This is a topic where the more I learned about it the more I opened my eyes to it and saw it happening on my own life.
I'm very easy going and there isn't much I get too worked up about. My wife, on the other hand, is a meticulous planner. I could see her getting stressed out making decisions for a vacation. I realized that by not caring, I wasn't helping and offloading the burden to her. Now I truly didn't care if we went to restaurant A or restaurant B, so she always had to make the decision. Since realizing this I've relieved her more from all the decision making, even if I really don't care about the outcome. Why should I do this? Well, because she's my wife and while I may not care which restaurant we go to, I care about her.
TL;DR It's real and I decided to do take up more of this emotional labor in life.
That resonates with me. But I struggle a lot. I feel like my wife's irrationality on some subjects forces us to both spend some of our very limited time here feeling anxious and negative. It's frustrating and feels very one sided. Why can't she meet me half way and stop being so anxious on half the events? Well.. because irrationality doesn't work that way; I get that.
I think that true zen for me is finding a way to just relax and be okay with emotional inefficiency. Not sure how to do that.
Conflict in relationship, especially intimate relationships, is rarely about the content.
It's typically that the context of the situation brings up an emotion that is taboo / off limits, one that the person has spent a life time avoiding.
This avoidance is typically do to previous developmental or shock trauma.
You can actually learn to use your conflicts as a psychedelic of sorts to do deep transformational work, if you have the right context, language and tools.
From my view, this inability to transform conflict is why most relationships end and why most people in relationships aren't happy (despite relationships being the single greatest predictor of health and life satisfaction.)
That's exactly how I view conflicts. It's the surfacing of something much deeper that is normally completely hidden, either suppressed or managed at the cost of Emotional Reserve.
When something flares up, I try to not let it go to waste and start digging. Instead, it's an opportunity. Either my wife or me (usually both) will then gain some insight about ourselves. We can then apologize for the content wich caused it and then move to the context.
We've been doing this since we were engaged and this has allowed us to grow a lot in terms of emotional stability, and build some strong reserves. Of course the flip side is that with deeper reserves, it can take a lot longer for conflicts to surface, so we now look at frustrations as the opportunities to introspect.
Are you in NYC by chance? I'd love to invite you and your partner to join us for a Psychedlic Love Workshop aka The Love Dojo (as our guest).
My partner and I curate a group of couples doing this work (and singles looking to find a relationship with this context), and practice some really cutting edge tools.
For example, we've pioneered a version of breathwork to be used in times of conflict with your partner that can transform long standing conflict patterns.
despite relationships being the single greatest predictor of health and life satisfaction.
That predictor isn't specifically referring to romantic relationships, but all social relationships.
That means family, friends, love, professional etc. It means that ideally, a person who has more of these things is more likely to be healthy and satisfied.
Having a wife but no friends for example, isn't ideal, and vice versa.
Please don't directly connect irrationality with anxiety.
Sure, there's a connection between the rational and emotional parts in humans, but this doesn't mean that being anxious automatically means being irrational.
Quite a few fears have their origin in the childhood, when the rational
parts of the brain haven't been that developed, and perhaps that's the
reason why these fears can have such a deep impact.
When these fears come up in an adult they might overwhelm him and it
can be quite hard for the rational part to counter them in any way.
When you don't have these fears it's less about being more rational and
perhaps a lot more about not having made harmful experiences in your
youth.
I think my point is: yes, the fear is irrational, but you're not irrational because you have the fear. Or saying it the other way, you can't be just rational and the fear will disappear.
So it's quite unempathic to think about someone being irrational because he's anxiously, and you don't have anxiety because you're rational.
Thanks for that! I suffer from some severe anxiety (diagnosable so, even) and one of the most difficult things for me to accept is that it is irrational. Removing the source of anxiety just makes my mind find something else to be anxious about, for example.
I find it extremely uncomfortable to admit to myself that my own mind, my 'self', can actually be the source of self-sabotage. My rational side, irrationally, often 'solves' the problem by simply denying this fact and carrying on dysfunctionally.
What makes all this worse is people who in various ways encourage this denial, even if they mean well.
Thankfully, I have at least two people in my life, as well as my mother, strange as it feels to admit this as a grown man, that I can confide in, and whenever I take the courage to at least express the irrational fears in all their irrationality, they help me by, well, observations like yours. Somehow merely the acknowledgement that my irrational fears are legitimate despite their irrationality is a tremendous help in dealing with them. I'd encourage everyone to keep this in mind when dealing with people suffering from what I guess we'd call 'mental disorders'. You have no idea how much just acknowledgement can do for them/us, and it doesn't have to take much effort!
I'm a grown man and I have in the past few years developed an understanding I didn't know about, but is definitely deeply rooted in my childhood: very busy places like farmer's markets, theme parks, etc. really stress me out and make me anxious. I know it's irrational. But being irrational doesn't invalidate my feelings. My feelings are valid by definition.
And my solution isn't, "be more rational." But acknowledging that they're not rational is important in investigating the issue.
You can't immediately make the irrational fears disappear, but you can consciously suppress those fears and grit it out to do what needs to be done, thus achieving most of the same benefits. Do this enough times and the irrational fears will gradually diminish (at least for some people).
> Are you sure? I find that mentally walking through a checklist of true-true facts makes my sweating/shaking/vomiting go away (for a while)
Calming thoughts certainly can help, that's the whole idea behind the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
But it might not work that easily for everyone and for every fear, and it
also depends how much you're feared, because you certainly can't calm down
a panic attack with a few thoughts.
One should just be aware that what works for one person might not work for
another.
Yes, but the irrationality is a property, not a cause, so "be more rational" is a terrible approach to dealing with anxiety because, on par with "just don't be depressed".
Anxiety is a relatively easy to address problem, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) works pretty well. It's also amenable to short-term talk therapy, usually.
Agree; in fact I'd go further and say that anxiety is by definition irrational. If it were rational, it would simply be "worry", which is useful. The difference is that in the case of worry, it makes sense to mitigate the external thing that is worrying you, while in the latter it is necessary to address/mitigate the emotions themselves.
Thank you for sharing. Yes I can see what you mean. I use the word irrational to describe behaviour and decision-making that has no logical founding. I'm not trying to suggest irrational equals wrong or invalid. How my wife or I feel about something is valid regardless of its rationality.
Your wife can meet you half way by getting some therapy for her anxiety disorder. I went to a CBT psychologist for four months to address General Anxiety Disorder, and it did a lot to make me aware of anxiety driven behaviours and teach me coping skills that were actually pretty easy to apply, in my case.
"Emotional efficiency" is probably not the best way to address this, but at root, if your wife's anxiety is causing problems for her and for your relationship, that's a treatable issue. It's as if your wife has a sprained ankle that's preventing you two from going on walks, and neither of you are addressing the sprain.
Not all problems are solved or can only be seen through a lens of rationality or irrationality.
Many things have to be understood with the heart, rather than the mind, or vice versa.
I don't believe women or men are more logical or emotional based on their gender alone - most are adults who do not continue to develop both emotional awareness and thoughtfulness.
When I'm presented with similar anxiety, instead of dismissing it, I try to embrace and understand it (like an entrepreneur) and try to work through what causes it, and if the worry actually resulted in the bad thing happening.
Emotional labour deficits in relationships (Paying attention, caring, demonstrating it in action) is real. It can go both ways too.
Doing something because someone else cares for it even when you might is a demonstration of care, because most likely you are receiving it.
A lot has to do with becoming an adult in reality too - first being able to take care of yourself, and then others, even when you might not want to most days, but because the long term benefit comes from caring and giving first, and ensuring a relationship lets giving happen easily.
It is true that worrying is like paying interest on money you may never borrow. Worries rarely materialize, not because one worries, but because things happen often largely out of our control, and learning to come to have a decent relationship with not being in control and open to the fact that change is constant has helped a lot in my relationships.
Dealing with anxiety/irrationality comes down to people being able, and available to do their inner work and growth. How we are ultimately results from whether we feed the worrier or the warrior in us.
The mind (thoughts) and the heart (feelings) don't speak the same language, are often at odds with each other to the point that the logicians rule out emotion as being valid, both are far less effective without the other.
Thoughts and feelings have a habit of straightening up when they know they are being watched by ourselves. Awareness is a gift.
I sometimes wonder if when we experience pain, it is in part because we are using our mind when we should be using our heart.
I wish I had something worth saying to pay back your contribution in kind. But I don't. You've got a lot of interesting thoughts there. Nothing I strongly agree or disagree with. Nothing that leaps out as demanding my curiosity.
I'm in a similar position. My wife's a planner. She over-thinks alot, creates lists for everthing and needs to discuss details with me/friends/parents which most of the time I deem unnecessary.
I realized that I can't change her. There's no single solution, but there are a few things she did, which helped her being more relaxed: Yoga, talk therapy, less coffee/more sleep, taking time outside of family. She also had iron deficiency; the doctor fixed this with iron infusions which really helped alot against feeling tired (also keep an eye on iron in food).
On the other hand, I try to be supportive and do not question everything she does or thinks anymore. Don't try to be a therapist, instead help her to fix herself :)
And in some cases satisfy the need/desire despite it seeming unnecessary or illogical (or even problematic). This is something I struggle with immensely, and ironically for no logical reason!
Yes! I've been working really hard to accept this and just go with it: sometimes it's perfectly okay to accept an irrational situation and move forward with it. This week it's to stop trying to fight the concept that we're grown adults and it shouldn't matter how our family judges the quality of our yard. Instead, it's to go out there and do what I deem to be an unnecessary mow and trim. The absolute bottom line is that I got more exercise, enjoyed the waning summer weather, and my wife feels happier.
Be careful with the iron rich foods if you're eating the same meals as your wife. Some research shows a positive correlation between higher iron consumption and heart attacks / strokes.
Typically anxiety causes irrationality rather than the other way around. And people with anxiety problems can get treatment, but the treatment is not to just "stop being so anxious."
Irrational thinking is never rational. That's something we've both had to consciously realize. We're both irrational about our own things and we've learned to just make it work with each other. Usually the type of things that crop up are never worth getting too upset or worked up over.
I've found that simply being more invested in the decision or issue, it eases some of the tension. That anxiety may have been a result of shouldering all the emotional labor in the first place.
You say she is a meticulous planner, and maybe that's the case, but maybe you are missing the point(as is most of the other commenters here). the point isn't whether it's Restaurant A or B, the point is you have to make a decision about A OR B, or even going out to a restaurant at all.
Someone has to think about: lets go out for dinner tonight @ restaurant A. Women generally do that thinking, because like you said, you just don't care. The point is, she is still doing the emotional labor, because she has to think about dinner tonight for both of you, and if it should be a restaurant, or making it at home or whatever.
or TL;DR: She is still holding the responsibility of making sure you both eat dinner.
You're exactly right, this was the point I was trying to make. I never realized this before. I used to only see it rationally, that she should choose since she cares and I don't. But then it turned into her always choosing and having to decide and plan it. Once I realized this is what was happening I made a conscious effort to ease that burden and take my share of the emotional labor. Of course choosing a restaurant is only a single, low-impact example.
My relationship has this dynamic too for eating meals and other chores. The alternative IME is that I'll make a decision and then she complains about it. At which point we are both stuck with the hassle.
exactly right. It's taking the responsibility for X happening, and dinner is just the icing on the cake as it were :)
Maybe it's taking the responsibility for deciding what to do over the thanksgiving holiday, or christmas.. Do we go to in-laws, travel, do we do it here local, etc. It's not really making the decision, it's the responsibility for making it happen.
Right, choosing a restaurant in an easy example. It's managing the groceries too, it's keeping track of our social schedule, it's even keeping our chore tracker up-to-date (something I currently need to work on).
My spouse has assumed the responsibility for ensuring that the family has a dinner every evening. I have assumed the responsibility for ensuring that every individual family member is capable of providing their own dinner from available materials every evening, if they choose to eat a dinner.
This is "give a man a fish" versus "teach him how to fish".
In this, we are at cross-purposes. I can prepare salubrious meals. I rarely have the opportunity to do so, because the spouse oversupplies the household needs, such that on days when no meal is freshly prepared, there are still 3 to 4 different choices for which leftovers to eat.
I frequently get asked about what requests I have for the grocery shopping. My response is always "get nothing", because our standards for the conditions differ so widely. This is not "get nothing specifically for me," but "do not go grocery shopping at all." When I look in the pantry and see enough food to last for three months, my spouse sees the same, and thinks "OMFG, we literally have nothing to eat; I need to buy more food right now." I could draw up an inventory and 90 meal plans using nothing but what we have on hand, and hear, "We're not eating that."
In a sense, the burden of that "emotional labor" is piled upon a great sleigh of my spouse's own making. I cannot explain, "You should not be worrying about doing this, because this is a thing that no one needs to do." It gets done anyway. Often, the emotional and communications effort of worrying about doing the thing, or convincing me to do the thing, is greater than the actual physical effort of actually doing it and being satisfied with the result.
Like some cousin posts, I often have no specific preference for what I may eat for dinner. I will literally eat garbage (if it's on top--the Costanza rule). As such, about any restaurant with a food safety inspection score rated at "Waffle House" or higher works for me. In the rare instance where I actually do want something specific, my suggestion is usually countermanded by, "I don't want that. Pick something else." You can imagine my "WTF face".
It is largely self-flagellation. The only way I could ease the burden is by taking away my spouse's freedom to make those irrational choices, which results in a different set of problems. Or maybe by springing for some deluxe anxiety counseling. In this instance, choosing the restaurant is like volunteering to wash a compulsive hand-washer's hands once a day. Even if you are a surgery nurse, and have perfect scrub-in technique, your hand-washing will not relieve the emotional burden, because the irrational compulsion is still there. It's not something you can share.
I'm not sure your preference for running the gas tank down to empty before refilling it is more logical than her preference to keep it topped off.
It sounds like you each have your preferences, and the tension comes from one (or both?) of you assume that your emotional preference is somehow objectively or factually correct.
Maybe if you indulge her on the pantry situation to assist in her happiness, she can indulge some preference of yours that's particularly important to you?
It's not even a matter of running it down to empty. It's actually using some fraction of the capacity of the tank built into the vehicle instead of always using a 50gal bypass tank that takes up all the trunk space.
And I never specified whether either of us were male or female. (On the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog.) I'm not going to say whether you assumed correctly with your choice of pronoun.
In our household, my spouse overfills the pantry regardless of my preference. I don't get worked up over it, or keep score. It's just something that happens, and isn't important enough to turn into a point of contention. Each issue exists independently, so it would be unfair argumentation to drag that one into a separate issue to try to score points and "win" instead of addressing the issue itself. So we have a pantry that is difficult to walk through without turning sideways.
I don't worry about it. It's a first world problem. My spouse knows I don't like it, and that's all that needs to be done from my end.
>Someone has to think about: lets go out for dinner tonight @ restaurant A. Women generally do that thinking, because like you said, you just don't care. The point is, she is still doing the emotional labor, because she has to think about dinner tonight for both of you, and if it should be a restaurant, or making it at home or whatever.
You say that someone has to think about it. But do they?
When I'm suffering from decision fatigue and I have to make a decision on something I don't find too valuable (where to eat), I'll literally flip a coin or use a random generator.
It offloads the burden tremendously.
The issue the author has is not that the burden isn't being shared. It's that the values are different. I don't know about her, but I've met people for whom flipping a coin is not an acceptable answer - because they care, and they don't want a flippant method of deciding.
The conflict is that one side cares and the other doesn't.
And part of the problem is that not everyone takes ownership of the issues they care about. If you care about a lot of things, then yes, you will feel the burden.
I like a clean house. It makes me feel much better than an untidy house. But I also feel that burden of cleaning, and the burden is worse than the feeling I get in an untidy house. So I keep it tidy enough such that there is a balance. Not too overburdened, and not too untidy.
In my experience, most people do not understand this tradeoff. They'll have high standards, but will not to bear the burden of those standards, and will be impatient with everyone who has lower standards.
Well, someone needs to take the responsibility on for making sure you eat. Generally that's yourself. Flipping a coin is making a decision. When in a relationship, however, that could be your partner, especially if you are male and your partner is female. Because it's generally expected that partners/families eat meals together.
There absolutely is, with any responsibility a give/take about how you handle those responsibilities, especially if they involve another person. How you handle those decisions can be critical to your relationship. If they have very high standards, and you have very low standards, then you either compromise, or one of you changes your standards. Ideally you would talk about it, and come to an agreement, but that doesn't usually happen. Usually the high-standard person just takes responsibility and keeps it up to their high standards and stays upset with the low-standards partner.
> The conflict is that one side cares and the other doesn't.
So definitely there can be conflict here, the question is, does the conflict stay hidden, or do one or both of you bring it out, talk about it and reach a mutual decision around it? If you want a nice healthy relationship, I would hope you would talk about it. :)
I know I have definitely felt upset about lower-standards before I finally wised up; now I force communication about it whenever I find myself owning responsibility for something because my partner has lower-standards than I do about something. I hope my partner(s) do the same thing, I know we have talked about it, but I don't get to control their thinking... yet :P haha
While dating, the trope (especially with platforms like OkCupid) is that the man has to perform all the emotional labor:
He has to write tons of messages just to get a first date, pick a good restaurant (and pay for it!), be witty and entertaining all evening, and be just the right amount of seductive (but not come on too strong) in order to "win" a second date.
Dating isn't one-sided. A woman is still expected to be charming/interesting/fun to talk to. If a man sees dating as one-sided, are they really that interested in the person they're conversing with or are they just trying to trick them into bed?
Initiating a relationship is indisputably one sided. The gender roles are so strong that many girls would rather say "when are you going to ask me out" than "will you go out with me"?
The woman often takes that role on herself and refuses to relinquish it ever, though. If the man constantly decides, she will complain and second guess his usurpation of her emotional labor.
They are both adults. Neither of them needs to take responsibility for the other eating dinner. It's not like he's going to starve to death without her intervention.
The trick is deciding, period. The key is recognising that when she says "But restaurant B has X", she is not really suggesting that you go to B. She is offering you a chance to show that you have thought it through, that you have mastery over the situation, or at the very least are prepared to stand up for your opinions. When you shrug your shoulders and immediately defer to her, it's upsetting; it makes her feel as if you believe that she is more competent than you, or that her opinions are worth more.
The correct response to "But restaurant B has X" is "Perhaps, but I'm in the mood for A today." After all, she asked you in the first place. Don't be a pushover.
> She is offering you a chance to show that you have thought it through, that you have mastery over the situation, or at the very least are prepared to stand up for your opinions.
Or, she could respect the fact that it doesn't matter for him which restaurant they go to.
> When you shrug your shoulders and immediately defer to her, it's upsetting; it makes her feel as if you believe that she is more competent than you, or that her opinions are worth more.
No, it doesn't. And if that's what she feels, it's her problem. He doesn't see the difference between A or B. He may say something like "A is closer" or "B is cheaper", but maybe that's all he cares about. She sees differences he doesn't, so why should he be burdened? My girlfriend relies on me to buy electronics. I rely on her to buy healthy food. If she wants my input she asks. If I reply with "I don't care", she just picks something in two seconds. We never argue about it.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but if you care much more about trivialities than your partner, and you expect the other person to change or to exert extra effort just to match your expectations, then you're simply not a good match for each other and things will never work out the way you expect.
Choosing between restaurant A or B when the other person doesn't care or see a difference is something you do FOR YOURSELF. If you expect the other person to make this choice for you, you're asking for a favor.
Classic. I sort of hate that kind of statement, because it doesn't state what the person wants to do. Are you saying that because you want to go to B, or because you want me to consider going to B?
It's so much better when it is "Nah, let's go to B because it has X and I know you like it too." Desire clearly stated, everyone in agreement, let's go.
> I think the trick may be deciding before it becomes a decision on her radar in the first place.
One way my wife and I handle this is to have separate responsibilities that we each own. For instance, I handle bills. Not because I'm better at it, but because it causes her more stress than it causes me. I also proactively communicate our financial status, so that she isn't surprised by anything.
