoriously bad at finding things. And I some. You know, you talked earlier at the episode about like, sometimes it's totally innocent and sometimes it's really purposeful. I have definitely found myself thinking sometimes, like, is he joking? Like, you know, he said he was trying to find something. He looked for it for so long and then he asked for help. And I found it in two seconds, like for real. So I get curious about. Maybe we need to look into the research a little bit about, like, are men's brains actually wired differently? They're just not as objectively just not as good as finding things as women are. I don't know.

I think that is probably true. I have this memory in middle school, kind of like doing research, not a project. Our teacher basically had us do this thing where there was two different puzzles that we had to solve and One was, like, a spatial relations type. Here's a bunch of shapes, and you need to rotate them and move them around to kind of solve a puzzle. And then another one was more of, like, a straight up memory type of thing, where it was like, okay, you get to look at this picture for, like, two minutes and see where all the things. See all the, like, animals in this picture. And then in two more minutes, you have to, like, write down all the animals that you saw. And there was a very stark gender difference. Right. In general, most of the guys in the class had done way better on the spatial relations problem. The guys had done better on the spatial relations problem than the other problem. They'd also done better than the girls on the spatial relations problem. And in general, the girls had done better on the memory problem than. Than the guys had.

Okay, so there might be something to this. We actually just had a perfect example of this that just came up. Xander asked me a couple of days ago, like, hey, babe, do you know where the ketchup is? Which is also, like, another piece of this. We'll get. We'll talk about mental load a little bit later. But I love when he asks me where something is that's, like, closed up in the fridge. Yeah. I'm like, upstairs, and you're standing in front of the refrigerator being like, hey, where's the ketchup? And I'm like, are you kidding me? Except I usually know. I'm like, it's in the door, babe. And then you said, no, there's no ketchup here. I said, okay, look in the cabinet. It's in the middle cabinet on the second shelf. That's where we keep the backup ketchups. No, there's no ketchup there. And so I just took you for your word or at your word? For your word. I took you at your word. And. Okay, wait, we have to do a little aside here. I have to confess, I am starting to become worried that our audience is thinking or is going to think I am just doing this, like, bad at idioms. Is idioms racist?

I don't know. I got nothing for you.

I was starting to worry that people are gonna think I'm just doing it as a shtick. Like, I want to have a little thing that I do in every episode where I, like, no. I say the phrase funny and, like, oh, ha ha. But really, they think that I'm, like, faking it, and I know how to say the phrases, and it's just, like, a dumb shtick, but it is real. I just Like, I cannot wrap my head around very common phrases.

Anyways, this defensiveness is.

It is suspicious. I'm acknowledging. I feel defensive. I feel worried about this. I'm self conscious. It's real. Xander can attest to it. It happens all the time when we are not recording.

It's pretty hilarious. It would be really hard to fake.

To fake it?

Yeah.

Like, I'm not a good actor.

You'd have to script out the entire podcast. Or you'd have to, like, plan out. Like, here. Here are some idioms that I would like to drop, and then here's the way I'm gonna mess it up. That'd be exhausting, man.

It would be a lot of mental labor. A lot of mental load. Okay, going back to the ketchup. So I took Xander at his word, and I purchased two ketchups this morning. One to put in the fridge, one to have as the backup. I got our groceries. I'm putting them away, and what do I see as I open the cabinet? On that second shelf is a ketchup. I have not checked yet. I will after we record this podcast. Maybe we'll have to put it on Instagram. Maybe we'll do a poll. Like, what do you think? Do you think that there is a ketchup in the refrigerator? That should be a poll. That absolutely should be a poll. And I think we should bet on it. What do you want to bet? I say that there is a ketchup in the refrigerator.

All right. I say there isn't. Shall we bet our old trusty oral sex one?

Oral sex?

Yeah. This is actually a thing that Vanessa and I like to do because, really, everybody wins.

It's true.

Yeah. Because, like, we can't really bet money because, like, it's her. Her money is my money. My money is her money. So they'll be like, okay, I'll bet you $10,000. Sure.

I won $10,000. Okay.

Yeah. I'll take it out of our bank account and you can put it right back in.

We'll put it up as a poll on Instagram when we release this episode. Do you think there's a ketchup in the fridge? I'm curious to see how many people have faith in you and your finding abilities.

Well, by the way, but we can't count the full ketchup that you already put in from the grocery store.

Oh, I didn't, because I was like, there's one in the refrigerator.

Okay. Well, I'm pretty sure I remember finishing the ketchup, so. Ooh, I'll be enjoying that blowjob later.

We shall see.

Hope, are you thinking about ketchup?

Delightful. Delightful thing to think about. Yeah, you've been pretty bad sometimes. Like, your shoes, wallet, glasses, all kinds of stuff. So what else came up, babe?

Childcare. He's a legitimate mathematical genius, but he acts like he can't figure out the kid's schedule.

Oh, yeah, Cleaning was another huge one. Someone said my husband once cleaned the entire bathroom head to toe with the toilet brush.

Like, head to toe. Like, as if he also cleaned himself. I cleaned myself head to toe along.

With the bathroom with the toilet brush. Oh, my God.

I'm like, well, it was already. The cleaning supplies were already there.

No, no. Maybe. Maybe if it was like a brand new in the plastic wrap toilet brush. Never been used. But once that toilet brush gets used. Oh, my God.

No, I also feel like the trying to, like. Wait a second. Oh, God.

Are you having trouble with an idiom now?

No, no. I was. I forgot what is included in cleaning the bathroom. I was like. I was like, that toilet brush might scratch up the paint on the walls. And I was like, hold on a second. Nobody washes the walls when they clean the bathroom.

Just, like, mopping down all the walls.

I mean, I guess what I was thinking was, like, this dirty toilet brush that's been scrubbing this toilet for years. And then, like, you're gonna have to wipe down the whole bathroom after, you know?

Oh, yeah, he just made little poopies.

Got everywhere.

Little poopies.

Little poopies.

The sanus. All right, and what's our last example? Read us our last story, babe.

Cooking. I asked my husband to check the chicken in the oven, and he said, yeah, still there. Then left. It was a total, genuine response.

As the chef of our household, do you appreciate this one? She's like, yeah, the chicken's still there. It didn't run away. It came back to life and busted out of the oven. Ran away.

I mean, it's pretty preposterous. If you said this to me, I would be pissed. I would be real pissed. I'd be like, come on, it's still there.

And finally, this last one, it was not a common response, but it made me laugh when I read it. Does going down on me count?

I think this fits. I think this really does.

