Do you, parent reading this, think to yourself: “What a cold fish! Maybe she just shouldn’t have kids?” Perhaps it’s true. A friend told me that she was so excited about having a baby, she had the opposite impulse to mine. While I want to shock my husband with Shulman’s extensive list of duties (or an updated version thereof), she massaged the data for her reluctant partner, making charts and graphs to show him how easily a baby could fit into their lives.

Parents may also think I’m crazy to assume that I’ll be able to anticipate needs and duties before knowing what my future-kid is like. Another mom friend told me as much, pointing out that while each of her children are annoying to bathe in their own ways, her husband doesn’t mind giving her daughter a bath, and she feels the same about her son. This is a situation that they could never have anticipated four years ago, when making the decision to conceive.

But here’s why I still think my approach is pragmatic. In their 10-year study of 100 couples’ transition into parenthood, psychologists Carolyn and Philip Cowan found that couples that had differing understandings of what life with a child might be like were at the highest risk of conflicts. They saw that partners who succeeded at being parents and maintaining good marriages “have a process for discussing issues; they don’t avoid conflict and they don’t prolong fruitless stalemates.” The Cowans emphasized the importance of setting an agenda for these conversations, getting over the idea that a “date” to talk is “terribly artificial,” and instead seeing the “checkup” as an outlet. Perhaps our contract could stipulate a weekly summit—a time to re-evaluate the division of labor, based on whatever strange bathing preferences (or dietary needs, or hobbies, or …) might evolve. Certainly, it would serve as a foundational document, which could be referred to whenever disputes arise.