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Kirsten had a list.

She had never written it down, but she knew it by heart. She was the one who knew when the dentist appointments were. She was the one who noticed the milk was almost gone. She was the one who remembered his mother’s birthday, bought the card, had the kids sign it, and mailed it.

Porter had a list too.

His was shorter. He knew how many times he had reached over in the last month and she had turned away. He knew that he had spent all of Saturday finishing the basement stairs and she had walked past them twice without saying anything. He knew that the last three times they had sex, she seemed like she was somewhere else.

Neither one had said a word of this to the other. They had both decided the same thing. They were each giving more than they were getting.

What scorekeeping is

So what is scorekeeping? Scorekeeping is tracking what you give and what you get back, and letting the difference between those two numbers decide how much more you are willing to give.

Nobody starts keeping score because they woke up wanting to be petty. Usually you asked for something already, and either it didn’t land or it landed and nothing changed. We start keeping score because we want something and we do not know how to get it.

What scorekeeping looks like

Scorekeeping shows up in ordinary, invisible ways, and most of it stays inside your own head.

Around the house it sounds like this:

1. You know exactly whose turn it was to get up with the baby, and you know he has gotten out of it twice.
2. You count how many bedtimes you have done this week.
3. You handled the yard, the cars, and the gutters this month, and she never said a word about it.
4. You took the day off the last time a kid was sick, so this one is his.
5. You leave the dishwasher full to see if she will notice, and you already know she won’t.
6. You compare what her Saturday looked like to what yours looked like.

In the emotional side of the marriage it sounds like this:

1. You remember every single time you apologized first.
2. You track who calls whose parents.
3. You count how many times you asked about her day and she did not ask about yours.
4. You keep a running tally of the hard conversations you started.

And then there is the sexual scorekeeping, which is the version that does the most damage and gets talked about the least:

1. You count how many times you initiated and got a no.
2. You track how many days it has been, and you watch that number climb, and the number itself becomes the argument.
3. You do something generous around the house and then feel like you have earned sex that night.
4. You say yes to sex you do not want because you feel like you owe him one from last week.
5. You say no to sex you would have wanted because of how he talked to you on Tuesday.
6. You keep score of where you spent the most time the last few times on their pleasure and they didn’t reciprocate.
   
   7. You bring up something from four years ago as proof that this is a pattern.

If you heard yourself in more than one of those, you are not unusual. You are married.

Why your count is always wrong

Keeping score has a mechanical problem built into it. Whatever number you have landed on is a perception, and it is probably not accurate, because you cannot see most of what your spouse does.

In 1979, two researchers named Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly published a set of five studies looking at how people estimate their own contributions to a shared effort. One of those studies used married couples. They gave husbands and wives a list of everyday activities and asked each spouse, separately, how much of the responsibility for each one was theirs. Then they added the two answers together.

If both spouses were seeing the situation accurately, those two numbers would add up to about a hundred percent. They didn’t. Across activity after activity, they came out over. Both spouses were sincerely reporting a bigger share than the other one gave them credit for.

Nobody in that study thought they were lying. Ross and Sicoly put the gap down to memory. Your own effort is easier to recall. You were there for all of it. You remember standing at the sink. You remember lying awake thinking about the kids. You remember the mental work of planning the week. You do not remember your husband refilling the windshield washer fluid, because you were not in the garage, and you have never once thought about windshield washer fluid in your life.

There is a second thing happening, and it is stronger than memory. Our brains want to be right more than they want to be happy. They have a confirmation bias. So if you believe you are doing more than your spouse, your brain will go find evidence that you are right, and it will ignore a lot of what your spouse is actually doing. It hands you every dish you washed and every appointment you scheduled, and it skips right past the tank of gas he filled and the laundry he folded while you were out.

One of the first demonstrations of confirmation bias came from a psychologist named Peter Wason in 1960. He gave twenty nine people a guessing game where they had to work out a hidden rule by testing sequences of numbers. Almost all of them kept generating examples that fit the rule they already suspected, rather than looking for one that would prove them wrong. Only six got to the right answer without a wrong conclusion along the way. The rest picked a theory, tested only what would confirm it, and felt certain about something that wasn’t true.

That is what your ledger is doing. You are testing a belief you already hold, using only the evidence that agrees with it. And every time you find a piece, you feel more sure, which is exactly the feeling that keeps you counting.

This shows up most clearly when one spouse owns a single very visible job. Say your husband makes dinner most nights. He is standing in the kitchen, everyone sees it, everyone eats it, and it is the most obvious contribution in the house. So when he thinks about who does what around here, dinner is sitting right at the front of his mind, and it feels like a lot. Meanwhile you booked the orthodontist, restocked everybody’s socks, signed the permission slip, and dealt with the thing with his sister. The kids emptied the dishwasher and took the garbage out before he got home. None of that happened where he could see it, so none of it is in his head, so none of it gets counted.