If there's a "trick," it's to have an interesting, playful discussion about it, previewing and anticipating all the choices and their potential sensory impacts and feelings and emotions of the whole experience, including the trip there and back.
With both of you visualizing and making connections and learning about each other, you're making fun, exciting memories to the point that the dinner just restates or cements the pre-experienced sensorium. :)
Right, she is holding the responsibility of making sure you both eat dinner. It's on her radar, it's been there since last month, and it will be there next month too. Until you two talk about it, and decide, gee maybe I should handle making sure we have dinner every night next month, so you don't have to.
My wife is not a meticulous planner. Now she is required to be. Now she runs a household, two teens, school, bills, planning, holidays, all of it.
Some programmers here have said "Well, I bring in the money, its fine for my wife to have this as a full time job".
Imagine if suddenly, instead of being a programmer, your job was now procurement and planning for a stockroom including suppliers. Like, wait, what? Imagine if this was the only job you could get now (its a thought experiment ok).
So you went from "what your day looks like as a programmer" to "what your day looks like running a warehouse, calling suppliers, negotiating deals, negotiating better deals, dealing with employees who are sick, employees who steal things, blah blah".
There are people who like that job, or are at least good at it. I would hate that job. Now imagine your new job is "running a household": making calls, dealing with mental illness (maybe thats just my family), school, school reports, children dealing with school pressure, hiring a cleaner, firing the shitty cleaner you hired, reporting the stolen jewelry to the police, hiring a new cleaner with better references, etc
Again, thats not a job that I want. I make a ton of money, I do have conversations with other people and I enjoy it. I would die in this other job. I'm not qualified and I don't have the personality for it.
Neither does my wife. But its her full time job. And she has no choice. For the next 8 years at least.
It doesn't matter that your job makes more or all the money. It matters that your wife (or partner) is trapped in a dead-end job that she hates and sucks at and she cannot quit.
I am going to go and have a conversation with her about taking over some of her "duties".
We've started using this for simpler decisions ala choosing a restaurant or a movie to watch.
The 5-2-1 game... You pick 5 things, she selects 2, you select the final. Or vice versa. Stops the back and forth and shares responsibility. It's literally removed the mental drain and occasional arguments about simple decisions. Sometimes we simplify it to 3-1, if the choices aren't available ... I pick 3 and she picks 1 or vice versa.
It is merely a single example. There are far more meaningful examples that I won't share simply because they're much more private issues. Nitpick the example, if you like, it doesn't change my point.
Besides, the issue isn't picking what restaurant we go to, it's always being the one who has to decide, to weigh the options. And not just restaurants, but what time should we go? When do we leave? Should we drive? Take the bus? When do we need to get more groceries? What dinners do we have planned for the week? Are we running low on laundry detergent? Was I supposed to call the doctor yesterday? She was handling all that an more, nearly all the time. I wasn't doing as much as I could have been doing. Now I make an effort to do more and our relationship is better for it.
Look at it like a garden. If someone decides they want a nice looking garden or lawn, then they work on it. But another person can be perfectly fine with some grass that gets cut on a Saturday when it looks too long.
If my partner wants a garden and works on it, they aren't removing any work from me since I don't want a garden. In the same way, all these decisions don't have to be planned out. Using emotional labor to plan it out is their choice, much like working on a garden.
That's what I don't get about the concept of emotional labor. Most of it involves things that I don't care about and which my life is perfectly fine without any care being given to.
When ever I go out to eat lunch, I often don't plan it all when I start. I walk out the door of my office and if it looks nice I walk, if it isn't nice I drive. Snap decision with no planning. Where I end up? I just go until I find someplace I find acceptable and stop. Why is there any need for emotional labor? Emotional labor in this case isn't to achieve a necessity.
I also haven't seen people address how single people handle it. They have to deal with all of their own emotional labor and have no benefits from economics of scale (if that even applies to emotional labor).
To sum it up, consider the years I lived as a single man. Either I handled all my emotional labor and understand it just fine, or it didn't need to be handled in which case all this work is a nicety that shouldn't be treated as a necessity.
Well if you're single this is all moot anyway, the point I'm making is about a relationship. I'm also not talking about hobbies, there's no problem there. I'm also not talking about when I go for lunch while at work, because it's just me. I'm talking about the sorts of things that are necessary to run the household my wife and I share.
The thing is, yes, maybe one doesn't need to plan all this out and this emotional labor isn't necessary. But you know what? I'm married to her and I love her and she's my best friend so it is my problem, because I don't plan on leaving her. Life and love is not rational.
>Most of it involves things that I don't care about and which my life is perfectly fine without any care being given to.
I'm the same way. My wife is not. We've both changed to accommodate one another because we want to.
For what it's worth, our strong relationship is even stronger now that I've become more aware of this and done something about it.
>The thing is, yes, maybe one doesn't need to plan all this out and this emotional labor isn't necessary. But you know what? I'm married to her and I love her and she's my best friend so it is my problem, because I don't plan on leaving her.
And perhaps I want to surprise my partner who wants a garden by planting them one when they have to spend a week traveling with their job. But looking at it as something that you do out of love for a partner is vastly different than how this article looks at it and vastly different from it being some gendered issue that I've seen emotional labor presented as in the past.
Imagine it a different way. Say I was a big dog person, by my partner was not. But we compromised and got a dog (and assume that compromises happen on many issues, which I think is a sign of a healthy relationship).
Now imagine if I wrote up an article like this. "Dog loving is the unpaid job women still don't understand." That would be absurd.
I don't want to argue with you, because I admire those that consider the needs of others and put that consideration into practice, but I can see BearGoesChirp's point too.
Let's take food as an example. Having a well stocked kitchen is something that requires planning, but how much planning is required for each meal? Sometimes when you have something particular in mind that takes extra preparation time, but it's often possible to improvise an evening meal and still come out with something that's just as satisfying/healthy. Is it irresponsible to not plan every part of how a household runs?
Another example is holidays. People's ideas of what constitutes a good holiday vary wildly. I'm guessing you've found what works for you and your partner, but let's imagine a scenario with a different couple. One person wants to plan everything they'll do before the holiday starts. Their partner wants to just turn up and see how things unfold. Both are valid (I have my own preference, but I'm not going to muddy the waters with that). How are these two people meant to resolve these different preferences for how they like to organise their holidays?
I don't mean to argue since this is entirely personal and different for other people. If that's the dynamic you have and everyone is happy, great. My point was I thought that's the dynamic we had, but it really wasn't. I became aware of it and made an effort to share the effort.
I think everybody that has lived on their own understands what the author is calling emotional labor. Different people demand different amounts (with some floor) of emotional labor from themselves though. When two individuals with different levels of emotional labor get into a relationship, the one with a higher level expects that the labor has now doubled and should be split evenly. Every time the delta between their natural preferences arises, one partner feels that the other is slacking off.
"If I were to point out random emotional labor duties I carry out—reminding him of his family’s birthdays, carrying in my head the entire school handbook and dietary guidelines for lunches, updating the calendar to include everyone’s schedules, asking his mother to babysit the kids when we go out, keeping track of what food and household items we are running low on, tidying everyone’s strewn about belongings, the unending hell that is laundry—..."
That all sounds like household management with some relationship management thrown in. What does it have to do with labouring over emotions? It sounds like this person needs a partner who shares more household responsibilities and has an organization and cleanliness habit that is more in line with their own.
EDIT: I just did a quick search of this term "emotional labor" and this comes up from wikipedia:
"Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, co-workers and superiors."
That seems a lot more reasonable definition for emotional labour. Actual emotion management. The author of the featured article seems to want to attach this term to just about every kind of task that occurs in a household.
I think that one of the things I'm continuously disappointed in is that comments like this tend to get more exposure and agreement than the concept that the author is trying to bring to light. I get so excited to see discussion about these concepts, but then the idea gets ignored because the author isn't using exactly the right words. It really makes me feel even more isolated and unheard.
Yes, communication is a very important part of discussing concepts, but its a bit like being interrupted by a grammar nazi while you're trying to indicate that you're drowning.
For what its worth, I agree with you. I don't like the term emotional labor for this type of situation. But that's the term that's commonly applied to it and correcting what its called isn't fixing the issue. And I don't think that boiling it down to "Sorry, you should have thought of this before you married the guy." is helping anyone.
Well delivery can be just as important as the message. It sounds like she alienated male-audiences by implying it's a problem with a whole gender instead of implying it's a gender-neutral trait.
After all, how does she know who does the cleaning, planning, keeping track of birthdays in my relationship?
And I don't think it's fair to dismiss her gender-targeting delivery as a trivial detail such as grammar, she's clearly a professional writer and it's hard to imagine it's accidental.
I wonder if she's playing on her audience's pent-up emotions and intentionally stirring controversy to get more-internet attention? (not quite trolling, but a gentler form)
> "Well delivery can be just as important as the message."
Only if the delivery is offensive, otherwise the message is more important.
To give an example, I'm a native English speaker, and when I speak with some non-native English speakers they can make some quirky decisions on how they deliver their message. However, if I've understood the underlying message, I'll look past it, and address what they meant.
To bring it back to the topic at hand, meta discussions like the one we're having now often start out as a form of deflection. Regardless of the term 'emotional work' (I prefer 'hidden work', you may have a different preference), do you agree that the underlying message of the article is broadly correct? It's not so much about who takes on the 'hidden work', but rather it's about the toll it takes.
No, because I don't know what the underlying message is - you didn't spell it out, neither did parent, or anyone in this chain.
If you unentangle the first example the author gives, she wants to give a task to the man, without explaining how to do it, and then complains that they don't do it properly. But it's not even just that, it's her wrapping this task into a "Mother's Day gift", i.e. forcing the man to do emotional labor to figure out what the woman really wants and how exactly to do it. This is a counter-example to her overall argument, both in her literal words(about emotional labor), and (I'm guessing here) in the underlying meaning of "men should do more of the hidden work"(how do you expect them to do the "hidden work" if you never explain to them that you're doing it, you want to share the responsibility, etc?).
If there's a deeper underlying message that I'm missing here, please, I'm interested in knowing about it. But every time I read an article like this, all I can think of is "dysfunctional relationship" and "unreasonable expectations".
> "If you unentangle the first example the author gives, she wants to give a task to the man, without explaining how to do it, and then complains that they don't do it properly."
This is where you're wrong. The wife makes it very clear to the husband how she wants the job done. This is clear because the husband reluctantly acquiesces to her request before deciding to go with a different approach. Once you accept that the wife's instructions were clear, the rest of your argument falls down.
No, I actually don't get her larger point. She describes frustrations with her husband (which I feel are not generalizable), and I don't even accept her framework necessarily (it generally seeks to use blame to resolve a marital issue which I find counterproductive, a therapist would never use a word like 'fault').
Let's imagine a more extreme example to make the point clearer. Imagine you have to become a live-in carer for an elderly relative, and they rely on you to take care of their every need, with very little in the way of time off. Can you see that such a situation, whilst still something that can be carried with dutifully with a minimum of fuss, could still be emotionally draining for someone? If so, what do you think causes the situation to be emotionally draining?
So I still don't get her larger point. I think we can all agree emotional draining exists, as you articulated. I also agree it happens in relationships. But then she drags gender into it and loses me entirely.
Gender is "dragged" into it because our social norms are keeping unequal balance of relationship responsibilities alive. The article touches on this when the author describes the difference in behaviour between her children. It's possible to see this anecdote as something that reflects on the innate difference in the personalities of her children, but there is something to said beyond that. It's the whole nature vs. nurture debate again. I can see that the experiences in early childhood shaped the person I am today, and I don't think it's any different for the children of today. How a child is praised (or not praised) shapes what they think of as normal. Can you see that it's possible to reinforce a certain view of what's "men's work" and what's "women's work"?
But you literally cannot discuss something if you don't agree on what's being discussed.
People who understand the grandparents definition of emotional labour are going to read the first couple paragraphs of this article, wonder what the author is on about, and quit reading.
The terminology shapes the way people think about the topic. And people need to understand the issue to fix it. Otherwise you're just shotgun debugging.
and correcting what its called isn't fixing the issue
No, it doesn't. But presenting the issue poorly isn't helping fix it any faster, either. This entire conversation was largely avoidable had the article communicated better.
But you didn't make an effort to reword it with the right words. Only you can see your internal thoughts and monologue, all we have to work with is the words we see.
Judging by your post, we could reword the article down to this: "Men should take up more household chores". Okay, that's uncontroversial. Digging down into the first example of the article:
"What I wanted was for him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, do the (emotional labor) work I would have done if the job had fallen to me."
Wouldn't it be easier to just tell the guy to do this, rather than veil it in a Mother's Day gift and expect him to "do the right thing"? Is it not the partner's responsibility to communicate clearly what they want, why they want it, etc? Why is the assumption that your partner, your loved one in life, is being malicious, is unwilling to do "the emotional labor", rather than just not knowing how to do it? Would it be fair if I asked my partner to "buy me a new PC for my birthday", and then complained that she didn't do research on the manufacturers, didn't make a custom build out of individual specced components, but rather bought me the first google result?
What I am continuously disappointed about in these discussions is how the authors, almost always female, seem to treat their partners like shit. I would never think to blame my partner for not being as good as something as me; I would look for a way to teach them, I would take this as a bonding experience for our relationship. This is why I will turn the author's claim around - no, you aren't "fed up", you're nagging - when did you make an honest effort to help your partner do the things you want them to do? How is what you're doing productive?!
Yes. It's the wrong term. She objects to having to manage some of the household tasks. She doesn't want to manage the housecleaning or manage child care. Fine. Managing is work. No need for the different nomenclature.
Sometimes the hardest thing for a manager is to give up managing something. Being in control is not a pure cost. Managing is work, but it's also prestige, power, and security. It's also easy to delude yourself into believing that you have "higher" standards, when all you have is different wants. And if you're a manager, chances are you're a better debater and negotiator, so your beliefs are sheltered even if you're wrong.
When I was a manager, kicking the micromanagement habit required months of conscious effort. It wasn't easier at first. A problem with most bad habits is that overcoming them involves things getting worse before they get better.
It took a while for people to believe that they could make their own decisions. Most of them had already been doing so, but keeping their managers out of the loop. Giving up control meant that I was actually allowed to know what was going on.
If someone complains to me that people aren't taking initiative, I ask them if the people are really allowed to take initiative.
> ""Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job."
Isn't that what she's saying? She doesn't want to have to tip-toe around her husband's feelings the way she seems to have to. She spends a lot of emotional labor (or capital, if you prefer) trying not to point out obvious things like, "I shouldn't have to tell you to put away the thing you took out. I shouldn't have to praise you for doing the work you were expected to do. I shouldn't have to just accept that you never reciprocate those emotions when I do the things you can't seem to, or want praise for."
"I would not have to make the calls, get multiple quotes, research and vet each service, arrange payment and schedule the appointment. The real gift I wanted was to be relieved of the emotional labor"
What she's saying is she wants to do less work, and then she throws the term "emotional labor" in there as though that's a catch-all description for any work that she normally does that she would rather not be doing. But maybe I just don't understand the term.
"Then I tried to gingerly explain the concept of emotional labor: that I was the manager of the household, and that being manager was a lot of thankless work. Delegating work to other people, i.e. telling him to do something he should instinctively know to do, is exhausting. "
Nope, again, she's just saying she's doing a lot of work, specifically here delegation and managerial work. This is the way she is explaining the concept of "emotional labor" but most people just call it work and/or management.
I'm not sure how it helps to call it "emotional labor". It just confuses the issue putting focus on the individual's personal symptoms as the result of a problem rather than the problem itself. The real issue seems to be a work imbalance which leads to frustration. Fix the work imbalance, the frustration goes away.
"emotional labor" == minding ones manners, adopting and using customs appropriate for the current scenario, and .. generally .. not being a dick.
I think its harder for people to not be dicks to one another, if they've never learned the value of minding ones manners, and it has to be stated: our modern society doesn't really promote this fact. More like, "get your own way no matter what" these days, it seems ..
>That’s the point,” I said, now in tears, “I don’t want to have to ask.”
>Walking that fine line to keep the peace and not upset your partner is something women are taught to accept as their duty from an early age.
>My husband is a good man, and a good feminist ally.
>However, it’s not as easy as telling him that. My husband, despite his good nature and admirable intentions, still responds to criticism in a very patriarchal way.
>Yet I find myself worrying about how the mental load bore almost exclusively by women translates into a deep gender inequality that is hard to shake on the personal level.
>It is difficult to model an egalitarian household for my children when it is clear that I am the household manager, tasked with delegating any and all household responsibilities, or taking on the full load myself.
This sounds like a very dysfunctional marriage. I have been observing what I consider are good marriages that have stood the test of time. Marriages where they have been married 30, 40, 50 years and are still crazy about each other. Here are some things that I have found.
1. Good communication. Never expect the other partner to read your mind.
2. Compromise. If what I want hurts or causes pain to the other person, it is not worth it.
3. Loyalty. My spouse is more important to me than any ideology or person.
4. Individual love. My spouse is their own person. They are not some avatar of a family, ethnicity, or gender.
5. Selflessness. I choose to do what it takes to make my spouse happy without expecting anything in return.
These thing should be done by both husband and wife. The author, goes against everyone of them. She expects the husband to read her mind. The whole article feels like some primal cry for appreciation and notice. She criticizes her husband publicly in an article that will be read by millions. She views her husband and son as avatars for men. Her first loyalty seems to be to feminism, and not to her family.
Many times I have seen dysfunctional marriages where the husband justifies his selfishness by using societal gender roles or religion - "The Bible says I am the head of this house". That is wrong. In this article, the author justifies her selfishness using feminism. That is also wrong.
> 1. Good communication. Never expect the other partner to read your mind.
I've also discovered this. Placing communication on first place is vital for the health of a relation.
Even with minor things like the other person asking "what's wrong?", it's much better to reply truthfully with "I got into an argument with a stranger online and I can't believe what a fing * he was" or "I'm just tired for exerting myself too much at work". Too often people reply with "nothing" or "I'm fine" which only serves to confuse the other person ("Is he upset because I was late?", "have I gain weight", etc.). All these things add up and eventually people forget why they entered the relation in the first place.
>My husband is a good man, and a good feminist ally.
I'm not sure I needed to read anymore than that. It is a sexist view, by someone who I would suspect would argue they aren't sexist. Based purely on my personal experiences, I've found people who hold such a view tend to have a very fundamental incompatibility in world view from myself.
Are you married yourself? Most people are pretty good on 1-5 most of the time. That's the key part though, "most of the time". The thing that gets a relationship is how frequently things fall apart, because they will.
90% of the time? Yeah, dump it.
10% of the time? Things are still bad, jettison it.
0.001% of the time? Who knows.
This also precludes the inevitable terrible boss, infertility issues and the hormones that come from 'fixing' them, MiLs, etc. Things in a marriage are also the things that happen outside of it.
So yeah, I'd say most marriages are 99% in line with 1-5, the trick is the 'error' rate.
Easy to preach, but much can go wrong, people can get ill, people can get in trouble, people can get addicted, people can get used by others (mothers, daughters, friends, bosses). What then, will you front and deal with it? Will you try and sail the ship through the storm? Or will you make a list of the good things that you could have had if only?
I'm not sure I buy this. In my experience at least, it all comes down to standards — it sounds like this woman has higher standards for what constitutes a "running household", and gets frustrated when her husband doesn't share those standards. It sounds like he would be content with boxes on the floor, dirty bathrooms, etc. When she asks him to raise the house to her standard, she is asking him to adopt her perspective of what is acceptable and what is not, which is not trivial. He needs to be asked to tidy up because he genuinely does not see a problem with things being messy.
Why isn't the solution for the woman to compromise on her expectations, finding a middle ground for cleanliness and organization? Why must the man fully adopt her perspective?
