Several months ago, Dan and Meghan Nichols, a couple from Cleveland, realized that they could no longer ignore the deep rift that had developed in their relationship.
The Nicholses, married for over a decade with three children, have had increasingly heated fights over Meghan’s mental load. That’s the ongoing and largely invisible work of managing a household and family, including resupplying groceries, scheduling everyone’s medical appointments, and arranging children’s extracurricular activities.
In heterosexual couples, these tasks largely fall to women, even though women now make up nearly half of the U.S. work force.
“I was at a breaking point, and just exhausted,” Meghan said.
So the couple enlisted some help. Instead of a marriage counselor, they turned to an unlikely source: Zach Watson, a former high school math and science teacher who lives in New England. Mr. Watson is a self-described “recovering man child” who became a mental load coach three years ago.
In his sessions, Mr. Watson walks men through the often-unseen labor that is keeping their household running and develops strategies with them to rebalance the workload.
Mr. Watson was trained as a certified Fair Play Method facilitator using a course developed by Eve Rodsky, the author of “Fair Play,” a book that offers a system to help couples redistribute the workload at home.
There are 121 Fair Play Method facilitators in the U.S. that work with the public; only eight are men, said Jenn Younker, Chief Operating Officer of the Fair Play Policy Institute.
The couple’s session, their first with Mr. Watson, took place on a Friday morning Zoom call. Mr. Watson began the session by reviewing Mr. Nichols’s progress with household tasks. Some things had gone well; some did not. One morning, Mr. Nichols said he would get their children ready for school so Meghan could sleep in.
He made the children’s lunches and got them dressed, but then he decided to take a quick nap.
“I kind of slept through my time that I expected to wake up,” Dan said. He hustled the children to the car so they wouldn’t be late, but they missed breakfast.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t step back,” Meghan said. “Can I trust that you’ll handle things?”
During this session, Mr. Watson encouraged Mr. Nichols to take “full ownership” of a job.
If you’re folding the laundry but not putting it away, Mr. Watson explained, and you ignore that the detergent is almost empty, “that’s 80 percent, not 100 percent.”
Mr. Watson, who has been married for 10 years and has a 4-year-old daughter and infant twins, has learned from his own mistakes. He shares those lessons in sessions and with his 1.4 million social media followers, among them the actress Kristen Bell, with whom he did a video skit on “decision fatigue” among mothers. He also secured a book deal with Random House.
“A few years ago, I would not have expected that I’d be on Zoom calls multiple times a week talking to people about how they empty trash in their home,” Mr. Watson said. “But here we are.”
Rewriting “The Man-Child Playbook”
A perpetual imbalance in household labor can seem, to some, like a small issue, but it can lead to relationship strain and burnout and lower sexual desire, and eventually result in divorce.
Oona Metz, a Boston-based psychotherapist who specializes in treating women navigating divorce, said, “I talk to women all day long about why they’re getting divorced, and almost every time, this issue comes into play.”
Many of Mr. Watson’s clients are teetering on that edge. Most have been sent to him by their wives or partners, and “divorce or separation has been brought up,” he said.
Mr. Watson is the first to admit that he knows every trick in what he calls “the man-child playbook.”
He married his wife, Alyssa Watson, a clinical research analyst, in 2015; tensions began in 2018 when they bought a three-family house. It was his idea, he said. The plan was to renovate the place so they could generate passive income from having a renter.
Instead, it was Mr. Watson who was passive.
During the 19 months of renovation, he said, Ms. Watson was “making all the decisions,” despite having a full-time job. Their fights grew so intense that they separated for three months.
They eventually got back together, and their daughter Everly was born in 2021. While Ms. Watson said that “Zach was really driven to be an involved dad,” they began to fight once again about her lopsided mental load.
He realized he needed to be a better husband as well as a father, and plunged into research. In 2022, he read “Fair Play,” and started posting videos on social media about the ways men were adding to their partner’s mental load.
In one 2023 post, he explained that Alyssa had just pulled blueberry muffins out of the oven and left the room. His daughter asked for a muffin, so he yelled to Alyssa, “Do you think these muffins are too hot to feed her?” he recalled.
It was a “stupid question,” he said. “I could see them steaming.”
The post hit a nerve, racking up 25 million views to date. After his social media posts on the mental load, he received a flurry of comments and direct messages from viewers asking him if he would consider an advisement role.
Soon after, he trained to be a “Fair Play” facilitator. He has since coached hundreds of clients, whom he charges $75 for an hourlong call.
Some clients supplement his sessions with psychotherapy or couples therapy, but others do not, Mr. Watson said. “I don’t really dig into people’s pasts,” he said. Instead, “I give them action steps.”
Mr. Watson, who is funny and self-effacing, helps clients to clearly define their roles and urges couples to have a weekly meeting, separate from his coaching, about household logistics.
Then, at each session, he charts their progress, keeps clients accountable by using systems that he has set up, encourages them to share their emotions, and troubleshoots solutions.
Ms. Metz, the therapist in Boston and the author of “Unhitched: The Essential Divorce Guide for Women,” said that Mr. Watson’s coaching could be useful if people are open to changing their behavior. But, she said, if it’s a “character issue, where someone thinks, ‘This is not my job, and this stuff isn’t a big deal,’” that may be harder to work with.
Over and over, Mr. Watson tells his male clients: If you take on more of your partner’s mental load and also do the emotional work, your relationship will likely improve — sometimes dramatically.
Ms. Watson has seen this upward curve in her own marriage. “Zach went from being another child I had to look after to someone that’s actually carrying his weight around the house and in our lives,” she said.
When the couple received the news that twins were on the way, Mr. Watson immediately went into chore-planning mode.
“I was able to recognize so much of the labor she was going to start taking on, and where I could take over,” Mr. Watson said.
A more balanced household load can result in a tighter bond. “There’s a lot more smiling, a lot more happy times,” Dan Nichols noted in his session with Mr. Watson, exchanging a shy grin with his wife. “It’s easier to connect, to communicate,” he said. “Intimacy stuff is way better. And it doesn’t feel like I’m jumping from screw up to screw up.”
Mr. Watson often tells male clients that there are two effective “easy-action items” that they can do right away: Stop saying that you are “helping” around the house and “quit asking open-ended questions.”
He added, “Stop saying things like, ‘Where’s the ketchup?’ Did you actually look in the shelf?”
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