Today there is a lot of talk about equality in relationships. The overall idea is that there should be an equitable distribution of load between the partners in a relationship.

This is an idea with plenty of merit. For many centuries women were thought of as lesser human beings. They couldn’t get an education, work, or even own property. Which was terribly wrong.

Now there is a strong emphasis on equality, but in many ways it is as destructive as the original myths. Not because of its intentions, but because of its consequences.

When you focus too much on equality, you begin to measure everything that you bring into the relationship, and everything that the other person brings. You count how many times you call, you take note of who does the dishes, who spends more money, and who does whatever else. The moment you begin to think this way, one of you will never do, or be, enough.

No matter what metric you choose to use when evaluating your contributions to the relationship, there is always going to be one person who does more than the other. One person will spend more money, call more, visit more, make more mistakes, etc. There is no relationship in which both partners contribute equally in every respect.

However, when you are focused on equality on every aspect of your relationship, you begin to take accounts on even the silliest of things, but the implicit bias is that you will consider only the areas of the relationship where you are excelling. Consequently, your partner will never be enough. There will always be something he is not doing that he should be doing, somebody she is not that she should be. And there are few things more exasperating than working to reach a standard that is unreachable.

What you should focus on instead is service. Relationships are not businesses; the balance sheets do not always have to add up. Sometimes you will give more, sometimes you will receive more.

I have always had a problem with the saying that relationships are 50 – 50. It comes from that accounting, equality, balancing point of view, which transforms your relationship into a series of business transactions that must add up for it to survive. Instead, view it as a 100 – 100. You give everything you have, and (hope that) they give 100 percent of themselves too. Then you can rely on the power of synergy – that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Of course, because you are different, as I said earlier, 100 percent of you and 100 percent of the other person will not always be quantified the same.

However, this is not to say that you allow yourself to be taken advantage of. Sometimes there are much deeper issues. In such cases, no amount of service would do anything substantial for the relationship. But then, if focusing on service would not do anything for you, it is unlikely that any amount of insistence on equality would.

In some ways, equality in relationships and happiness in life are like – you are much more likely to achieve them by focusing on other things. Also, while they are very difficult to quantify, their absence is very conspicuous.

If your relationship were truly unequal, you wouldn’t need to draw a pie chart with the percentage of dishes washed on a yearly basis (or whatever other metrics you use to quantify your contributions to the relationship) to realize it. It would be evident to you both. And you would know what to do about it.