The Relationship Advice That Drives Me Nuts
The devaluation of women's time and labor is not a "story we're telling ourselves"
Fighting with your partner? Use these 4 phrases.
This was the subject of a dedicated email from The New York Times that recently graced my inbox. It claimed to offer four magical phrases that will help people in relationships share their “grievances in ways that speed the repair process.”
Well, of course I clicked through to the story. I’ve been fighting with my estranged husband since June. I’ve shared plenty of grievances, but there has been no repair process, speedy or otherwise.
Like all of my self-help-obsessed American counterparts, I was eager to know what I was doing “wrong” so that I could fix it. This, despite the fact that I already had a pretty good idea of what these four phrases would be, had already wrestled with them in multiple therapy sessions, had already felt like a failure because they never worked in the way I was told they should work.
Now and then, there were some flashes of understanding, some glimmers of empathy, but they never took hold. And of course, I blamed myself. Clearly I just wasn’t doing it “right.”
The four phrases this particular article recommends?
“This is what I saw or heard.”
“This is what I made up about it.”
“This is how I felt.”
“This is what would help me feel better.”
It’s not bad advice — for some types of conflicts. When it’s simply a matter of two parties coming to the table with two perspectives, the “story I’m telling myself” approach can prevent defensiveness and encourage empathy.
But more often than not, as in the case of this article, counselors and relationship “experts” and self-help gurus apply this advice to conflicts surrounding domestic labor inequity — which, let’s face it, is a primary driver, if not the primary driver, of marital strife. In doing so, they imply that these conflicts are nothing more than communication problems that can be solved if we can successfully articulate our feelings and refrain from putting our partners on the defensive.
The article’s author, Jancee Dunn, recounts a recent situation in which she was cleaning up the kitchen while her husband was on his phone in the living room. After repeatedly asking him for help and receiving no response, she “slipped into an old habit,” imagining “a thought bubble above his head” that went something like this:
“Life is good… I’m kicking back while my wife does everything! My time is more valuable than hers!”
In this particular case, Dunn eventually confronts her husband about the story she’s “concocted” that involves “him deliberately ignoring me and prioritizing his leisure time over mine.” The cute twist at the end? Her husband takes out his earbuds and says, “I’m sorry, what?”
This is supposed to prove that Dunn’s story about labor inequity and the devaluation of her time was just that — a story. Now she and her husband can share a laugh about her getting all worked up over nothing.
Maybe we can let Dunn’s husband off the hook in this particular case — and I say maybe because even with earbuds, was her husband really totally oblivious to her bustling around the kitchen? Was he not aware that the kitchen was a mess and required attention?
But hey, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Regardless of exactly what happened this time around, it’s still abundantly clear that Dunn, like nearly every heterosexual wife or ex-wife I know, has experienced frustrations in the past regarding labor inequity and the devaluation of her time.
Clearly, there is a much, much larger problem at play here — a problem that has nothing to do with communication or lack thereof, a problem that cannot, nor ever will, be solved in the home.
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The problem is this: As a society, we simply don’t value care work and household work, including the emotional and mental labor they entail. The labor that women disproportionately take on — often before, during, or after the jobs we work that are recognized by the formal economy — is not “profitable” and therefore not really labor. It’s just “stuff around the house,” a series of menial chores, nothing to get all worked up about. It’s not like it’s paying the bills.
And besides, our husbands are happy to help! We just have to communicate better about what we need them to do. Which is, of course, its own form of labor, but details, details. I mean, do we expect our husbands to read our minds?
Of course, it isn’t just our husbands who consistently demonstrate an utter lack of regard for our labor and our time. This disregard is systemic — deeply embedded and deeply internalized.
We fail our infants and young children during crucial developmental stages with scant parental leave options and a wholly inadequate, patchwork system of childcare that is not deemed “important” enough for government funding. We design workplace demands around outdated assumptions that workers have partners at home, and we deem essential household labor as trivial compared to the male dominated industries that power our country’s economic engine.
