Stephanie Kuntz

If someone wants to go further than the minimum standards, fine, they can't pretend that you need to do that too.

If they want to do less, however, you did have an agreement and you gotta live up to that.

So that's that important part of negotiation.

I mean, I'll just use my own marriage as an example.

I really don't care if the bed gets made.

But I am an avid cook, and I spend lots and lots of time on cooking and cooking preparation.

And there was a period when I felt kind of resentful that my husband didn't come in when I was cooking a major meal that he didn't care about having.

and help along and do the grunt work for me.

And then I realized, you can't do that.

If he doesn't care and he doesn't want that, you're doing this mostly to give pleasure to yourself.

You can't just assign the grunt work to him.

It has to be, if you're going to get pleasure out of this meal, you have to be able to say, I can do the grunt work as well as the fun, fancy stuff and flame it at the end and get all the applause for it.

So that's the kind of self-examination both

partners need to do and the kind of negotiation and compromise they need to do when they're talking about chores.

One thing that same-sex couples can really teach heterosexual couples is they don't have the same sort of expectation that one part because he's a boy and one because she's a girl have certain kind of skills or interests.

So they tend to divide chores much more thoughtfully than

There's a lot of debate about that, and it depends what the reasons for your choice.

But there's actually very solid research that shows that people who choose not to get married because they want to, not because they've been rejected over and over again or the kind of person that don't have friends, those people tend to build very wide friendship networks, wider than most married couples.

And to the extent that they have done that, that's what counts.

And in fact, I quote research in the book that it's really by the time you get into old age, it's your friendship networks even more than your marriage partner that decides how you're doing.