Women feel taken advantage of. Men feel micromanaged.
How to fix the unequal share of household labor in heterosexual relationships.
I’m scared to write about the unequal share of household labor in heterosexual relationships.
The fact that women in the U.S. spend almost double the amount of time each day than men on unpaid housework and caretaking.
I’m scared because so many women are fed up with it and (justifiably) pissed off. Zawn Villines, who writes the Liberating Motherhood newsletter, calls it straight up “abuse.” A commenter on one of my recent posts wrote that it “enables the infantilization of men.”
I bet it’s a big reason why unmarried and childless women report the highest levels of happiness and are more likely to live longer than those who marry and have children.
But it’s important. Many of the men who come to me for therapy are struggling through relationship conflict because of it.
Why is it happening? What should men be doing to address it? Why should men even care? What can we do about it as a society?
I know I’m not going to fully answer these questions in this post. But here are some thoughts to get a conversation started (let me know what you think in the comments or email me: jeremy@jeremymohler.blog).
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Management—not labor—is the issue.
The biggest complaint from women seems to be that men aren’t sharing the responsibility to manage household chores and childcare and meals and doctor’s appointments and caretaking for older relatives and maintaining social connections and all the things.
It’s not that we aren’t contributing to the work. It’s that we’re not joining in the coordinated “adulting” that goes into living a life and having a family. “[The] mostly invisible combination of anxiety and planning,” in the words of journalist Jessica Grose.
Things like anticipating that registration for your kid’s summer camp happens months beforehand. And planning and coordinating meals for the week. And making the list of “thank you” notes that need to be written after a birthday party. And... And... And...
Men might pull our weight doing tasks—washing dishes, doing laundry, cooking meals, cutting grass, waking up early with the kids. But many women feel like they’re the only ones tracking what and when things need to get done. And then monitoring those things after a decision is made. Like figuring out what preschool to choose and then making sure all the medical forms are filled out for the first day of school.
It seems like we’re in a feedback loop.
I’m pulling from a small sample size, but it seems like there’s a pattern with my friends and therapy clients. The women feel taken advantage of and exhausted. The men feel micromanaged and checked out.
The women feel like they’re the only ones paying attention to the bigger picture and the small details. Like their partner fumbles everything. Like they can’t trust him.
The men feel like they’re being controlled. Like they aren’t allowed to manage things the way they want to. Like they can’t get anything right. Like they’re a worker, and their partner is the boss.
This cycle seems to reinforce itself. The more that women get frustrated and try to manage their partner to do things the “right” way, the more that men get frustrated and give up, sinking deeper into the worker role.
Men need to make up for the imbalance.
I get why women feel stressed and resentful. There are times in my relationship when I feel like I’m the only one paying attention to how tidy the house is. Or what our plan is for the next five years. It can feel lonely and frustrating. It can also feel maddening. Am I crazy for caring about this so much?
I chalk it up to being more anxious in general than my partner. I worry about future things more than she does. This worrying often doesn’t reflect the reality. Plans get made. Things get done. Everything works out in the end. I checked in with her before writing this post, and she agrees that we’re both doing our fair share of planning and household labor.
Yet, my experience is different than what women are experiencing. Women carry the weight of cultural expectations about being good at running a household and caretaking. They’re told it’s their “natural,” God-given ability. If the house is messy or the forms aren’t filled out or “thank you” notes don’t get sent, it’s often seen as their fault.
As feminist historian Silvia Federici writes,
“[Women’s] minds, our bodies, and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function ... and then have been thrown back at us as a model to which we should all conform if we want to be accepted as women in this society.”
One way that women’s minds and emotions have been distorted is anxiety about living up to these expectations. Grose says, “We have culturally defined good mothering as worrying and doing this sort of mental labor, whereas we don’t define good fathering in quite the same way.”
Men need to recognize that their partner is under this pressure. It’s like the societal pressure we feel about “providing and protecting”—and the resulting shame when we come up short.
This doesn’t mean just being subservient and saying things like, “What do you need me to do?” That might be helpful sometimes. But we should check in with our partner about the share of household labor and management. We should talk about coordinating and collaborating. We should think of responsibilities that we can “own” and own them, from start to finish.
