The 50/50 Marriage Hack Is Going To Save You So Many Arguments About Dinner
Making decisions as a couple can be a challenge, but this new method helps give your partner an important perspective.
If you have a partner, you are likely intimately familiar with the hardest part of marriage. It’s not keeping the spark alive, maintaining trust, or establishing a workable budget. It’s not even the equitable division of household labor. It’s deciding what to make for dinner, every day, for the rest of your lives.
One person comes in with an idea, the other shuts it down but offers no alternative. It’s maddening.
But actor Kira Kosarin recently introduced “The 50/50 Method” on TikTok to help couples make these kinds of monotonous decisions. Honestly, it’s pretty genius. And the best part is that this can help couples make decisions together on just about anything.
“My husband and I have a really great method for negotiating small things,” she begins. “Like whether we want to go out or stay in, or what we want for dinner in a way that doesn’t get you stuck in that awful loop where it’s like ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ ‘Well, I want to do this, but I’m happy to do that if you want.’”
Ugh. Who among us? Enter: “The 50/50 Method” for making decisions.
“It basically takes that conversation and it turns it into numbers so that you can articulate what you would want selfishly and then also find common ground and make the decision based on what you now know, truly, the other person wants,” Kosarin explains.
She gives the example of what to get for dinner — again, the worst of all marriage discussions.
“One of us will go ‘Hey, I can’t decide. What’s your 50?’ And I’ll go, ‘I’m leaning, like, 60% Thai, 40% Indian.’ And then maybe [my husband] Max will go ‘Ooh. I’m leaning, like, 10% Thai and 90% Indian.’”
Since it’s clear his desire for Indian is more powerful than her desire for Thai, and since she’s not completely against Indian, Indian would win out in this circumstance.
“Because even though I want Thai a little more, I now know you want Indian a lot more,” she says.
The 50/50 Method allows both people to get a clearer picture of where the other is coming from so that compromises are made with more granular information about the other person’s preferences and feelings. It puts everything into perspective in a way that simply saying “I prefer Indian” doesn’t.
Kosarin goes on to explain that you can apply the same technique for deciding to go out or stay in on a Saturday night. You can apply it to multiple choices as well (that’s the fun of percentages!). She notes she uses this method with friend groups when they’re trying to decide where to order takeout or something.
Of course, sometimes the decisions are clearer than others: an 80/20 is going to win against a 60/40, but what about a 60/40 compared to a 40/60? Or a 90/10 versus a 10/90? It’s not a perfect system, but it nevertheless allows you to quantify your feelings in a way that might be helpful.
“It works really well for us and it’s kind of a fun little game,” Kosarin concludes.
So next time you can’t figure out what color to paint a wall, or what show to watch at the end of the night, or what to do this Saturday, consider the 50/50 Method. It might just make everyone 100% happier.
