‘What’s your favourite food? ‘Where do you want to go on your honeymoon? ‘What’s your favourite colour? Courtship is often full of questions, but they hardly reveal what marriage will actually look like once two people begin sharing a life, responsibilities and the mental load of everyday living. Once the wedding is over, that’s when the mental load of marriage begins to reveal itself, from remembering and planning to managing the countless invisible tasks that keep a household running. In an interview with HT Lifestyle, counselling psychologist, author and life coach Damini Grover decodes why mental load can become a relationship problem.
Before getting married, couples talk about how they’ll divide up the chores. Who’s cooking? Are both partners working? Where do they live? How will you handle money? But we don’t hear as much about the work that can’t be easily captured on a chore chart: the mental load of managing a shared life. Most people often get confused between mental load and sharing responsibility . Damini highlighted that it’s the difference between taking a parent to the doctor and remembering to make the appointment for them. It’s buying food vs. seeing what’s being used up. It’s going to the family function versus remembering the birthday, buying the gift, coordinating plans, and keeping up with the relationship. This is especially the case if one moves from a parental home where parents took care of many things to a marriage. We cannot assume that an adult is self-sufficient.
Marriage does not require a perfect 50-50 split every day. Because the other one can’t, there are going to be times when one of you is carrying more.
