How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

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.)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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?!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

    I could either live with the clutter and step over it or pick up after him

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 my boss asked me to call some cleaning companies and arrange a schedule so they come clean the office, all on my "free" time, I'd expect extra payment because that is extra labour.

Leftist cynicism aside: I'm talking more about the "socks on the floor, chair in the way, keeping the house in order mentally" side of things

While I get the idea that my wife allows certain things to drag her down emotionally, and the solution is to step up and surprise her by taking care of things (and recognizing her contribution to the drudgery), what I see in this article is much different. I see a narcissist who expects others to read her mind, and a codependent husband whom she declares as inept and sees no problem at all pillorying him in Vanity Fair. And a bit of dishonesty too. She claims she doesn’t want to micromanage her husband yet is obviously displeased because he chose a pragmatic approach to her gift as opposed to doing it her way.

PS my wife’s solution to this problem. She asked. Not to do the dishes or clean the toilets. She asked me to take care of some things that concern her, without her having to ask me. Things I would normally “step around” because they’re not priority for me.

She wanted two things. She wanted someone else to clean the house. This is fine. It happens all the time. But the second thing was that it still had to be done to her exacting standards.

So the request was, in essence, "First, become me. Then do this thing that I want in exactly the way I would do it." Hidden requirements.

The husband, not understanding this, went about hiring the cleaners in his own way, to meet his own standards. I know exactly how I would do it. I would set a budget limit of $300, which is acceptable for the spouse-to-spouse birthday gifts in our household, and try really hard to find someone to clean once a month for 12 months at $25 a pop, which seems like the minimum amount that would be required to get the van to roll, for a 90 minute appointment.

All that "household office work"? Don't do it. Instead of spending 30 minutes on the phone with a cleaning service, haggling and scheduling, scrub one toilet. Instead of vetting a person to make sure they won't pinch your porcelain statuette, vacuum the floors. You don't need administration and management in an organization with less than 6 people in it. If you're one of those "all children are a blessing" families, with 10+ people in one house, yes, someone needs to be a household manager. But for most families, the chore chart is as far as it needs to go. Stop whining about how hard it is to micromanage everything, and let other people have their own responsibilities, with their own performance standards.

If you like everything done just so, you're going to have to be the one doing all the things.

And I know how it would turn out, too. My spouse would end up cleaning the house the day before the cleaners were scheduled, so they wouldn't be cleaning a dirty house. Madness. Knowing this, I would simply get a gift of comparable value that was not requested. And I'm not even going to explain why, because that way leads to a fight.

It's a normal and healthy part of relationships to come to an agreement about what tasks should be done, how thoroughly, and who should be responsible for them. It's something else entirely to stipulate the _means_ by which someone else should accomplish tasks. That's micromanagement, and it verges on an assault on human autonomy.

Maybe part of the concept of the gift was establishing an ongoing relationship with a cleaning service, but the article really makes it sound like a one-time concern.

For example, some people feel guilty for buying luxury items when they "should" be saving or spending on their children, so luxury goods or gift cards make good presents for them. Some people have problem choosing among similar alternatives so gift cards are terrible for them.

In this case, it looks like they both find cleaning services painful, the wife because there are many alternatives and it's emotionally draining to choose and the husband because it's expensive and he feels like a sucker paying for it when he can clean the bathroom himself. It was mostly bad luck and misunderstandings.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

This article is in line with "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

That's the subtitle of the article. It doesn't say "some men." If I wrote an article that was titled, "software: the paid job women still don't understand," please do tell me how you would interpret that.

This type of conversation needs to occur more. The 'Not All Men' rebuttal and counter-rebuttal offers absolutely no benefit to anyone but more often than not, on any medium I would have seen that posted here instead of your written piece.

I understand your perspective seattle_spring, truthfully I find myself in your place more often than not. But I find my self at ends with my own personal beliefs and alliances. For the purpose of discussing this topic at greater length I'll be focusing on why this conversation needs to occur in a similar thought process shown here.

I find your argument seattle_spring, to be similar in tone to the Not All Men rebuttal. Though your reasons, experiences and feelings for how you perceive this piece on Emotional Labour is not vilified, you have your reasons for feeling how you do. I also empathise the personal struggles you're going through (I've seen first hand the struggles of supporting those in the medical field). But I believe your argument is misplaced and steph above me articulates this well. Let me unpack this.

When the Not All Men brigade reared their heads on Reddit in response to the women only screenings of Wonder Woman (WW), there was a lack of conversation on both sides of the fence from both the brigade and the Feminist allies of the WW screenings.

I personally found the WW screenings distasteful and if I was asked my opinion on it, I'd discuss this. But I was neither inflamed nor agitated by the screenings. There's other topics that deserve our attention (as a feminist allied man) that deserved more of my energy than these female only viewings of WW.

What am I, as a men, really being deprived of by these WW screenings at a tangible level? It really has no direct consequence to me. Though from a perspective or trying to find and build unity between sexes I thought it was counter productive. Anyway, I digress.

However. The same men who were the most public around these discussions around why he was _so_ offended and vilified by these women only screenings. Where was their horror, disapproval, loud and defensive counter argument when the rights of his sisters, daughters or wives rights to sexual reproductive health, taken away from them by a group of older white men less than 6 months prior? Where was _their_ rage and hostility then? Why were they quiet?

Therein lies the meat of the conversation.

It's not _just_ that these Not All Men are defensive about protecting their image about what they perceive to be a gross generalisation. It's that the Not All Men brigade are ignorant and blind to their hypocritical contradiction, where they care _more_ about their offense to these WW screenings and it's triviality, and yet are so very quiet while America's women's sexual rights were taken from them.

I feel sudo_steph, you did well to both show empathy to seattle_spring and his own battles, whilst still offering him the perspective that as a man, we can still be disadvantaged by the same cultural and societal forces that disadvantage most women. So again, thank you.

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.

Why do you think it didn't do that?

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.

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-...

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?

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.

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 is sexist.

That's some hilarious hypocrisy.

So that's my anecdote. Your comment is basically sexist blather.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.