Why Fairness Is Destroying Your Relationship (And What to Do Instead) (Podcast Episode 388)

That’s not fair.

You said it as a kid. You’ve thought it as an adult. Maybe you thought it this morning when you were loading the dishwasher while your partner sat on the couch. Maybe you thought it when you were the one who made the dinner and then also had to clean up because somehow that’s just how it goes. Maybe you’re thinking it right now, because you’re the one reading this, trying to figure out how to make things better, and why are you always the one who has to make changes when they’re not doing anything? That’s not fair either.

Fairness is one of the most universal thoughts humans have. And it’s also one of the most quietly destructive forces in a relationship. Today, I’m going to show you why the fairness argument keeps you stuck, what the research says about what’s happening in your brain when things feel unfair, and the one question that will change everything the next time you feel the resentment starting to build. You’re going to leave this episode with a completely different way of thinking about fairness, and I promise it’s going to change how you show up in every relationship in your life.

20-minute read

Introduction

If you’ve been listening to Relationships Made Easy for a while, you know I have strong feelings about competition in relationships. I gave a TEDx on this topic, and in it, I lay out exactly how keeping score is the real reason relationships fail. Not communication problems. Not trust issues. Those are symptoms. The root cause is competition, and at the heart of competition is this idea of fairness.

Fairness shows up everywhere. It shows up in how you divide the household tasks, in who earns more money, in who got to sleep in on Saturday. It shows up when your partner gets a promotion, and your first reaction isn’t joy but a quiet, sinking feeling that the scales just tipped. And it shows up in the hardest moments, when you’re the one in the most pain, and someone suggests you need to be the one to make changes first, and every cell in your body wants to say, “But it’s not my fault.” So let’s talk about it. All of it.

Why Does Fairness Feel So Urgent?

Before we get into why the fairness argument backfires, it’s worth understanding why it feels so powerful in the first place. And for that, I want to take you into a brain scanner.

In 2003, neuroscientist Alan Sanfey and his colleagues at Princeton conducted a landmark study using a game called the Ultimatum Game. Here’s how it works: two players split a sum of money. One person proposes a division. The other can accept it and both players get paid, or reject it and neither player gets anything. Economically, accepting any offer is rational. Even if you’re only offered a dollar, that’s a dollar more than you had. But what Sanfey found is that people routinely reject offers they perceive as unfair, even when it costs them money.

The brain scans told the real story. When participants received an offer they considered unfair, a part of the brain called the anterior insula lit up. That’s the same region associated with disgust and physical pain! In other words, unfairness doesn’t just feel bad intellectually. It registers in your brain as something physically aversive. It feels like touching a hot stove.

This is why fairness arguments are so compelling. Your brain is literally treating perceived inequity as a threat. Of course you want to fight it. Your nervous system is telling you something is wrong.

Relationship researcher Elaine Hatfield, who pioneered Equity Theory alongside colleagues Walster and Berscheid, spent decades documenting what happens in relationships when people feel this way. Her longitudinal research found that people who felt under benefited in their relationships reported significantly more distress and far lower relationship satisfaction. More importantly, Susan Sprecher’s experimental research established that this runs in both directions: being reminded of times when you felt shortchanged actually causes you to feel less satisfied with your relationship, not just reflects it.

But here’s where it gets really interesting (OK, maybe that’s just me, you know I love research). A study by Grote and Clark found that distress and fairness perception have a feedback loop. When you’re in pain in your relationship, you start scanning for evidence of unfairness. And once you start keeping score, the distress increases, which makes you scan harder. This is what I see in my office all the time. Couples who started out with a garden-variety conflict end up in a full-blown war over who did what and when, because the tracking itself makes everything feel worse.

And your Reticular Activating System (RAS) is compounding this whole mess. I’ve talked about the RAS a lot over the years because it shows up everywhere in relationship dynamics. Your RAS is a filter between your conscious and subconscious mind. When you consciously focus on something, your RAS treats that as an instruction to your subconscious: find more of this. Think about a time you learned a new word you’d never heard before. Suddenly, you start hearing it everywhere, in podcasts, in conversations, in articles. The word was always there. You just weren’t tuned to it. The moment your brain got the signal to look for it, it started showing up constantly.

Your RAS works exactly the same way in your relationship. The moment you start tracking fairness and thinking my partner never pulls their weight, your brain gets the order: find every example of this. And it will. Every single time. Not because your partner has suddenly gotten worse, but because that’s what you told your brain to look for. Meanwhile, it’s filtering out everything that doesn’t match. All the moments your partner did show up, did help, did try. Those just don’t register anymore.

The Moving Target Nobody Tells You About

So, if fairness feels that real in your brain and body, why am I saying it’s the wrong goal?