It runs the other direction just as easily. A wife carrying the daily grind can be genuinely unaware of what her husband is absorbing at work, or that he is the one who handles the insurance renewal every single year, or that he is the one keeping an eye on the budget, the investing, and whether the two of them are going to be okay in retirement.

So the ledger in your head is honest and it is also incomplete. And his is honest and incomplete in the exact same way, just pointed the other direction. Two people can both be telling the truth about their own experience and still both be wrong about the marriage.

What scorekeeping creates

So what does all of that counting actually do to a marriage? The first thing it turns into is resentment.

Resentment and scorekeeping feed each other. Something bothers you, so you start counting. The counting hands you more to be bothered by. That loop keeps running whether or not one single thing in your marriage has actually changed.

Resentment tends to start one of two ways.

The first is when you never say anything. Maybe you want help getting the kids down at night. Maybe you want your husband to plan something for once instead of asking you what you want to do. Or maybe you are the husband, and you want your wife to notice that the cars got serviced and the taxes got filed and the yard got handled without anybody asking. Maybe you want her to reach for you first sometime. Either way, you don’t say it. You expect your spouse to notice, because it is obvious to you, and because you are fairly sure you would have noticed if the situation were reversed. So you wait. Every time it goes unnoticed, it goes on the pile. And your spouse has no idea there is a pile.

The second is when you do say something and nothing changes. You brought it up. Maybe you brought it up three times. It got acknowledged, there were two good weeks, and then it slid back. That one goes deeper, because you did it the right way. You asked directly, you were clear, and it still didn’t hold. That is the version that turns into “why should I even bother.”

Both of them end up in the same place, which is a running ledger with your spouse’s name on it.

Resentment also does something to the count itself. It makes the count feel accurate. Once you resent your spouse, the counting stops feeling petty. It feels like paying attention. And that is exactly when you stop questioning the number, right at the point where your brain is working hardest to protect it.

It also changes how you read everything your spouse does.

He comes home and asks what’s for dinner, and instead of hearing a question, you hear one more thing you are expected to have handled. She says she’s tired, and instead of hearing that she’s tired, you hear the beginning of a no. Neutral things stop being neutral. You are running every ordinary moment through the count, and the count already told you what to expect.

It also changes what your giving means. When you do something kind in order to even the score, you want something back for it. Your spouse can feel that, even if neither of you ever says a word about it. What you meant as kindness lands as pressure.

That is what happened with Bridget and Curtis.

Some weeks Curtis did the dishes without being asked, took the kids to the park on Saturday morning so Bridget could sleep in, put gas in her car. To her, that was just her husband being her partner. Then Saturday night he would reach for her, and something would tighten in her chest. He had been a good husband by every standard she could name. There was nothing to object to. So she would say yes. And she would lie there feeling like she owed him.

What she eventually noticed was that Curtis kept a running list of the week and told her about it. He would mention that he had let her sleep in, or that he had filled her tank. And the one Saturday she said no, the dishes sat in the sink for four days. That was when the tightening in her chest made sense.

After that, she braced a little every time he was extra helpful. That is a hard thing to admit, that your husband being kind to you makes you nervous.

Scorekeeping also guarantees you never get the thing you actually want. Counting is not asking. And if you did ask once and nothing changed, a year of counting since then is not asking again. You can spend two years getting very good at proving you do more than your spouse does. At the end of those two years, you will still be doing more.

And when it finally does come out, it comes out as an accusation, usually in the middle of an argument about something else, and usually with years of examples behind it. Then your spouse gets defensive and starts naming examples from the other side, and now you are both counting and neither of you is talking about what you actually wanted.

There is a pattern sitting underneath a lot of these ledgers. In family systems work it gets called over functioning and under functioning. I taught a whole class on this in my membership back in August, and you can join and get access to it. One spouse takes on more and more, because they see it, because they care how it turns out, because it will not get done otherwise. The other spouse does less and less, partly because it is already handled before they ever get to it. And each one makes the other more true. The more you take over, the less room there is for your spouse to step in. The less your spouse steps in, the more you take over. Murray Bowen called this reciprocity, and Harriet Lerner brought it to a general audience in The Dance of Anger in 1985.

The over functioner is almost always the one keeping the ledger. And the uncomfortable part of that pattern is this. The over functioner really is doing more, and is also keeping the other one from stepping in. Both of those are true at the same time, which is why this one is so hard to see from the inside.

When your spouse is the one keeping score

So let’s say your spouse is the one keeping score. You cannot make them stop. That is their work, and pushing on it directly tends to make them hold the list tighter.

What you can do is respond to what is underneath the counting. When someone starts reciting the tally, there is almost always a want sitting behind it, and that want usually has not been said. So you can ask. “It sounds like you’re carrying a lot right now. What would actually help?” That question does something an argument can’t do. It gives your spouse somewhere to put the want besides the count.

