"I shouldn't have to ask for that"

There's a version of this objection that deserves more respect than the others, and it usually comes up around housework and children. You're not complaining that they don't read your moods. You're complaining that they don't see the overflowing bin, the empty fridge, the school form that needs signing, or the child who needs new shoes. You see all of it. If you have to ask for each thing, you're still the one doing the noticing and the planning. They've become your assistant, waiting for instructions. "You should have asked" is a maddening reply, and I agree with you about that.

So I won't tell you to ask for each task. It doesn't work, for the reason you've given. It leaves you as the manager of the household with one extra duty, which is delegating.

But silence doesn't work either. Waiting for someone to start seeing what they've never seen, while you get angrier, is the habit in its purest form. They don't see the bin. They may never have had to, because it's always been dealt with before it reached the level at which they'd notice. That may be unfair, and they may be responsible for it, but they still can't see what they can't see.

What's left is to ask once, for something bigger. You ask for whole areas in place of single tasks, and you ask for the noticing along with the doing. "I'd like you to take over everything to do with the school. Forms, trips, parents' evenings, uniform. I won't remind you or check. It's yours." That's one conversation, and you don't then have fifty small ones. It hands over the seeing and the planning as well as the work.

It will go imperfectly at first. A form will be late. If you step in and rescue it, the area comes back to you, so you have to let the form be late.

This is my own suggestion, and I offer it without research behind it. But it fits the argument of the book. The other person can't take a fair share of a load whose size they've never been shown. The honest first step is to show them. Sit down together, list everything that gets done and by whom, and let them look at it. I'd expect the other person to be surprised, more often than not. In most cases they haven't been hiding from the work. They've never seen it written down.

And if you show them, and ask plainly for a fair division, and they decline, then you've learned something important about the relationship. You couldn't have learned it by staying silent.