I was a homemaker for a couple of decades. So, I spent a great deal more time physically at home than my husband and the house was where most of my work occurred. When my husband left his dirty clothes on the floor, I could either live with the clutter and step over it or pick up after him. Either choice was still an imposition on me that lowered my quality of life.
Furthermore, since doing laundry was one of my responsibilities, him not putting his clothes in the hamper just made my job harder. And, no, it wasn't really acceptable to just not wash his clothes because they weren't in the hamper. We were financially dependent on his job. He had to be presentable. Plus, leaving dirty clothes laying around is a hygiene issue and I have health problems.
It would be a little bit like if I went to his office and dumped my laundry on his desk and he would either have to deal with that or work around it -- all day, every single day. We were married about 16 years before he grasped that and stopped leaving his dirty clothes on the floor.
When you are in a partnership, the actions of your partner are going to impact you. If they aren't considerate, they will impact you negatively. That is simply reality. Acting like it is not is crazy talk.
This whole topic mostly boils down to partner choice. If a person is messy, that person is messy. If you are tidy, and not willing to compromise, a messy person is not a good partner for you. It's going to be a pain point, he won't change, you won't change, people don't change. A relationship is a game of compromises. I don't know where are you from, but where I'm from there's a prevalent culture where people think that when they find a possible partner that fits some of their criteria, they can change him/her in the future, when they're married, to make a perfect significant-other; and I feel many commenters here have similar mindsets. This is insidious and toxic, and produces perennially unhappy relationships. If you won't love and accept a person as they are, better don't mess your life up, nor theirs.
My ex was not messy. He did things like meticulously organize his book collection and kept his own possessions in pristine condition. He was just a sexist pig.
He did not think he was a sexist pig. He was very idealistic and talked about the importance of women's rights. It wasn't apparent I was marrying a troglodyte until well after we married and our first child was on the way. On some level, he wanted a modern two career couple lifestyle. But, when push came to shove, he expected me to pick up after him, cook for him, etc. Trying to get him to see where his words and his actions parted ways was very challenging.
A lot of people are like that about various things. This is part of why psychology distinguishes the conscious from the subconscious.
People never have perfect information about their partner. There is a lot dating does not reveal.
(My ex was not a bad guy. I don't hate him and these issues are wholly unrelated to why we divorced.)
I'm really uncomfortable reading these insults, even if they're deserved. More so because they're in response to a comment of mine (even though I'm not the destination). I'd be so pleased if you removed them. That said, I do understand where you're coming from (both through empathy and some cases I personally know). But you should see that we agree: he probably was a bad choice for you. People always hide their bad parts when it comes to dating, and some are outright dishonest and manipulative, but that does not change the fact that someone was a bad choice. What I wanted to say was that I think that, we can not blame people for being what they are; and thus that we should pick who we would love for who they are, not for what we can sculpt out of them. I was not trying to advice or criticise you or anybody else on relationships and dating, I'm sorry if it came off that way.
You have that backwards. You replied to a comment of mine in a manner that implies a great many negative things about me and my marriage. Those implications are entirely inaccurate, but given that this is an overwhelmingly male forum, it is a no win situation for me. Not rebutting them implies that you are correct. Rebutting them has resulted in my comment getting downvoted and now you acting like your feelings of offense vastly outweigh the importance of my feelings of offense.
And we do not agree: He was not a bad choice for me.
> "Those implications are entirely inaccurate, but given that this is an overwhelmingly male forum, it is a no win situation for me."
How does the fact that HN is an overwhelmingly male forum make this a no win situation for you? Are you suggesting that only a few HN members could ever see things from your point of view?
For what it's worth, I thought that this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15359215 was a little too callous, but not in an intentional way. Talking about relationship problems in broad strokes after someone gave specific details about an old relationship is almost never going to end well, as it sounds like they're summarising a relationship they have no knowledge of. However, I get the sense that gkya was talking in broader strokes to talk about patterns rather than single cases, so whilst it sounded like it was about a specific relationship considering the context, in practice it was just a badly directed comment, in my opinion.
English is not my mother tongue, so maybe I've done a silly language transfer using "you" to mean "one, people". I've definitely heard native speakers use second person in similar ways though, but mostly British.
Americans do that a lot too. I have done it and had it go sideways in public discussions. That really was the only explanation needed to straighten things out with me.
The problem is that isn't what you said to me. Instead, you informed me of your discomfort and asked me to delete my remarks out of deference to your comfort.
You called your ex husband a pig, in responding to me. That was what I said I wanted you to remove, because I feel strong discomfort having caused someone I don't know at all getting insulted at in public. I'm still very uncomfortable with it and still, I'd be happy if you edited your comment to remove that particular word. Wrt the other issue, well, I've said I'm sorry enough times and all I've gotten was bias and aggression. You've said that I'm acting to create a certain impression on other readers, and you've implied that I'm sexist. I won't add any more comments to this thread because this is becoming really annoying and actually offending.
So, you are uncomfortable that my ex husband was insulted in public, though he was not named. But me being insulted in public is not a problem.
Every single remark here by you errs on the side of some man's feelings mattering a helluva lot more than mine. I am not implying you are a sexist, but your actions continue to err in a particular direction. If you don't like the impression that makes, you can just stop doing it and genuinely apologize to me instead of adding yet more faux apologies wherein you repeatedly act like I am somehow in the wrong.
If you speak English as a second language, it is totally fine to say "Whoops, I didn't mean to offend. English is my second language." It is not totally fine to tell someone else they are being offensive, they need to change their behavior and then excuse the misunderstanding based on your poor English. That isn't cool at all.
Because they're not the one that conflated gender with understanding, and that's what I found interesting about your exchange. The rest of the discussion was just a common form of miscommunication that happens when someone wants to talk about specifics and the other wants to talk in generics, and the two collide.
I am the top ranked openly female member here. That observation is informed by long experience. In gendered discussions that get heated, the majority of people on HN will tend to side with the man or the male point of view.
Once a man says or does something moderately problematic that is a stereotypically gendered issue, the odds are long against a woman getting a fair shake. Your choice to reply to me and accuse me of making this a gendered issue instead of siding with me and letting them know that their remark is a sort that does not work well is completely consistent with that pattern.
> "I am the top ranked openly female member here. That observation is informed by long experience. In gendered discussions that get heated, the majority of people on HN will tend to side with the man or the male point of view."
With all due respect, on HN I don't care whether I'm replying to a man or a woman, someone young or old, someone who lives close or lives far away. I barely even look at usernames, and will often only do so if I'm replying to someone, or someone makes an interesting comment (good or bad). If you say you're the top ranked openly female member here, good for you, but it honestly makes no difference to me. If you've found yourself getting flak for being a woman, I'm sorry about that, there's no justification for that, but I suspect that many people are of a similar mindset to me and judge based on written content rather than background.
> "Your choice to reply to me and accuse me of making this a gendered issue instead of siding with me and letting them know that their remark is a sort that does not work well is completely consistent with that pattern."
I commented on your gender remark AND sided with you in the general discussion in the exact same comment. I did not take one side over another. How you could come to any other conclusion is beyond me. Here it is again:
Well, you are basically fighting with me (but not them) and your criticism of their remark was vastly more sympathetic than your criticisms of me. That is part and parcel of the pattern and it is incredibly insidious.
I didn't expect you to know who I am. Nonetheless, it remains true that men will notice remarks they feel are disrespectful of men and pounce on them, oblivious to the fact that it is a woman being ganged up on and only trying to defend herself from unfair criticism. And the ganging up on her is very much a gendered, problematic thing.
It puts a woman in a position of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I only mentioned my position as the top ranked woman here to advise you of my long standing firsthand experience. That's it. And yet it has become yet another reason for you to act like I am somehow doing something wrong.
This whole thing is off topic and a ridiculous, unfair derail. The odds are very high that others will join this debacle and it really won't matter how I handle it, I will still be framed as being in the wrong and also framed as making it a gendered issue rather than as having a right to rebut the original remark that started this nonsense.
Anyway, I am running a fever, so replying at all is probably rooted at least in part in poor judgment. So, for the record, I plan to bow out. Hacker News can have a brouhaha if it so desires. But there is probably zero good to be gained by me participating further in this utter and complete nonsense.
> "Well, you are basically fighting with me and your criticism of their remark was vastly more sympathetic than your criticisms of me. That is part and parcel of the pattern and it is incredibly insidious."
If I found gkya's comments more interesting than yours, then I'd be responding to them directly, and more openly discussing their comments. You could see this as argumentative if you want, but my main line of questioning was asking you to clarify a statement you made. If you can point to a single sentence I've said in our exchange that you found offensive I'd be interested to hear it.
> "I only mentioned my position as the top ranked woman here to advise you of my long standing firsthand experience. That's it. And yet it has become yet another reason for you to act like I am somehow doing something wrong."
I'm not suggesting it's wrong, I'm suggesting it's mostly irrelevant. I could say something like "I'm the most vocal proponent for Brexit on HN", and whilst that has a small element of truth to it, I don't think people hold it against me beyond a comment thread. I'll probably forget we had this chat in a week, and we may find ourselves agreeing on a different topic before too long. That's the impermanent, impersonal nature of HN, most of it isn't tied to identity, it's just people playing around with debating ideas and sharing experiences. What I'm saying is, I doubt people hold a grudge on HN, and if you choose to be openly female on HN and people like or dislike what you say, perhaps they're just liking or disliking what you say regardless of your gender.
If I couldn't get my point across, that's probably my bad; I wasn't implying your person with the pronoun you in that comment, I'm sorry. I was trying to talk about relationships in general. And I may have misunderstood you, I'm sorry about that too. But this is a discussion, not a contest of who's offended whom more, or of correctness.
So, when you tell me to delete something because it offends you, that's fine. When I tell you that your remark was just as offensive to me, you add yet another criticism of me to your track record and act like I am behaving badly for mentioning that I am offended.
This is exactly why emotional labor is a popular catch phrase: Because women are expected to care deeply about how men feel and to twist themselves out of shape to cater to the feelings of men. But, how women feel is not supposed to matter.
I think it comes down to communication. If my wife said "put your clothes in the hamper because I want you to, and that's where they belong", I might fail to put them there. If she said "put your clothes in the hamper because leaving them on the floor makes my life a lot harder, and also I might get sick", I would never fail to put them there.
By framing the issue as something I care about (my wife's health and happiness) and not something I don't care about (whether or not clothes are on the floor), effective communication saves the day.
I think the issue with the article is that it demonizes this very communication as a form of unfair, sexist "emotional labor", and therefore (at least to my mind) makes it less likely to occur.
EDIT: I'm not trying to imply that your personal situation went one way or the other, or that it was a failing on your part to communicate effectively. I'm just citing my own personal anecdote, because that's all I have.
And the author of the article states that communication is not happening effectively in her marriage in part due to gender norms influencing mental models and expectations. And I am telling you that effective communication in my marriage on that one detail took 16 years to finally achieve.
Most of the comments here are pretty dismissive and attacking of the article and its author, while acting like she is just an unreasonable bitch. Most participants here are male. The author is female.
Women tend to just not get listened to. Getting heard is a huge uphill battle. The effort involved in trying to find some means to get there gets us accused of being nags, etc.
That is, in fact, the entire point of the article.
I find altering environment to be much (like, much) more effective than altering behavior. Clothes chronically on the floor somewhere[1]? That spot needs a hamper. Toddlers' toys all over the place and spouse vetoes throwing out like 80% of that junk? Bins, in child-locked cabinets. Time spent cleaning massive toy messes immediately down by well over half, for a one-time cost of a few dollars, time spent policing how much crap the kids are spreading around the room (a hopeless task anyway) dropped to nearly zero. Notice you're (both) not managing to get the kids' clothes sorted and to their dressers/closets? Kid- and clothing-type-labeled pull-out bins (god I love bins) on shelves in the laundry room, basically eliminating any actual need to cart the clothes from room to room (it just makes for more work later) and putting the output location closer to the input. Problem reduced from "OMG this is really becoming a problem" to "it's not perfect, but WOW is this better". Etc., etc.
Altering behavior's rarely worked for me. My own, sometimes, my spouse's... well, pretty much never. So if it's the effect you want gone, it's often possible to make it go away really fast and with little fuss (often praise!) through a change in your environment. I'm sure lots of people of both sexes put this into practice, but I can say with certainty that it just never, ever occurs to some, and they'll put up with and complain about the issue indefinitely if someone else doesn't spend a few bucks and a few minutes making it permanently disappear.
[1] just taking your example, not implying that the solution was appropriate in your case or that it wasn't attempted and failed—to be clear, this approach definitely can't solve every problem.
I'm a big fan of that approach. I recommend it often. But, at the end of the day, if your spouse is simply monstrously inconsiderate, you going out of your way to find environmental solutions is just more work on you to minimize problems that will never really go away without taking the bull by the horns and confronting your spouse about their bad habits. (Or, you know, divorce. That is the other way to stop getting crapped on by a consistently inconsiderate spouse.)
Taking a specific example to the next step... If wife places a hamper where dirty clothes have been placed previously, now she is tripping over the hamper instead of the dirty clothes.
In concept, your environmental adjustment makes a lot of sense, and probably works well for many (not all) use cases.
But again, here we are, where the WIFE takes the 'burden' of solving that problem. She has to put a plan together of how to change the environment, that requires time/effort.
Other comments elsewhere on this thread mention that the wife/woman should relax her standards. Not related to the above, but I'd like to just call out, why are we not asking the man/husband to raise his standards!?
If that was the point of the article, I think it was spectacularly ineffective at communicating it. Your points here (and above) are a far better and more succinct presentation of the argument than the article itself was.
“That’s the point,” I said, now in tears, “I don’t want to have to ask.”
The word considerate means to consider how your actions or inactions will impact other people. The vast majority of the ongoing internet discussion of so called emotional labor hinges on the detail that the societal expectation is that women are required to do this. Men are not. And when a man's failure to think before he acts negatively impacts a woman and she complains about it, she gets told she just is failing to communicate, etc.
No matter how much effort a woman puts into effectively communicating what she wants, it will never put a stop to the fact that someone else's consistently inconsiderate behavior will consistently negatively impact you. That is the crux of the issue: Women as a group are asking men as a group to think before they act and are being told by men as a group "How dare you! That is an unreasonable expectation!" (In essence.)
In that one scenario yes, that communication could save the day. I think the article is more about what happens if you multiply that by 100, and one person is disproportionately making that communication happen.
I could either live with the clutter and step over it or pick up after him
But those aren't your only choices.
If you decided to park your car in the middle of the street, the choices of those around you aren't limited to either put up with it or to clean up after you. Instead, you car gets towed.
The key difference between these situations is that one has agreed upon expectations and consequences. People only resort to nagging when they find themselves in a situation where there are no agreed upon expectations and consequences. Further, consequences are extremely effective. You only need to be towed once before you learn to be more careful about where you park.
If you agreed upon an expectation/consequence of "clothes left on the floor for more than 2 days will be thrown away", you wouldn't be putting up with clutter for very long.
This also helps with directing negative emotions. When someone is nagged, the negative emotion is usually directed at the nagger. But if he broke the rules and had his clothes thrown away, he'd be angry with himself.
If you agreed upon an expectation/consequence of "clothes left on the floor for more than 2 days will be thrown away", you wouldn't be putting up with clutter for very long.
When you are married, that approach fails on a number of fronts.
First, unless you are ultra wealthy, throwing out his clothes will painfully come out of the family budget to replace, especially work clothes, especially if you are a household living on one income -- his -- as we were. Second, replacing them takes time and effort. I was a traditional homemaker, so I handled a lot of his errands. So, I do what? Pick them and put them in the trash can, then go shopping for more, instead of picking them up and putting them in the hamper? Third, it is just bitchy and hostile. This man was my lover. Just being a bitch to him every step of the way was not one of my goals.
You don't create a more loving, caring environment by seeing just how much you can piss on your lover before they decide to file for divorce. He did eventually get what I was saying. It just took an unfortunately long time.
I think I understand your perspective, but I disagree, and this might highlight why emotional labor disparity is such a big problem for so many relationships -- because each side sees things from a different perspective.
You're right, adding just one expectation/consequence would be a real problem, because a lot of the fallout would eventually end up in your lap. To make this work, it would have to be part of a larger system. The consequences have to be set up to make things more fair, not less fair.
throwing out his clothes will come out of the family budget to replace
Alternatively, if the family had a "fun" budget set aside for his and hers, the consequence would be much more effective and fair if it came out of his fun budget -- he was saving up for an Xbox and now he has to wait two more months to afford it because he just blew $100 replacing dress shirts which were thrown away.
So, I do what? Pick them and put them in the trash can, then go shopping for more
This would definitely be unfair to you -- he needs to be the one to shop for the replacement clothes. This also highlights a similar issue from the article -- many of the burdens were essentially volunteered for, because one party preemptively took it upon themselves to take on the burden, without discussing it or setting up a system ahead of time. For example, the burden of constantly keeping track of which groceries were running low was mentioned. If the chore of shopping for groceries rotated between both partners, this wouldn't be a problem. If its his turn to deal with groceries, OP doesn't need to worry about it that week.
Third, it is just bitchy and hostile
I strongly disagree here, and I think this is the root of how our perspectives differ. I deal very well with rules and consequences. I don't see that as bitchy and hostile -- that's good communication and honoring an agreement. If I agreed to the rules and the consequences, I have only myself to blame. From my perspective, nagging is the thing which is bitchy.
Also, this can cause an unhealthy blame shift for me too -- instead of blaming myself for breaking the rules, I'm tempted
to shift blame onto her for perceiving the clutter (leading to the "why is this such a big deal?" argument, which is the worst possible button I could push at that time).
You don't create a more loving, caring environment by seeing just how much you can piss on your lover before they decide to file for divorce.
Here, I agree, but just from a different perspective. I cannot imagine being in a relationship with the author of the article. Navigating a minefield of poorly defined expectations and responsibilities, with a healthy dose of nagging, and its just a matter of time before I'd reach for the divorce lever.
You are making a lot of assumptions that do not apply to my former marriage. For example, there was no money for each of us to have a fun budget. We just were not that well off.
I don't disagree with the general principle that, in theory, you can find other alternatives. In practice, that is not always true. Furthermore, you are taking an example from my actual life and telling me I am wrong about my own life, in essence. And you are doing so very much after the fact. I am not even married to him anymore.
Plus, your solution sounds a bit like "Well, there are always alternatives. Like you could just burn the house down rather than clean it!" Sure, you could. It is also utterly ridiculous and impractical for the vast majority of people.
The reality is that if you are married and cannot get their cooperation, some things will negatively impact you. Period. There is no clever hack that lets you stay with an inconsiderate, uncooperative person and somehow not get crapped on by that fact.
That is true regardless of gender. But, certain social norms mean women tend to be subjected to certain problems of that ilk more consistently than men. If a woman actually wants a relationship and doesn't want to just suck it up and feel victimized, asking him to change some is unavoidable.
It is a question I wrestle with: Do I ever want to get involved with a man again? Because women get horribly vilified for even trying to talk about the problem space. I am very much a conflict avoider. If just asking nicely for someone to be considerate makes me some mega bitch in not only his eyes, but the entire world's eyes, I dunno. Maybe sex isn't that important to me.
Because that is what it boils down to: Women can put up with this kind of crap, they can try to sort it out with their man while he and the entire world act like that is just bitchy of her, or she can sleep alone. The first two both feel like being a professional victim.
Such questions actually make me suicidal because sleeping alone is not my cup of tea. So, in my book, those all look like terrible options. But, hey, I am menopausal, so sleeping alone is beginning to look less like a reason to go jump off a bridge.
Anyway, I think it would be wise of me to bow out of discussing this further. It would be super nice if your future hypothetical examples do not implicitly suggest I was just an idiot and if you had been there to advise me, all of my marital problems could have been readily solved with some little hack or other. Thanks.
"It would be super nice if your future hypothetical examples do not implicitly suggest I was just an idiot and if you had been there to advise me, all of my marital problems could have been readily solved with some little hack or other"
Thank you for pointing that out -- I hadn't realized I had done that. Brainstorming solutions is useless if my communication makes someone feel like an idiot.
