The Doorman Fallacy in Marriage: Why Efficiency Kills Emotional Connection
Thursday, September 11, 2025.
We live in an age that worships efficiency. Groceries arrive with a swipe, the rent pays itself, and a cheerful kiosk replaces the receptionist. Faster, cheaper, tidier.
But as ad man Rory Sutherland likes to point out, efficiency often blinds us to meaning.
He calls it the Doorman Fallacy: the belief that a doorman’s only job is to open a door.
By that logic, you can replace him with an automatic sliding door and call it progress.
Except the sliding door doesn’t greet you, reassure you, or lend the building its sense of ongoing human dignity. The doorman wasn’t just functional—he was also symbolic.
Couples fall into the same trap at home.
They reduce each other to jobs: provider, scheduler, housekeeper, sexual partner. Then they wonder why the marriage feels more like an airport concourse than a relationship.
The Doorman Fallacy at Home
“I pay the bills, isn’t that enough?” The paycheck keeps the lights on, but it doesn’t tuck anyone in at night.
“I keep everyone’s schedule.” Emotional labor obviously matters, but the family also needs warmth, humor, and presence. Nobody remembers perfect carpools; they remember the goofy car songs.
“We have sex once a week, box checked.” Frequency without connection feels less like intimacy and more like compliance.
These are the automatic doors of family life: they open, they close, they technically work. But something essential gets lost.
Why Families Fall for It
It’s easy to count what’s functional—money, chores, calendars, even orgasms.
What’s harder to measure are the small, symbolic acts that actually hold relationships together: a glance of reassurance, a running joke, the way someone saves the last bite for you.
In therapy, couples often come in saying, “But I’m doing my part.” What they mean is: I’ve ticked the measurable boxes. Their partner is usually saying: “Yes, but I need the invisible ones.”
This isn’t laziness or selfishness—it’s cultural training.
We prize efficiency and dismiss what can’t be tallied. Yet research consistently shows that marriage thrives on the relatively unmeasurable: turning toward emotional bids (Gottman & Silver, 2015), daily rituals that create belonging (Fiese et al., 2002), and the symbolic gestures that reinforce security (Imber-Black & Roberts, 1992).
How Therapy Shifts the Lens
Science-based couples therapy slows down the audit.
Instead of debating who took out the trash, it asks: what did that small act mean? Did it signal partnership, or was it just a chore?
Therapy helps people see that it isn’t just what they do, but how they do it.
John Gottman’s research shows that the health of a marriage depends less on dividing tasks evenly than on whether partners respond to each other’s emotional needs (Gottman & Levenson, 2002).
A hug, a kind word, or a playful touch isn’t “extra.” It’s the essential work of marriage.
The Question for You
Before you tally up chores and bills, ask: Where have I fallen for the Doorman Fallacy?
Have I been treating my partner’s efforts as purely functional? Have I outsourced affection for efficiency? Am I overlooking the small, symbolic gestures that carry more weight than any paycheck?
Efficiency runs a household. But it’s interpersonal meaning that keeps a family thriving.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Fiese, B. H., Tomcho, T. J., Douglas, M., Josephs, K., Poltrock, S., & Baker, T. (2002). A review of 50 years of research on naturally occurring family routines and rituals: Cause for celebration? Journal of Family Psychology, 16(4), 381–390. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.16.4.381
Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (2002). A two-factor model for predicting when a couple will divorce: Exploratory analyses using 14-year longitudinal data. Family Process, 41(1), 83–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.2002.40102000083.x
Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work: A practical guide from the country’s foremost relationship expert. Harmony Books.
Imber-Black, E., & Roberts, J. (1992). Rituals in families and family therapy. W. W. Norton.