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 article is about weak men, men who are too lazy and slothful to shoulder responsibilities like running the household finances. Such men are more like children, doing the minimal amount possible, so lacking in initiative and organization that they are unable to even hire a cleaning service. Saying this is about "understanding" "emotional labor" is wrong because it lets weak, child-like men off the hook too easily for their failings. They are just lazy and ineffectual.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?".
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?
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!?
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
I've taken enough of this childish stuff. I did apologise because I was wrong, and I did say that you were offensive, because you were. You attack me and expect me to care about your feelings, and you attack the entire HN community and expect them to back you. I really repent having started this thread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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"?
>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
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.
>It's real and I decided to do take up more of this emotional labor in life.
Hey man, if you dont mind me asking. Has your sex life improved after you changed your behavior. I remember reading about "choreplay" somewhere but not sure if it actually works.
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.
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'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.
>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.
"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.
"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 ..
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.
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.
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.
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 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?!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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. I can't say I'm at all surprised to see that sort of mens-rightsism around ycombinator, though.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
You have wholly failed to grasp the concept of sexism. "Women are bad at tech" is a sexist statement, while "men are bad at emotional labor" is not. This is no more a double standard than saying 0/1 is 0, while 1/0 is undefined. The asymmetry exists a priori, and so the balance of those statements is descriptive of sexism, not causal.
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.
With all due respect, you are mistaken. Simply associating behaviors with sex is no more sexism than associating adjectives with nouns is English. It's whether those constructions have meaning that makes the difference. In a world with a perfectly even balance of social power, it would be equally & symmetrically sexist to say "all men are X" or "all women are X." We do not live in such a world! The outcomes from those two statements are not evenly distributed, and we may find it useful to describe the factors contributing to that disparity of outcomes predominately driven by sex as "sexist."
Let's look at this another way. Some how, we have managed to collectively convince ourselves that "sexism" is bad without accurately identifying what sexism is. This causes an interesting cognitive dissonance wherein the beneficiaries of sexism, who categorically do not think of themselves as bad people, must find a way to justify how they are not sexist. One particularly facile way to do so is to simply redefine the term "sexism" to something vacuous that implies no particular weight to the underlying distribution, ergo no individual bears any particular responsibility for the ongoing structural inequity.
Unfortunately, while this neatly resolves the mental tension, it reinforces the cycle of "sexism is bad, but we don't actually know what sexism is -> we redefine the term to have no descriptive or predictive power".
Nope. You're going to have to elaborate on why there's an asymmetry, not just restate that there is with big words and an unrelated analogy hoping we'll believe it.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
448 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadWhere 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I can relate to where you are coming from here, but I ultimately arrived at:
“I want you to care about me wanting to have clean dishes in our shared home.”
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlie_Russell_Hochschild#Work_...
“You should’ve asked”
https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
https://emmacliten.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/you-shouldve-...
https://emmacliten.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/you-shouldve-...
https://emmacliten.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/you-shouldve-...
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.
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.
Did you even read the comic? In the first line...
"Back when I was in my first job, a colleague invited me over for dinner."
What do you think that tells you about their working background? Do they sound like stay at home mums?
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.
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.
> 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?".
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?
The question goes both ways. If their mutual goal is living together, that is.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Had the gender roles been swapped, it would have been a very hard to stomach article for a lot of people.
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.
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.
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.
Did you miss the words "more often expected" in your quote? I don't see how it's sexist at all, let alone 'outrageously'.
> 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.
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.
I'll share a comic others in the thread have I had enjoyed before: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
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.
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.
Fortunately, my wife is a clinical psychologist, so #3 was off the table in our house.
It sounds like you've got a good thing going...1 and 2 I can deal with, the quiet seething is a no-go.
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.
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.
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.
But, from the article:
“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.)
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.
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!?
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.)
And we do not agree: He was not a bad choice for me.
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.
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.
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.
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15360339
EDIT: To the people downvoting Mz in this comment thread, can you not please, it's not warranted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mz did not attack you, you've blown their comments out of all proportion.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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).
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
In a household with more than two people, especially, the resulting mental load can get unreasonable very quickly.
“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?
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.
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.
This part struck a chord with me.