Emoji. Tipsy slash queasy emoji.

But, I mean, I think this is a legit one. A lot of men, their initial pushback on oral sex is like, I don't feel very comfortable with my technique. Like, I don't know what to do. I don't want to make a fool of myself. As if, like, your own worry about, like, your competence is so big that, like, your partner shouldn't get to experience some pleasure.

Yeah. All right, so let's talk a little bit about, like, how does this show up in our relationship?

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

Let's go. We're going in.

We're going to get real here. Yeah. We each spent a little bit of time separately, like, thinking about the ways that it shows up in our relationship, because it does show up in ours. It absolutely does. And again, it kind of goes back to what Xander said about the shades of it. Like, I actually don't even love the phrase weaponized incompetence, because to me, that sounds like the extreme end of what you were describing. Like a very deliberate, manipulative hiding something from somebody. And I don't think that level of it happens in our relationship. I think in ours, it's much more subtle. It's more nuanced. It's not as purposeful. And I think that probably a lot of people can relate to that. I would say the majority of the times weaponized incompetence comes, it kind of is in these more subtle ways, not in the, like, over the top being super manipulative.

Yeah.

So for us. I already mentioned this one already. It definitely comes up around finding things in the house. You ask me a lot. Where is this thing?

It's just because you're so good at remembering where they are.

And the thing is, I am. Which makes it so much worse. We'll talk about that. I would say the thing that you do it in the most often is with the dogs, not knowing how to take care of them or, like, do certain things for them. You ask for my help a lot with that. Another thing that has come up between us is you definitely have said to me a few times, well, you just have a stronger preference about how this should be done, or you care about this more than I do. So that's part of why I was queezing over. Can I make that into a verb? No.

Queezing.

I'd be queezing. I'm queason.

Sure.

It's very cute, actually. Queason.

It's very close to queeving.

No, it's not queefing. I'm just queefing all over this.

I like how we can just casually drop that word in our podcast. Most people who do podcasts can't do that.

Yeah. Who can make the tie between weaponized Incompetence and queefing. Anyways, I was queasing over those things that we were saying at the beginning of the episode because you have said some of them to me, and that has made me feel judged. Yeah, I do care about these things more. Why do I care about these things more? Why don't you care about them more? And we're gonna get into, like, the gender dynamics that I think are at the root of this. But I think for me, yeah, it's led to this feeling of judgment around feeling like you get to be the cool, laid back, let it roll off your shoulder, like, just cool surfer dude, bro partner. And I have to be like, the more uptight, detail oriented, stick up my ass kind of partner. And we obviously don't have kids, but I could really see this dynamic feeding into us having kids and, like, maybe me starting to feel resentful of, like, oh, you get to be the cool parent. The, like, laid back, chill, do whatever you guys want to do. I'm a cool mom, like Amy Poehler and mean girls. Whereas I would have to be, like, the bad cop, the authoritarian, the disciplinarian, like, the not fun one. And, like, that just. Just feel shitty.

No one wants to be the not fun person.

Yeah. So it's just. Yeah, it stirs a lot of questions up around, like, why is that the case? And then on the flip side of it, I have done some weaponized incompetence myself, mainly around financial stuff in the past. And this was in a period of our relationship where, you know, our finances were pretty strained. I was going back to grad school. Xander was the primary breadwinner. We had combined our finances. So it was like switching from two incomes to one income and a lot of debt racking up at the same time. And I think for me, it came from this place of, like, I sort of just wanted to bury my head in the sand about finances and just, like, let Xander do it. And, you know, and there was a way that I could kind of justify it as, like, oh, well, you know, he's the one making the money. Or, like, he just has a better mind for this. He's just better at this. So I think I've come a long way in that. But that's definitely, you know, that was a thing in the past for sure.

And when that was happening, there was the gender dynamic coming into it where I was like, oh, well, I'm. I'm the guy. I'm supposed to do this anyway. I'm the one earning the money. I was I was already managing my own finances before we combined our finances, so, like, why not just continue doing it for both of us? But like Vanessa said, it was, you know, it was us adjusting to a new normal when it came to finances. And I started taking on a lot of stress around it. It felt like if things felt tight at the end of the month or whatever, I felt really alone with that stress. Like I didn't have a teammate to share that stress with. It felt like, well, my, you know, the least that I can do as the. As the breadwinner is also manage the finances. And then I started finding myself feeling a little resentful and judgmental of Vanessa. And I would look at purchases that she was making because I'd be like, oh, I'm holding all this stress. I'm trying to be really tight about things. But she doesn't know about that because I'm keeping it to myself because I feel like it's my job because she's not participating in it. It just was this whole mess. Ultimately, we had a few big fights about it. We had to kind of renegotiate the arrangement there. And things have been a lot better since then.

Yeah.

Otherwise, onto my grand finale of weaponized incompetence. I've thought long and hard about this, and I think the one that bothers me the most is the way that we break up the responsibilities around trash in our houses. I take the trash out to the bins, and I take the bins up to the street on trash day. And in exchange, Vanessa puts the liners in our little trash cans in our kitchen. After I take the trash out, Vanessa does not. I don't know if she doesn't know how to or she doesn't like to. There is a way to put the liner on the bin and kind of tuck it in so that the liner is tight around the trash bin so that when you throw stuff away, it doesn't just knock the whole liner down into the trash can. I feel like I've showed Vanessa a number of times how to do this. It takes about two to three extra seconds when you put the liner in. It's been four years in this house with these trash cans. Without fail, if Vanessa does the liners, they fall into the bin. It's annoying.

So Xander told me that this was going to be one that he was going to share, like right before we recorded the podcast and I died because I was like, absolutely. That I. Absolutely. And pretending to be. You caught me red handed. Absolutely. I. Yeah, I hate doing the trash can bins. I hate doing the liners again. It's not like a purposeful, like, let me pretend to be so bad at this that he'll just take it over.

But I do end up doing it myself a lot. What will happen is Vanessa will do the liner. You know, the next day, I broke. I throw something large into the trash, and the whole bag goes in. And so then I go, okay, well, Vanessa's not here. Do I want to keep dealing with this, or do I want to just fix it?

Just do it myself.

Maybe I should do what you do when you, like, leave piles of recycling things. Like, if the recycling bin is full, I should just leave both of the liners, like, down in the trash and be like, all right, figure it out. Figure it out, lady.

No, you're totally right. You're totally right. I definitely, like, put very minimal effort into it. I know how to do it better. I absolutely know how to do it better. I could do it better. It would only take a couple of extra seconds to do it better, but I definitely just, like, lean into not doing it.