Because fairness is a moving target. There’s no fixed standard. There’s no chart you can consult to find out what “fair” looks like in your specific relationship, with your specific circumstances, at this specific moment in your lives.

Psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy, author of Good Inside, makes a point about this that I love. She writes that when families set fairness as a goal, they actually create more conflict, not less. Her phrase is: “We don’t do fair, we do individual needs.” Because the moment you start tracking what’s fair, you’re not asking what do I actually need? You’re asking what does my partner/the other person have that I don’t? You’re looking outward instead of inward. And that outward gaze is the engine of resentment.

Here’s an example I see all the time. Let’s say your partner travels for work. You’re home managing the kids, the appointments, the house. They come back after five days away, drop their bag, and within an hour, they’re horizontal on the couch watching a game. You’re furious. You’ve been “on” for five straight days and they get to decompress the second they walk in? That’s not fair.

But your partner has been in back-to-back client dinners and presentations, sleeping in hotels, eating airport food, and performing at a high level under constant scrutiny for five days. They’re depleted in a completely different way. Neither of you is wrong about what you need. But the fairness framework puts you on opposite sides of a ledger, when the real question is: what does this team need right now, and how do we get there together?

This is what I mean when I say fairness is arbitrary. You can always make a case that something is unfair if you look at it through the right lens. If you count hours, one of you wins some weeks and the other wins others. If you count emotional labor, you might have a case. If you count the nights you both lost sleep in the first year with a baby, it gets murkier. The scoreboard is always going to show something, and it’s always going to feel incomplete. There is no “fair.” There’s only what you both need.

Why Keeping Score Makes You Lose

I’ve been talking about competition in relationships for a long time, and I did a deep dive on this in my episode on keeping score. But let me give you the essential version here.

When you’re keeping score in your relationship, you’re treating it like a competition. And in a competition, someone wins and someone loses. You set it up so that when your partner does well, you lose. You set it up so that when they need something, it comes at your expense. This is the dynamic that turns partners into opponents.

I want you to hear me on this. You and your partner are one shared resource. This means that when you pull energy from your partner, you’re pulling it from your team (which also means you’re pulling it from yourself). When your partner is depleted, your team is depleted. You’re depleted. There’s no separate scorecard because there’s only one account.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Your partner can’t take anything off your plate because it’s the same plate! You’re both just moving around the mashed potatoes and nothing is actually changing. The work doesn’t disappear. The stress doesn’t disappear. You just shuffle it around and both end up exhausted and resentful.

This is why the lines that seem so logical actually work against you:

“I drove the kids to soccer on Tuesday, so you need to take them on Thursday.”
“You went out Friday night, so I get Saturday.”
“I did the cooking, so you need to clean up afterward.”

These statements put you on opposite teams. They signal to your partner: I’m watching you. I’m tracking what you owe me. And that energy poisons connection faster than almost anything else I know.

John Gottman’s research has shown that one of the most reliable predictors of relationship failure isn’t how couples fight, it’s how they respond to each other’s good news. If your partner gets a promotion and your first thought is resentment or relief that the score is balanced, you’re in serious trouble. Keeping score means you structurally can’t be happy for your partner. And that is a profound loss, for both of you.

“But Why Do I Have to Change First?”

I’ve been saying for years that the one in the most pain needs to change first. I’m not saying you’re wrong, or that your partner is off the hook, or that the situation is okay. It’s saying: if you want things to be different, someone has to move first. And the person with the most motivation to move is the person who’s suffering the most.

If you’ve been nodding along, at some point a voice in your head has said, “This all sounds great, Abby, but you don’t understand my situation. I’m the one who’s been showing up. I’m the one who’s been doing the work. It is not fair that I have to change first when none of this is my fault.”

I hear you. And I want to say something that might feel uncomfortable. You’re right that it might not be your fault. And it doesn’t matter.

This is what I call Relationship Gridlock. Picture a traffic jam where no one can move. Everyone is honking. Everyone is frustrated. Everyone has somewhere to be. And everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. Here’s the thing about gridlock: it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. It doesn’t matter who cut whom off three intersections back, or who should have taken a different route. What matters is that just one person moving their car is all it takes to break the whole thing open. One person. That’s it. The person who moves isn’t the loser. They’re the one who actually gets where they’re going.

When you’re waiting for your partner to change first, you’re sitting in gridlock insisting it’s their turn to move. And everyone just stays stuck.

This is where my oft-quoted research by Timothy Wilson becomes so important. In his book Strangers to Ourselves, Wilson documents something remarkable about how our brains work: your conscious mind processes about 40 bits of information per second. Your subconscious mind processes 11 million bits per second. What that means for your relationship is this. If you make changes while you’re still full of resentment, your partner’s subconscious is picking up on every single bit of it, even if their conscious brain sees the nicer behavior.

