How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

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.

"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.

>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.

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?

This article is flamebait. The title is "Women Aren't Nags", below a big middle finger to the reader, so it's not like it tries to hide it. And much of the article is saying that men are emotionally immature or worse.

For example, she asks her husband to get the house clean for mother's day. He assumes she meant what she asked for, and does a deep clean of the bathrooms himself. But

> What I wanted was for him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, do the emotional labor I would have done if the job had fallen to me.

But for a single cleaning, just doing it himself was more direct and effective, so what he did isn't unreasonable. But it didn't go through the specific process she didn't mention but was really what she secretly wanted. So there has been a failure of communication here.

Other examples also show similar problems with understanding and communication:

> It was obvious that the box was in the way, that it needed to be put back. It would have been easy for him to just reach up and put it away, but instead he had stepped around it, willfully ignoring it for two days.

One person's "willful ignorance" may be another's blind spot. Some people just don't notice some types of mess. An extreme form of this is sometimes called "clutter blindness" (itself a minor form of hoarding), but it exists in moderate forms too, leading to disagreements like this one. Neither the author nor her husband is in the wrong here, but they both need to do more to understand the other.

And about "emotional labor":

> If I were to point out random emotional labor duties I carry out—reminding him of his family’s birthdays [etc.]

Some people care more about those things than others. Unless he asked her to do that for him, it would probably be fine if she didn't - after all, what would happen if they weren't married? I'd recommend she stop doing it - not as "see how you get along without me!" to spite him, but as an honest experiment that both she and her husband might learn from. It's possible she'd see how his life works just fine without those reminders, or that he'd see how those things are important and start to do them himself.

"...That’s why I asked my husband to do it as a gift."

What kind of "gift" is "asked" for and when not received it is aired in public and shame the man for not living up to the expectations she "didn't feel the need to communicate".

This is frankly disgusting and speaks volumes about the author's solipsism and inconsideration of her husbands story. One sided and exceptionally ignorant. Under the guise of "Equality".

I am a man and enjoy this "emotional labor" managing my house and investment properties. I also make a great income as a software consultant and enjoy calling suppliers and service professionals and is pretty easy. Pick up the phone, talk to people, schedule appointments.

This speaks more to her choice of mate and her communication abilities and the kind of contempt she has for her husband. For the whole world to see. He would be wise to re-evaluate her commitment and his commitment to the relationship.

This a kind of emotional blackmail and will serve to control him in the future since he knows that she will air their dirty laundry to be on the internet forever.

Here's some advice for people of all genders:

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.

Describing cleaning as emotional labour is weird to me. I'm fully on board with the "many women do lots of emotional labour that goes unnoticed" logic but to me cleaning is labour and that's that. It's a job, and it should be talked about as hard labour, not some mysterious emotional nebula that men avoid because of gendered conditioning.

I think the danger here is that by conflating emotional labour and cleaning, we obfuscate the true depth of what emotional labour is. Emotional labour what goes into having a mentally ill spouse, a child dying of cancer, a colleague or friend fighting through divorce or depression, the strain of a job that expects a positive mood when you're all wore out inside.

Cleaning is fixed by labour. Having a husband who doesn't clean, gets defensive, can't communicate, can't remember his fucking kids birthdays, etc. is fixed by emotional labour (or divorce). To me that sounds like the author married a person who's not accountable, doesn't share her standards about how labour should be divided, harbors gendered conceptions of how a household should be run, doesn't share her standards of cleanliness, doesn't share her standards for communication skills, etc.

So my response, in a nutshell, is that while this woman is right to push back against gendered standards of who does household work, it has nothing to do with emotional labor, per se. It has everything to do with the fact that she apparently picked a husband who is really hard to live with, or at least hard enough to live with that she's forced to write a tangential thinkpiece about it

I love working 10+ hours a day to pay for 100% of me and my fiancé's expenses, coming home, cooking dinner, and cleaning up everything while she studies for med school; going to bed early so I can do some shopping before work; and then being told I'm a useless man by some nobody with a shitty marriage on a website that's supposed to be about technology.

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.

If the goal of this article is to validate frustrated wives, maybe it has succeeded. But if conversely, it was aiming at making a compelling case to men I don't think it has.

I for one feel stereotyped and vilified (and I also feel at risk of being criticized for even admitting my own feelings).