I should also say that the key thing about this approach is the conversations which it forces both parties to have. Once you enter the game of consequences, the negotiation of the rules becomes a high priority for both parties. These conversations will churn up all sorts of faulty assumptions and bring to light hidden expectations and burdens which the other partner had long been unaware of.
With luck, this system will sharpen the subject of arguments to being solely about re-negotiating the rules, rather than the anger, resentment, guilt and blame which come from a system of unstated expectations and silent burdens.
My father has a higher standard of cleanliness than my mother. When my father leaves for work trips I've noticed that my mother will do the dishes once every couple of days, whereas when my father is around he does the dishes daily. My father tends to do all of house cleaning because he likes things to be clean. They do not quarrel about it, they do not even talk about it, my father simply does the cleaning (I think he enjoys the act of cleaning to be honest).
Sounds to me like the partners in the article have a dysfunctional relationship and this isn't really a gendered issue but a "people issue". My experience probably isn't the norm though (both of my parents are engineers with careers) so I understand that this probably colors my perception of this not being a gendered issue, just wanted to offer a contrary perspective to the one posed in the article.
I think you are missing the forest for the trees a bit here by focusing just on cleaning standards. As the author said, part of the emotional labor is the management of the household but also the management of relationships within the house.
This isn't about forcing a man "to fully adopt her perspective." This is about the idea that women are more often expected to be the ones to suggest a compromise, or to be the ones which have to point out these rifts in the relationship. More generally, to do the actual work of being in a relationship and keeping it healthy.
To flip around what you just said a bit: Why doesn't the husband notice that his wife is always picking up after him, or that she is not recieving acknowledgement of the work she has done, work that he feels should be acknowledged when he does it? Why must the woman be the one to notice there is a problem, to articulate it and to come up with a solution, as if the problem is her problem to solve and not a problem with the relationship, which consists of two people who are supposed to be partners?
Why must she? Because she's the one who has issues with it. A relationship needs communication, since mind-reading doesn't work yet. I'll try to avoid using he/she since the article itself is very sexist, as is your post. Partner's have different expectations, and one partner may not see an issue until it's brought to their attention. It has nothing to do with gender, or emotional labor or any other drivel. It has to do with accepting that a relationship requires communication, and from the communication, understanding and compassion.
And a relationship where one person feels such an emotional burden is not healthy.
I have to point out this as well:
"This is about the idea that women are more often expected to be the ones to suggest a compromise, or to be the ones which have to point out these rifts in the relationship. More generally, to do the actual work of being in a relationship and keeping it healthy."
This is outrageously sexist. In my relationship, I'm continually suggesting compromises, and "doing the actual work of being in a relationship and keeping it healthy." The idea that women are the caretakers of relationships is silly. In a healthy relationship, both partners have responsibility and the ability to keep things operating on an even keel.
You caught me off-guard a bit saying my post is sexist. To be clear I am NOT saying that this is how things are in all relationships, or how things should be. I'm very much in the camp of partners needing to be full partners, and for open and health communication.
I'm also not blind to the fact that there are still some deeply ingrained stereotypes, however subtle, about gender roles in our society, and I'm trying, perhaps poorly, to rephrase some points from the article (and others like it), in which the author very clearly names this: "the mental load bore almost exclusively by women."
This isn't a personal attack on you or your relationship. On the contrary, it sounds like you have a pretty healthy relationship, and I'm happy for you!
But the fact that this concept resonates with many people though, men and women, probably means there is something here that warrants more conversation for a lot of people, even if it isn't something that is a problem in your particular relationship.
I can definitely confirm that despite my many readings of articles and studyings of psychology, this article describes some of the most common issues I've run into in romantic relationships with women on a day to day level, but in some cases relationship-ending. I don't think the point of the article is, or the point of our discussions should be whether this is the way things just are, or should be. Rather, it's about acknowledging that this is very often the case, whether by nature or nurture or whatever. Just that 'common ground' might be essential to developing ways to improve things.
You're treating a description of the status quo as prescriptive, which is how you're mistakenly viewing the article and the poster to whom you're responding as "outrageously sexist". Women are still, by existing social norms, expected to be relationship caretakers, and this is being identified as a sexist problem to be addressed, not as a goal.
I still think like this stinks of "i'm a grown up and they're not" when the parent comment here is more correct, its more different standards.
There are equivalent reasons various members of the household get pissed about stuff which always boil down to:
> why isn't anyone paying attention to what I do?
Q. Why does my flatmate leave his freaking tools every bloody where?
A. 'cause he is the house handyman and when stuff is broken he fixes it.
Q. Why am I constantly tidying up my flatmate's mess?
A. Because he's a bit careless but ultimately its flatmate B that's requiring the clear table so its in deference to them.
Q. Why does flatmate B always leave the damn hoover plugged in like a freaking tripwire around the house?
A. 'cause when they've done the hoovering they can't be bothered to tidy up that part of the tidy up.
Everyone has their foibles and everyone can do better but to expect everyone else to magically assume your perspective and notice you all the freaking time is a selfish position. To be exasperated that you have to communicate your discomfort is a laziness of its own. If you fail to communicate then that's on you.
Sure you shouldn't "have to" but part of accepting other people into your life is accepting their imperfections.
Anyway, pushing this into some genderised codshit is bollocks.
I think you didn't understand parent's point. It's not women that are
expected to put effort, it's the party that's not satisfied with current
state that is expected to put effort.
> Why doesn't the husband notice that his wife is always picking up after him, or that she is not recieving acknowledgement of the work she has done, work that he feels should be acknowledged when he does it?
Blind spots of attention. When she does it, the (unconscious) reaction would
be "I didn't need it, I'd be fine either way". When he does it, the
(unconscious) reaction would be "I didn't need it, so I wouldn't do it, but
I did anyway".
> Why must the woman be the one to notice there is a problem,
It's not that woman must notice a problem, it's that woman did notice it.
> [...] to [do all the work with problem], as if the problem is her problem to solve and not a problem with the relationship, which consists of two people who are supposed to be partners?
Again, it's the attention and its blind spots. The problem didn't get noticed
and acknowledged as such in the mind of man.
If you want me to do something, it's you who normally should put effort,
not me, because I don't care if you will have it done or not. This is how
interaction between two people works. It's silly to expect me to look around
for the ways to please you out of the blue. Why would you suddenly expect this
mechanics to work differetnly in a relationship?
--
[Clarification]: The description above is about how things work between
people, not a praise of man's passiveness. If a couple wants to change how
this mechanics, they need to put continuous effort in working against it, and
this means they need to notice it and decide to do so.
I mean - I'm always looking for ways to please my partner, and to a lesser degree, my friends, family and co-workers. Little trinkets I think she might like, a surprise dinner, doing some dishes that we've been letting slide, making tea, refilling water, whatever. And she does the same for me. And my friends, family, and co-workers tend to do the same as well.
It's not silly. It's called kindness, and it's part of emotional labour.
Which seems to bring us back around to the first point again.
Is she having to do a disproportionate amount of pleasing her partner though? We don't get that perspective, only that she's putting more effort than him into the parts she cares about - which might go both ways.
Yes, but that’s not because she’s a woman (as she appears to claim), it’s because she hasn’t come to some sort of agreement about how to run the house. She’s talking past her husband to millions of people.
Had the gender roles been swapped, it would have been a very hard to stomach article for a lot of people.
Which is why it's sexist. The implication is that if her husband were a better feminist he would be perfectly able to anticipate and provide everything she wanted in a friction-free and effortless way.
The fact that he doesn't proves he's still mired in patriarchy, which of course he needs to be educated out of.
Assuming your partner is sort of okay, I guess, but essentially ideologically defective is not a particularly healthy basis for a relationship.
Aside from chores, it's not as it men - feminist or not - never provide emotional support to women. I would be astonished if the husband never listened to problems, provided cuddles and backrubs, and all the other emotional maintenance that men give their partners.
I sometimes think this culture has a very poor record of educating people how adult relationships are supposed to work. Unfortunately this article seems to be an example of that.
That's right. Whenever I start to feel this way (and it does happen from time to time), before I complain I remind myself that I don't ever even think about routine car maintenance or yard work, the taxes and their due dates and payments. I never have to get rid of (or cause!) dead rodents or unplug the toilets or remember to dig out the hairball accumulating in the drain. Everyone's got an emotional or practical mental load; it's just easier to recognize your own.
Yes, but it needs conscious effort, which means that you need to realize
you need or want to do it. It's very difficult to do something if you never
even thought you could think of doing.
As a male, I can offer something of a counter-point: clutter makes me uncomfortable and I find it hard to ignore it or "let it go". If there's a full trash bin, I feel that I need to empty that bin before I can throw anything else away. This feeling is not shared by my partner who will happily wedge an item in around the edge or pile on top with the intention of emptying the bin at a later time, when it's more convenient.
It's not clear to me where the compromise in this situation might lie. First and foremost, I think it's important to admit that this isn't a big deal either way. But the fact that I am uncomfortable, or that the knowledge of the full bin itches at the back of my mind, makes it an issue I find difficult to dismiss. In my own life I try to remind myself that this is my own issue and that leaving the bin until later is not an unreasonable attitude to take.
In practice, I believe I often just deal with the bin (or whatever issue is at hand) and move on. Sometimes, I am ashamed to say, I get cranky and maybe even huff and puff as I do so. By the same token, on many occasions my partner will empty the bin even though they may prefer to leave it for later. I think that this is compromise, but it's not anything systemic and there's no "rule" that dictates who does what.
A compromise could also be to divide the tasks differently: instead of the tidy and less tidy partners being 50/50 on taking the garbage out, perhaps it should be 99/1 on garbage (the less tidy person only handles it in unusual circumstances) but the less tidy person takes on different responsibilities like running the finances or taking on car maintenance or cooking dinner.
I'm not in love with the phrase "emotional labor" but I would suspect if you reflect more deeply you will see the scenarios in this article playing out in your own and others' relationships.
It's not really about standards, more the fact that it's not fair to women when the default assumption is they are in mental charge of household and child-rearing duties - certainly when both partners are working.
That comic is really funny, in a bad sense. She should've asked. For one, as someone who enjoys cooking, I really want to be alone in the kitchen. Also, if a person is not considerate enough to help, that won't change. If that guy is not already helping her out in the kitchen, probably he's that type of guy. As I said in another comment, if you want to live with someone who'll automatically help you with the kitchen, marry such a person. Because you won't be able to make the guy in that comic into what you want.
I think about some things I said in did in relationships in my 20s and cringe.
I hope I have gotten massively more in-tune with others' emotions and desires, having read more, witnessed modeling aside from my parents, and gone through a more varied and extensive set of personal and interpersonal experiences to compare with.
While I have observed most people's personalities being fairly static, I do think it's possible to morph into an empath. Quickly, even, if tragedy or mental health issues strike.
I don't disagree you, it's possible to morph oneself into an empath, and maybe re-shape one's character and/or habits. But it's lots of effort in vain to try and morph someone else, that's what I am trying to say. Re-reading my comment I see that I could have made it more clear.
This comic calls it the mental load, the posted article calls it emotional labor. Based on some additional googling, I think mental load is the more established term.
Compromise does indeed go both ways. I'm not seeing that here though. At no point does the woman say "well, I guess we just don't do that thing in our house." (Obviously when children come into the equation, the man's not knowing the pediatrician's phone number is true learned helplessness and laziness, rather than a difference in standards, because presumably both parties enjoy having a healthy child).
I agree that the role of woman-as-manager is encouraged by societal expectations, but when it's this distressing, she needs to let go of some standards rather than piling them on to her emotional plate. You can't marry someone with different standards of cleanliness and expect yours to prevail — the only fair expectation is to land somewhere in the middle.
Its not like she's talking about polishing silver or some martha-stewart level domesticity. The standards of living the author describes are pretty basic.
Dirty clothes on the floor? What is this, your college dorm!? It is an unlikely option that the man/husband could also raise his standards.
I'm a woman and I frequently leave clothes on the floor of our bedroom, usually in a little pile, but sometimes socks here and there. Eventually I gather and wash them. Truly, in all these years, no harm has ever once come of it.
The article specifically says that he's willing to do more of the chores or whatever is asked of him around the house. That is compromise. I don't care about clutter whatsoever, and while I'd be happy to clean to make my partner feel better, it's not going to make me care any more. This article just reads like a woman who is mad that her husband doesn't share her perspective -- she notes that he has no problem doing the work.
The problem isn't messiness. The problem is the additional mental load it creates for half of a household to keep increasingly more information in active memory while staying functional. If you continue this computing analogy, you can easily see how the added search cost, not to mention memory/storage load, dramatically affects system performance (but with the benefit of things being done with full contextual awareness). Compare this to a system with extremely limited working memory, which flies in comparison but only puts the very most recent or most critical actions in context.
In a household with more than two people, especially, the resulting mental load can get unreasonable very quickly.
These are the kinds of issues you're supposed to discuss before you marry someone. She has higher standards, and she ends up doing all kinds of (unnecessary in her husband's mind) work to keep those standards, which are hers alone.
Discussion is one thing, but I think the real test is cohabitation. There are lots of things you think you can deal with in theory, but when faced with it every day, you are forced to either 1) come to a compromise, 2) let it go, or 3) quietly seethe about it for the rest of your life.
Fortunately, my wife is a clinical psychologist, so #3 was off the table in our house.
However it's done, it's my opinion that a couple should come to an understanding about practical and mundane details of their life situation before making serious commitments.
It sounds like you've got a good thing going...1 and 2 I can deal with, the quiet seething is a no-go.
This article is flamebait. The title is "Women Aren't Nags", below a big middle finger to the reader, so it's not like it tries to hide it. And much of the article is saying that men are emotionally immature or worse.
For example, she asks her husband to get the house clean for mother's day. He assumes she meant what she asked for, and does a deep clean of the bathrooms himself. But
> What I wanted was for him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, do the emotional labor I would have done if the job had fallen to me.
But for a single cleaning, just doing it himself was more direct and effective, so what he did isn't unreasonable. But it didn't go through the specific process she didn't mention but was really what she secretly wanted. So there has been a failure of communication here.
Other examples also show similar problems with understanding and communication:
> It was obvious that the box was in the way, that it needed to be put back. It would have been easy for him to just reach up and put it away, but instead he had stepped around it, willfully ignoring it for two days.
One person's "willful ignorance" may be another's blind spot. Some people just don't notice some types of mess. An extreme form of this is sometimes called "clutter blindness" (itself a minor form of hoarding), but it exists in moderate forms too, leading to disagreements like this one. Neither the author nor her husband is in the wrong here, but they both need to do more to understand the other.
And about "emotional labor":
> If I were to point out random emotional labor duties I carry out—reminding him of his family’s birthdays [etc.]
Some people care more about those things than others. Unless he asked her to do that for him, it would probably be fine if she didn't - after all, what would happen if they weren't married? I'd recommend she stop doing it - not as "see how you get along without me!" to spite him, but as an honest experiment that both she and her husband might learn from. It's possible she'd see how his life works just fine without those reminders, or that he'd see how those things are important and start to do them himself.
> What I wanted was for him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, do the emotional labor I would have done if the job had fallen to me.
This one really jumped out at me, because even if I had stuck to the letter of her request (hiring a service rather than doing it myself), I would have fallen far, far short of her expectation.
Calling four or five services? Embarrassing myself by spamming my friends on social media for a maid-service recommendation? You have got to be kidding me.
How about just hiring one at random, try them out for a few months, and then decide if you like their service? Or maybe spend 30 seconds on Yelp?
"...That’s why I asked my husband to do it as a gift."
What kind of "gift" is "asked" for and when not received it is aired in public and shame the man for not living up to the expectations she "didn't feel the need to communicate".
This is frankly disgusting and speaks volumes about the author's solipsism and inconsideration of her husbands story. One sided and exceptionally ignorant. Under the guise of "Equality".
I am a man and enjoy this "emotional labor" managing my house and investment properties. I also make a great income as a software consultant and enjoy calling suppliers and service professionals and is pretty easy. Pick up the phone, talk to people, schedule appointments.
This speaks more to her choice of mate and her communication abilities and the kind of contempt she has for her husband. For the whole world to see. He would be wise to re-evaluate her commitment and his commitment to the relationship.
This a kind of emotional blackmail and will serve to control him in the future since he knows that she will air their dirty laundry to be on the internet forever.
By laboring over a decision for hours or days, you can unintentionally turn a trivial task into a heavy one. By making decisions quickly you save yourself all the extra emotional and mental labor.
Sure you will make mistakes, especially as you are learning to do this. But you will get better at it with practice. It is a skill worth pursuing.
I understand there are some decisions that should not be made quickly. Learn to recognize those decisions and create a system for yourself for processing those in a reasonable amount of time. For me, choosing which housecleaning service to hire is not a decision that should be labored over.
I agree that this is an important skill to cultivate, as well as the ability to sum-up approximate costs accurately and quickly. That said, I do think that when we are looking at adding a regular, recurring cost to our budget we would be well advantaged by doing the requisite research. In the case of a cleaning service, it's possible (perhaps even preferred) that they'll be performing this service when no one is home. In my own experience, I have found a shockingly wide variety of price points when looking for such a service.
My own rule of thumb is to get three estimates, hopefully at least one from a company or service that was recommended by someone I know personally.
Getting the right service is obviously important to her. But that doesn't mean the decision should be labored over -- the cost of a wrong decision isn't high; if you don't like the one you hired, just try another one.
Paradoxically, sometimes the only way you can get enough information to make the "right" choice is to make a choice in the first place. If it isn't a one-time choice, the downside is generally minimal.
One of the great tricks to learn when making decisions is that if it's taking too long to choose then the difference between the choices must be small enough to practically not matter. Make a choice, Any choice. Flip a coin if it helps.
This is the number one skill I've been trying to learn at work. Too many minor decisions add up and severely hurt
productivity if they aren't resolved quickly.
Describing cleaning as emotional labour is weird to me. I'm fully on board with the "many women do lots of emotional labour that goes unnoticed" logic but to me cleaning is labour and that's that. It's a job, and it should be talked about as hard labour, not some mysterious emotional nebula that men avoid because of gendered conditioning.
I think the danger here is that by conflating emotional labour and cleaning, we obfuscate the true depth of what emotional labour is. Emotional labour what goes into having a mentally ill spouse, a child dying of cancer, a colleague or friend fighting through divorce or depression, the strain of a job that expects a positive mood when you're all wore out inside.
Cleaning is fixed by labour. Having a husband who doesn't clean, gets defensive, can't communicate, can't remember his fucking kids birthdays, etc. is fixed by emotional labour (or divorce). To me that sounds like the author married a person who's not accountable, doesn't share her standards about how labour should be divided, harbors gendered conceptions of how a household should be run, doesn't share her standards of cleanliness, doesn't share her standards for communication skills, etc.
So my response, in a nutshell, is that while this woman is right to push back against gendered standards of who does household work, it has nothing to do with emotional labor, per se. It has everything to do with the fact that she apparently picked a husband who is really hard to live with, or at least hard enough to live with that she's forced to write a tangential thinkpiece about it
I think you might be missing the point. The gift that she wanted was the house cleaning service. She had already been planning/considering hiring someone anyway. The gift was that she would not have to do the work to find, vet, make the calls, research, arrange payment, schedule, etc. for this task. The gift was supposed to be him taking over that work.
> The gift, for me, was not so much in the cleaning itself but the fact that for once I would not be in charge of the household office work. I would not have to make the calls, get multiple quotes, research and vet each service, arrange payment and schedule the appointment. The real gift I wanted was to be relieved of the emotional labor of a single task that had been nagging at the back of my mind. The clean house would simply be a bonus.
also
> I had wanted to hire out deep cleaning for a while, especially since my freelance work had picked up considerably. The reason I hadn’t done it yet was part guilt over not doing my housework, and an even larger part of not wanting to deal with the work of hiring a service. I knew exactly how exhausting it was going to be. That’s why I asked my husband to do it as a gift.