I call this “the wobble.” Your partner notices you’re being kinder, saying thank you more, maybe even helping more. Their conscious brain logs it. But their subconscious, processing at 11 million bits per second, is picking up on the frustration underneath. And so, they get suspicious. They don’t trust the change. They’re thinking, “Let’s see how long this lasts.” And then when you don’t get the response you were hoping for, you feel justified going back to resentment, and the whole cycle starts again.

This is why genuine change, change that comes from actually shifting your perspective rather than just white-knuckling better behavior, is the only thing that works long-term. Your partner can feel the difference. Their nervous system knows.

Fault is irrelevant to healing. You can be completely right about who caused the problem and still be the person who has to take the first step toward solving it. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

The One Question That Changes Everything

So, what do you do in the moment? When the fairness thought shows up, when you feel the resentment rising, when you catch yourself tallying up everything you’ve done and comparing it to everything they haven’t?

You stop and you ask, “What do I actually need right now?”

This is Dr. Becky Kennedy’s reframe, and I want you to really sit with it. The fairness thought is a signal, but it’s not pointing you toward a problem with your partner. It’s pointing you toward an unmet need in yourself. Your brain is flagging that something is off. Your job is to get curious about what that something actually is.

Not “Why hasn’t my partner done their share of the dishes?” But “Am I exhausted? Do I need help? Do I need rest? Do I need to feel like a priority? Do I need to feel like we’re a team?”

Because once you know what you actually need, you can ask for it. Not accusatorially. Not as an indictment of your partner’s inadequacy. Just “I’m really depleted right now. Can we figure out how to get me some time this weekend?” Or “I’ve been feeling like we’re each on our own islands lately. Can we reconnect tonight?”

This is a completely different conversation than the one that starts with fairness. That conversation puts your partner on trial. This conversation invites them to show up for you.

And when your partner says something is unfair? The same question applies. Instead of defending yourself or pulling out your own scorecard, try, “What do you need right now?” You might be surprised by the answer. It’s rarely actually about the thing they’re complaining about.

You’re rarely going to get through an episode of Relationships Made Easy without me mentioning mindfulness, and today is no different! Mindfulness is one of the most powerful tools for catching yourself mid-score-keeping. When you can notice the thought without acting on it, you create space to ask a better question.

Stop Negotiating Across a Line and Start Looking Up

Here’s a tool I give to clients that changes how they see almost every conflict. Most couples approach problems like they’re standing on opposite ends of a straight line, facing each other. You’re on one end, your partner is on the other, and somewhere in the middle you’re negotiating. Who’s going to do the dishes? If you can’t do it, then I have to. We go back and forth, bargaining, trading, keeping score. The same mashed potatoes, still on the same plate.

And here’s the thing about compromise, which I know sounds like the obvious solution to all of this: research actually shows it doesn’t work as well as we think it does.

We know now from an abundance of research that compromise doesn’t make either person happy because both people tend to feel they either gave away too much or received too little. Both people walk away feeling like the loser. That’s not a solution. That’s just resentment wearing a different outfit.

I want you to try thinking about it as a triangle instead. You’re at one corner of the base. Your partner is at the other corner. And the problem, whatever it is, sits at the top. You’re not facing each other. You’re both facing up, looking at a shared problem together, and the question isn’t “who’s going to handle this” but “how are we going to solve this together.”

When you’re looking across a line at your partner, there are only two options: you do it or they do it. That’s it. When you’re looking up at a problem together, a whole world of options opens up. Can you bring in outside resources? A cleaning service, a neighbor, a family member, a different system altogether? Can you take something off the plate entirely? Maybe the dishes don’t need to be done every single night. Maybe you order in twice a week, and everyone gets a break. Maybe going out with friends this Saturday isn’t the hill to die on.

The shift from the line to the triangle isn’t just practical. It’s emotional. When you stop treating your partner as the obstacle and start treating the problem as the obstacle, the entire energy of the conversation changes. You’re on the same team again. And that’s when real solutions actually become possible.

What to Do When It Really Is Unequal

I want to acknowledge something. Sometimes things are genuinely unequal. Not in the moment-to-moment way, but structurally. One partner is carrying significantly more of the household management. One partner’s career has been systematically deprioritized. One person’s emotional labor is invisible and unacknowledged.

Research consistently shows that perceived inequity in household labor and emotional work is associated with lower relationship satisfaction and higher rates of marital dissolution. This is real, and I’m not asking you to pretend it isn’t.

And here’s a question I hear a lot when I get to this point: “Okay, Abby, so if I stop keeping score and stop demanding fairness, does that mean I just have to do everything?” No. Absolutely not. Here’s how you actually divide things without turning it into a competition.

What I’m asking you to do is approach the conversation differently. Because the fairness argument, as satisfying as it feels, almost never produces change. What it produces is defensiveness, counter-accusations, and deeper entrenchment on both sides.