Oh, yeah. And the double whammy. That just reminded me when I hear you admitting that you don't put any effort into it. She also doesn't really shake the bag. I would say, you know, how. Do you know how Trash bags, they're all, like, folded up. They're usually rolled up, and so they're, like, stuck together. I feel like oftentimes, once I see the bag in there, she's, like, opened it a little bit, but, like, you have to, like, push your hand into the bag to really open it up.

I'm not putting my hand in the trash bag. You don't.

When it's totally clean at the beginning.

Oh, no, it sounds great.

No, you got to open it up, shake that bag out so you get air in it. Then.

You know what? I do do that, but the dogs are always around me, and they get really scared by that, and so I just do it, like. So I try to do it softly so I don't scare them too much. I have some ideas for. For what we can do with this. We're going to loop back around at the end about what to do if your partner is weaponizing their incompetence.

All right, let's solve this.

We will. We will, babe. Okay, let's take a step back, though, first, and kind of talk a little bit about the history behind weaponized incompetence. So this is actually a fairly new term. As best we can tell. It first appeared in a 2007 Wall Street Journal article. But this is, of course, an age old issue. This has been going on for a long, long time.

Yeah, we only just now have a term for it. This has been going on for about as long as humans have been splitting up chores, being in monogamous relationships probably.

It did start to get really popular on TikTok lately. There were a lot of TikToks. Tic Tacs.

Tic Tacs. Wow. Tic Tacs.

Tic Tacs. Oh, my God, I've never felt older.

Vanessa's Tic Tacs. True colors are coming up. These kids and their Tic tacs. Back in my day, you only ate Tic Tacs. They're minty fresh breath. Now you have to make TikToks.

Is that how I found on the Internet? Oh, my God.

This sounds like your momming.

Like my mom and Netflix.

Netflix also? Yeah.

Or.

Or my, like. Oh, is it on your. My face page.

My face page, yeah. My mom definitely called it my face page for a long time. And also she insisted that there was a Netflix and we were like, mom, no, it's Netflix. And she's like, it's a different company. It's a Netflix and a Netflix. They do the same thing. Somehow. There's two different names.

Oftentimes competitors are very, very similar names. Just trying to capitalize on the other one. Success. It's feasible.

Well, on Netflix and TikTok, there have been some funny videos that the kids have been making. It's mostly been women making fun of their male partners for totally, like, dropping the ball, being an idiot. So I think there's one of like, the mom is showering. The husband was supposed to watch the baby for a couple minutes while she showers, but he fell asleep and the baby, like, drew all over the walls.

Mayhem ensued.

Mayhem. Another one about, like, how bad men are at doing the laundry of, like, this woman showing, you know, oh, he shrunk all my clothes and all the whites got turned red and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So there were a lot of really funny TikToks going around. They like, resurfaced this issue and made it, like, even more prominent. But the bottom line with weaponized incompetence is that it's really so, like, Xander and I, we are talking about it in our relationship in a light hearted way because we have one of the lighter shades of weaponized incompetence. Right. And we're, we're talking about it in a lighthearted way because we also, I think, have the the trust in each other and the foundation in our relationship that we know. Like, we will talk about this. You know, we'll continue to talk about it in our relationship.

We can, in a real way, we can joke about our own laziness in a couple select areas, like shaking out trash bags.

But it, you know, this is a serious thing, and especially if it's happening some of the darker shades of it.

In your relationship or for bigger things like, like, I don't feel like I can let my partner take the kids to school because they always screw up this or that, or, like, make the kids lunches, which takes me half an hour or something. Like, you know, you're talking about a large time commitment where you're just saying, screw it, I'll do it myself, because he can't do it. Right?

Yeah. I mean, the bottom line is we all have tasks that have to be done for the health and safety of ourselves and our families. And if you're weaponizing incompetence, you are really taking away from your partner's autonomy. You know, you're forcing them to carry this heavier load, to take up more time, more energy, make more of an effort to do these things that you really should be taking care of yourself. So you're putting a lot of weight unfairly onto your partner. And there are also some really, like, complex and interesting gender dynamics that feed into this, as we found, like, you know, with our Instagram audience, and definitely, you know, much broader. Actually, scientific research has found that, you know, men are more likely to be the culprit of weaponized incompetence. And I think a lot of this is rooted in the fact that we live in a patriarchal society, right? Like, we have very stereotypical ideas of what men do and what women do. And we tend to put a lot more of an emphasis on those male tasks than we do on the female tasks. So stereotypically, we think of, you know, the women's work as cleaning and taking care of the kids and cooking and doing the laundry and the schedules and all that kind of stuff. And we think of men's work as going out into the world and working and making money and being the providers. And we definitely put place a lot more of a value on, like, making money, providing for your family over doing the laundry and cooking dinner and stuff like that.

But let me ask you, what good is making that money if the laundry doesn't get done? You have no clean clothes to wear, you have no food to make dinner or no one scheduled. What the kids are doing and, like, you get home from work and you're like, where are the kids? Oh, whoops, they're still at school.

Yeah. So obviously, Xander and I, you know, do not believe that these traditional men's jobs are more important or more valuable than the stereotypical women's jobs. Like, we don't buy into these kinds of gender roles and dynamics. But I think we were all socialized in a society that does believe this. And those kinds of beliefs, they get in early, they get in deep, and they can have a big impact on us, even if that's not rationally what we want to believe. So, you know, one of our examples was my incompetence coming up around financial issues. But in general, we definitely see a lot more weaponized incompetence come up around the stereotypical women's work kind of tasks. The cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the taking care of the kids type of stuff. I was spending some time thinking about this before we recorded this episode. You know, I was thinking a lot about what I mentioned earlier, this idea that, like, yeah, I do care about a lot of the household things more than Xander does. I do care about having the towels that are nicely folded and the refrigerator that's well stocked and organized and making sure that we have, like, a supply of all of our household products, like a little backup. I do care a lot more about this kind of stuff. And I was thinking to myself, like, why is that? I don't think that you are inherently a more chill person and I'm inherently a more, like, stick up my ass kind of person. Why is that? That I care more about some of these things. And I do think the vast majority of it comes down to socialization and to, like, to really go in on it for a second. I do believe that as women, we are socialized to pay more attention to these daily household related tasks and to feel like we can have a sense of control and authority and, like, structure around them. It's really a way of preventing us from seeing the ways that we don't have control and power in the larger society. Even though, again, I rationally don't believe this. I don't believe in traditional gender roles and stereotypes and all of that, but I do think I've been socialized to, like, oh, let me pay attention to keeping my refrigerator well stocked so that I don't pay as much attention to the ways that I am systematically denied power as a woman in this society.

