Having a clear strategy surrounding chores and regularly checking in are key to a healthy relationship, said Silvia de Denaro Vieira, the founder of Coexist, a home management app designed to help couples share the mental load.
Vieira, 32, realized the need for this tool when she moved in with her boyfriend (now husband) Hugh McFall, in 2022. “I came in with very high expectations of frequency of cleaning and washing,” said Vieira. She was taken aback by Hugh’s lackadaisical approach to cleaning their Sunset apartment. She didn’t want to resent picking up his slack or his slacks.
They tried fixing their organizational mismatch with the software tools they used effectively at work: Asana, Notion, and Google Docs. Even Post-it notes. Nothing stuck. “They all felt very corporate… and reminded us of our jobs,” she said.
Vieira was frustrated. She’d seen the scary Harvard Business School study, which noted that 25% of divorced couples cited disagreements over housework as the main reason for their breakup. “There was nothing out there [to help]…so I built it myself,” she said. Vieira joined Techstars Oakland and raised $120,000 to build Coexist, a mobile app that exited beta this May.
Priced $6.49 per month, the app has a clean, uncluttered interface and offers shared to-do lists, AI-powered meal planning, grocery lists, and a template section full of actionable documents that range from the mundane to the meta. Alongside travel packing lists and movie night suggestions is a “Discussion” template that encourages couples to map expectations for their shared life: Are they okay with pets in the house? Weapons? Shoes indoors? Sure, this could have come up earlier in the relationship, but it’s surprisingly easy to forget these details when you’re falling in love and your oxytocin levels are high.
“It sounds cheesy [but] this saved our relationship,” said Vieira. “It’s not like, oh, now it’s you versus me. It’s like you and me versus this thing that we set up together that we agreed to.”
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source link