I think you missed the point. Yes, she wanted a house cleaning service. But that’s not the gift she wanted. The gift she wanted was for her husband to magically divine that she wanted him to use her emotionally-laden approach (seeking recommendations via social) to solving the problem of hiring the service instead of his pragmatic approach of identifying the cost of the service, which he then used his prior training as a magical diviner of her expectations to arrive at the conclusion she wouldn’t budget for it. Perhaps incorrectly. But that’s the problem with expecting your spouse to be a mind reader, they will try to do it, often to an undesirable result.
While I get the idea that my wife allows certain things to drag her down emotionally, and the solution is to step up and surprise her by taking care of things (and recognizing her contribution to the drudgery), what I see in this article is much different. I see a narcissist who expects others to read her mind, and a codependent husband whom she declares as inept and sees no problem at all pillorying him in Vanity Fair. And a bit of dishonesty too. She claims she doesn’t want to micromanage her husband yet is obviously displeased because he chose a pragmatic approach to her gift as opposed to doing it her way.
PS my wife’s solution to this problem. She asked. Not to do the dishes or clean the toilets. She asked me to take care of some things that concern her, without her having to ask me. Things I would normally “step around” because they’re not priority for me.
She seems like the sort of person who is very particular about the way things are done, and if you don't do them that way she'll be upset. He probably knew he was setup for failure, since she knows exactly what she wants, but won't tell him. He is definitely too passive, but she has probably inadvertently trained him to not do things without permission, because when he's tried she's been upset because he did something she didn't want. She wants him to take initiative, but he's probably gotten in trouble for initiative in the past.
I mean think about it. If you were tasked at your job with evaluating venders, would you talk to just one, and then tell your boss it couldn't be done within the budget? Probably not.
If I got one bid that was kinda high, and I knew I could do it myself in an hour, I would just do it. Because hiring a vendor would mean I would spend an hour dealing with them, then have to pay them on top of that. That's the "emotional" component the wife wanted to be freed from. So bottom line, she's pissed that he didn't go down the road of emotional drudgery like she would have chosen for herself and just did the job instead.
Yes, because then she's left running around watching the kids and taking care of everything else while he does that (which totally defeats the point because what she wanted was a rest) and he's only provided a one-time "solution." The article kind of goes off the rails after that but this complaint seems both fair and easy to understand.
She wanted two things. She wanted someone else to clean the house. This is fine. It happens all the time. But the second thing was that it still had to be done to her exacting standards.
So the request was, in essence, "First, become me. Then do this thing that I want in exactly the way I would do it." Hidden requirements.
The husband, not understanding this, went about hiring the cleaners in his own way, to meet his own standards. I know exactly how I would do it. I would set a budget limit of $300, which is acceptable for the spouse-to-spouse birthday gifts in our household, and try really hard to find someone to clean once a month for 12 months at $25 a pop, which seems like the minimum amount that would be required to get the van to roll, for a 90 minute appointment.
All that "household office work"? Don't do it. Instead of spending 30 minutes on the phone with a cleaning service, haggling and scheduling, scrub one toilet. Instead of vetting a person to make sure they won't pinch your porcelain statuette, vacuum the floors. You don't need administration and management in an organization with less than 6 people in it. If you're one of those "all children are a blessing" families, with 10+ people in one house, yes, someone needs to be a household manager. But for most families, the chore chart is as far as it needs to go. Stop whining about how hard it is to micromanage everything, and let other people have their own responsibilities, with their own performance standards.
If you like everything done just so, you're going to have to be the one doing all the things.
And I know how it would turn out, too. My spouse would end up cleaning the house the day before the cleaners were scheduled, so they wouldn't be cleaning a dirty house. Madness. Knowing this, I would simply get a gift of comparable value that was not requested. And I'm not even going to explain why, because that way leads to a fight.
She wanted two things. She wanted someone else to clean the house. This is fine. It happens all the time. But the second thing was that it still had to be done to her exacting standards."
Nope, you missed the point.
The point was the wife wanted a day free from housework, which isn't unreasonable. The husband screwed up because by doing the cleaning instead of hiring someone in (which was suggested they could afford from money she earned) he left her needing to do the rest of the housework, like looking after the kids. The end result = no day off.
She didn't ask for what she really wanted, so she didn't get it. This story is repeated every day, everywhere around the globe. She made a wish, and it was granted by a monkey's paw, or an evil genie, instead of a fairy godmother.
Part of the job that I get paid for is to help people figure out how to say what they want in a way that other people can understand well enough to give that to them. The amount I get paid indicates that this sort of thing may be a somewhat uncommon skill, but also in high demand. You can't really expect that skill to be present in every 2-person relationship.
Cleaning services don't watch your kids. If you want a day off, ask for a day off. But when you take that day off, you can't reasonably expect that everything you normally do will still get done in the way that you do it. The world does not revolve around you, and it takes constant effort to fool yourself into thinking it does.
Micromanagement is bullshit at the office, and it's bullshit at home. If you want relief from the emotional burden of making sure the whole world dances to your tune, you will have to allow someone else to play theirs. You will have to accept that you are the only person that wants exactly what you want, and that sometimes close to that is good enough.
If you cooperate with a person that overextends their will onto the world, you are not really helping them. You are reinforcing their unhealthy behaviors, and allowing them to export their self-torment to you. Some people enjoy that sort of thing, and that's fine. Sadists can pair up with masochists, and make each other happy. It's not my thing, so when people throw that kind of relationship at me, I dodge instead of catching it.
This "emotional labor", as described in the article, is not real work [in my opinion]. It is squirting neurotransmitters into your own brain, that will occupy receptor sites for a time, and then reuptake to be squirted out again later. If your own emotions cause you enough distress to raise your cortisol, medical treatment is available, including therapy by trained professionals that specialize in your exact problem. Would you ask your spouse to set a compound fracture in your leg? Not unless you were on walkabout in some hinterland. Normally, you go to an orthopedic surgeon at a hospital. The same holds true for a broken brain. It is not acceptable to use another person as your brain-crutch for the rest of your lives when genuine treatment is available. And if you value your own life, you will not be that crutch for someone else for any longer than it takes to get them to someone that can actually help them.
Don't allow yourself to be micromanaged (unless you like it).
> "She didn't ask for what she really wanted, so she didn't get it."
Incorrect. Read this...
"My husband waited for me to change my mind to an "easier" gift than housecleaning, something he could one-click order on Amazon. Disappointed by my unwavering desire, the day before Mother's Day he called a single service, decided they were too expensive, and vowed to clean the bathrooms himself."
The husband understood what the wife wanted, because he made a half-arsed attempt to meet her request, and then tried to get out of it. Does that sound like the actions of someone who doesn't know what his partner wants? The husband wouldn't have made such a song and dance about the gift request if he didn't know what his partner had asked for.
I'm not presuming that this particular husband would have done any better if she had made a more precise request.
He didn't actually have the balls to just ignore the request and come up with his own gift idea, either. So this is definitely not entirely on the wife.
If this is what the author wanted, which I 100% agree with you it is, why didn't she just say that? Admittedly, I often find myself in the clueless husband role, but my wife has been making a huge effort to directly say what she wants. The result is that both of us are much happier. If the author of this article wanted her husband to do the legwork of finding a housekeeper she should have asked for exactly that.
It's a hallmark of passive-aggressive behavior. Expect someone to know what you want and subtly imply it rather than just outright saying it, often becoming frustrated when people don't behave the way you want them to.
I may be missing something fundamental, but what is the point of a cleaning service, if not a clean house? Is there some other benefit to be gained from a cleaning service? Why did it matter how the house got cleaned?
It's a normal and healthy part of relationships to come to an agreement about what tasks should be done, how thoroughly, and who should be responsible for them. It's something else entirely to stipulate the _means_ by which someone else should accomplish tasks. That's micromanagement, and it verges on an assault on human autonomy.
Maybe part of the concept of the gift was establishing an ongoing relationship with a cleaning service, but the article really makes it sound like a one-time concern.
> I may be missing something fundamental, but what is the point of a cleaning service, if not a clean house? Is there some other benefit to be gained from a cleaning service?
Not having to worry about a clean house. And a service is probably going to do a more thorough job that can be repeated. Hence, she asked him to arrange for a cleaning service. She did not, apparently, explain why she wanted a cleaning service, but he also did not ask her that.
One benefit is that someone from outside the household does the cleaning, which means that everyone else is available for other household tasks, like watching the kids (which the author had to do while her husband was cleaning).
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
So would you please not comment like this? It takes effort not to, but it's effort we all need to make if this community is to not suck. I'm tempted to call it emotional labor but I suppose that would be trolling.
It's not about "talking to the proletarians". It's about the emotional work involved with talking to a bunch of people, organizing those discussions, comparing the results, etc.
As a generally introverted person, just thinking about discussing the details with 3 or more people makes me feel exhausted. And that doesn't even count the planning, review, time off of work, etc.
Basically, the term emotional labor gets used a lot to mean "women's work" and especially to refer to the largely invisible parts of what women are expected to do.
I don't like that usage, but I usually don't bother to nitpick it. I do understand why this is kind of a hot topic and why the term emotional labor gets applied to it.
I don't have a better solution. It seems like there simply isn't a good way to talk about these issues.
I think the economic term would by "economic externalities". That's used as well when, for example, a coal plant dumps sewage into a town's water source, and the town is then forced to clean it up. Someone has to pay for that, but the coal plant avoids the responsibility. We're starting to get past that as a society now, with coal plants being required to pay for the environmental damage they do, and it might be time to start noticing that "women's work" - childraising and housekeeping - is an unaccounted externality as well, that someone has to pay for.
It does seem kind of confusing. The first time I encountered the term "emotional labor" it referred to aspects of customer service work (like responding politely to abusive customers, being performatively cheerful, etc) and it was intuitive to me what it meant. Using the term to mean unpaid, typically female labor seems less intuitive.
Emotional labor is a real thing and a large part of what women are expected to do is rooted in catering to the feelings of other people. But, yeah, it gets used kind of sloppily. Just about anything women want to complain about gets lumped in with it and the writing frequently fails to make it crystal clear how x, y and z actually relate to or are rooted in the expectation that women cater to everyone's feelings.
Another issue writers run into is that if you aren't using any of the hot catch phrases, no one will read your piece. I wrestle with this fact a lot. I blog at times about such issues. I try to be evenhanded and sympathetic to both sides. I really struggle with titling stuff and my writing gets damn little traffic.
My refusal to use the standard catch phrases, because of their frequently toxic framing, is a barrier to being heard at all. And I sometimes wonder which is worse: Putting out a fucked up message in hopes of some partial solution emerging or simply howling into the void and going entirely unheard.
Making any progress is incredibly challenging.
This piece was published in a major publication. If it didn't use a popular catch phrase, they probably would not have published it at all. Those popular catch phrases are important hooks for titling things and for communicating with the public.
On my own personal blogs, I have the luxury of refusing to use phrases I don't like. You generally don't have that luxury when trying to get published by an organization that needs to hit certain traffic targets to survive and keep their doors open.
The part of this that genuinely is an issue of emotional labor is her desire for her husband to actually be considerate. That is the crux of the issue here.
The article perhaps is not as clear as it could be about that fact.
Its just the common term for it. Is it the most correct term? Probably not. But its this invisible labor that many people don't even recognize exists, so to lump it in with regular physical labor pretty much to ignore it.
I don't know, this is the first time I've really ever heard this term. If I had heard the term outside of this context, I would imagine it to mean "interactive/inter-communicative/social" work, instead of physical work, but it feels like there's some kind of historical/feminist context here that I'm not aware of.
As the other commenter said, it has nothing to do with elitism. Research takes time. Calling people takes time. And god forbid you have to call a government or medical entity, you might be on the phone for hours.
Do you realize how hard it is to get a straight answer on how much things SHOULD cost with regards to housekeeping, lawn care services, plumbing, tree services, roofing, foundation repair, and the list goes on? Sure you can call the company and ask, but are you getting ripped off? Now you have to call 5 companies and compare to see what the average price is and where you might get the best price. There goes 45 minutes of time (if you're lucky).
Plus you have to vet these people. If they're going to be in your house/yard handling your things you want to make sure they are trustworthy and possibly licensed/bonded as may apply. So you go down the rabbit hole of yelp and NextDoor and Thumbtack and whatever else you may find only to read about things that you didn't even realize you needed to be worried about. Well, there goes another hour.
Finally you have to actually call them back and schedule. Does this day work? What do you need to do to prepare for them to come? Do you need to be there? Who needs to take off work for that?
Its just... a lot. Its a lot of work. And keeping track of what needs to be done and when and your husband won't use a damn google service so you can't just sync calendars and he won't even look at the one on the fridge anyway is just exhausting. There's a reason why one of the highest ranked reasons for strife in a marriage is an imbalance of housework.
I actually do hope that my comment reads as anxiety inducing as I think it does. Its a lot, and it feels stupid at the time to even have to do it. You think we don't know that we seem like over-anxious worriers? We're in 2017! Why can't we have automated this? But then I'd have to be the one to figure out what automated service to go with and determine if we can trust it to not rip us off and figure out what their customer service is like if something goes wrong, ad nauseum.
We were looking for a new washer and dryer. Our friends moved and offered us their old units. I was amazed at how much stress this removed--not because of the monetary savings, but because it removed our need to make a decision about what to buy. I think that was the point of the article. The decision-making process is emotionally expensive and that is what she wanted as a gift.
Dan Arielly calls this "the pain of paying". Supposedly the secret to good gift-giving is that you should get something that the other person wants but finds painful to acquire.
For example, some people feel guilty for buying luxury items when they "should" be saving or spending on their children, so luxury goods or gift cards make good presents for them. Some people have problem choosing among similar alternatives so gift cards are terrible for them.
In this case, it looks like they both find cleaning services painful, the wife because there are many alternatives and it's emotionally draining to choose and the husband because it's expensive and he feels like a sucker paying for it when he can clean the bathroom himself. It was mostly bad luck and misunderstandings.
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't find figuring out which product to buy a painful or emotionally draining experience. I rather enjoy researching different models and features, comparing and contrasting. How hard is that?
Imagine you don't enjoy researching a household item. (Why? Maybe you'd rather do something else. Doesn't really matter.) Now it's harder. Either way, it's definitely effort, and you can only squeeze so much effort into a day.
It is significantly easier when making decisions by yourself. With the washer/dryer example, there was a lot more going into it including how long we may end up staying at that house, etc. There wasn't anything that really stood out as being the "correct" choice, so not needing to decide was very welcome.
That sounds like normal labour to me. Just a more administrative/managerial type instead of the hard physical type.
If my boss asked me to call some cleaning companies and arrange a schedule so they come clean the office, all on my "free" time, I'd expect extra payment because that is extra labour.
It's emotional because one partner is expected to care about it while the other may remain indifferent. Sometimes your partner needs you to care so they can take a break from doing so. Now deep down you don't have to really care; there are things I do for my wife not because I care whether it gets done, but because I care for her and if she wants me to care, then damnit I'm going to care.
But caring about cleanliness wasn't labor for the author. It came naturally to her. If anything, it was the husband that was expected to apply emotional labour to make himself care.
Which I now see was the point. Women are traditionally expected to care about their partner's preferences even if they don't really understand or care themselves, while men are expected to be practical, cold and uncaring. Thus gender roles contribute to an imbalance in the distribution of emotional labour.
A lot of life admin isn't satisfying or enjoyable, it's just a drudge. Are you suggesting that relentless, menial work with no end in sight comes naturally to anyone?
I'm single, and I've found ways to keep life admin to a minimum, but when you're running a household there's tons of small jobs that add up. It becomes hard to switch off. I've seen it happen multiple times.
The actual work of cleaning does not come naturally to anyone. The "emotional" work of worrying about cleanliness is a different matter.
If she did not care about housework, she would just not do it, not hire anyone else to do it, and the house would be a mess. That's what the husband does and it works for him because that's his personality. He only cares when someone important to him nags him about it, and he has to "work" to at least pretend to care.
The actual work of cleaning the house he did, eventually. He never did the emotional work of convincingly pretending to really care about it.
You missed the point of the article. The husband screwed up with the cleaning too, even though he did the cleaning. It was never about the cleaning, per se, but the mental drain of running a household.
Read the article again. This is the key part...
"I was gifted a necklace for Mother's Day while my husband stole away to deep clean the bathrooms, leaving me to care for our children as the rest of the house fell into total disarray."
If the idea behind Mother's Day is to give mothers a day off, can you see why the gift of getting cleaners in would've worked, but the gift of offering to do the cleaning did not?
I agree with you, but I think we are using different semantics.
He technically did the cleaning. He screwed up because he didn't consider what the point of cleaning was (like you say, giving her wife a day off) and he just did something that he thought was approximately equivalent to what she literally asked.
I call that "not really caring". If he cared, he would have realized he should have cleaned the day before and given "a clean bathroom on Mother's Day" as a present instead of "the act of cleaning the bathroom on Mother's Day".
I call it "not really understanding". The cleaning was most likely more work than a few more phone calls to cleaners for quotes would've been. If it was about not caring then why wouldn't the husband put in the minimum effort and get in someone else to do the cleaning?
Because it was expensive and it goes against his pride to pay so much money for something he can do himself. Maybe he cared a lot about his self-image as a self-sufficient most-definitely-not-a-spoiled-rich person.
"He told me the high dollar amount of completing the cleaning services I requested (since I control the budget) and asked incredulously if I still wanted him to book it."
In the article she mentions that she controls the budget, so it was probably over the budget he had to work with.
I'd suggest that's a massive stretch considering the lack of details about the husband's attitude towards money in the article. The only relevant information was him finding one particular quote too high. I don't think you can extrapolate a pattern of behaviour from that single data point.
Throughout the whole article, the author gives the impression that her husband is a stereotypical man. According to stereotypes, typical men don't want to call "the guy" to repair things when they break, especially when it costs a lot of money.
To be honest, the author's culture is alien to me and I only have stereotypes (TV and movies, mostly) to go on.
Well said. It was real clear to me when in the middle of the article there is the following line:
“That’s the point,” I said, now in tears, “I don’t want to have to ask.”
Either she has communication problems and is unwilling to have even one talk about her tidiness standards, or she has already tried that and he just ignores it.
I love working 10+ hours a day to pay for 100% of me and my fiancé's expenses, coming home, cooking dinner, and cleaning up everything while she studies for med school; going to bed early so I can do some shopping before work; and then being told I'm a useless man by some nobody with a shitty marriage on a website that's supposed to be about technology.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
This article is in line with "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
I can understand why you'd feel that way. Venting like this is usually really bad for the kind of discussion we're hoping for here (the thoughtful kind!) but your comment interestingly makes up for it by being grounded in personal experience. That makes the feeling easier to relate to. It seems more genuine.
I think you might be under a mis-impression of what Hacker News is. It's for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, and definitely not just about technology. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Face stickers of the 18th century French aristocracy, to mention just one recent submission, are quite on topic.
Does this story do that? Well it's complicated but yes I think it does in part. The thread is surprisingly non-horrible (edit: or was when I saw it, anyhow) and the concept of emotional labor is intellectually interesting, even if the article does hit some bruised areas and is trollishly packaged. That makes it an exception to the rule, which is also interesting in a meta sort of way.
Nobody is calling you useless. Clearly, you've done your share (quite possibly, more than your share) of emotional labor / domestic work in your relationship. But surely you know that you are defying norms here? Statistically speaking, those burdens do fall on women far more often than on men: http://blogs.reuters.com/equals/2014/03/12/more-work-and-les...
It's not the greatest article in the world, but the main message, that women are expected to perform unacknowledged emotional labor to a higher degree than men, is largely valid, even if the author's examples were not the greatest. Even from a young age women are pushed into emotional labor. For example, the only "odd jobs" I was ever offered as a pre-teen were for babysitting, which is a very emotionally demanding job (kids are jerks) that I hated. I wasn't even paid at minimum wage because I just didn't know any better at that age, and despite asking around, I couldn't get any gigs for different work. Meanwhile my male peers got neighbors asking them to mow lawns and clean cars, which I would have greatly preferred to chasing little jerks around and making them happy enough to not complain to their parents about everything.