What I'd recommend the author do is-

1. Reflect on her feelings. What does she really want, what is it really about / a symbol for (cleaning/initiative = caring?) ? Also understand any accumulated frustrations that may be coloring things.

2. Try to understand her husband's feelings, as well as any of his accumulated frustrations.

3. Ask him and make sure you understand his feelings. To do this, you need to be able to listen without judging what he has to say, even if it's hurtful. Once he feels understood, you'll be half-way there.

4. Talk to him about your feelings (does he not notice, not care, or something else). If he's uncomfortable talking about this, that's another thing you can't ignore and steamroll over, but should investigate gently. Hopefully he can understand your feelings without judging either.

5. All 4 steps above depend crucially on sincerity, good-fath, a sense of humor, and tact.

As an aside, I'd never consider publishing a criticism of my relationship online (nor would I use an anecdote as the basis for a gender-criticism), unless I had talked it over with my partner first and they read the whole thing. Of course everybody is free to share their experience, but wouldn't people naturally be hesitant to date somebody who uses intimate challenges as career-fuel?

This reminds me of my ex. I would make the bed because she never did it.

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.

It is interesting to read the comments here and compare them to my own experience. I've been married for more than a couple of decades and recognized both the author's complaint and the responses of the people in the article. I have also participated with my wife in very similar discussions.

Three things that I now believe, having lived through this, are that my wife and I see value and obligation differently (and pretty much always have), the "emotional" part is important because there are other emotions at play below the surface, and that the roles and issues your own parents had in this space will color the perceptions of you and your spouse.

I can thoroughly recommend that you clip or save this article into your archive of things and re-read it every few years for the next couple of decades and reflect back on the disagreements you and your spouse have had :-)

I found this comic on the topic also insightful:

“You should’ve asked”

https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/

This sounds a lot more like the story of an unhappy marriage and poor communication, than about emotional labour. The narrative of a bumbling but hard working ox of a husband and a whip smart, but overworked wife is tired and unhelpful to both parties.

This is a highly charged, and - frankly sexist - article about how people have expectations that are unfulfilled because they simply don't communicate with each other.

There isn't a single example of this "emotional labor" in the article, where a consideration is given to "the man" about how much labor it takes, emotionally, to keep up with someone who has high expectations for their environment, but does not communicate those expectations in a way that forms consensus - instead, opting to 'shame the man' for not having the same standards.

However, in spite of the blatant sexism, the true value of this article is that, when people fail to properly communicate, much much un-necessary work develops, and this gets in the way of having a great life. Yup. Perhaps we as a society should stop forwarding the ideal that "people should just know what expectations they have to meet", and rather promote the idea that "its always good to work things out about who does what and how clean things have to be, before you get married, or you know .. move in with each other"... The fact that the author hasn't cottoned on to this, frankly, belies a serious immaturity on her part.

This sounds like someone with an anxious attachment style that is terrified of expressing her needs and who has grown resentful of a lifetime of suppressing her feelings for the approval of others.

Notice how she resents that her husband wants appreciation for the things he does, and yet she doesn't feel appreciated?

This is a dynamic they co-created and one they could work on together.

Healing the underlying stuff that is driving this resent would lead to a happier more connected experience for her (and in the process, I imagine he would become more of what she wants).

It's not her fault, he appears to not know what really drives conflict, so no matter how much he does, it will never be enough -- until he makes an effort to learn how to make his woman feel seen and understood and safe with all of her emotions.

Most people lack these skills as they never had them modeled.

"What I wanted was for him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, do the emotional labor I would have done if the job had fallen to me... I knew exactly how exhausting it was going to be. That’s why I asked my husband to do it as a gift."

It's ironic that the author complains about her husband's low emotional intelligence yet she doesn't seem to understand that other people may have a different approach to a given problem.

Judging by the remarks on this thread, not many of you are interested - but those of you who are may find this compiled PDF of a Metafilter thread valuable:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0UUYL6kaNeBTDBRbkJkeUtabEk...

I can say without hesitation that learning more about emotional labor (and reading that PDF in particular) has helped me be a better husband and father.

In the 1950s, society inflicted these expectations on women about how they should maintain their families. Homes should be immaculate, children should be participating in all sorts of activities, etc. Now, we’re embracing the idea that men should carry their share of the domestic labor, but haven’t quite rejected old ideals about what a home should be run like. So we’re in a weird transition state where we’re trying to get men to do work that nobody really needs or wants to do.

