Negotiating With The Emotional Labor Union (Maggie Update)

Some people worry about one thing. Some people worry about other things. Some people see their worrying as a commodity for which they deserve compensation. They’ve given this a name, emotional labor.

The crying, the snapping at him—it all required damage control. I had to tell him how much I appreciated the bathroom cleaning, but perhaps he could do it another time (like when our kids were in bed). 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. I tried to tell him that I noticed the box at least 20 times over the past two days. He had noticed it only when I was heaving it onto the top shelf instead of asking for help. The whole explanation took a lot of restraint.

This is a leap into the middle of a narrative, and the “box” referred to, the “box” giving rise to “the crying, the snapping at him,” was a box of gift wrap that was taken out to give the writer, Gemma Hartley, a necklace for Mother’s Day.

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.

Was he thoughtless about the box? Sure. Some guys would have put it back because we finish what we start, and it’s not done until everything is put away. That’s just how we roll. So Hartley’s hubby isn’t that kind of guy? Well, what kind of guy is he?

My husband is a good man, and a good feminist ally. I could tell, as I walked him through it, that he was trying to grasp what I was getting at. But he didn’t.

There might be a message in there if she looked hard enough, but it’s hard to see when you’re crying. The real problem wasn’t the box, which was just a substitute object of excuse for Hartley’s conflation of her annoyance with his cluelessness. The problem was that she didn’t want a necklace for Mother’s Day. What she wanted was for her husband to value her emotional labor.

He said he’d try to do more cleaning around the house to help me out. He restated that all I ever needed to do was ask him for help, but therein lies the problem. I don’t want to micromanage housework. I want a partner with equal initiative.

“Equal initiative” is a curious phrase when what she means is “obsessed with the things that obsess ME!!!!” Or to put it otherwise, why can’t men feel more like women? To point this out, of course, is to court ruin, as this is a flagrantly sexist thing to say, since everyone knows that there is no such thing as male or female, or any gender in between.

Bearing the brunt of all this emotional labor in a household is frustrating. It’s the word I hear most commonly when talking to friends about the subject of all the behind-the-scenes work they do. It’s frustrating to be saddled with all of these responsibilities, no one to acknowledge the work you are doing, and no way to change it without a major confrontation.

On the contrary, there is a very simple way to deal with these responsibilities. Hartley’s feminist ally husband told her the way. If he’s not doing something you want him to do, just ask. Unless he’s lounging about the house eating bonbons all day, he’s probably doing things too. One can’t quite tell from the narrative, as Hartley never mentions anything her husband does so she doesn’t have to. It’s almost as if the only thing she thinks about is herself, her feelings, her frustration. It’s almost as if her husband’s existence is merely an extension of her neediness, and her feelings toward him focus only on what he doesn’t do for her sake.

“What bothers me the most about having any conversation around emotional labor is being seen as a nag,” says Kelly Burch, a freelance journalist who works primarily from home. “My partner feels irritated and defensive by the fact that I’m always pointing out what he’s not doing. It shuts him down. I understand why it would be frustrating from his perspective, but I haven’t figured out another way to make him aware of all the emotional and mental energy I’m spending to keep the house running.”

Why is it always the woman’s job to “keep the house running”? It’s a totally fair question. So don’t. Stop doing it. Stop worrying about it. End the tyranny of emotional labor. Go on strike. Better yet, let the laundry pile up and when he says the inevitable, “Honey, I have no clean underpants,” shrug.

But then, he may do the laundry, just as he cleaned the bathrooms, because it needed to get done. And chances are pretty good he won’t respond to the shrug with a, “fine, go you fix the leak in the sink,” because that’s not the way guys respond. But it will still be about doing the job, not acknowledging your emotional labor. You may get clean laundry, but that’s not what you want.

And you will probably still suffer the burden of your emotional labor because he won’t do it “right,” he won’t do it “your way.” It’s not because your emotional labor is worthless, but because it only exists in your head. In his head, there’s only the thing to be done. All you have to do is ask. He can’t read your mind.