From a software dev perspective, I usually see this come through in the form of unequal expectations placed on male vs female PMs. I remember overhearing a colleague describe a highly professional PM to a new dev candidate as as the "Team Mom". Now, I've never ever heard anyone call a male PM call "Team Dad". But because this PM happened to be female, a parent, and not emotionally idiotic, they would always make her take the burden for working out inter-personal conflict, even for teams she wasn't responsible for. She had tons of other work, and there were male PMs and managers who could have assisted, but none of them would. They would just wait for things to get terrible and then throw a meeting at her about "conflict resolution". She hated it, but was afraid that she wouldn't be seen as a team-player if she didn't go along with it, so she just did it.
So that's another example of why emotional labor stinks and does disproportionately impact women, even in tech. Fortunately, the easiest way to fix this is just to pay attention and notice when it happens, in other words, perform emotional labor to notice when emotional labor is not equal. If you're doing that, great, this article wasn't about you.
Doesn't mean that the author was wrong for calling out a pattern of inequality that can be identified, or that HN readers are wrong for taking interest and engaging with her arguments. I suggest you perform some emotional labor on yourself right now, because this article is really not about you or your feelings at all. It's about a widespread pattern of inequality that impacts women disproportionately.
This type of conversation needs to occur more. The 'Not All Men' rebuttal and counter-rebuttal offers absolutely no benefit to anyone but more often than not, on any medium I would have seen that posted here instead of your written piece.
I understand your perspective seattle_spring, truthfully I find myself in your place more often than not. But I find my self at ends with my own personal beliefs and alliances. For the purpose of discussing this topic at greater length I'll be focusing on why this conversation needs to occur in a similar thought process shown here.
I find your argument seattle_spring, to be similar in tone to the Not All Men rebuttal. Though your reasons, experiences and feelings for how you perceive this piece on Emotional Labour is not vilified, you have your reasons for feeling how you do. I also empathise the personal struggles you're going through (I've seen first hand the struggles of supporting those in the medical field). But I believe your argument is misplaced and steph above me articulates this well. Let me unpack this.
When the Not All Men brigade reared their heads on Reddit in response to the women only screenings of Wonder Woman (WW), there was a lack of conversation on both sides of the fence from both the brigade and the Feminist allies of the WW screenings.
I personally found the WW screenings distasteful and if I was asked my opinion on it, I'd discuss this. But I was neither inflamed nor agitated by the screenings. There's other topics that deserve our attention (as a feminist allied man) that deserved more of my energy than these female only viewings of WW.
What am I, as a men, really being deprived of by these WW screenings at a tangible level? It really has no direct consequence to me. Though from a perspective or trying to find and build unity between sexes I thought it was counter productive. Anyway, I digress.
However. The same men who were the most public around these discussions around why he was _so_ offended and vilified by these women only screenings. Where was their horror, disapproval, loud and defensive counter argument when the rights of his sisters, daughters or wives rights to sexual reproductive health, taken away from them by a group of older white men less than 6 months prior? Where was _their_ rage and hostility then? Why were they quiet?
Therein lies the meat of the conversation.
It's not _just_ that these Not All Men are defensive about protecting their image about what they perceive to be a gross generalisation. It's that the Not All Men brigade are ignorant and blind to their hypocritical contradiction, where they care _more_ about their offense to these WW screenings and it's triviality, and yet are so very quiet while America's women's sexual rights were taken from them.
I feel sudo_steph, you did well to both show empathy to seattle_spring and his own battles, whilst still offering him the perspective that as a man, we can still be disadvantaged by the same cultural and societal forces that disadvantage most women. So again, thank you.
This article never specified you, or your relationship. It used their relationship to discuss a topic that can often happen. You are feeling attacked, and I'm sure you have good reasons in your personal life to be upset, but your reaction is unreasonable here.
> Emotional labor is the unpaid job men still don't understand.
That's the subtitle of the article. It doesn't say "some men." If I wrote an article that was titled, "software: the paid job women still don't understand," please do tell me how you would interpret that.
It's also outright wrong. Every single man has to handle all of his emotional labor himself. While not every single man is in a great place, I know many who live happy fulfilling lives, so that means they know fully well how to manage their emotional labor.
I think this current trend where we assign responsibility for our emotions to everyone else is highly toxic and ultimately self-defeating.
You can learn to control your own emotions or you can walk around waiting for everyone else to make sure you're happy and comfortable. Only one of these strategies is going to have any chance of success.
>I think this current trend where we assign responsibility for our emotions to everyone else is highly toxic and ultimately self-defeating.
I agree, because one thing I've learned in this life is that you can't "fix" other adults. This applies to spouses, employees, employers, subordinates, family members, friends, etc.
People are what they are, and your basic choice is to either accept them for what they are, or separate them from your life to whatever degree is necessary if you can't. You might be able to temporarily coerce behavioral changes in someone, but the change will only be external and temporary.
If a guy is the type who would rather spend the entire weekend on the couch watching TV rather than attending to household chores while things fall apart around him, it's unfortunate, but that's who he is. With enough nagging and head games, he might be manipulated into fixing the broken screen door, but that's what it will take each and every time.
If a subordinate at work never seems to accomplish anything because there's always some drama in their life distracting them, they're not going to one day magically transform into the model employee.
That's why you have to be careful when choosing a spouse or an employee. They're going to be what they are. In fact, if anything, their bad traits will probably amplify once they've closed the deal, and they know it will be more difficult to get rid of them.
I'd offer a third option which is taking responsibility for your pain / emotions, but not trying to "control" them.
Instead, welcoming and allowing all of them and creating space to engage and explore them.
This can lead to much deeper connection with your self and others, and increased health.
When you do this, you will also be more available to help others feel their emotions and to help them take responsibility for feeling them fully.
I quibble over the term "control" because I see much of our cultures problems as an avoidance -- either making it others people's job, or turning to drugs / addictions / psychiatry / etc. to avoid feeling.
You're right, control is the wrong word. It's more "don't let them control you". With practice I find I can feel an emotion, recognize it as an emotional response, then either find some productive action to address what's causing it or if none are available, let it go.
Not that I'm always perfect at doing this, but I find it's more helpful than just being annoyed/sad/angry and waiting for some external change in circumstances to make me feel better.
I've been living my entire adult life after having been diagnosed schizophrenic at 18 (and bipolar at 31).
Choosing to live without medication, this practice of feeling emotions fully and letting them teach me whatever they are meant to, has allowed me to transcend that diagnosis.
I've found that within hard to experience emotions are often anchient patterns or old traumas waiting to be released - everything from my father cheating on my mom, to my step dad abusing us, to being circumscized, to being terrified by Catholic propaganda.
I find that when I surrender to the emotions as sacred teachers (sometime using altered states like Breathwork to get closer / amplify them), that I end up with more clarity, compassion and confidence.
If the goal of this article is to validate frustrated wives, maybe it has succeeded. But if conversely, it was aiming at making a compelling case to men I don't think it has.
I for one feel stereotyped and vilified (and I also feel at risk of being criticized for even admitting my own feelings).
What I'd recommend the author do is-
1. Reflect on her feelings. What does she really want, what is it really about / a symbol for (cleaning/initiative = caring?) ? Also understand any accumulated frustrations that may be coloring things.
2. Try to understand her husband's feelings, as well as any of his accumulated frustrations.
3. Ask him and make sure you understand his feelings. To do this, you need to be able to listen without judging what he has to say, even if it's hurtful. Once he feels understood, you'll be half-way there.
4. Talk to him about your feelings (does he not notice, not care, or something else). If he's uncomfortable talking about this, that's another thing you can't ignore and steamroll over, but should investigate gently. Hopefully he can understand your feelings without judging either.
5. All 4 steps above depend crucially on sincerity, good-fath, a sense of humor, and tact.
As an aside, I'd never consider publishing a criticism of my relationship online (nor would I use an anecdote as the basis for a gender-criticism), unless I had talked it over with my partner first and they read the whole thing. Of course everybody is free to share their experience, but wouldn't people naturally be hesitant to date somebody who uses intimate challenges as career-fuel?
> "I for one feel stereotyped and vilified (and I also feel at risk of being criticized for even admitting my own feelings)."
If I can ask you a question without you feeling criticised... why do you think you've taken this article personally?
It's interesting to me as I don't see anything remotely controversial in the article. It becomes an article for a news site not because it's a novel occurrence, but because it's commonplace and frequently overlooked. Even if it's not an issue in your relationship, can you accept that it happens in other relationships?
If you don't see the subheadding as remotely controversial, I have to wonder if your agenda is advancement of women or advancement of equality. If this piece didn't want to be sexist it could have removed gender entirely from the piece.
> "If this piece didn't want to be sexist it could have removed gender entirely from the piece."
Reference to a cultural phenomenon backed up with statistical evidence is not inherently sexist. If you don't think the issues described are statistically more likely to be experienced by women, even though there's strong evidence to the contrary, what message do you think that sends out?
What statistical evidence? I think a wide-ranging study on this topic would be interesting.
However, I also don't know what the point would be of breaking it down by gender (any more than you'd break it down by race).
Wouldn't you be better served to have instead spent that time figuring out how to fix the problem (how do you explain it effectively) rather than whom to blame?
Dude, I can't anymore. I thought this had nothing to do with chores but only "emotionally draining" things.
I don't know if I buy the premise there's a difference in which sex is drained more, I don't think you can extend an argument to a whole gender based on a % difference in averages, I don't know if it matters who is drained more, I don't know if the cause is cultural, I don't know the answer is blog posts rather than spouses just telling each other how they feel, I don't buy that this is a pressing problem worthy of my focus (as compared to say, pesticides).
I guess I don't know why I engaged with this article anymore, lol. But no worries, you tried to explain it and that sincerity counts for something.
I was married to a woman who (after marriage) was diagnosed with a personality disorder. Reading this article was like a look back into my marriage.
I was always being told about everything I did that failed to meet her standards, or failed to do at all, and how it was because I didn't care about her enough to do it the way she wanted it done.
Then, when I'd try to do things in anticipation of her ever changing priorities, or to offload things from her plate I'd be read the riot act. Clearly it wasn't because I was trying to be considerate and meet her ever changing standards. I was obviously because I was criticizing her in some kind of chauvinistic way, or undermining her position in the household.
I'm very happy to be out of that situation, and I completely agree that normalizing this type of behavior is ridiculous.
That's awful, and I'm sorry to hear it. Every time I see stuff like this show up on FB or HN or Reddit, I find it personally distressing, because it's enabling for people with Cluster B traits. They feel justified and empowered in continuing to emotionally abuse their friends and partners. Meanwhile, the victims of abuse are led to believe that they're the ones who are in the wrong.
it's also enabling for misogynists who are more than happy to claim that this is normal behavior for an entire gender (it's not). This submission has already been flagged, which is nice, but I can't help but feel that it's being flagged for the wrong reasons. Funnily enough, I bet the flags are coming from people with all sorts of conflicting political views.
For those of you in a relationship with someone similar to the author of the article, it doesn't have to be like this. There are plenty of women out there (the vast majority) who won't expect you to read their minds, who won't gaslight you, who will let you disagree with them without fear of extreme consequences, and who will take your needs and struggles into account, instead of just making everything about themselves.
It sounds like a bit of a fine line between (in the author's case) taking responsibility for managing HIS emotions for HER complaints towards him, and your example, which is more like emotional blackmail.
It is interesting to read the comments here and compare them to my own experience. I've been married for more than a couple of decades and recognized both the author's complaint and the responses of the people in the article. I have also participated with my wife in very similar discussions.
Three things that I now believe, having lived through this, are that my wife and I see value and obligation differently (and pretty much always have), the "emotional" part is important because there are other emotions at play below the surface, and that the roles and issues your own parents had in this space will color the perceptions of you and your spouse.
I can thoroughly recommend that you clip or save this article into your archive of things and re-read it every few years for the next couple of decades and reflect back on the disagreements you and your spouse have had :-)
Yes, the comments here assume that life outside of working for a paycheck is “preference”. I expect most commenters are unmarried, don’t have children, and think that money by itself solves problems. It seems like I was there not so long ago...
First, are the women depicted in this comic stay at home moms? If so then yes, I would expect them to take care of the house. Regardless of gender. If they both have jobs, then the workload should be shared. It's not about gender. It's about distributing the work. If he goes to work 8 hours a day, she can work 8 hours a day. Staying at home and not doing anything is nothing short of disrespectful.
Second, the "mental load" of having to remember all those things isn't a herculean task. A calendar, a TODO list, a shopping list on the fridge are simple solutions which greatly reduce the load.
I confess to skimming the introduction, thank you for the clarification.
> What do you think that tells you about their working background? Do they sound like stay at home mums?
This is just flogging a dead horse. They aren't stay at home moms and I wholeheartedly agree the burdens should be shared equally, as I wrote in my original comment.
Honestly, as far as that aspect goes, I found the comic helped me understand it better than the article did. While I think I understand the general concept of emotional labor, the example of the gift wrapping left out seemed kind of petty in that an item being out of place in a closet seems fairly easy for even an attentive person to miss and forget about. What I gatherer from the comic, is that it's more about situations in which one partner assumes that they don't need to do anything unless specifically asked.
Two humans won't have the same expectations for things.
Yes you should not have simply asked. You should have communicated your expectations about household work and discussed with your partner. And if you're not compatible split-up. You don't have to be part of a couple to be happy.
It's funny, my wife cooks, and I do the dishes. That is our agreement. However, often she will make dishes throughout the day that are not a result of cooking (coffee mugs, plates for small snacks she makes for herself, etc). Sometimes I will get yelled at for "not doing the dishes" when I neither a) created them or b) enjoyed the spoils the dishes were used to create/consume. How's that for gendered?
Another thing: when I do the dishes, the drying rack looks like a well-engineered marvel. Everything is stacked perfectly and efficiently to dry as quick as possible. The things we use most often are the most accessible on the drying rack. When my wife happens to do the dishes (if I'm out of town), the drying rack looks like a shantytown in a post-apocalyptic futurescape...things are piled up with no rhyme or reason, you have to dig through a bunch of wet tupperware to find plates or cups, the silverware is mixed in with the sharp knives. Yikes.
There are times when she does a household task, such as fixing a door or something, I come back when she's done to find the tools strewn everywhere and I have to put them away. I guess that makes me the woman.
My point is: there are divisions of labor. It's important to decide what those divisions are, where they begin, and where they end. I don't get angry at my wife when the dish rack looks like a scene from Mad Max because she hasn't had all the time I've had to perfect the skill (and I'm just glad she did the dishes at all). But conversely, I ask her not to get mad at me because I didn't put a gift bag back in the exact place it was supposed to go after she re-organized our closet and I lost track of which box is for what.
That said, we've both discussed, ad nauseam, the above issues and worked out or differences. This usually happens when resentment builds to the point of one speaking harshly to the other, at which point we cool off, dissect what we're feeling, and both attempt to change our behavior.
I think that's the real point here: it's not so much about gender (am I woman for doing the dishes?), it's more about dividing the tasks, setting the boundaries for those tasks, and talking to each other when something needs to change.
I wonder if a similar comic showing that more women in western countries murder their infant children than men (mostly due to postpartum depression but factually accurate) would be regarded as valid if similar explanations were provided as above.
I have issues with the following line in that comic:
> when a man asks his partner to ask him to do things, He's viewing her as the manager of household chores
I disagree heavily with this comic. There's many reasons why he might've not helped by himself. In fact there's a good chance I would've acted like he had and not because I see females as household managers, but because I've been snapped at plenty of times for helping when it wasn't desired, and not helping when it is desired. Unless I'm a perfect mind reader the only winning move is not to play, so I refuse to play.
If you need my help you can very well ask for it. The only thing she would've needed to do in this comic to defuse in the entire situation is go "hey guy, help?".
This sounds a lot more like the story of an unhappy marriage and poor communication, than about emotional labour. The narrative of a bumbling but hard working ox of a husband and a whip smart, but overworked wife is tired and unhelpful to both parties.
This is a highly charged, and - frankly sexist - article about how people have expectations that are unfulfilled because they simply don't communicate with each other.
There isn't a single example of this "emotional labor" in the article, where a consideration is given to "the man" about how much labor it takes, emotionally, to keep up with someone who has high expectations for their environment, but does not communicate those expectations in a way that forms consensus - instead, opting to 'shame the man' for not having the same standards.
However, in spite of the blatant sexism, the true value of this article is that, when people fail to properly communicate, much much un-necessary work develops, and this gets in the way of having a great life. Yup. Perhaps we as a society should stop forwarding the ideal that "people should just know what expectations they have to meet", and rather promote the idea that "its always good to work things out about who does what and how clean things have to be, before you get married, or you know .. move in with each other"... The fact that the author hasn't cottoned on to this, frankly, belies a serious immaturity on her part.
I agree: This article is blatantly sexist, and the author is essentially complaining about her partner not telepathically reading her mind to "sense" her completely arbitrary standards for cleanliness in the home. She makes a big point of how she "controls the budget", and yet I have a strong suspicion that she wouldn't allow her husband to do so if he offered.
Let's be clear: Socks laying on the floor doesn't affect people's health. The standards of cleanliness adopted by western women (starting in the middle of the 20th century) were created by a patriarchal consumerist advertising industry working to market new chemical household cleaners. They are, scientifically, wholly excessive and even counterproductive. I say this as someone who keeps my home clean and uncluttered, and washes the dishes and cleans the kitchen every night.
Edit: The marketing psychology used for this prays on people who measure higher on tests for neurotic tendencies. From a statistical perspective, the distribution for women on this trait is significantly to the right of men. For more examples of "purity" marketing to people higher on the neuroticism scale, see numerous illogical products that are environmentally damaging: bottled water, soap with "cleansing beads", "flushable" wipes, etc, etc.
If I wrote a blog post ranting and raving about how my wife never wants to manage the maintenance of our vehicles, and how I'm emotionally tired of trying to get her to keep track of the mileage of her vehicle to ensure she gets an oil change, I'd be called a whiner at best and sexist at worst.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me tire of the self-proclaimed Northeastern intelligentsia. You can package this up as a well-written, intellectual essay all you want. It doesn't change the fact that this is no different than the person at lunch whining about their spouse to their coworkers while they all roll their eyes.
> The real gift I wanted was to be relieved of the emotional labor of a single task that had been nagging at the back of my mind. The clean house would simply be a bonus.
The clean house is presumably a goal, here. Otherwise, the obvious solution is not to clean the house.
(I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having the clean house as a goal. But it's important to know what your goals are, so that you can decide which actions will further your goals.)
>>There isn't a single example of this "emotional labor" in the article, where a consideration is given to "the man" about how much labor it takes, emotionally, to keep up with someone who has high expectations for their environment, but does not communicate those expectations in a way that forms consensus - instead, opting to 'shame the man' for not having the same standards.
Not to mention the 'emotional labor' of working full time to keep a family afloat.
The only part I agree with the author on is that the man should be keeping his house running and in working order. If it was not part of their division of labor agreement (aka marriage) that she would maintain the house as well as raise the kids (I'm assuming, based on what she wrote) - then he needs to step up by doing those things himself or hiring someone else to do. Which is what she asked for originally.
Everything else is her misusing a term to justify her emotions and argument and shaming her husband for not fixing how she feels.
The biggest issue, as you said, is the lack of communication.
I think you and the parent comment have completely missed her point.
> Not to mention the 'emotional labor' of working full time to keep a family afloat.
She mentions this exact same defense that many men say. You also don't know their income breakdown; she has a job, she's freelanced, while also making household and familial decisions.
This particular author’s arguments are irritating, self-centered, and over-generalized, so I’m not really defending the piece.
But the author is quite explicit that her husband does any task asked; what she’s asking for is that he take more initiative and not require praise when he does so.