Well, what I will say about that is that, yeah, in the past, I definitely would agree and say you know, I don't care so much about making sure that we have all this stuff stocked. I don't really. Whatever. It doesn't bother me that much about, you know, the. Whether the fridge is full or empty or whatever. But I will say, after all these years, I have gained a huge appreciation for all of these things. And like, heaven forbid, if you were to just disappear from my life. Yeah. An older me would have just been like, oh, whatever, I'll go to the corner store to pick up whatever, because I ran out of it. I didn't think ahead. But the reality is I've really come to appreciate it. All these things that we have, this planning that goes into things, and it would really suck to do it without you. I don't think I could go back to the way that I would have lived on my own, because the last time I lived on my own was I was 22. 22, yeah. You know, I don't think either of us want to go back to 22, right?

Oh, no, for sure not. You know, I am proud of the way that we handle it in our relationship. Like, you've come to value the importance of the, you know, the household stuff as well, to participate in it. You don't put all the pressure on my shoulders to do all of it. So we value those tasks more. We split them more evenly. Again, it just all comes back to the socialization. It's like I can rationally believe things and I can want to have my life structured in a certain way, but I have been socialized to, you know, to think of things in a pretty backwards way. And I think as women, we're really. There's a lot of pressure put on us, and I think in particular on mothers, to do it all, to be able to take care of all of it and, you know, not needing any help and be so detail oriented. And I think it's hurting so many women to feel this intense amount of, like, pressure, this expectation, you know, just have to do everything. And I think another little, like, complicating factor in this is that we have sky high expectations of women and an extremely low bar for men, and especially like the man in a male female relationship.

And you're talking about doing, like, household tasks.

Yeah, yeah. Doing household tasks. Yeah. I've been having some really interesting conversations with my friend Amy. She and her sister own, expecting and empowered together. Amy's a good friend of both of ours, and we've been having some really interesting conversations about how this shows up on social media in particular. So Xander is a very, you know, he's a really great partner. We're very equal partners in our relationship.

Oh, thanks.

You're welcome. And similarly, Amy's husband, Drew is a really wonderful partner, too. Like, you know, we all share household responsibilities, you know, in our relationships. And so Amy and I were talking about. I was saying, you know, every time that I share something about Xander, like, helping out around the house, cooking dinner, doing something with the dogs, cleaning up. Same thing with Amy. Amy was like, you know, yeah, Drew's the one who does all the cooking in our house, and every time she shares. So it's like we would get all of these messages from women saying, like, oh, my God, like, you're husband is so amazing, and he's so wonderful, and, wow, he helps out so much. And, like, that's so incredible. And for a while, I couldn't figure out. I was like, these messages are really bugging me. And I couldn't figure out why they were bothering me so much. And I finally realized through these conversations with Amy, it's because the expectations for you men are so low. Like, we have never gotten a message about me saying, oh, my God, you're such an amazing partner to Xander. Look at how you're taking care of him and helping out around your household. That's so, so incredible. Like, I am expected to do all of this stuff, whereas if you do things, it's like, oh, my God, wow, what a miracle. I want to be careful here, because you and I, we spend a lot of time being, you know, appreciative of each other, and we like to go over the top with it, and we like to, like, acknowledge each other for even little things like, oh, I really appreciate that you brought the mail in. Hey, I saw that you put my laundry away. Thank you so much for doing that. Right? So, like, we like to thank each other for those little things, but at the same time, it's coming from a place of feeling that, like, that's your responsibility. Like, you're an adult human being. You're in an adult relationship. We are a partnership. We are a team. You are expected to contribute to this team, just like I am expected to contribute to this team.

So, yeah, send some DMs to Vanessa telling her how great of a wife she is for, you know, doing the laundry. She would love it. You could tell her, hey, Vanessa, you are killing it at your wifely duties. If you. If you say the words killing it at blank, Vanessa will have a great day.

It's true. It's very true. I'M a sucker for that phrase. But, yeah, I think it's just one example, you know, illustrating how low our expectations are that we're kind of fawning over men for doing things that are very basic and expected. Xander does not deserve a gold medal for unloading the dishwasher. Like, I can appreciate him, he can appreciate me for doing that. I'm not saying, like, you need to have this combative household where you're just, like, never, like, you were expected to do that. Don't expect any acknowledgement. But I think, like, coming from other people, like, we don't need to fawn over other people for doing a basic thing that should be expected in relationships. Xander's an adult. He should contribute. We got another story from. From a woman on Instagram that I think was a good illustration of this. She said, my husband took our baby girl to church while I stayed home with our sick baby boy. I knew that the other churchgoers would help him since he's a guy. We talked about this. He said, yeah, it's because they think I'm helpless. And I thought to myself, we as a society can be the culprits with this one. I know my husband is very capable and he wouldn't ask for help. It's the ladies that come and help him. But when a mom has her babies, like I do every weekend, they rarely hold the babies unless they want to. So, again, another example here of, like, sounds like these, you know, these women at church are kind of flocking to this man. They're like, oh, you sweet thing, you have the baby. You're all by yourself. Here, let me. Let me take her for you. Like, don't worry about it.

Yeah, it's like you've never held a baby before.

I know. Like, oh, my God, what a miracle of dad holding his own child. Picked up his own child, versus, you know, when we see a mom doing that, it's just like, yeah, that's what mom's supposed to do, right? So just another example of these really tricky units and really shitty, honestly, gender dynamics that come into play. We also have to talk about the overlap between weaponized incompetence and mental load. So if you haven't heard us talk about mental load before, we have some YouTube videos about it. We will link to those in the show notes. But basically, mental load is the mental energy that it takes to keep track of all the moving parts of home life. So it's not just doing the tasks themselves. It's also thinking about what needs to be done. When does it need to be done? What needs to be in place in order for it to get done? How does it need to get done? Like, all of this mental load that we are carrying. And again, coming back to the socialization here, women, we are socialized to take on the majority of that mental load. So a lot of times you'll hear male partners saying, like, oh, yeah, I'm happy to help. Just tell me what to do. But then it's like, okay, maybe you're doing the task, but you're still putting the mental load on your partner to know what it is that needs to be done, to have a plan for how to do it, to explain it to you, how to follow up with you and make sure that you did do it. So it's like you're just doing a very small sliver of the work by actually, like, doing the task.

