The Dishwashing Theory of Relationships

Imagine you're at a dinner party. Remember dinner parties? The host prepared a salad singing odes about the approach of spring, with pomegranate seeds that pop in your mouth like little joy grenades. And a casserole that reminds you why you always put on a little extra during winter, so good that not a single spoon gets left behind. You bring two bottles of wine and make up a cheeky story of how you just picked them up from that tiny little vineyard on your way back to town before admitting they're $12.99 at Safeways. Everybody laughs a lot, everybody feels like family.

As you all decide to punt on dessert for the time being, you offer to do the dishes. The dishwasher is loaded quickly, but the bowls and casserole dishes need some manual labor of love.

And you scrub the shit out of them. At home you'd be perfectly content leaving tiny bits of burnt in brown coloration on the sides of the casserole dish, but that's just not going to cut it here. You get the dish sparkling clean, dry it up, and put it away (and I mean neatly stack it with the other casserole dishes into perfect Russian doll situation instead of just shoving it into the shelf with the assortment of Tupperware lids and mason jars). It feels good, you’re doing it for a friend.

Another story: a few years ago a good friend of mine asked me to go to court for her. She got a misdemeanor charge for selling wine at a not-for-profit theater production, and had good hopes that the judge would just throw the case out. However, she was on tour with her production company, so she asked me to go. Me. The least confrontational person I know. To court. If that happened to me, I would have just paid whatever fine to not have to think about the problem again. But for her, I was willing to fight. I would not leave that courthouse before the judge agreed that a slap on the hand was more than appropriate. The very same thing that would make me frightful and complacent turned me into a fierce, uncompromising fighter when doing it for a friend.

I call this the dish-washing theory of relationships. There are some tasks that we dislike enough that we take whatever compromise we can find. But doing the same task for a friend, we will finish it to perfection with unbreakable determination. I accept that my own casserole dish will never fully recover from the French Toast Incident of 2018, but that's not going to happen at my friend's dinner party, not on my watch! On the contrary, doing this otherwise disagreeable chore now is a delight, as you find joy in doing something for your friend. It just shows that it is not scrubbing pans that you dislike, as the same physical action in another context brings pride and joy.

If there’s a task you dread doing, but where the outcome is very important to you, chances are someone in your life would actually enjoy doing you a favor and picking up that task. Notice the two qualifiers: it needs to be something you’d either avoid or compromise on, and it needs to be important to you.

I use this mental model all the time with my partner to get out of chores that I know I’ll half-ass anyway (and obviously, give her a way to do so too): for us that’s often calling banks and dealing with bureaucracy.

There’s another, even more impactful way to use this model: looking out for other people’s dirty dishes. What inevitable struggles are your friends trying to avoid? How can fight the most tedious fights of your co-workers or people reporting to you for them?

Remember, what goes around, comes around. Even if it’s just a clean casserole dish.