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Shikha Sharma
I know when we are out of dish soap.
Not because I have checked. Because I know. The dish soap level is one of approximately forty things I am tracking at any given time without consciously tracking them. The tracking happens in the background of my mind, a persistent low-level monitoring system that runs continuously and produces, when queried, immediate accurate information about the state of the household.
My husband does not know when we are out of dish soap until we are out of dish soap.
This is not a criticism of my husband. He has excellent qualities. His monitoring system is just different from mine. His runs on visible evidence. When the dish soap is gone, the dish soap is gone, and at that point the information is available. Before that point, the information is not tracked.
My system runs on projection. I see the dish soap level and I compute when it will be gone and I add dish soap to the list before it is gone. The list is in my head. The list is always in my head. The list has been in my head since we moved in together and I do not know how to stop running it.
I am not unusual in this. I know I am not unusual in this because every woman I know who lives with a partner has some version of the same list. The list has different contents. The management system has different configurations. But the list exists and it runs and it is not visible to the person who does not run it.
We were at the kitchen table last Sunday, Sunfeast Marie Light between us, and I said we needed to get more dish soap this week. My husband said okay. He wrote it on his phone. He will get the dish soap. This is the system we have arrived at: I track, I notify, he executes. It works. It is also not quite right, and I have been thinking about why it is not quite right for some time.
What the List Contains
The list is not just consumables.
The list is: dish soap and when it runs out but also the dentist appointment that needs rescheduling and the bill that is due on the 15th and the thing his mother mentioned that we should follow up on and the friend whose birthday is next week and whether we have plans and what we said we would bring to the thing two Saturdays from now and the fact that the filter on the water purifier has not been changed in a while and whether we have the replacement.
The list contains logistics and social obligations and maintenance items and things that were mentioned once in passing that need to be remembered and acted on at a future date.
The list is not written down. It is held. Holding it requires a portion of cognitive space that runs continuously and does not switch off when I am not actively thinking about the household. It runs in the background of work meetings and conversations with friends and the evenings when I am supposed to be relaxing. It is always there.
My friend Priya described it to her husband using the computer analogy. She said imagine your laptop has forty tabs open all the time. Some of them are active. Most of them are running in the background. The background tabs are still using memory. The battery drains faster. She said she is the laptop with the forty tabs. He said he was the laptop with maybe four tabs, two of which were muted. She said yes, that is correct.
He said he had not known the tabs were open. She said that was the problem.
The Noticing
The list starts with noticing.
You notice things and they go on the list. The noticing is not effortful in the moment. It happens automatically. You walk past the dish soap and you notice the level and the level goes into the tracking system. You hear something mentioned in a conversation and you note that it needs following up and it goes on the list. You see the date and compute what needs to happen before what date and the computation goes on the list.
My husband does not not notice. He notices different things. He notices when something is wrong with the car. He notices when something in the flat needs a repair. He notices things in his domain and tracks them with the same automatic efficiency that I track things in mine. The domains are different. The total list, when combined, covers the household. The distribution is not even.
My friend Kabir acknowledged this about himself after his wife described it to him. He said he had genuinely not known the scope of what she was tracking. He had thought the household managed itself with occasional inputs. She had been the inputs. The household had looked like it was managing itself because she was managing it.
He said he asked her to teach him to notice. She said noticing was not something you could be taught. It was something you had to decide was your responsibility and then the noticing followed. He said he would try. She said okay. He has been trying for eight months. She says the improvement is real but the tabs are still not equally distributed. Progress, not resolution.
What Would Fix It
I do not think there is a clean fix.
The list is partially structural. It emerges from who noticed first and who took on the responsibility and who has been doing it long enough that it is now automatic. Redistributing the list requires redistributing the noticing and the noticing is harder to redistribute than the tasks.
My husband can do the dish soap run. He can book the dentist. He can remember the birthday if I tell him. The doing is transferable. The tracking, the knowing-before-being-told, the background-tab awareness, is harder to transfer because it requires a different configuration of how you move through the space.
My friend Meera said she and her husband made a deal. He took the list for one month. She told him what was on it and she did not add to it during the month. He ran it. He said at the end of the month that it was exhausting. She said yes. He said he had not known. She said she knew he had not known. He said how long had she been doing it. She said since they moved in. He said that was six years. She said yes.
They share it more evenly now. Not perfectly. But more. The awareness that the list exists and has weight was the thing that changed things.
He just needed to know the tabs were open.