And I think as a partner, if you are finding yourself pushing back on chores or tasks or feeling worried that, well, my partner has this really specific way that they want to do it, or somehow, like, this task is overly complicated, so if I jump in to help, I'm only going to be screwing things up or I need to ask a million questions. That's a really good indicator that your partner is probably carrying a lot of mental loads. When you have a lot of mental load, then you have a clear idea of how something needs to be done, when it needs to be done to fit in with all the other tasks that need to be done. So, yeah, you could be like, oh, well, it's true, you have a high expectation or you have a really detailed way it needs to be done. But it also probably means maybe I could jump in and take more of that load off of your plate. So it doesn't feel like this thing has to be done in this very specific way at this very specific time, because, you know, like, you're splitting things up instead so that your partner does some of it, you do some of it. They don't have to be thinking about your things all the time.

Absolutely. So let's get into, like, the real heart of this episode here of, like, what to do if your partner is. Is feigning incompetence. This one is not going to surprise you. You guys have to talk about it.

Wait, really? I feel like this is, like, all the stuff we talk about. The first question is, like, how can I do this without talking about it?

You can't.

Sorry.

You have to talk about it. I think one of the reasons for that, besides the obvious, like, we Just have to talk about everything. But, you know, one of the things is that your partner may not realize that they're doing this. Like, again, we keep talking about the different shapes of it here. I think the trash bag thing is actually a good example. Like, before Xander mentioned it to me, I just, I didn't think of it at all. Like, when I was thinking about, oh, what examples do I want to talk about in this episode? I definitely did not think of, oh, I do it around the trash bags. So sometimes, you know, we just have to share these things openly so our partner can realize like, oh, shit, I did not mean to be doing that, but I can now see that I am doing that. It. So if there is weaponized incompetence in your relationship, the primary thing that you guys need to do is get a clear plan for your mental load. So a clear plan for what are all of the tasks that you are responsible for as individuals, as a couple, as a family. Get everything out on the table and make a crystal clear plan about who is responsible for each and every single one of those tasks. Tasks. And we actually have a mental load workbook that will guide you step by step through this process. It's really inexpensive. It's based on what we did in our own relationship to like split up our mental load and make it feel equitable for our relationship. So we will link to that in the show notes as well. But it's been so useful for us to have this clarity and have a specific written down plan of like, who's responsible for what. And so that way, you know, it feels like, feels balanced in our relationship. So this is going to feel different in every relationship. Right. Like, it's going to. You're not necessarily going to have like a 5050 balance in every single relationship depending on your circumstances. But again, it's just this idea of having a specific plan. Part of that plan is that when something is your task, the entirety of that task belongs to you. So it's not just that you are doing the task, it's also that you're doing the mental load of the task.

Yeah. You can't just be like, oh yeah, I'll take the trash only when you ask me to.

Exactly. You have to be the one from start to finish the whole cycle of the task. What needs to be done? How do you need to do it? When does it need to be done? What needs to be in place for it to be done? The whole aspect of it. So we include in the mental load workbook like one of the steps is really getting clear with each other about what does each of these steps entail. So if there's something that you've been doing for a really long time, but your partner has never done it, there are probably a lot of details that you know about that task that you could pass on to your partner. So it could be. We have steps about this, like, in the workbook itself, but kind of, you know, seeing is your partner open to learning what you've learned about it? Do they want to know that feedback, or is there a different way that they want to be doing it?

Yeah, I think that's really important when you do this in your relationship. If one partner is used to doing the task that they're going to be giving to their partner and they do it really well, can be really easy to just be like, all right, now I'm going to tell you exactly how you need to do this to the other partner. That can feel a bit like, okay, well, it's not really like, I have the autonomy to do this. You're telling me exactly what I need to do. So I think that, you know, it's an open question of, like, do you want to sort of have a training process when it comes to this? Are both partners feeling good about. Yeah, I would love to learn from you, and I feel good about. About showing you what I've learned. If neither of you feel good about that, I think it's totally fine to be like, all right, we're each responsible for educating ourselves on how to do this. Google YouTube can be your friend here. You can figure literally anything out.

I think that's such an important detail. Like, the topic of weaponized incompetence just feels so heavy and, you know, mental load and all this stuff. And the reality is, you can figure out how to do any of this stuff.

There are no excuses.

Google it.

Hey, 20, 30 years ago, I totally. Sure, I totally understand. Hey, like, I don't have the book on how to do what. Like, how did I. How to clean the bathroom book with the toilet.

That's why I'm using the toilet brush.

All the. The 100 uses for a toilet brush.

Yeah, that book.

But, yeah, I'm sorry, guys. There are no more excuses these days.

You can Google it. Let me Google that for you. Oh, yeah, link to that page.

There's a very deep and strong subculture on YouTube around cleaning and cleaning supplies.

Oh, my God, there absolutely is. Yeah. So I think maybe for some of the tasks, what you can do is work backwards and sort of think of, okay, what is, like, the minimum acceptable standard for each task? What is it that really needs to be done here? And then figure out, you know, what's the plan to get there? And I think this is such a great opportunity, especially if you feel like you have an imbalance in your relationship, like Xander and I do in ours, and about who cares about tasks more? This is a good opportunity to say, okay, you know, so we're talking about the laundry. What is it that needs to be done? Does it really need to be folded in the specific Marie Kondo kind of way? Or, you know, I don't even know what that is.

Marie Kondo.

Oh, you know, Marie Kondo. Nah, the. Like. Does it spark joy? You throw it out. If it doesn't. She's like, master organizer.

Oh, I've heard that. I just don't know the name.

Yeah, it's this opportunity to have these conversations. And for you, if you're someone like me who finds yourself really caring about a lot of these minute details, to ask yourself, where does this come from? Where was I taught this? Is this actually what I, like, want for my life? Is this serving me in my life? And maybe if you're the partner who doesn't care about a lot of things, asking yourself the same sorts of questions, where was I taught this? Have I always had somebody taking care of these things for me? Maybe, you know, is this serving me to be showing up in the world in this way and just. Yeah, it's a great opportunity to get clarity between yourselves about what is it that truly needs to be done. Okay, maybe I'm going a little too far here, but I think, like, honestly, this could lead to some really interesting, deeper conversations of, like, we got one life to live. Am I really gonna care that much about having the pantry organized in the little, you know, organizer boxes with all the labels facing out and, you know, chips are all together and the pretzels are all together? Like, does that really bring you joy?

Yeah. I feel like maybe the best example is just, like, you know, the special way that you like to have the towels folded. Like, let's say that my job was doing all the towel laundry. All of a sudden, you know, Vanessa has a way that she really likes the towels to be folded.