Learn to make decisions immediately and quickly.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Keep it up though, that's awesome!
The somatic approach is an excellent addition to this work, if you have a chance to try it out, you won't be disappointed.
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.
Further, the tools for transforming Conflict are useful across a spectrum of relationship types.
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.
Extrapolating fears rooted in one environment to another in which there is no danger is: 1) very human 2) irrational.
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.
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!
And my solution isn't, "be more rational." But acknowledging that they're not rational is important in investigating the issue.
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.
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.
If someone wants to kill you, then you're just worried?
The alternative view is that it's actually a clear view of society and its systemic violence, and a recognition of that causes distress.
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 :)
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.
"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.
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.
If this is considered some sort of labor then we are truly in golden age of human civilization.
Most people everywhere in the world would die to do this sort of labor.
Also why not do a coin flip , outsource the labor to a coin.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Her: Where are we going to eat? Me: Restuarant A. Her: But restaurant B has X. Me: Sounds good. Let's go to B. Her: But you wanted to go to A.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Funny how the stereotype reverses after marriage.
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.
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"?
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.
this is also a good trick to find out what you actually want, which reveals itself when a choice is made for you.
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
Hey man, if you dont mind me asking. Has your sex life improved after you changed your behavior. I remember reading about "choreplay" somewhere but not sure if it actually works.
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".
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/5whgvh/lpt_if_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit:
That is a shame because it does sound like an interesting concept.
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 ..
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.
Sometimes terms mean different things in different circles or groups or contexts, it doesn't mean either usage is "wrong" necessarily.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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".
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.
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?!
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.
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.
She would complain that I didn't make the top sheet tight enough.
My response was if you want the sheets tighter, make the bed yourself.
It's childish to expect someone else to care about something as much as you do.
Did the author make her expectations clear or was she expecting her husband to read her mind?
It sounds like she was expecting her husband to care about the same things she did.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> Good communication. Never expect the other partner to read your mind.
This reminds me of the scene from the movie 'The Break-Up 'with Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston .
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How so? She said exactly what she wanted. He's the one who interpreted that to mean "a clean house."
To argue against things, you need to do more than call the thing 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's not a failing of anything other than the husband's ability to listen and her ability to be upfront with her expectations.
Income breakdown is irrelevant.
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.
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.
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."
That is sexist.
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.
Let's look at this another way. Some how, we have managed to collectively convince ourselves that "sexism" is bad without accurately identifying what sexism is. This causes an interesting cognitive dissonance wherein the beneficiaries of sexism, who categorically do not think of themselves as bad people, must find a way to justify how they are not sexist. One particularly facile way to do so is to simply redefine the term "sexism" to something vacuous that implies no particular weight to the underlying distribution, ergo no individual bears any particular responsibility for the ongoing structural inequity.
Unfortunately, while this neatly resolves the mental tension, it reinforces the cycle of "sexism is bad, but we don't actually know what sexism is -> we redefine the term to have no descriptive or predictive power".
That's some hilarious hypocrisy.
So that's my anecdote. Your comment is basically sexist blather.
Can we tone it down a little, I'm here for the discussion, not the sexism.
This is as sexist as the article itself.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
no it's not. maybe i can counter your sexist statement with another one: women just complain louder about it.
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.
You're missing the point. She mentions that the clean house isn't the goal, the clean house would "simply be a bonus"
> complaining about her partner not telepathically reading her mind to "sense" her completely arbitrary standards
She also makes the point that she has told him what she wants.
But all she actually asked for is the clean house, that's the communication problem here.
I don't see her quoting what she told her husband, so we only have her summary to go off of. I think the details would be important here.
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.)
The goal is to reduce the mental burden of having to think about the cleaning.
You can achieve the second goal by deciding not to clean the house. But that doesn't satisfy the first goal.
Nope, there is a clear goal. The author made it clear that a clean house was "a bonus". What do you think that suggests about what the main goal was?
I never said all goals were equal, so asking which is the main goal is irrelevant; my point is just that both goals exist as goals.
It takes two to communicate. That's the real emotional labour in the article: trying to communicate when the other party isn't listening.
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.
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.
I also don't require any praise for what I do. The cleanliness is it's own reward.
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 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 piece, however, is none of those.
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.
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.
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.