I agree with many other commenters that coming to consensus on “everyone in the family is expected to spend 2 minutes every evening putting away things they’ve taken out without requiring nagging or praise” is a very low bar and should not be a hard communication problem to solve in a healthy relationship.
I'm male. I have a female roommate. (We're not involved) I do almost all of the dishes, I take out the trash, I clean the kitchen and the public bathroom, and tidy the dining space and wash the floors, and I harbor zero resentment towards her. I just value cleanliness more, so I should expect to pay a premium (in labor) for that preference.
I also don't require any praise for what I do. The cleanliness is it's own reward.
I flipped your and your roommates genders in my head, and was immediately incensed about the continued repression of women in our society - looks the program is working as intended. Um hmm.
Why were you incensed? I'm totally fine with our arrangement; it's just a consequence of basic supply and demand and the fact that no one owes me amything.
I think the comment was meant to draw attention to today's societal programming. It seems very likely that if a woman were to say the same thing one might be inclined to view it as an example her internalized misogyny and symptom of the systematic oppression of women in general, rather than a human being who derived satisfaction from keeping their living space tidy.
Many couples haven't even thought to communicate about this because the unconscious social conditional is so strong. It's an unreflected assumption that the female and male are in charge of certain duties.
In my experience communication happens again and again and again over a period of years until the woman gives up in exasperation and just seethes silently. It's hard to get someone to engage in emotional labor (or as I like to call it, 'giving a fuck') when they simply don't give a fuck, no matter how much you communicate.
Since not caring enough to do the basic gruntwork associated with a decent relationship is almost always a male problem in our society, I'm also gobsmacked that you'd call it sexist. It's about as sexist as calling gun violence or any other widely gendered thing a male problem - there's exceptions out there, but it's not worth being pedantic about.
I think you're arbitrarily privileging "giving a fuck" over "not giving a fuck". Try this:
Alice wants Task X to be done.
Bob does not care whether Task X is done.
Let us stipulate that, if Task X is not done, nobody will be materially, objectively harmed.
Alice says: because I want Task X, you will do Task X. Alice does not ask Bob's opinion on Task X, but rather assumes that Task X is inherently necessary, and therefore Bob's opinion is not worth considering. In fact, Alice is annoyed that Bob hasn't taken the initiative to recognize the inherent necessity of Task X, and complete it on his own without being asked.
Bob does not believe Task X to be inherently necessary.
Option 1: Bob may complete Task X because it makes Alice happy. That's nice of Bob. Unfortunately, Alice is seething that she had to ask Bob in the first place. That's kind of mean of Alice.
Option 2: Bob fails to accomplish Task X, because it isn't his personal priority. That's kind of thoughtless of Bob, but Bob is a human and sometimes we let low-priority items drop off our radar. Alice will do Task X herself, furious that Bob did not do it.
Option 3: Bob fails to accomplish Task X, because it isn't his personal priority. Alice lets go of Task X, leaving it undone, because it's just Task X, and her relationship with Bob matters more to her than Task X. That's nice of Alice.
In a "fair" scenario, Option 3 should be on the table at least half the time. But it never is. Why can Alice not let go of Task X? Why MUST it be done? Why is Alice's perspective on the necessity of Task X to be privileged over that of Bob?
It’s usually because not doing the task has very real negative consequences and due to the sexist nature of modern society the consequences fall most heavily on Alice, not on Bob. Don’t buy the nephews birthday cards? The relatives think badly of Alice, not Bob. Take your son out in mismatched or slightly too small clothes? People pass judgement on Alice, not Bob.
When Bob doesn’t think something is necessary and Alice does, Bob needs to step back and think about why she does, because there’s generally a good reason. Going immediately to game theory isn’t helpful when you’ve got imperfect information due to your own lack of introspection.
> Take your son out in mismatched or slightly too small clothes? People pass judgement on Alice, not Bob.
Or they'll just laugh it off with "I see daddy dressed you today". Meanwhile if Bob dresses his son impeccably, Alice will get all the credit.
If Bob keeps house instead of working overtime, Alice will get all the housekeeping credit and Bob will be judged for not being an effective breadwinner.
It's almost like societal gender roles can screw over both sexes.
Is this true? I couldn't fathom my relatives being upset at my wife for that sort of thing. (Her relatives might be upset at her, since they're the related ones.)
And no one cares what kids wear.
Maybe this article is necessary for some upper crust WASP readers who would feel the way you indicate (since I agree that is sexist and unreasonable), but it's totally foreign to me and my social circle.
Now, I suppose if the wife isn't working, then maybe those sorts of things are her "job", so I can see where it comes from. But among the younger generation I think it's more common for women to work and so people more intuitively understand household things can't just be the women's responsibility anymore.
> When Bob doesn’t think something is necessary and Alice does, Bob needs to step back and think about why she does, because there’s generally a good reason
Again, privileging Alice's perspective. Why shouldn't Alice step back and wonder why Bob DOESN'T think something is necessary?
I agree that there are sometimes social consequences that will fall specifically on Alice for failing to keep her house in order. Similar social consequences will fall on Bob if he, for example, fails to keep a steady job. Society is a bitch, but that isn't Bob's fault.
I think Option 3 happens a lot, but Alice rarely tells Bob. Then when Alice loses patience and gets mad at Bob, it looks like she is freaking out over one single thing when the problem is more systemic.
In my experience, you're wrong. See how that works? My wife simply doesn't care as strongly about the house as I do; nor about maintaining her car. Or family finances, grocery shopping, laundry, etc etc. For the first few years of our marriage, this was an issue. Then I learned that it was "my" issue to deal with. I had communicated as much as I could, and she didn't have the same expectations. So we compromised; she doesn't get mad when I stress about something, and I don't feel like it's her job to make me happy and cater to every feeling I have.
So that's my anecdote. Your comment is basically sexist blather.
We have hard data on gun violence, proving it's mostly a male problem. But "emotional labor" is both poorly defined and supported anecdotally, so the discussion around it is often driven by sexist stereotypes, as in this article.
Partners in a marriage - or a business, too - often disagree about who should do what. It's not one-sided as the article presents. Now, there might be some common patterns like, say, women reminding men of their families' birthdays (an example from the article) but there are many opposite-gendered patterns, like remembering to check the oil or air pressure in her car, etc. Note how just mentioning such stereotypes is already kind of sexist - it's saying something bad about a whole gender ("men don't care about details of family life", "women don't care about details of car maintenance").
Stereotypically, women get frustrated by some things their partners don't care as much about, and likewise men get frustrated by other things their partners don't care about. Focusing on the stereotypes isn't productive, though, and not just because they are often wrong.
Nonsense. Associating behaviour with sex, is sexism, pure and simple.
The fact that he is a man has nothing to do with the fact that he doesn't have the same agency - nor the 'right' to complain about it - as his wife does. Making that association a part of the discussion is sexism.
It's weird that the Internet is the first place to say things like: "Maybe women don't WANT to be in tech", "there are biological differences", etc. but also turn around and complain that it's sexist to imply men (on average) have difficulties with emotional communication.
The word "want" describes desire, willingness, and a level of interest.
Saying someone or a group of people are not interested in doing something is entirely different than saying they are less capable.
The proper equivalent to "men (on average) have difficulties with emotional communication" for the example you gave would be "women are not as naturally capable as men when it comes to tech jobs."
Perhaps you're undervaluing the degree to which desire promotes skill. Maybe it's that men have difficulties with emotional communication because they don't have a desire to communicate emotionally and, thus, have not built up the skill set.
Exactly. The lack of self awareness in her comment was astounding. But those are the types of comments we should expect when we think of some people's testimony as "anecdotes" and other's as "Lived Experiences".
The author provides several examples of emotional labor. The author also tries to explain to her husband (who she says he hasn't fully grasped) that she doesn't want him to clean the bathrooms for mere cleanliness, but for easing the burden of managing the cleanliness of the household.
She fails to understand how its not his fault that her standards are not being met, and that he's failing in his insubordinate duties by not meeting her standards - yet takes no responsibility for having adequately constructed a consensus between the two of them over the issue of household management - "because its the womans job to manage the household".
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Men are just as capable of having a clean house as anyone else - we ultimately succeed in having a great household 'emotionally' when all parties are of equal agency as each other. In this story, I see only un-equal agency, and I believe that is the true cause of her upset .. Let him decide on the standards for the household, independently and under his own determination, and stop undermining the relationship by assuming greater authority over the issue. Otherwise, you have totalitarianism in the household, and no man - nor woman - really deserves that.
You are kind of exemplifying the attitude that the parent comment complains about. You have standards that are not being met, but instead of communicating clearly you just try to shame the other person.
I understand communicating such simple things is not as simple as the thing would make it seem. In fact, the point of the article was that such work is unappreciated.
But just because it's not appreciated it doesn't mean it's not important. You should still do it.
She's not sexist for expecting those things, she's sexist for trying to attribute her Husbands lack of those qualities to all male partners on the basis they are men.
Yeah, he's lazy. But that's for him to fix - not the male gender.
Also - It's not his responsibility to shoulder the burden of her emotions. It is his responsibility to get the things done that were agreed upon between the two of them. If she is not happy with the arrangement, they need to come to a new agreement.
The only direct failing I see is the main example she gave, he should have just picked a damn cleaning service. Everything else is a sexist, emotion fueled diatribe about how men are emotional vacuums and don't help out enough around the house.
> In his mind, he was doing the thing I had most wanted—giving me sparkling bathrooms without having to do it myself. Which is why he was frustrated when I ungratefully passed by, not looking at his handiwork as I put away his shoes, shirt and socks that had been left on the floor.
It's not about taking an equal share in the "emotional labor". It's about her not communicating proper intent, treating effort "ungratefully" and ultimately being disappointed for not receiving what was wanted.
She wanted:
> The gift, for me, was not so much in the cleaning itself but the fact that for once I would not be in charge of the household office work. I would not have to make the calls, get multiple quotes, research and vet each service, arrange payment and schedule the appointment.
but she asked for:
> one thing: a house cleaning service.
That's the stereotypical "women don't say what they think".
I think they don't "say what they really think" because it's hard work.
I hate gifts and would rather receive cash for a present, but if I were the sort of person who wanted a specific gift I would find it annoying to have to justify it, explain what the gift really means to me on a deep level, and so on.
That sort of "emotional labor" might in fact be the reason I dislike gifts, now that I think about it.
> but if I were the sort of person who wanted a specific gift I would find it annoying to have to justify it, explain what the gift really means to me on a deep level, and so on
That's fine if you don't give a shit whether or not you receive the expected gift. But throwing a tantrum after the fact and writing an entire blog post about it is unreasonable. She (they) clearly has deeper problems than not receiving what she wanted. Those problems can't be resolved without communication.
Right. I have enough self-awareness that I don't bother asking for specific gifts. It all adds up to compromise, knowing your quirks and limitations and not trying too hard to make reality conform to your quirks.
However, I think it is not fair to criticize the author for trying to do the right thing. She was wrong at the time to expect her husband to understand without communicating, but then she had a serious talk with him, and now she literally wrote an essay explaining her thoughts.
It's like when a boy cleans his room, praising him is the right thing to do, even if you feel a little sexist doing it (because you did not praise his sister for the same thing). You have to tailor the praise and criticism to the individual. Don't be harsh at the kid for not cleaning as well and as often as his sister, and don't be harsh at the author for not communicating early enough.
> It's like when a boy cleans his room, praising him is the right thing to do, even if you feel a little sexist doing it (because you did not praise his sister for the same thing).
Sexism is tricky because it's sometimes unrelated to the problem. I recently saw a small boy in a shop yelling at his sister not to touch him because she played with a dog and her hands were dirty. I'm pretty sure his room is cleaner than hers, and their parents praise her for cleaning her room and not him. Personality traits are sometimes mistook for gender stereotypes and people feel shame for being sexist. Actions should definitely be tailored to the individual, which is not sexist if individuals have different sexes. But it's easier to follow rules and guides (such as ethics and politically correctness) and even easier to mock and shame people who appear to break them.
I agree with you. What I meant is that the boy should be criticized or praised as an individual, not as a stereotype of his gender or as a comparison to a sibling.
This individual author has trouble communicating. As an individual, she wrote an article talking about her feelings. Even though the article is kind of unnecessarily mean, it is progress compared to what she was doing before, which is nothing. That deserves praise.
There are things in life that are "beyond disgusting", but this age-old tradition going back to as long as there have been marriages scarcely makes that cut. Chomping at the bit and flying off the handle is hardly going to get you anywhere.
Also, in two comments, you've failed to address the central point of the OP: What if the guy has lower standards for cleanliness? What if he doesn't mind the odd gift box not kept away for two days? The OP is saying that the woman seems not to have paused to wonder about whether they agree on the fundamental standards for "how much effort is worth putting into our living spaces"
Mind you, I lean towards your side of the argument. I grew up witnessing what the woman perfectly described: there are millions of tasks that women quietly do that men demand that they be applauded for. My parents are definitely in that mould.
Just like a dirty bathroom is disgusting? The article also illustrates that people have different subjective standards for disgusting. What you find disgusting and beyond the pale is something I find insightful, subtle and interestingly wrong.
To argue against things, you need to do more than call the thing disgusting.
>Let me be more clear, then: saying that a female author is sexist for expecting her partner to take an equal share of the emotional labor of their shared life is beyond disgusting.
Where did this "emotional labor" term even come from? Talking to people on the phone, doing household work -- why does this qualify as "emotional behavior", and not actual, you know, labor? Considering that plenty of people do both of these things as part of their dayjob.
When I hear that term, I think of having to walk on eggshells around someone who is an emotionally abusive partner.
Airing her grievances online is immature and isn't going to help their situation, there's a good chance her husband is going to get more defensive about it.
That tactical mistake notwithstanding, she's on the whole quite correct though.
She says:
> When my husband brushes out tangles before bedtime, he needs his efforts noticed and congratulated
That's such a common attitude. He needs to just do the damn work already without being such a baby about it.
Her complaint is that he needs to "see" work. Don't leave the gift wrap out in the middle of the room, but put it back. Hear a squeaky door hinge, just fix it. That kind of thing. The fact that he doesn't, and the fact that he needs to be told time and again, can of course be a source of stress. If he doesn't recognize that truly, then he's being obtuse. Most likely though, it all happens more in a grey zone. Not that he doesn't realize leaving the gift wrap out is an inconvenience, but that he doesn't care enough to put it back. Not necessarily because of malice, but this soup of lazyness, unattentiveness, and perhaps, every once in a while, a smidgen of malice, you know, that little urge to needle other people sometime, especially nagging ones.
It really isn't much about failure of communication. From the article, they talked about it plenty. It's in a national publication now. He knows she wants him to be proactive, instead of wait-and-see. It's about a mismatch between habits and expectations. There are many ways this can resolve. Either she learns to live with it. Or he changes. Either of those could both be happy solutions to their issue, with both parties finding contentment. But his half-assed approach of 'well, just ask me, I'm happy to do it", and then gloat or moan about it afterwards, is obviously not doing it.
>there's a good chance her husband is going to get more defensive about it.
She complains in the article that her husband gets defensive in these conversations - odds are she's simply can't see how her speech gets perceived as an attack. Especially because she very quickly blames Patriarchy for his defensiveness rather than taking an honest look at communication patterns.
Example:
>My husband, despite his good nature and admirable intentions, still responds to criticism in a very patriarchal way. Forcing him to see emotional labor for the work it is feels like a personal attack on his character.
Criticizing someone to force them to see things your way is completely unacceptable to me. I might have high standards for personality in a life partner, but yeah, no, I'd rather be single than put up with that.
This sounds like someone with an anxious attachment style that is terrified of expressing her needs and who has grown resentful of a lifetime of suppressing her feelings for the approval of others.
Notice how she resents that her husband wants appreciation for the things he does, and yet she doesn't feel appreciated?
This is a dynamic they co-created and one they could work on together.
Healing the underlying stuff that is driving this resent would lead to a happier more connected experience for her (and in the process, I imagine he would become more of what she wants).
It's not her fault, he appears to not know what really drives conflict, so no matter how much he does, it will never be enough -- until he makes an effort to learn how to make his woman feel seen and understood and safe with all of her emotions.
Most people lack these skills as they never had them modeled.
"What I wanted was for him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, do the emotional labor I would have done if the job had fallen to me... I knew exactly how exhausting it was going to be. That’s why I asked my husband to do it as a gift."
It's ironic that the author complains about her husband's low emotional intelligence yet she doesn't seem to understand that other people may have a different approach to a given problem.
Judging by the remarks on this thread, not many of you are interested - but those of you who are may find this compiled PDF of a Metafilter thread valuable:
I can say without hesitation that learning more about emotional labor (and reading that PDF in particular) has helped me be a better husband and father.
In the 1950s, society inflicted these expectations on women about how they should maintain their families. Homes should be immaculate, children should be participating in all sorts of activities, etc. Now, we’re embracing the idea that men should carry their share of the domestic labor, but haven’t quite rejected old ideals about what a home should be run like. So we’re in a weird transition state where we’re trying to get men to do work that nobody really needs or wants to do.
I dislike this term, and I'm dismayed by its recent leakage into the mainstream. I have yet to see an explanation for what it means, that is distinguishable from "being a person." The people who use the term usually seem exceptionally entitled and self-centered. The assumption that women do more of whatever it's supposed to entail is sexist, and I see little evidence for it. It seems like an academic-sounding way to say that women are better people, plus they don't get rewarded for being better people, so life is unfair to women and men need to do something about this.
It's a good term that is being appropriated. Emotional labor described some aspects of jobs such as customer service, nurse, etc., where the work actually requires feeling certain emotions so that your client can feel empathized with. What the author is talking about is simply domestic labor.
I simplify can't imagine bearing the emotional burden of having to call someone to "deep clean" my bathroom. These are the woe-is-me thoughts of the top tier of society.
Anyways this is a classic example of expecting someone to be able to read your mind simply because they love you. One person is uptight about micromanaging their environment, the other more laid back. You talk about that and find an equilibrium. I would be very hurt as her husband to find she had communicated that to the world without communicating it to him.
As a thought exercise I wonder what would people's advice be if the author was in a same sex relationship and the pair was having disagreements over cleaning and relational priorities. I am guessing most of the advice would be about how to communicate better with your partner. Now that maybe slightly easier with a same sex partner but I think the point is still a valid one. Peal back some of the feminist rhetoric and you have a couple who need to work on their communication skills.
> It is difficult to model an egalitarian household for my children when it is clear that I am the household manager, tasked with delegating any and all household responsibilities, or taking on the full load myself. I can feel my sons and daughter watching our dynamic all the time, gleaning the roles for themselves as they grow older.
It's so bad for me... I read the whole article and I cannot figure out what 'emotional labor' is.
The scenes described play out constantly in my home. There are these major gaffs in both directions: For me, I cannot infer how to set the table from what's on the stove, and my wife is therefore convinced that I have a learning disability.
For her, she is incapable of using the Maps app on her smart phone to help me when our destination changes after departing the house. And I am therefore convinced she has a learning disability.
Let's accept that things are structurally different upstairs and therefore inputs are not processed the same way and therefore the actual problem is not in the wiring, but in our expectations.
I think the correct term (instead of emotional labor) would be „ownership“. It’s the very thing my mother has complained of (well, the lack of it actually) about my father. He didn’t care about most things because he gets easily stressed about owning or being responsible for tasks, so he only initiates and rallies for tasks that he likes doing. Luckily they divorced some years ago.
Alas, I have adapted some of my father‘s behavior, but as I‘m truly growing up, it’s getting better. Ownership is empowering, and it must not be connected with guilt. For me (and probably my father), ownership always led to perfectionism and guilt when something did not work out; but screw guilt, and nobody‘s perfect. BTW in German, the terms ownership and responsibility are somewhat conflated into „Verantwortung“, which is easily interpreted as being held accountable.