Triple fold.

Yeah. You know, the. The occasional time where I fold a towel, I try to be careful to do it in the way that she did it. However, if we were to renegotiate our tasks and I started doing the towels, if I were to start doing the towel folds in a different way, I guess the question would be, would that really feel like the end of the world to you? Is that something that you could be like? I can live with that. Because the alternative would be, like, if Vanessa was just like, oh, my God, I care so much about having that triple fold. I'll just take the entire task myself. Like, that would be crazy.

No, I mean, so there are certain things that do genuinely bring each of us pleasure. Right. So I actually do get a weird, perverse pleasure out of the towels folded nicely. So I do the towels, and I feel good about that. And, like, that that was a task. The laundry was a task that I was happy to take on, versus, for me, having the pantry organized. I don't feel a pleasure in that, but I could totally see there are some people who fucking love the Container Store and all their little labels and all this stuff, and maybe that actually genuinely does bring pleasure. If that's the case, awesome. You go for it. That's.

You know what I think it might be because you can only see the first shelf in the pantry.

Very true.

If you could. If you could see all those shelves, you might. You might like them organized better.

That's a very good point. I cannot see. I barely can see that. That first one. So, yeah. So, you know, dividing up your mental load in this way, like, gives you that opportunity to see, like, what are the tasks that you genuinely do? Like, doing it does bring you a sense of joy.

What are the ones.

Ones that your partner does? How can you split things up? And I think, oh, one other really good example that we should talk about with this dividing of stuff is to see if there are ways to outsource or get rid of the tasks that really aren't important to you. So as part of this conversation, you might realize, yeah, you know what? Doing this one thing, like, we. We don't really care about it. Let's just let go of it and free up that energy and attention. Attention for something else.

Or we find ourselves arguing about it a lot. It's really tough to split it up, and we can't really see eye to eye on the standard that we think it should be done to.

So forget about it. Like, it's not really that important. The pantry one is a good example of that. I think there was a certain point where I was like, oh, but it would look nice to have all of our cabinets organized. But I didn't want to do it. You didn't want to do it. So we were like, forget about it. Who cares? Our pantry is very disorganized it's ugly. I don't care.

Maybe it takes an extra three seconds to find a snack.

Yeah.

Than it would otherwise.

We don't care. And then outsourcing is the other option here. So if you are in a privileged enough position where you can pay somebody else to do a certain task for you. And the way that we did this in our relationship was we prioritized, like, okay, once we have some extra money to get help, what are the tasks that we both hate the most or that, like, bring up the most tension for us? And so for us, that first thing was cleaning. When I was back in grad school, Xander was the primary winner. Like, I kind of took on all of the household cleaning because I sort of felt like, oh, I'm. I'm like the stay at home partner and like, I should be doing this. I don't like cleaning. It takes a lot of time. I also like. I don't like cleaning, but I love having a clean house. So it was like, not a good combination. And it was like, very quickly starting to lead to resentment of, like, wait a minute, like, why am I the only one doing the clean? You know, there was just a lot of stuff that was coming up. And so we made the decision that as soon as we had a little bit of extra money and we could safely afford to do this, that we would hire house cleaners. And so we've had house cleaners for years. The last four years since we've been in la, we have had Norma and Julia, our incredible house cleaners, their sisters. They're so sweet. Sweet. It feels really good to have them coming into our home, bringing this good, sweet energy into our home, taking care of our home. Like, they make it sparkle. They bring us flowers on our birthday and our anniversary.

We give them flowers.

We give that, like, it's a very. It's a very loving relationship.

We give them lemons and oranges and avocados from our backyard.

It's just a really sweet relationship that we've managed to form with them. We feel so lucky to, like, have them in our lives. And it means a lot to us to take good care of them. And so that's just like the best money we've ever spent. It takes so much off of our plate, like, the actual doing of the tasks and all of the mental load of, like, what needs to be cleaned and when and how do we do it and what are the supply. Like, everything is off of our plate. It's just so worth it to us to make that investment.

Yeah. I think the key thing is that you have to find a way to quantify by doing that work yourself. Like, what is that worth to you? How much time does it take for you? How much mental energy, how much anxiety goes into that, or how much does it hurt when you both. When it's a contentious relationship around, like, who does the cleaning or who does this, who does that? You know, if you can quantify that for yourself, it makes it much easier to spend that money. I think a lot of people get really focused on. On just the straight up number of dollars it costs to outsource a task without considering the opportunity cost, which is, like, what you could be doing yourself with that time, what you could be doing with that extra time or energy.

Yeah. And then one final tip that we'll give around this, like, dividing up the mental load is just to be honest and open about it. The trash example is a great example here. Here we made the conscious decision when we were dividing up our load of, like, Xander would take out the trash, but I would do the liners. And I realized that what I like, instead of doing this, like, silly little dance of doing them badly every single time that the trash goes out. Like, what if I just said, I don't like doing the trash bags? I don't like doing it.

Oh, that's really good to know because I actually do kind of enjoy doing it. I wouldn't say I enjoy it. I don't dislike it. It's not weird, it's not gross. Maybe it feels good to get it on there tight just because you don't, but it would be my pleasure to take that on from you. It's. It's an easy. It's an easy enough thing to do. I see that it. I see that you really dislike it. And I can also see how, you know, I don't, like, feel resentful of Vanessa for this, but I do see that every now and then I'm like, God, why can't Vanessa just do this? Like, does she. Doesn't she notice that this sucks?

That's the key of the episode. Doesn't she notice that this sucks? Yeah, and I've been. Yeah, I've been very passive about it. Instead of just coming out and saying, I don't like to do this, can we renegotiate what our arrangement is around this? I've just been doing a shitty job at it, and that's a shitty thing for me to do. So there we go. So we are renegotiating. You will do the liners.

Yeah, I am totally happy to do that, Vanessa. We don't even need to renegotiate anything. It takes an extra, like, 30 seconds.

At most if there is a, you know, another kind of task that you find yourself not loving doing. Or maybe the next time we sit down with our full list and kind of reevaluate everything, maybe there's another task or a little piece of something that I could take back. But, hey, there, we did it. We resolved a little weaponized incompetence issue. Another piece of advice that we wanted to give around the topic of weapons. Weaponized incompetence. Pay really close attention to your language. And this might be something that's a little bit specific to us, because, to be totally honest, like, this is something that we are in real time working through in our own relationship. But I find myself getting triggered sometimes by specific words or phrases Xander uses, where it feels like I start to create this story in my head of like, oh, this is a weaponized incompetence image issue where he's just, like, putting this all on me. He's acting like he can't do this. And so we had this realization, this really important realization just yesterday, actually.