I dislike this term, and I'm dismayed by its recent leakage into the mainstream. I have yet to see an explanation for what it means, that is distinguishable from "being a person." The people who use the term usually seem exceptionally entitled and self-centered. The assumption that women do more of whatever it's supposed to entail is sexist, and I see little evidence for it. It seems like an academic-sounding way to say that women are better people, plus they don't get rewarded for being better people, so life is unfair to women and men need to do something about this.

There was an extended discussion on topic of emotional labour on Metafilter as well - http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emo...

It's intersting due to start contrast in HN and MeFi communities and what commenters have to say about it.

I simplify can't imagine bearing the emotional burden of having to call someone to "deep clean" my bathroom. These are the woe-is-me thoughts of the top tier of society.

Anyways this is a classic example of expecting someone to be able to read your mind simply because they love you. One person is uptight about micromanaging their environment, the other more laid back. You talk about that and find an equilibrium. I would be very hurt as her husband to find she had communicated that to the world without communicating it to him.

As a thought exercise I wonder what would people's advice be if the author was in a same sex relationship and the pair was having disagreements over cleaning and relational priorities. I am guessing most of the advice would be about how to communicate better with your partner. Now that maybe slightly easier with a same sex partner but I think the point is still a valid one. Peal back some of the feminist rhetoric and you have a couple who need to work on their communication skills.

> It is difficult to model an egalitarian household for my children when it is clear that I am the household manager, tasked with delegating any and all household responsibilities, or taking on the full load myself. I can feel my sons and daughter watching our dynamic all the time, gleaning the roles for themselves as they grow older.

This part struck a chord with me.

It's so bad for me... I read the whole article and I cannot figure out what 'emotional labor' is.

The scenes described play out constantly in my home. There are these major gaffs in both directions: For me, I cannot infer how to set the table from what's on the stove, and my wife is therefore convinced that I have a learning disability.

For her, she is incapable of using the Maps app on her smart phone to help me when our destination changes after departing the house. And I am therefore convinced she has a learning disability.

Let's accept that things are structurally different upstairs and therefore inputs are not processed the same way and therefore the actual problem is not in the wiring, but in our expectations.

I think the correct term (instead of emotional labor) would be „ownership“. It’s the very thing my mother has complained of (well, the lack of it actually) about my father. He didn’t care about most things because he gets easily stressed about owning or being responsible for tasks, so he only initiates and rallies for tasks that he likes doing. Luckily they divorced some years ago.

Alas, I have adapted some of my father‘s behavior, but as I‘m truly growing up, it’s getting better. Ownership is empowering, and it must not be connected with guilt. For me (and probably my father), ownership always led to perfectionism and guilt when something did not work out; but screw guilt, and nobody‘s perfect. BTW in German, the terms ownership and responsibility are somewhat conflated into „Verantwortung“, which is easily interpreted as being held accountable.

I‘m sure there are a lot of reasons that can lead to passivity or the lack of ownership in a relationship. IMO it‘s one of the most toxic things that can exist. It can ruin precious years of your life, and turn family life into hell. Take ownership if you don’t already.

This article is terrible. She sounds extremely self-centered. Does she think about the "emotional labor" that her husband goes through? She only appears to care about the hysterics that she creates from her own insecurities, and then wants her husband to share in those. Does she spend the time to document the emotional labor that he has to go through every day? Nope.

This is housekeeper neurosis. She cares a lot about the house, he doesn't hence conflict, plus the fact that she essentially want's her husband to be able to read her mind.

They should consider doing some psychotherapy.

The article has a few interesting points about gender, but she stretches them almost to the breaking point. The call for budgets I get that as emotional labor goes, but the "he should know better and read my mind and satisfy all my emotional desires as my idealized husband would" crap I don't buy.

That's just plain old neurosis and an underhanded slap on the wrist for her husband.

Talking with a Boston cop, he tells me he's married to a nurse. I asked "Who has the most stressful job?". His response: "Her, she actually has to care about the people she works with."

This is a very good piece that makes a kind of labor visible that often goes unseen.

The article quotes a few sociologists; the concept of "emotional labor" comes from another that isn't cited in the piece, Arlie Russel Hochschild. Hochschild also coined the term "the second shift" to refer to the wildly uneven gendered division of labor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlie_Russell_Hochschild#Work_...

