Sami & Benjamin
Sami and Benjamin live in a cohousing community in Oakland, CA with their 5 month old son Elijah and 3 year old daughter Tallulah. After 10 years of friendship, they reconnected romantically and discovered they have a shared commitment to efficiency, fairness and problem solving all aspects of life. Below is their full interview and some of the solutions they have created:
Shared Chores: When Sami and Benjamin started discussing an equal workload in the home, to better understand what equal meant they wrote all the chores they could think of on the back of unused business cards. They then traded these cards between each other until it felt balanced between the two of them. They then wrote these chores down here and have a printout on their fridge so there is never any confusion about who is responsible for what.
Additionally, they have a weekly meeting to add additional tasks that may pop up outside of the routine chores. These get written on post-it notes and live on the cupboard next to the fridge. This weekly meeting has been a useful way of avoiding resentment that previously was building up when Benjamin wanted something done around the house and was asking Sami to do them at inopportune times.
Divide the Mental Load: A key part of efficiency is avoiding redundancies. Benjamin and Sami feel there is no point in two people thinking about an aspect of life when just one person can do it. Therefore they try to divide the mental load as much as possible. In addition to dividing chores, they take turns planning special occasions and trips while each person is responsible for packing clothes for one kid.
Separate Bank Accounts: Benjamin witnessed his parents fighting about money growing up and therefore wanted to avoid this in his own marriage. Sami’s friend Jordan had told her about her approach in her marriage of having separate bank accounts with one shared account for shared expenses. This seemed like a natural way to go so this is what Sami and Benjamin now do. As a result, they are able to mitigate a lot of arguments. For example if one person doesn’t support a purchase, the other person just pays for it on their own. If someone doesn’t complete a chore, they may pay a fine. Or if someone wants to show the other person gratitude they may pay for something such as dinner or a massage.
Pregnancy Compensation: When Sami was getting ready to deliver their first child, Sami brought up the fact that she did 100% of the pregnancy and asked Benjamin what he could do to make up for this effort. The two disagreed about how much effort it is to be pregnant so they turned to data, made a survey, received about 30 responses and found it was about a 1:2 ratio, meaning it’s twice as hard to raise a child as it is to be pregnant. So after doing some algebra they decided that Benjamin would be Tallulah’s primary childcare provider until she turned 1. This worked out well since Benjamin was transitioning careers and had time to do so. Sami wrote in more detail about it here.
For the second kid, Benjamin had transitioned careers and could no longer be the primary childcare provider. Therefore Sami decided to put together a budget proposal to be financially compensated this time around. After looking up the cost for a surrogate mother, Sami charged Benjamin half this cost and received $25,000 for her pregnancy. Sami wrote more about this experiment here.
Side note- as another efficiency example not mentioned-Benjamin also wears the same clothes everyday so he doesn’t have to spend time thinking about what to wear. Sami is inching towards this, but still enjoys the variety for now.
The goal of these episodes is to expand the vocabulary for navigating life together. Have questions, thoughts, respectful comments? Leave them below!