If something is genuinely unsustainable for you, here’s what works:

Name what you need, not what they’re failing to do. “I need more support with morning routines” lands differently than “You never help in the morning.”
Get specific about what would actually help. Not a general complaint but a concrete request.
Look for ways to add resources to the system rather than just reassigning tasks. Can you hire help? Can you simplify something? Can you let something go? When you’re stuck fighting over who mops the floor, sometimes the right answer is to find a way neither of you has to do it.
Have the harder conversation about equity directly, not through accumulated grievances. “I’ve been feeling like we’re not operating as equal partners and I want us to talk about it” is a much more productive opening than a list of evidence.

Right and Wrong or Just Different Preferences?

Here’s one more tool I want to leave you with, because I think it’s the most overlooked piece of all of this. A lot of what we fight about as “unfair” isn’t actually unfair. It’s just different. And we’ve confused our preferences with the correct way to do things.

Let’s take cleaning. Your partner wipes down the counter after dinner. You look at it and you’re furious because there’s still a sticky spot from the jelly jar. You might even think the term that’s been floating around lately: weaponized incompetence. But what if that’s simply their version of “clean enough”? Not wrong. Not lazy. Just a different standard.

And before you insist your standard is the right one, think about this. Someone else might say a counter isn’t clean unless you use bleach. Another person mops the floor every night with a disinfectant. You probably don’t do that either. Does that make you wrong? Or does it just make you someone with a different preference?

There’s no universally correct way to load a dishwasher. There’s no objectively right way to fold laundry, make a bed, or organize a pantry. There’s your way and there’s their way. Both are preferences.

This matters for fairness because so much of the scorekeeping in relationships is actually about enforcing our preferences on our partners and then resenting them for not sharing them. Some examples:

You like the house picked up before bed. They don’t care. Neither of you is right. You have a preference.
You think responding to texts within an hour is basic courtesy. They check their phone twice a day. Neither of you is wrong. You have different preferences.
You want to talk about a problem the moment it comes up. They need to process first and come back to it. Both are valid ways of handling conflict.

When you can start asking, “Is this actually wrong, or is this just different from how I’d do it?” you’ll be amazed at how many fairness arguments dissolve. If you have a strong preference that something needs to be done a specific way, you have two options: do it yourself, or hire someone who’ll do it your way. What you can’t do is hand it to someone else and then grade them on your rubric.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have standards or conversations about how things get done in your shared life. You absolutely can. But those conversations go a lot better when you walk in knowing you have a preference, not a monopoly on correctness.

Wrap Up

Here’s what I want you to take away today. Fairness is a feeling your brain generates when it senses a threat. It’s real and it matters. But the fairness framework, the scorekeeping, the tracking, the “why do I have to change first” logic, keeps you locked in competition with the person you’re supposed to be partnered with.

Your relationship doesn’t have two scorecards. It has one account, and you’re both drawing from it. When you stop asking “Is this fair?” and start asking “What do I need, and what does this team need?”, everything changes. Not overnight. But it changes.

And if you’re the one in the most pain right now, the one who’s been doing more and feeling unseen and wondering why you have to go first: I know it feels deeply unfair. And you still get to choose whether you want to keep waiting for circumstances to change, or whether you want to be the one who changes them. The one in the most pain always has the most to gain.

The free download for today is The Fairness Reframe: The One Question That Stops Resentment Before It Starts

And if fairness is a big issue for you and you’re ready to go deeper with tools that will help you change how you think, feel and act for good, you can get this week’s Therapy-to-Go Bundle.

For just $10 you’ll get:

The Fairness Reframe: The One Question That Stops Resentment Before It Starts
The Score-Keeping Self-Audit: Where Your Brain Is Tallying What You Don’t Realize You’re Tallying
The Triangle Conversation Worksheet: From “Me vs. You” to “Us vs. The Problem”
Scripts for Needs-Based Conversations: Replacing the Fairness Argument With What You Actually Want to Say
Where Your Fairness Story Started: Journaling Prompts to Uncover the Origin of Your Score-Keeping
Bird’s-Eye Pattern Inventory: Where Score-Keeping Shows Up Across Every Relationship in Your Life

Resources

Abby’s TEDx: The Real Reason Relationships Fail

How to Focus on What’s Right INSTEAD of What’s Wrong in Your Relationship

Keeping Score in Your Relationship Makes You Lose

Three Lies Keeping You Stuck in Relationship Gridloc

Emotional Healing Techniques: Mastering Mindfulness and Self-Acceptance/Compassion

The Key to Letting Go of Resentment

How Emotional Labor is Killing Your Relationship

You’ve Got to Have High Standards and Low Expectations

Mindfulness Starter Kit

References

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