It's not emotional labor. It's that she tends to worry and obsess over routine decisions, and he can't be cared to put in effort on things that aren't important to him directly. Even if he changed, she would still nag and belittle his choices because she still worries and obsesses; even if she changed, he would half-ass and still be lazy. They both have to change, and they don't need to make it into this grand narrative of emotional labor.

She should not expect him to ask five friends on facebook to find a cleaning service. He should realize that it is important to her to have one and just get one instead of complaining to her about it. Both failed, and it had little to do with any grand feminist narrative.

What bullshit. Gender equality is basically becoming code for "man really should act more like women". Well fuck that.

Anecdote related to the part about ignoring the box:

My wife pointed out to me recently that I don't put away things if she leaves them in strange spots (out-of-place scissors, maybe). After some discussion, we both came to the conclusion that this is a side-effect of growing up with my mother.

In my childhood home, if you put something away in the wrong place, that was far worse that not having touched it at all. So I grew up conditioned to ignore mess that I didn't know how to fix.

I understand the husband was naive for expecting that it would be easy to find an inexpensive and convenient house cleaning service. He wanted "something he could one-click order on Amazon", and housecleaning services are not like that.

But why is that the case? Why can't there be an Uber* for housecleaning? Even better, why can't they pay an actual maid to clean the house all the time? Every hour she is cleaning the house (or researching to hire a one-time cleaning service) is an hour she could be working, so unless her labor is less valuable than a maid's, she would actually be saving money by not cleaning the house herself.

I understand that in the US this sort of thing is not that simple because in developed nations labor costs are so high (in the third world more families have maids than washing machines and dishwashers), but even so, there is still inequality. Her labor should be more expensive than a maid's labor. Why can't they take advantage of that, reap benefits of trade?

*ETA: I now believe "Uber for housecleaning" is a terrible idea. The correct thing would be "Upwork for housecleaning". Something more focused on long-term professional relationships.

I come here for the interesting tech news, not gender politics.

This article focuses on one kind of labor needed for a family to operate, but doesn't really talk about the others, such as the kind that bring in money. Equal share of labor is very important, but I don't think it's wise to expect a 50/50 split on every individual kind of labor. Theres been a lot of push back in society against the dynamic where one spouse goes to a paying job, and the other takes care of household matters, but how is that not an equal split of family labor? If both spouses work paying jobs, then it makes sense to start dividing household matters more.

That being said, I think parent-child interaction is something that needs to always be a 50/50 split, because it's good for the child.

I spent about 5 years trying to convince my wife to let me hire a housekeeping service. I had several in, and none met her standards. I finally found one she loves. Me, I would have been happy with the first one that I had in.

This article confuses and conflates 3 things.

1. Chaos muppet theory. In this article, the wife is the order muppet, and the husband is the chaos muppet. Is this gendered? I don't know. My sister and I are both order muppets and our spouses are chaos muppets. That means in my household, the man (me) takes on what the author calls 'emotional labor' but is more like 'management labor'. There are a large number of household things I take on because I feel like I must. This is not about my wife, it's about my own neuroses and desire for order. And it's not about division of labor, because we have a very ad-hoc system of who makes dinner, does the dishes, etc etc. That kind of stuff is more about who is busier and who has more free time. If I have to study for a test I try my best not to feel bad about just walking out after eating dinner and leaving the dishes, and just as often I start cleaning up while she reads an interesting article. I'm sure if you asked my wife and I separately, we would both say we take care of 60% of the work and the other does 40% :)

2. Responsibility for emotions. Is this gendered? The author makes a good argument for the expectations society has put on women to not be a burden or a nag, to manage emotions and expectations, and so on. I'm sure some men take this on more than their female partners, but I find it very plausible or likely that the author is correct that it's more frequently women doing this work. It's not the same about who is more emotional; it's entirely possible the man could be much more of an emotional person yet not take on the responsibility of managing others emotions (in fact, that might be what's happening in the article if the woman feels she needs to tip-toe around his feeling so much).

3. Actual household work. Flat out work. Child care, cooking, cleaning, picking up the dry cleaning, whatever. I'm sure many tomes have been written about the gendered roles and expectations and how these have changed over time and the work that remains to be done if one's desire is to equally partition these tasks.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/low_concept/2012/06/what_...

A while ago I came across this great annotated archive of a Metafilter thread about emotional labor. Provides a lot of examples to make it easier to grasp the idea.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0UUYL6kaNeBTDBRbkJkeUtabEk...