5 min read

Dear Snackers,

This week's Soul Snacks is brought to you by one of my most favorite relationship experts, Dr. Morgan Cutlip. Morgan is fantastic at identifying the pain points between couples and the division of the mental load. She helps break it down in a way that doesn't feel like an attack on the person who does not typically carry the majority of the mental load. Her messaging is realistic, tangible and palatable for both people in the relationship - a true service to married couples struggling in this area. She's just written a new book on the topic and below is a piece from Morgan which better explains the ways she can help. Feel seen and Enjoy!

xo, Caitlin

By Morgan Cutlip

This weekend, I got into bed and started laughing uncontrollably. Not the “haha that was funny” kind—more like the “I’m on the verge of unraveling and my only two options are cry or laugh” kind. Why? Because I had spent 3½ hours folding laundry and another 1½ cleaning the kitchen… and yet, when I finally laid down, there was a fresh pile of laundry waiting and the kitchen was already trashed again. What in the Groundhog Day is going on here? When do these relentless, treadmill tasks end?

The grind is real. Most days, I feel like a hamster on a wheel—pushing, hustling, trying… and still having nothing visible to show for it. My husband asked if I was okay (concerned, probably, that I was teetering on the edge), and I told him, “Can you believe how much we did today… and yet it feels like nothing actually got done?” He had been out there too—power washing the deck, doing taxes, changing water filters—and yet the to-do list didn’t budge.

This is modern family life. There’s always something - someone to feed, bills to pay, kids to taxi, tasks that just keep multiplying. Our kids are 11 and 9 now, but I remember the early years of motherhood so vividly. I remember the overwhelm. I remember the resentment that crept in almost instantly. I remember thinking, “Why has my life changed so much… and his hasn’t?”

When I learned the term “mental load”, suddenly, I felt like the women of the world were giving me a collective hug. You mean this thing—this constant buzzing in my brain, this weight I can’t shake—it has a NAME? And even more than that, it’s not just me? That moment changed everything. It led to deep shifts in my marriage. And it eventually led me to make this my life’s work—helping couples navigate this very real, very unspoken issue.

What is the mental load? The mental load is the invisible, never-ending to-do list in your mind. The part that makes you the default calendar keeper, snack packer, birthday rememberer, doctor appointment scheduler, and everything-else wrangler. It’s invisible—so it’s hard to explain, hard to hand off, and hard to get appreciation for.
And it takes up cognitive real estate that could be used for peace, patience, presence
and yes, even desire and connection.

When it’s not shared fairly, it chips away at your relationship. That’s what happened in mine. We fell into roles by default—not by choice, and I absorbed it all (like a Bounty Quicker Picker Upper). We didn’t talk about who would do what—so I just did it, but we learned. We had the hard conversations, and we made the changes. Now, we navigate the mental load together.

You can do this, too. If you’re feeling the weight of it all, if you’re carrying more than your share, if you’re feeling burned out and disconnected in your relationship, it’s not too late to make a shift. It won’t happen overnight—but it’s possible. And it matters.

That’s why I wrote A Better Share. A Better Share: How Couples Can Tackle the Mental Load for More Fun, Less Resentment, and Great Sex is your guide to making lasting, realistic changes in how the mental load is handled in your home. It’s full of simple, practical tools that are already helping couples reconnect, rework their roles, and start showing up as a team again. And by the way? The response from men has been amazing. This isn’t a book that stirs up blame or defensiveness—it’s a book that helps you finally talk about what’s really going on, and gives you the language and structure to do something about it.