Eve Rodsky, the American helping couples balance the mental load
FeatureAfter narrowly avoiding depression, Eve Rodsky achieved massive success with her book 'Fair Play', which was later adapted into a card game. In the book, the former lawyer develops a method for sharing domestic chores and mental load within households. The bestseller and the game have been translated in numerous countries, but not France.
Her simple story about blueberries is now famous across the United States. In 2011, Eve Rodsky was living in a beautiful house in Los Angeles. She had a husband, three children, including a newborn, and a demanding job as a lawyer. One day, she got into her car, already late to pick up her younger son, with a breast pump and diaper bag in the back and an important contract on her lap, when her husband, Seth, texted her: "I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries." Eve Rodsky pulled over and burst into tears. Was this the end of her marriage, she wondered. "It's annoying to me, because I'm a lawyer and I teach families how to communicate. I used to be a lawyer for families like in the show Succession. That's what's so embarrassing, that I wasn't able to ask for what I needed in my own family, my husband. That's when I hit rock bottom," recalled the 48-year-old Californian in a recent interview by videoconference, speaking quickly and laughing easily, her long blonde hair hastily tied back.
Since then, Rodsky recovered and her marriage endured. She turned this experience into a book about the mental load and how to better balance it in couples. Published in 2019, Fair Play sold over 250,000 copies in the first three years and spent two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. A year later, she created a card game to help couples share domestic chores, which was also a success, often described in the American press as a marital "wake-up call."
In 2021, she founded an online research institute, the Fair Play Policy Institute, which has already trained over 400 people. In the US, Rodsky is nicknamed the "Marie Kondo of relationships" for her ability to declutter couples' lives, much like Kondo tidies closets. There's still work to be done: According to a study by the universities of Bath in the UK and Melbourne in Australia, published at the end of 2024 in the Journal of Marriage and Family, 79% of mothers say they handle daily tasks (housework and childcare), compared to 35% of men who claim the same.
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