For years, my husband Rob left his socks on the living-room floor. He’d leave his coat hung over the back of a kitchen chair. His shoes would languish in the hallway. And don’t get me started on the wet towels or half-filled coffee cups I found all over the house. ‘Why doesn’t he see this stuff?’ I’d think to myself. ‘Why doesn’t he care?’.
My husband is a feminist ally and a good man, but that hasn’t always made him good at emotional labour. By that I mean tracking the mental work of the household and empathetically responding to those around to keep everything running smoothly. It encompasses noticing what needs to be done and doing it – buying loo rolls when we’re running low, remembering his mother’s birthday... Things that seemingly don’t come naturally to Rob.
And he’s not alone – the Office for National Statistics found that women do around 40% more of the household chores and childcare than men. But do women have as much responsibility as men for these woeful stats? We tell men that they cannot, and quite frankly should not, put in the effort to learn these skills because they’ll never come close to a woman’s expertise in this realm.
The prevailing sentiment is that men are hard-wired differently. They’re less emotionally intuitive. We tell women it’s easier to simply shoulder the load than to try to work ‘against nature’ to right this imbalance. Stay in your lane. It’s not worth the trouble, even though it takes a great deal of energy to perform this type of labour, and our brains never fully switch off. If I’m honest, I bought into that myth for a long time. The problem came to a head one Mother’s Day. As a present, I’d asked for a cleaning service to come and blitz our bathroom. Frankly, I wanted a break. My husband had called one company the day before, decided they were too expensive, and instead gave me a necklace as a gift and cleaned the bathroom himself.
Meanwhile, I was left to care for our three children while the rest of our house fell into carnage. I tried to explain my frustration, but Rob’s knee-jerk reaction was to defend himself against what he saw as an attack on his character. He took it as me saying that he didn’t do enough or that I expected perfection. In reality, he wasn’t the problem. The way we condition men and women to either perform or neglect emotional labour was the problem, and the fact that these social norms had slipped into our household was the problem – and, of course, I couldn’t eloquently express any of that while fuming over a simple task I felt he hadn’t properly thought through.
It is especially difficult when you’re frustrated by how it’s playing out in the minutiae of everyday life. More often than not, it looks like you’re just pissed off about socks being left on the floor. It becomes tedious to explain how it’s so much more than that, especially without sounding like a nag. That’s why, in 2017, I decided to write an essay on emotional labour addressing mine and other women’s frustration and the toll it can take on an otherwise happy relationship. It was called Women Aren’t Nags – We’re Just Fed Up and, much to my surprise, the piece went viral. It has now been shared almost one million times. Since then, emotional labour has been a topic of constant conversation in our household. I’m teaching my husband how to get more in tune with emotional labour – something he has actively expressed a desire to learn – but, quite honestly, the work involved in explaining concepts that are second nature to me is sometimes hard.
Both of us are still learning. Rob still often helps only after I’ve reminded him. And I find myself falling back on old habits, taking over the emotional labour instead of pointing out my husband’s blind spots. I have to pause, breathe, and remind myself that he is learning this skill set for the first time in his life. Because the truth is, emotional labour is a learned skill, not an innate one. It will, however, be worthwhile. Leaning into emotional labour means leaning into your life, becoming more fully connected with those around you and their needs, and ultimately coming into a better understanding of the full human experience.
It also means gaining a deeper appreciation of the life of your partner. Because it’s never really about the socks on the floor. It’s about how we care for one another, how we notice one another – and how we show this to the people we love.
_'Fed Up’ by Gemma Hartley (__£14.99,_Yellow Kite) is out now. Can YOU relate to Gemma and Rob? Let us know at feedback@graziamagazine.co.uk