I‘m sure there are a lot of reasons that can lead to passivity or the lack of ownership in a relationship. IMO it‘s one of the most toxic things that can exist. It can ruin precious years of your life, and turn family life into hell. Take ownership if you don’t already.
This article is terrible. She sounds extremely self-centered. Does she think about the "emotional labor" that her husband goes through? She only appears to care about the hysterics that she creates from her own insecurities, and then wants her husband to share in those. Does she spend the time to document the emotional labor that he has to go through every day? Nope.
This is housekeeper neurosis. She cares a lot about the house, he doesn't hence conflict, plus the fact that she essentially want's her husband to be able to read her mind.
They should consider doing some psychotherapy.
The article has a few interesting points about gender, but she stretches them almost to the breaking point. The call for budgets I get that as emotional labor goes, but the "he should know better and read my mind and satisfy all my emotional desires as my idealized husband would" crap I don't buy.
That's just plain old neurosis and an underhanded slap on the wrist for her husband.
What appealed to me about this article was precisely the fact that it stuck close to experience and whenever it went 'broader' provided caveats. Your comment somehow strikes me as the opposite of all those qualities.
Talking with a Boston cop, he tells me he's married to a nurse. I asked "Who has the most stressful job?". His response: "Her, she actually has to care about the people she works with."
This is a very good piece that makes a kind of labor visible that often goes unseen.
The article quotes a few sociologists; the concept of "emotional labor" comes from another that isn't cited in the piece, Arlie Russel Hochschild. Hochschild also coined the term "the second shift" to refer to the wildly uneven gendered division of labor.
It's not emotional labor. It's that she tends to worry and obsess over routine decisions, and he can't be cared to put in effort on things that aren't important to him directly. Even if he changed, she would still nag and belittle his choices because she still worries and obsesses; even if she changed, he would half-ass and still be lazy. They both have to change, and they don't need to make it into this grand narrative of emotional labor.
She should not expect him to ask five friends on facebook to find a cleaning service. He should realize that it is important to her to have one and just get one instead of complaining to her about it. Both failed, and it had little to do with any grand feminist narrative.
Anecdote related to the part about ignoring the box:
My wife pointed out to me recently that I don't put away things if she leaves them in strange spots (out-of-place scissors, maybe). After some discussion, we both came to the conclusion that this is a side-effect of growing up with my mother.
In my childhood home, if you put something away in the wrong place, that was far worse that not having touched it at all. So I grew up conditioned to ignore mess that I didn't know how to fix.
I understand the husband was naive for expecting that it would be easy to find an inexpensive and convenient house cleaning service. He wanted "something he could one-click order on Amazon", and housecleaning services are not like that.
But why is that the case? Why can't there be an Uber* for housecleaning? Even better, why can't they pay an actual maid to clean the house all the time? Every hour she is cleaning the house (or researching to hire a one-time cleaning service) is an hour she could be working, so unless her labor is less valuable than a maid's, she would actually be saving money by not cleaning the house herself.
I understand that in the US this sort of thing is not that simple because in developed nations labor costs are so high (in the third world more families have maids than washing machines and dishwashers), but even so, there is still inequality. Her labor should be more expensive than a maid's labor. Why can't they take advantage of that, reap benefits of trade?
*ETA: I now believe "Uber for housecleaning" is a terrible idea. The correct thing would be "Upwork for housecleaning". Something more focused on long-term professional relationships.
They've already accepted that as true. The point is that even with an "uber of housecleaning", you're still inviting a stranger into your house to be around your children, and you still have to make it work with your schedule. That's the work. The human aspect won't go away union as housekeeping robot is invented.
The human aspect is precisely what they should be leveraging, but it looks like they choose not to.
Hiring the right maid can be annoying, but you only need to do it once. But instead of hiring an actual person and forming a long-lasting relationship, they chose to hire a faceless housecleaning company for a one-time job. They will have to pay huge transactional costs (with associated emotional labor) all over again next time their bathroom gets dirty.
Well-considered, well-written, thoughtful, and constructive gender politics can be exceptionally useful. It concerns the viewpoints and interactions of much of the human race, generally with the rest.
I see this kind of non-tech related "culture wars" prone article creeping into hn. Can we keep on reddit or some other non-tech forum where it belongs?
I think the articles on philosophy and even crit theory are ok when they have an intellectual bent. Otherwise there's little sense in admitting Seth Godin but excluding Michel Foucault, both fine bald men.
I feel (and it's not just me) that there's a powerful, useful core to "continental theory" -- see Shimon Naveh, Elie Ayache, etc. Techies should be more well-rounded.
I agree that articles that apply philosophy and theory to politics are off-topic. We should be discussing (in addition to HN's core matter of startups) capital I ideas, not petty stuff.
This article focuses on one kind of labor needed for a family to operate, but doesn't really talk about the others, such as the kind that bring in money. Equal share of labor is very important, but I don't think it's wise to expect a 50/50 split on every individual kind of labor. Theres been a lot of push back in society against the dynamic where one spouse goes to a paying job, and the other takes care of household matters, but how is that not an equal split of family labor? If both spouses work paying jobs, then it makes sense to start dividing household matters more.
That being said, I think parent-child interaction is something that needs to always be a 50/50 split, because it's good for the child.
I spent about 5 years trying to convince my wife to let me hire a housekeeping service. I had several in, and none met her standards. I finally found one she loves. Me, I would have been happy with the first one that I had in.
1. Chaos muppet theory. In this article, the wife is the order muppet, and the husband is the chaos muppet. Is this gendered? I don't know. My sister and I are both order muppets and our spouses are chaos muppets. That means in my household, the man (me) takes on what the author calls 'emotional labor' but is more like 'management labor'. There are a large number of household things I take on because I feel like I must. This is not about my wife, it's about my own neuroses and desire for order. And it's not about division of labor, because we have a very ad-hoc system of who makes dinner, does the dishes, etc etc. That kind of stuff is more about who is busier and who has more free time. If I have to study for a test I try my best not to feel bad about just walking out after eating dinner and leaving the dishes, and just as often I start cleaning up while she reads an interesting article. I'm sure if you asked my wife and I separately, we would both say we take care of 60% of the work and the other does 40% :)
2. Responsibility for emotions. Is this gendered? The author makes a good argument for the expectations society has put on women to not be a burden or a nag, to manage emotions and expectations, and so on. I'm sure some men take this on more than their female partners, but I find it very plausible or likely that the author is correct that it's more frequently women doing this work. It's not the same about who is more emotional; it's entirely possible the man could be much more of an emotional person yet not take on the responsibility of managing others emotions (in fact, that might be what's happening in the article if the woman feels she needs to tip-toe around his feeling so much).
3. Actual household work. Flat out work. Child care, cooking, cleaning, picking up the dry cleaning, whatever. I'm sure many tomes have been written about the gendered roles and expectations and how these have changed over time and the work that remains to be done if one's desire is to equally partition these tasks.
A while ago I came across this great annotated archive of a Metafilter thread about emotional labor. Provides a lot of examples to make it easier to grasp the idea.
Women don't believe that men does any emotional labor since we don't cry when we hold back our frustration. I mean, this is a stay at home mom spending around 10 hours a week on her passion to write earning very little money (according to her blog) and she still dares to literally cry about her husband not doing most of the household chores?
I feel as if the article pays nominal lip service to third-wave feminist by quoting critiques of gender essentialism but otherwise puts people in two buckets anyway.
Sure, she's only talking about her story, but it's not because it's extraordinary; rather, the implied rant is that 'tis the same for all.
This is an interesting article on expectations of thoughtfulness, that are valid.
In addition to emotional labour, a person who is out-giving is dedicating a fixed amount of their limited attention to keep things in mind that could go elsewhere.
Using the example of the article, if two people living together on their own were to live on their own, they would likely be more thoughtful and aware.
Co-habiting has an strange effect, you start doing things you didn't do before, and stop doing things you used to. Some of it is based around preferences and habits - and some feel if you think something should happen badly enough (if someone always leaves the lights on), maybe you should do it.
Emotional intelligence, thoughtfulness, and pro-actively thinking of needs instead of being asked to do things is something anyone values when they are relied upon in an ongoing manner.
Interesting thought. I have a friend who has a job like that. She's the executive assistant to a startup CEO. He comes up with grand, vague ideas, and she turns them into a list of 14 things that need to be done and gets them done.
Tinges of things like this (along with an Italian matriarch) always made me assume women were just naturally in charge of households growing up.
Though in my household my Dad never really did the things the article mentions (it was more so me and my brother who did), so much as it was that he was often working long hours and couldn't have done a lot of the "activities management" type stuff if he'd tried.
But when he was home it was "Who left this sock in the hallway? Who didn't do dishes?"(prepare to die, he'd have murder in his eye). And he often spent his weekends doing home projects (new sink, new floor, new tile, etc.).
I'm a male, but I have this traditionally female role in my relationship. While the author's relationship may or may not be disfunctional, this is a real thing. An equitable relationship balances out this contribution.
The error here is confusing equality for sameness. We should celebrate and capitalize on our different strengths, preferences, and (since I'm heterosexual) genders.
We are not - and shouldn't be - the same. But we can equally contribute to our relationships in a way that befits ourselves.
> Disappointed by my unwavering desire, the day before Mother's Day he called a single service, decided they were too expensive, and vowed to clean the bathrooms himself.
and then...
> However, it’s not as easy as telling him that. My husband, despite his good nature and admirable intentions, still responds to criticism in a very patriarchal way. Forcing him to see emotional labor for the work it is feels like a personal attack on his character. If I were to point out random emotional labor duties I carry out—reminding him of his family’s birthdays, carrying in my head the entire school handbook and dietary guidelines for lunches, updating the calendar to include everyone’s schedules, asking his mother to babysit the kids when we go out, keeping track of what food and household items we are running low on, tidying everyone’s strewn about belongings, the unending hell that is laundry—he would take it as me saying, “Look at everything I’m doing that you’re not. You’re a bad person for ignoring me and not pulling your weight.”
When I was a kid, I remember getting frustrated one day when after I decided-- for whatever reason-- that I wanted to "trade licks" with my older, bigger brother. (I.e., I could hit his arm as hard as I could with the understanding he would then be able to do the same to me.)
I distinctly remember both my brother and father-- who were watching this-- both smiling and taking about 30 seconds to carefully (and repeatedly) explain to me exactly what would happen to my arm if I entered into this contract (plus the lack of retribution for the suffering described). Needless to say I decided not to go through with it.
That's all to say-- there is some obvious miscommunication going on here. The author wanted a gift of "cleaning plus", and the husband tells her that a "cleaning basic" quote was too expensive. That is the moment to carefully explain the "plus" part, and how the true cost is at least equal to the cost of "cleaning basic" plus hiring a life-coach for the full duration of the gift to explicitly enumerate each "cleaning plus" task as it happens.
Plus-- since these are adults-- the contingency that if the husband is still so oblivious that he's convinced he can just wing his way through "cleaning plus," to refuse that gift and instead accept something off of Amazon.
A bigger part is the political opportunism that practically guarantees that about half the population will oppose the other half, effectively neutralizing progress.
An example: If you ask anyone (of any political affiliation) if they favor more beneficial time off for birth-related activities, you will probably get a positive response. But if you accuse someone of being sexist because they vote the 'wrong' way, then you're demonizing half the country and putting them on the other side of the playing field.
The same thing happens with racism. When the word is exploited for political purposes, it dilutes the effectiveness of the term and artificially sets people opposite each other.
It's high time we define certain standards for what should be political and what should be universally agreed upon. Gender equality and racial equality should be in the latter category.
Why was the title editorialized? This HN title isn't the real one. It's not even the subtitle! It's an editorialized version of the subtitle. And that's not ok.
Edit: Personally, i find it a bit ridiculous the fact that people always find ways to blame other people for their own problems - in this case, someone is THINKING too much, and that somehow is someone else's fault?
If you want help, ASK FOR HELP. Otherwise, we're being chauvinistic if we even offer. This is what society has devolved to.
Does "Emotional Labor" exist? sure. But people need to manage their own mental stress levels. friends and family should help when they can, but they shouldn't be blamed necessarily be blamed for it.
I don't want you to clean the dishes. I want you to WANT to clean the dishes.
they push heavily that their target audience is affluent, college-educated women. they therefore want to run content that appeals to this demographic. the editors of this magazine believe that that demographic finds articles like this one appealing.
these are the primary advertisers purchasing spots in Harper's Bazaar
the products that Harper's Bazaar advertisers want to sell to their audience of affluent, college educated women is primarily very expensive luxury/prestige brand names in the high fashion industry.
--------
these are a few other recent articles written by the author, Gemma Hartley
> It was obvious that the box was in the way, that it needed to be put back. It would have been easy for him to just reach up and put it away, but instead he had stepped around it, willfully ignoring it for two days. It was up to me to tell him that he should put away something he got out in the first place.
> “That’s the point,” I said, now in tears, “I don’t want to have to ask.”
This kind of irrational thinking ended a relationship for me.
> why don't you care about me? Why aren't you able to anticipate exactly how I want you to behave at every moment?
Are you really arguing that most adults don’t realize that taking down a box which has a specific home then not putting it away for a few days is mildly annoying and irresponsible?
That someone would magnify mild irritation into a source of tears does sound like a communication break down, but... this was a pretty good example of a reasonable expectation from any housemate.
Having to be the nagging asshole is, in fact, work.
It is a symptom of much deeper irrational thinking patterns. The whole point of the article is the woman complaining that her husband misunderstood how she wanted him to handle the cleaning of the bathroom. She did not tell him specifically what she wanted, instead she expected that he reads her mind and figure it out. This is not how human communication works or should work.
Also breaking out in tears over such an innocuous thing is textbook emotional manipulation.
Based on its content, I'm surprised this made the #6 spot on the front page of HN, but now it seems to have disappeared altogether. I had to search to find it.
Users flagged it, presumably because HN threads have a track record of not being able to stay civil and substantive when this sort of topic is invoked.
There's also the baity title, which looks neutral on the article page because of the whopper it's paired with, but amounts to a Molotov cocktail here. Internet forums—or at least this internet forum—does not do well with gender generalizations in titles. So in accordance with the HN guidelines ("please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"), we'll s/men/some people/.
However, the current thread is fine so far, so we'll try turning off the flags.
Edit: in response to a reasonable complaint about my 'some people' edit, I changed the title to the least baity substring of the HTML doc title. That's what I'd have used if I had seen it sooner anyhow; we always prefer to use language from the article itself, down to the word where possible.
Speaking for myself: the article, the original title, the subtitle, and the hero image are all blatant flamebait.
There are a few, small, nuggets of truth here. What I mostly see is a dysfunctional relationship, grossly mis-matched expectations, and more than a slight possiblility of some deep-seated psychological issues. Even is you see all of these points without subscribing to any anti-feminist viewpoints (and I don't), it's pretty flagrantly obvious that those will appear in spades in a discussion (and have, and have, mostly, been rightfully flagged).
The third-party version of this might make for an interesting case study, and might even have carry-over to various workplace and inter-personal dynamics. As written and presented -- blame applying to the author and Harper's Bazaar -- this is poisoned.
I would actually say this is on-topic, as per HN FAQ:
“If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.”
I’ve learned quite a
bit through this article.
I now even see a possibility that ingrained dynamics like these could have lead to our industry’s well known lack of gender diversity.
It’s food for thought for sure, wouldn’t you agree?
Well I know at least 8 Google-Sexism posts got flagged to hell (every single one that didn't have flags disabled IIRC), so I'm curious why this one isn't.
Long ago, I heard someone remark, "some women will marry a man, and immediately try to change him into something that he is not and never was. It never works, and they both end up frustrated and miserable."
In the ensuing decades, I've watched that scenario play out many times, with both genders in both directions. (But mostly it was the woman trying to change the man.)
I don't think this is an accurate characterization of the article. It is technically accurate that the male in this article did strike me as lazy in his reluctance to call around when hiring a cleaning service. But I think it's an unfair leap to (1) categorize him as "weak, child-like" and (2) dismiss the article as a whole based on this categorization.
The main theme of the article, that managing the household requires a significant amount of work and that this work often goes not only unappreciated but that this lack of appreciation is both acceptable and expected strikes me as much more important. In particular, her husband was aware of the hassle involved in properly hiring a cleaning service and that's why he chose to avoid it. On some level we are all aware of the work that needs to be done but it is easy to forget that it happens.
Towards the end of the article, there are examples that I found interesting: when she brushes the daughter's hair, it's no big deal but when her husband does it he expects praise. When the son tidies his room, he expects acknowledgement but the daughter performs the same task as a matter of course.
In my own household, my partner and I strive for an even split in these duties. I have made numerous, painfully long calls to our insurance company to sort out bills and I did call around for quotes when we put up a fence around a portion of our yard. Still, it was painful for me to admit, I could see some of myself in the author's partner. In particular:
> My husband, despite his good nature and admirable intentions, still responds to criticism in a very patriarchal way.
And when the author talks about trying to explain this work and their feeling that it is unacknowledged.
> ...he would take it as me saying, “Look at everything I’m doing that you’re not. You’re a bad person for ignoring me and not pulling your weight.”
I often find myself getting defensive, often without a clear idea of why I am feeling attacked or unappreciated. I think, often, it boils down to feeling like I'm being accused of something.
Lastly, the idea that this reaction was something I may have learned and internalized at an early age is also interesting and worth thinking about. I do think there's a tendency to think that gender roles are a thing of the past, and many ways these roles express themselves is subtle.
I think automatically jumping to a defensive posture, even when one isn't being attacked (or there's nothing to defend) isn't a great response. It seems reasonable that I should be able to listen to someone else's gripes without jumping to the conclusion that I am somehow to blame.
In this article, it seemed to me that the author's goal was to try and get recognition for work performed, not to make their partner feel like they were not doing enough.
I want to say that I partly agree with you, but partly that I want to enhance what you've said a bit. I think stating it in terms of weakness is something that will help some men understand where they need to bring up their game. I know that I need to bring up my game in this area, and hearing you say it like that is a goad to me to do better. So on that front, I agree with you, and I thank you for stating this in a way that's motivating to me.
Where I'm not in total agreement is just the example you picked. I would say that "household finances" has often historically been "men's work," especially when you think about investing and retirement planning. I don't want the author's other examples to get lost here. Cleaning and hair braiding were much closer to the heart of the things that I myself have been too "weak and ineffectual" to accomplish, in your words. When I think about how I could make my wife's life better, these types of things, not the finances, seem like the right place for me to start looking. Obviously, in every couple, there are going to be different things, but I'd guess in most cases this, not finances, is closer to the heart of where things are off.
I’m struggling to see how he is any of these things. Reading your past comments, I can’t find a single one with a follow up (maybe that means you’re weak and ineffectual)... never the less, this one seems cruel. Should I be surprised to see other commenters actually agree with you?
Id be curious of a CEO who you think does these things. Most CEOs are successful people, so calling them “weak, ineffectual, lazy” sounds very hateful, and sad. And yet, this comment has only received support! I don’t think I’ll ever understand you people.
If a husband chooses to do a deep clean instead of calling around to find a cleaning service, it does not seem like laziness and more like a misunderstanding. It's quite likely that the deep cleaning involved more hours of work than calling around would have.
The problem is that resolving misunderstandings can require a lot of "emotional labour", and it's often easier to just do things yourself rather than try to resolve the misunderstanding.
But it's not solely her responsibility to resolve these misunderstandings, that's on her husband too. If not, your label of weak probably does apply even if lazy doesn't.
I'm very easy going and there isn't much I get too worked up about. My wife, on the other hand, is a meticulous planner. I could see her getting stressed out making decisions for a vacation. I realized that by not caring, I wasn't helping and offloading the burden to her. Now I truly didn't care if we went to restaurant A or restaurant B, so she always had to make the decision. Since realizing this I've relieved her more from all the decision making, even if I really don't care about the outcome. Why should I do this? Well, because she's my wife and while I may not care which restaurant we go to, I care about her.
TL;DR It's real and I decided to do take up more of this emotional labor in life.