We either pay peanuts for caregiving and domestic labor, or we pay nothing at all. If we were to factor women’s unpaid labor into our GDP, it would grow by an estimated 30–50 percent. And if women globally earned just minimum wage for this labor, an Oxfam analysis found that it would total $10.9 trillion annually. That, according to The New York Times, is more than the “combined revenue of the 50 largest companies on last year’s Fortune Global 500 list, including Walmart, Apple and Amazon.”
Studies from Gallup, Pew Research Center, The Lancet Public Health, the National Library of Medicine and other sources too numerous to list here show that even when men and women contribute roughly the same amount to the paid economy, women consistently put in far more unpaid hours at home.
Most of these studies and surveys don’t even factor in mental and emotional labor. That is to say, if one spends an hour a week purchasing groceries, the time it takes to survey the fridge and pantry, plan meals for the week, and make a grocery list is entirely unaccounted for. Even when visible household and caregiving tasks are divided somewhat evenly amongst men and women, women are far more likely to be doing the invisible planning that goes into them.
We refuse to name these well-documented inequities for what they are: exploitation. Instead, we trivialize them as “relationship issues” and “communication problems.” Our husbands can be annoying and clueless, but my goodness, they’re not monsters!
I don’t believe that men are inherently monsters any more than I believe that women are inherently nags. But I do believe that as long as we refuse to recognize the economic and social value of care work and domestic labor, wives will continue to “miscommunicate,” husbands will continue to respond defensively, therapists and articles will continue to arm us with inadequate phrases and tools, women like me will continue to try them, the results will continue to disappoint us, and we’ll continue to blame ourselves.
This is what I see or hear: Women consistently do more unpaid household and caregiving labor and enjoy less leisure time.
This is what I’ve “made up” about it: We’re being disregarded, disrespected, and exploited in our own homes.
This is how I feel: Fucking furious.
This is what would help me feel better: If we all stopped treating this as a story, or something we’ve “made up,” and started treating it as a reality that millions upon millions of women live with every single day.
What I’m reading:
This title of this story by
says it all: The Diapers Won’t Save Us. She outlines a White House initiative to provide new parents with diapers and other baby supplies, then compares the cost of these supplies to the cost of childcare, which the White House doesn’t help most parents with at all.So yeah, when it comes to supporting caregivers, I guess the government is kind of doing something. But it’s not really what we need, and it’s definitely not enough.
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The demise of my marriage stems fully from this dynamic. Not only was I working full time, I was solely responsible for all the house shit, the mental labor (planning, etc), and the family stuff (remembering family birthdays, buying gifts, etc). He mowed the lawn, took the garbage out, and did periodic house projects (painting, etc).
It worked though.
Then we had a baby.
Once the baby was born, I was solely responsible for him too. My ex would sometimes hold him in the evenings when he chilled after dinner watching TV, but he never changed a diaper, never gave him a bath, etc. Maybe that was my fault for not suggesting? Not pushing for that?
The resentment built up inside me over time becuz I was exhausted. When I pointed this out to him, he minimized it. I only had 1 child. I had an office job. I worked from home 2 of the 5 days. Why was getting dinner ready every day such a problem? Why did I expect him to help when he did the outside chores?
He was always saying I was crazy, and when he left, it was becuz I ‘beat him down’.
When I pointed out it sounded like he expected a housewife, he agreed that he did! But I was the primary breadwinner! He wanted me to be both, and to be ok with that. But I wasn’t.
After he left, of course, my responsibilities increased for sure and financially it was harder, but mentally, I found it easier to handle it all without a grown capable man in my line of vision every day not noticing my efforts and not stepping up to share in the burdens of life. He wanted a mother, a housewife, a breadwinner, as well as a partner. I couldn’t do all of that though. I wanted to be partners, the way we started out. I thought we had that, but once I became a mother, it all changed completely.
Zawn Villanes does a wonderful job of pointing out this issue too!
And unfortunately, men do know what they’re doing when it comes to this.