The thing not to do is pull out your own list. I understand the urge. They just said you never initiate and you can name four times you did, with dates. But the second your list comes out, you are both defending yourselves and neither of you is listening, and the conversation goes nowhere.

You also get to decide what you will and will not do, and that is different from trying to control what your spouse keeps track of. If you don’t want to have sex to settle a debt, you can say that. “I want to have sex with you. I don’t want to have sex to make something even. Can we start over on this?” That is you deciding for yourself, and it stays yours no matter what your spouse does with it.

And if the underlying complaint has something to it, take it seriously. Some of you are married to someone who keeps score because the load really is uneven and they have run out of ways to say so.

When you are the one keeping score

And if you are the one with the list, the work is yours and nobody else can do it for you.

Start by catching the count while it is happening. You will feel it as a very specific kind of satisfaction, a small click of being right. That click is the signal.

Then ask what you actually want. Underneath “I have done bedtime four nights in a row” there is usually something like, “I want to be able to sit down at eight o’clock.” Underneath “I initiated three times and got shot down” there is usually something like, “I want to know you still want me.”

Then say that. Out loud, to your spouse, as a request, without the evidence attached. “I would love it if you took bedtime tonight.” “I want to know that you still find me attractive. Will you tell me?” No preamble about the last four nights. Just the want.

That is much harder than it sounds. The evidence is armor. If you present the count first and get a no, you can be angry about the injustice. If you present the want by itself and get a no, it just hurts. Making a clean request means being willing to be turned down without a case to fall back on.

But a no to a clean request is information. It is not a debt. Your spouse might be exhausted. They might be in their own thing. They might just not have it tonight. None of that gets added to a running total, because you are not running a total anymore.

The other piece is saying it soon. A want you bring up when it happens is a request. Saved up and brought out later, it becomes an accusation.

The way forward

The way out of scorekeeping is to change what kind of relationship you think you are in.

In the late seventies, two researchers, Margaret Clark and Judson Mills, drew a line between two ways people relate to each other. In the first, you give something because you got something, or because you expect something back. That is how you deal with a contractor, or a coworker, or the neighbor who watched your dog. It is transactional. In the second, you give because you care about the person and you are paying attention to what is going on with them. Nobody is keeping count. That is an equal partnership.

Clark tested this a few years later. She had pairs of people work on a task together, one person starting it and the other finishing it. When they expected the transactional kind of relationship, they picked a different color pen so you could see who had done what. When they expected the other kind, they used the same pen and the work blended together.

Same task. The only difference was what kind of relationship they thought they were in, and the record keeping followed from that.

Marriage is meant to be an equal partnership. Under stress, and under years of feeling unseen, it turns transactional. And once it is transactional, you start keeping count.

In Moroni chapter 7, verse 45, Mormon describes charity this way. “And charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil.” Seeketh not her own. That is not a call to erase yourself or to give until there is nothing left. It describes love that is not keeping count of what it gets back.

Practically, that comes down to four things.

1. When you notice the tally, say the want within a day. Not the count. The want.
2. Separate generosity from sex completely. If you do something kind for your spouse, let it be finished when it’s finished. Don’t let it accrue.
3. Go looking for what your spouse contributes, on purpose. Your brain will not hand you that list for free. You will have to build it deliberately, the same way you built the other one.
4. If the division of labor is genuinely lopsided, have that conversation in the open, as a conversation. Sit down on a Sunday afternoon, write out everything that keeps your household running, and divide it between you. Fairness is a real and legitimate thing to want in a marriage. Scorekeeping is just a terrible way to pursue it, because it never actually gets negotiated. If you want a structure for that conversation, Eve Rodsky’s book Fair Play is built for exactly this. It breaks the work of running a household into a hundred task cards, and you decide together who owns each one. Holding a card means owning the whole task, noticing it needs doing, planning it, and doing it. Getting it all out on the table where you can both see it is most of the work. And plenty of couples find the surprises run in both directions. I taught a full class on the Fair Play method in my membership in September. If you want to work through it with some support, you can join and get access to that class.

One caution about all four of those. You can see the problem, and come up with a solution, and be right back where you started in six weeks. That happens because we change the behavior or the system and leave the thinking underneath it exactly where it was. If you rebalance the chores but you still believe you are the only one who sees what needs doing, you will start counting again. I did a whole episode on this a few weeks ago, Episode 439, on why the changes you make never last.

Kirsten and Porter did the fourth one first, because it was the most concrete. They put the whole list on paper and split it, and some of it shifted and some of it didn’t, and Kirsten was surprised by how much of what she was carrying she had never once mentioned to him.

The harder part came after. Kirsten had to start saying what she wanted the week it came up instead of banking it. Porter had to stop assuming her tiredness was about him, and start asking about it. He also had to let a Saturday of finishing the basement stairs be a Saturday of finishing the basement stairs, with nothing owed at the end of it.

The last time we talked, Kirsten told me she still catches herself counting. She just doesn’t act on it the same way. She notices the click, and then she goes and says the thing instead.