Men and Emotional Labor: It’s Time

IF you’ve ever been in a long-term relationship, at one point or another you have asked or been asked questions like these:

What will we be having for dinner?

What movie do want to see?

Where do you want to go on vacation next, and when?

When should we have sex next, and how?

What are we going to do this weekend, and with who?

What food do we need from the grocery store, what cleaning supplies and other things from Target?

How are things at your job?

How are things between us?

And if kids are in the picture, maybe some of these:

How is the child doing at school? What will he or she be doing this summer? Is she making friends? Does he need new clothes? How do we deal with the fact she won’t eat at dinner time? Why do you think she’s been so short-tempered lately? Why does he keep complaining about feeling sick? This list could go on forever.

These questions may seem common and mundane, but they have something important in common: they all contribute to the emotional labor of a relationship. Some may seem so basic and obvious, the normal responsibilities of adulthood, that they aren’t worth talking about.

After all, people not in relationships also need to buy toilet paper and figure out what to have for dinner.

But the difference is that when another person is involved (or more, in the case of parents) these questions, these responsibilities, transform into something much greater: they come to define the roles we play in our relationships, and hence the burdens we carry, and consequently they come to define the dynamic of how the relationship works.

I’ve never been much of a cook. My repertoire in the kitchen remains somewhat limited, though I’m trying. So in my past relationships, I deferred most kitchen duties to my partner, who were able to cook things I didn’t even know how to look up on Google. Which was fine, until one day, my partner inevitably asked why it was her always making dinner, and how nice it would be if I did it for a change.

The reason I’m writing about this is because understanding emotional labor, and its impacts, can do exactly what I set out do when I started writing this series: teach us how to be better men. Show us ways that we can be a man in today’s world, both for ourselves, and for our lovers, our friends, even our co-workers.

Emotional labor is the work — and all the thinking, planning, worrying, and tending to that goes into that work — of making sure everything runs smoothly and gets done.

It is close to planning, but more weighted: it is a step above, God-like to planning: it the spark that leads to one planning, not the actual planning itself. Emotional labor is close to problem-solving, but again, above it: it is noticing there are problems, or even better, foreseeing problems, and then addressing them.

Another example from my own life: I’m an OK communicator with my partners. I can be honest, and available, and open. I can speak to what I’m feeling, I can ask difficult questions of myself and others, I can disagree, I can argue without raising my voice. I can get across what I’m truly feeling, and yeah, I ain’t afraid to cry.

But for the life of me what I can’t do is be the one that says, “we need to talk.” Or, hey, something is bothering me and I need to talk about it. I can’t initiate that conversation. I can have that conversation all night long. But I can’t start it.

And the reason that’s so toxic, the reason that’s such a problem for a relationship, is that it shifts the burden just about entirely to her to bring the hammer down and call that meeting to order. If it were left to me, it wouldn’t happen. (I’m working on this, too.) Those important conversations, when we reveal the most important things we are feeling about each other, ourselves, our relationship…the conversations that bond us the most? Wouldn’t happen, unless she starts it.

And that, my friends, on top of being unfair, is bullshit.

A few weeks ago the podcast Freakonomics ran a series on CEOs, interviewing many of our country’s top executives. It explored all sides of what it means to be the person at the top, but what concerns me here was its discussion of women, and the situations in which they became CEOs — and what happened when they got there.

One episode was talking about how many companies who hired a female CEO did worse than those who hired men, and/or removed the newly hired female CEO faster than males hired as CEO. This phenomenon has a name, The Glass Cliff.

A theory behind The Glass Cliff is that newly hired women CEOs are, albeit most likely subconsciously, set up to fail. And that’s because women CEOs are more likely to be hired at companies where things have gone off the rails. Women were more likely to be hired as CEO to fix a problematic situation, and in many cases, the problems were too difficult to solve by anyone.

It is a grown-up version of being a kid, spilling a glass of milk, and asking your mother for help in cleaning it up. At the corporate level, the boards of trustees at some our nation’s biggest companies have turned to women to make things better, to fix it…and then spurned those women when the job either wasn’t done fast enough or as soon as they could be replaced. The jobs these women CEOS have “earned” is not just to return a company to profitability, but to be a caretaker of the culture that made the company struggle in the first place. They are handed real labor, and they are handed the emotional labor.

And as I said before, this is not only unfair, but it’s bullshit. But that’s what happens. We look to women to fix things. And who knows, maybe they are better at fixing things. I mean, compared to men, who broke the shit in the first place? Seems like an obvious choice.

This is a separate side of the #MeToo cause/movement. It’s not harassment or assault, or physical in any way. But it is emotional and psychological. And it is exhausting for women to have to carry that load, and the expectation that they are responsible for making things better.

So now let’s return back to our living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms.

Another snippet from my own experience. It’s small, but in so many ways is not. After a dinner that I did not cook, I was talking to my girlfriend as she did the dishes. I was caught up in what I was saying, but still. She looked at me, stopped me, and reminded me that while I was standing there, I could dry the dishes she was cleaning, or wipe off the dining table, or sweep the floor, or, really, anything that needed to be done. It was a real life example from this piece from Harpers, where I first heard about the concept of emotional labor.

The author of that piece has asked her husband to hire a cleaning service for their home as a Mother’s Day gift. He didn’t do it, and instead slaved over the bathrooms himself. He thought he was doing what she asked, but instead made the problem worse, which of course was beyond his comprehension:

“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. I stumbled over the box of gift wrap he had pulled off a high shelf two days earlier and left in the center of our closet. In order to put it back, I had to get a kitchen chair and drag it into our closet so I could reach the shelf where it belonged.

“All you have to do is ask me to put it back,” he said, watching me struggle.

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

“That’s the point,” I said, now in tears, “I don’t want to have to ask.”

I shouldn’t have to ask. You should just know. Why was I just standing there in the kitchen, not doing anything, watching my girlfriend do all the work? Why did this guy leave his clothes on the floor, and the box of gift wrap in the middle of the closet?

And you can’t use not being able to read a woman’s mind as an excuse. This is less operational and more a way of being.

I don’t want to have to ask. I shouldn’t have to ask.My girlfriend loved that I would do anything she asked — but she too got tired of asking. That is the emotional labor that I’m talking about.

That emotional labor is what leaves women being the CEO, the general manager, of the home. And some may very well like aspects of that. But it is exhausting, and unless mutually agreed upon in ways that find a balance that work for an individual couple, patently unfair and ultimately toxic.

These are extraordinarily difficult habits to break. It reaches into the deepest grooves of our behavior patterns. It takes an enormous amount of energy, not physical energy, but mental and emotional energy, to focus, to think, to appreciate, to be aware, to correct and change those habits.

But that’s the entire point, isn’t it? If we as men aren’t able or willing to do that difficult work, we shift the burden to women, as if it’s a walk in the park for them to come home from a full day at the office, just as exhausted as we are, and do the things we can’t, won’t or even just aren’t aware of needing to be done.

As I’ve admitted, I’m no angel in this regard either. There are many other examples. Deferring on what movie to see. Just hanging back and letting the other person decide how we should spend a beautiful spring Sunday. Too often letting her make the first move in bed.

Ultimately, it’s an abdication of responsibility, action and leadership.

And the end result is a messed-up power imbalance that can ruin your relationship. Trust me — I’ve been there. And you know what happens then?

You have all the time in the world to plan on what to make for dinner.

Oh, and that bathroom? It’s not going to clean itself.

A version of this post was previously published on psiloveyou.xyz and is republished here with permission from the author.

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