H/T Patrick Maupin

Update: David Meyer-Lindenberg just pointed me at Maggie McNeill’s brilliant quote about:

the unfortunate female tendency to forget that men cannot read between the lines as well as we can and are therefore mystified or infuriated by female guessing games of the “You should know what’s wrong without being told!” variety.
Some women understand men better than others.

 

14 thoughts on “Negotiating With The Emotional Labor Union (Maggie Update)

  1. Kathleen Casey

    She yaps about three children. Are their arms broken? Why have them if not to train them to do things? So much emoting. So little thought.

    1. SHG Post author

      Don’t be silly. Children can’t afford the price of emotional labor. And they don’t have time to earn it as they’re busy learning how to be good women.

    1. SHG Post author

      You realize, of course, that your failing no more excuses you from liability than Hartley’s husband. Or me.

  2. jay-w

    I suppose it would be irredeemably sexist to suggest that Hartley would be doing everybody a big favour if she just divorced her “feminist ally” (i.e., wimpy nice guy) husband already.

    That way, he would have a chance to find a nice pleasant, non-drama-queen wife who would appreciate him for what he is.

    And Hartley would be free to find the man that she really wants: A Stanley Kowalski, motorcycle outlaw type, whose instinctive response to her whining would be something guttural along the lines of “Put it away yourself, B***h, and then go fetch me a beer.”

  3. DHMCarver

    When I first saw “emotional labor”, I thought, What, is that the angst you go through before you produce your emotion? Then I read further and thought – WTF? For lulz I clicked on the link for “the concept of emotional labor” in the first extract from the piece, and lo and behold, it is a link to a 49-page, single-spaced document explaining the concept. I have too damn much to do around the house to read something like that.

    I loved that one of Hartley’s sources of proof was “a freelance journalist who works primarily from home.” Probably not the safest authority for such discussions. . . .

    A side note, in my household, these gender norms, if they are gender norms, are reversed – – and never once did I think of my annoyance as being “emotional labor”. I would feel like an idiot if I ever conceived of such a concept to explain my being pissed off about normal household annoyance.

    1. SHG Post author

      There is another way of understanding “emotional labor,” but it’s even less flattering to the laborer. Stop being a neurotic self-absorbed control freak and, boom, you’ll never have to labor again.

  4. Kate

    As a female person, I find this stuff so embarrassing. In my late 40s now, I feel like women in my lifetime are becoming weaker and weaker, and, even more inexplicably to me, bearing this weakness as a point of pride. I keep coming back to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s quote that Western feminism is obsessed with “trivial bullshit.” She is completely correct.

    1. Kate

      Just to add on my original comment, her describing her husband as “a good feminist ally” made me cringe. It manages to be both coldly ideological and emasculating at the same time. I can’t imagine thinking of my husband or our marriage in such a way.

  5. B. McLeod

    I don’t think this stuff is necessarily tied to gender. In law school, I roomed in a house with four other men (the owner, and other students in various fields of study). We had our various notions of how clean the kitchen, bathroom and common areas needed to be. All this was handled by somebody taking care of whatever when its condition of slovenliness surpassed their comfort level. Nobody (even the owner) expected everybody else to adopt or conform to their standards. I know some women who do things this same way. I can’t remember ever visiting my grandmother when her kitchen wasn’t piled high with dirty dishes. Some people have a greater tolerance for clutter, and to those with lesser tolerance goes the labor (physical and emotional) of clearing the clutter if they so insist.

  6. Pedantic Grammar Police

    This is an ancient debate. What is new is that some men are now “tamed” to the point where they can listen to this kind of thing without breaking into gales of laughter.

    1. SHG Post author

      Yeah, I remember when grandma and grandpa discussed her emotional labor. Grandpa even wrote a song about it.

  7. Lee

    >And you will probably still suffer the burden of your emotional labor because he won’t do it “right,” he >won’t do it “your way.'”

    Yep. That describes my house. 🙂

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