The person who wants to do it first, does it much more

Call this 'activation disparity'?

Slight differences in how frequently two people want to do something can lead to large differences in how often they do or initiate the thing.

Let me explain:

Sometimes, people who live together end up doing uneven amounts of chores, admin or childcare. Or, even if everyone does the same amount, one person tends to manage the process more, to be responsible for thinking about what needs doing and when to do it (the so-called ‘mental load’). Often but not always, women do these things more than men. Call this ‘chore inequality’.

In discussions of this dynamic, I’ve heard: ‘Chore inequality happens because the neat freaks just want more stuff done than the chaos goblins. It’s fine if they want things to be cleaner, tidier or more organised than their partner or housemates, but they shouldn’t get upset if the laxer person fails to meet their high standards. If this is gendered, it’s because women are pickier.’

People do have very different senses of how often things “should” be cleaned. But note that if two people have even a slight difference in ‘cleanliness orientation’, the slightly-neater person will tend to do the task all the time, in the absence of a system to prevent this (for example, a rota).

Let’s imagine: A and B are a couple who share a bed. A wants to change the bedsheet every week, but B wants to change it every 2 weeks. These aren’t radically different approaches to bedding cleanliness: both would agree that it’s unnecessary to change your sheet every day, and gross to leave it unchanged for several months. But if they just change the bedsheet “when it needs doing”, then A will always end up changing it: their “the bedding needs to be changed” sense will always be triggered after a week, whereas B’s won’t yet. This isn’t because A has a cleanliness preference that B completely lacks — if B lived on their own, they’d still change the bedding regularly!

This dynamic arises in other areas too. Consider sex: let’s imagine that C wants to have sex every 2 days on average, and their partner D wants to have sex every 4 days. Again, this isn’t a huge difference in sexual desire, compared to people who want sex multiple times a day, or once every few weeks. But in this situation, C will tend to initiate sex much more; C might feel undesired, and D might feel chased or pestered.

Or consider friendships: let’s say E wants to hang out every 2 weeks on average, and their friend F wants to hang out every month. Yet again, these two people don’t have vastly different visions of what they want their friendship to look like. But E will usually be the one who reaches out to arrange hangouts, and they might feel rejected by F's failure to ever do so.

I’m also not sure what’s fair when one member of a pair or group wouldn’t, in fact, do a task (much) if they lived alone — either because it’s not a high priority, or because they don’t have the spoons or executive function or motivation — but they still benefit from others doing it. Maybe they wouldn’t cook if they lived alone, but they still benefit from their housemates’ cooking. Maybe they wouldn’t naturally do anything about their garden, but they still enjoy it when others plant pretty flowers. Maybe they wouldn’t be organized and bothered enough to arrange nights out for themself, but they actually really enjoy it when their partner drags them to the theatre. In these cases, it seems like the less-proactive person is free-riding off the more-proactive ones a bit; but demanding that they do equal amounts of cooking and gardening and organizing also seems unfair.

Of course, people don’t have to contribute equally in every domain to have a balanced and fair relationship, as long as all parties are happy and their contributions balance out. I enjoy baking and my partners don’t, so it’s fine by me that I contribute cake to their lives that they don’t repay in kind.

But it can also be tricky; giving freely out of generosity or love can slide into giving out of obligation, or out of a sense that ‘if I don’t do this, no-one else will’. And that can start to feel burdensome. Lots of these things are gendered: women are more likely to feel a sense of responsibility for chores, and men are more likely to feel that it’s on them to initiate sex. Probably there are other ways in which people’s identities, legible and illegible, have burdened them with responsibilities that they didn’t ask for.

This means that “oh, X just wants to initiate sex/do the laundry/message more often” becomes complicated: wants how? Who told them to want that more than the manifold other things they could feel an urge to do? It feels like a thorny issue to navigate, especially for those of us who want to see the wider economy approximate more closely to the model of friends collaborating towards shared goals.