Yesterday.

Okay. Yeah. So what had happened? Quick little backstory. We feed our dogs raw food. We have to keep it frozen. We have to defrost it. And so we were at my parents for the holidays. We realized that we hadn't defrosted the food, so there was just, like, an ice block of food and nothing to feed the dogs. Xander asked me, what should we do? And in that moment, I hear, you know, on the surface, what should we do? It's not an offensive question. Right. Like, it's just asking me for my opinion. But.

Yeah. It's also not. Tell me what to do.

Yeah. It's not implying anything, but I'm helpless.

Do something.

As is the case and I think pretty much every relationship, like, we start to develop stories around things, and we can get triggered by certain things. So to me, that's a phrase that I hear Xander ask me. You know, I'm not fairly decent regularity. And I feel a lot of pressure in that. It feels like I'm the default person in the relationship who has to make these kinds of decisions. It starts to feel like. I mean, okay, now we're just, like, stirring up a lot of stuff from, like, one simple sounding example. But, like, this is. It's a dynamic that's come up between us. Right? So, like, there are times where I feel like. Like I am having to be the adult in the relationship. And you get. It kind of feels more like a mother son relationship at times. On occasion, not all the time, but on occasion. It feels like more like a mother son dynamic rather than a true partnership, like a true equals dynamic. And I'm fully owning, like a lot of this comes from my own shit that I bring into our relationship. You've got some shit that you bring into our relationship. We just have some baggage around it. And. And so it's easy for it to feel like that kind of dynamic for me. And so sometimes I'll catch myself when you ask me that question. And the most triggering times that it happens are when it's sort of like a moment of crisis. You're like, what do we do? What do we do? And then I just feel all of that pressure and it feels very alone to me. I feel very lonely. I'm the one who has to figure out what to do. Right. And so we realized we were having this conversation about the food later. Cause fortunately it wasn't a super triggering example at like, we had the space to like, talk about it a little bit more actually. Do you want to describe what you were. What you told me?

Yeah, so what I said to Vanessa was in that moment, yeah, we were in a bit of a crisis. It was a bit chaotic in the kitchen that we were in. There were people, other people moving around preparing human foods. And you know, I felt like I was a bit in the way with this raw turkey dog food. The dogs are like jumping all over the place and like crying because. Because they think they're about to get their food. And the reality is it's frozen solid. No way in hell I can get any of it into a bowl to feed them. And so I was just in the interest of time thinking like, okay, I have an idea of what we can do. And I just want to quickly get Vanessa's perspective so that I can kind of synthesize that in my head and just do something that's going to feel okay to both of us. And so what I told her was that was what was going on for me. I did. I didn't say that to you in that moment because all that stuff was happening. But usually when I say, hey, what do you think we should do? It's because I also have an opinion I haven't shared with you yet. And I'm just wanting to get yours quickly so that I can merge them together. And what I could do better in the future is say, hey, here's what I. Here's What I'm thinking. What do you think? Or does that sound okay to you or something like that?

Yeah. Okay, so here's where we have to. Have to get super specific. But if you say, what do you think that feels like the. You're the one who has to make the final decision.

Or like, I don't think anything.

Yeah. If you were to say something like, here's what I think we should do. I just wanted to see if you wanted to share something. Or I was just curious to see if you had any ideas about how we could do it as well. Something where it's more coming from a place of curiosity or like, I'm making the space for your opinion versus what should we do? What do you think we should do? You make the final decision. So, again, this is like a super specific, specific thing, but I think that having these conversations about language, like, we all get triggered by different words or different phrases. And so I realize, like, this sounds hard to do. Like this. Oh, tedious. Like, oh, my God. Are you guys really having this much of a conversation about, like, a tiny, you know, a couple of words of.

Difference about this one dog food incident? That's over and in the past. Now we don't. We know, we don't have a frozen brick. Now we have nice thaw. Dog food.

Dog food. But again, it's a dynamic that comes up a lot. And having these. The bottom line is, like, switching the language around. It's not a big deal for Xander, but it could make a big deal for us in the moment.

And also, this conversation is about so much more than just the dog food. It's about the way that we communicate with each other. It's about a lot of dog food. It's about how we handle moments of crisis. It's about how we do or don't share what is actually going on in our minds before we ask a question of our partner. And, you know, I was able to see that as a really valuable conversation. Whereas, you know, I think a lot of partners will be like, oh, like, why are we going into so much detail about this little thing that doesn't even matter anymore? And it's like, the reason why it's important to do that is because it is important in more than just this one situation. Yeah.

So now we have a more specific thing that we can say going forward. I already have an idea of how to do this. This. I just wanted to see if you had anything that you wanted to share that I don't think would feel triggering to me. And we can avoid a lot of potential situations where you might get tripped up by just by having this conversation about the language.

Yeah. And it's not going to be perfect. We're probably each going to mess this up as we get better at it. But in the meantime, now I have a goal for what I would like to do differently or like to do better. And Vanessa has an understanding of what is going on for me. Me. So that if I do say something similar to what I said before, maybe she doesn't immediately feel triggered. She kind of remembers, oh, this is what is going on for him as well. So we each have some room, some wiggle room to improve.

Okay. Another languaging example is around asking for help. And I think, like, just like we were saying, you know, just come out honestly and say, what are the tasks that you don't like to do or you don't want to do? Like, it's also okay to come out and clearly and directly ask for help with this whole conversation. Like, I don't want to make it seem like you can't have any sort of incompetence. You just have to be competent all the time and know what to do and do it and follow through. Like, of course we're human. We have good and bad days. We are struggling. Sometimes we need a little help. That's totally fine. It's just when the request for help comes out in these passive aggressive sort of ways or these indirect kind of ways, like, that makes your partner not want to respond to it. But if Xander were to just to ask me, like, hey, I know you know, this is usually my responsibility, but I'm just having a really tough day. Would you mind helping me out? I would like, yeah, of course. I'm so happy to help. Just being clear in those requests rather than doing it in this obnoxious like, okay, fine, I'll do the dishes. But, like, how do I do? And when does this go? When does this go and what do I do? It's just like, come on.

Or like. Or like, I need you to do this today. No other.

Yeah, no.

No other explanation.

Don't ever do that.

Like, as if it really should be your responsibility.

Yeah, exactly. And finally, our last tip is to set boundaries for yourself. So resist the urge to utter that catchphrase. I'll just do it myself. Resist the urge to just do it all yourself. It's just not fair. You shouldn't be in a relationship where you just have to do everything on your own because you're part of. Partner is weaponizing Their incompetence. And of course, it's only going to lead to resentment, and it's also going.

To lead to some kind of negative judgment on yourself. You're going to judge yourself for violating your own boundaries. It's just not a recipe for success.

Yeah. So don't do it.

All right, let's get into a couple listener questions before we close this thing out. First one. And this was such a common question. We got. This is just one wording of it. We got, like, a million different iterations of this one. But how do I tell the difference between genuinely not knowing how to do something and weaponized incompetence?

Oh, yeah, that's such a good one. And I think this is where those open conversations come into play. Like, there definitely are tasks that your partner just may not know how to do or they may not have an understanding of. Like, this is what this task entails. Like, the full story of what this task entails. So if you have those, you know, that conversation where you're being really clear about splitting up your mental load and assigning a partner to each individual task, that's your opportunity right there to see, like, yeah, do you need to know anything about this? Is there any confusion, Any questions that you have about this? And that's where you really get the sense of, like, oh, yeah, no, my partner has literally never done the dishes in their entire life. They need to, like, learn how to load the dishwasher. Or my partner has never cleaned the bathroom. They think that they do with the toilet brush. You know, so there's that opportunity to have a conversation, but it's not, you know, what you don't want to do is let's say your partner is, like, unloading the dishwasher and they're putting, you know, the spoons in the fork section or something. Like, you could very easily yell at them and be like, seriously, you don't know where the fucking forks go. That's obviously not going to get you anywhere. So it's. Having this might get you backwards. Yeah. Having those conversations in a calm and structured way.

All right, next question. Is it makes me feel annoyed, but then I forget about it. Does it add up subconsciously taking on stuff for their partner?

I guess maybe this is a better question for you to answer. Kind of going back to the, like, the trash example. So, like, yeah, you're the. The chill partner who, like, lets things slide off of his back. But, I mean, I'm willing to guess that there's. Even if it's something. Something that's you know, it obviously hasn't caused, like, a huge tension or friction. You haven't been, like, seething in your anger over me and the trash liners. But, like, obviously it bothered you enough that you would mention it as an example here.

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting question. I don't think that there's a single clear answer to this one. I do think, though, if this is happening in a number of areas in your relationship, even if each individual was. Feels small and minor, and you don't feel like you're holding a lot of resentment or you're really holding on to it at all afterwards, if you do continue to find yourself remembering it or starting to put patterns together of like, huh, this thing that she's doing is looking a lot like what she does with the trash. And that looks a lot like this other thing. That's a good sign that it is adding up subconsciously. I think that these things add up a bit more than we would would like to give credit for, because we all like to look at ourselves and, you know, we like to think that we're good people, that we're forgiving and all these things. And the reality is these things do add up. So, you know, I think it is better to address these things. That being said, when it is just one minor little thing or a couple of small things, I don't think it's really, in the case of this trash, for me, I don't think it was adding up to anything very consequential. Like, like, I noticed it. I actually, to be totally honest, I didn't think of that thing when I was brainstorming this. It wasn't until I was, like, reading our notes for this podcast, and I was like, oh, you know what? I guess there's also the trash thing. And I just think it's kind of funny. You know, I do think if it's like one little thing that's happening and it's just sort of a joke, and then like, afterwards you're just like, whatever. You don't have to be like, okay, we're sitting down and having a huge conversation about weaponized incompetence. Here's the one area you've been doing it to. Me. How dare you.

Yeah.

Last question is, how do you address this excuse? I wouldn't do it if it was just me. You're the only one who cares about this.

This one, really.

I feel like this one comes up, comes up so much.

Okay, so, I mean, first, I think this definitely gets into the socialization Aspect of things, of, you know, the things that women are socialized to really care about and pay attention to, versus the things that men are socialized to care about and pay attention to the value that we put on those different kinds of tasks. Oh, well, I wouldn't, you know, organize a refrigerator in this way. Does it really matter, that kind of thing? So it's tricky because there definitely are some things that I think as women, we are socialized to pay more attention to that probably don't really matter, or in individual families, don't matter. Like we were saying, Xander and I don't really care about having an organized pantry. Right. Versus I think there also are ways that men are socialized to undervalue stuff that happens around the house and not recognize. Oh, actually, having things organized and clean and thought out actually does have a really big impact on my life. It's just an opportunity for some really big and important conversations in a relationship. But I think ultimately what I come down to is I think of a relationship as a real partnership. And if something bothers one partner, then it's an issue for both partners. So I'm not saying that, you know, just because something bothers Xander, that makes it my responsibility to, like, take care of it and to fix it. But I am saying, like, because I love Xander and I respect him and I appreciate him, if something, you know, is meaningful to him, then it's meaningful to me because it's meaningful to him. And so I just think that this is a really dismissive comment to say, like, I wouldn't do it. You're the only one who cares. I think there is a way to say this in an. In a nicer way of like, hey, is this something that's really contributing to our lives? That's, like, bringing joy or calm or peace or, you know, whatever it is, or is this something that maybe we could free up some energy to use elsewhere? You could say it in that way. But to me, this feels really dismissive, like, you're the only one who cares about it.

The reality is, it's not just you. I think that's the key thing. If you are finding yourself saying, oh, well, I wouldn't do this, you know, if it was just me. It's like, okay, well, then get out of your relationship. Go live on your own. Go do everything just the way that you want to. But the reality is you are in a relationship. You have chosen to be in a relationship. And part of choosing to be in a relationship is. Is knowing that you can't do everything just the way that you would do it, as if you were alone. Like, that's not how life works. Like, you are two different people with two different experiences, two different sets of expectations, two ways of wanting to do things, two different ambitions, all kinds of stuff. You are not going to be equal in every single area.

That would be boring.

Yeah, that would be boring.

All right, well, we wanted to call your attention again to just two quick resources that we mentioned in this episode. The first is that Mental Load workbook like we mentioned. It's really inexpensive and it is such an awesome thing to do in a relationship to just have that crystal clear plan of who's handling what. It's just really going to cut off any sort of weaponized incompetence at the past. So we will link to that in the show notes and also we will link to our YouTube videos about mental Load.

All right, that's it for today's episode of Pillow Talk. Thank you so much for listening. Join us again next week when we talk about how to come back from mean comments your partner makes.

This one was inspired by our Instagram community. We get a lot of DMs that start with can we come back from this? So that's going to be a very interesting episode.

Stay tuned.

Sam.