I coach men to tap into their emotions and share them with their partner. To be more present. To set boundaries. To understand and communicate their needs. To be more attuned to their partner’s emotions and needs.
These skills aren’t easy for me. Meaning, I have to practice and work on them. I was conditioned as a boy to do the opposite. To withhold my feelings. To think that I have to handle everything on my own. To avoid emotionally uncomfortable conversations. To avoid collaboration.
Ultimately, we need systems change.
Yet, at the same time, I’m actually pretty good at managing and coordinating things at work. That’s why I think capitalism is ultimately why both women and men are struggling with this issue.
Capitalism is where this whole unequal household labor thing comes from. Before a few hundred years ago, everyone shared in work inside and outside the home to different degrees in different societies around the world. Household labor and caretaking wasn’t considered lesser than the “real work” of going to a job. It didn’t go unpaid. It was valued and handled by the family and often community as a whole. It wasn’t always fairly distributed, but men and women generally worked side by side, often on the same tasks.
In capitalism, housework and care work are taken for granted, devalued, exploited. Most men certainly need to do more of it, particularly the managing and planning. But it’s not as simple as we don’t want to. It’s that we’ve been conditioned to look down on it—because our society devalues it.
“There are all sorts of men who clearly are capable of planning ahead and being organized and doing all this executive function work for their profession,” says sociologist Allison Daminger. “And yet those same traits are not activated at home.”
That’s why this issue isn’t going to be addressed solely through individual men trying to do better. We need systems change. We need better government policy. We need more power over our lives. We need the ability to work less hours (for the same pay). We need to tax billionaires and big corporations for more public investment in things that support families, like federal parental leave and publicly funded childcare.
Speaking for myself and many of my friends and therapy clients, men are also struggling under the weight of too many responsibilities, too many work hours, too much “adulting,” too little time to rest and recover and enjoy life. On average, we’re struggling less than women, who now have to work full-time while working more at home. But we all could use more time and support.
Now, a question for the comments below (or email me at jeremy@jeremymohler.blog): How do you feel about the unequal share of household labor?
(P.S. If you become a paid subscriber for $5/month, you’ll get my weekly Friday Q&A posts with tips for a healthier, more fulfilling relationship, plus the warm feeling of supporting my writing!)
Meh I don’t agree with the “both sidesing” this bit implies “The women feel taken advantage of and exhausted. The men feel micromanaged and checked out.”
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Men’s feelings of being “controlled” are not equivalent (or even legitimate) compared to women’s feelings of being used as an appliance, taken for granted, exhausted, frustrated.
Eg if men’s norm is talking 80% of the time and women talking 20%, when men are asked to make it more equal, they end up with 70-30 - this feels “equal” to them. And they might feel “oh so oppressed” when asked to make it 60-40 or god forbid 50-50. Because their norm is so skewed. But their feelings of “oppression” at being asked to go 60-40 are objectively not valid. They are not in fact being oppressed. There’s various studies of men and women’s talking time to this effect.
Men’s feelings and actions arise from general laziness that heterosexual privilege affords them. Why not think about all the emotional labour / household labour? Because that’s “women’s work.” And dismissing it as such gives men the right to put their feet up and not have to do it AND to feel entitled about feeling “so oppressed” by his meany mean wife who is asking him to do better AND to feel entitled to some sympathy / empathy for his sorry position.
Why should I give any credence to the dude’s feelings when they arise from his belief that he is innately superior, his time and life and just worth more than the woman’s etc? Why should any woman bother empathising with her abuser who is stealing her time and life on a daily basis? Who is buying his free time with her exhaustion?
This is the problem with this article:
1. The article first “both sides” the argument as if both parties’ feelings and needs must be given equal consideration or be considered equally legitimately (instead of questioning the messed up beliefs that the guy’s feelings arise from)
2. The article reinforces this by talking about the feedback loop that is self-reinforcing, as if both partners are (equally) to blame.
3. The article pretends it will recognise that men hold power therefore men have the ability to move this dynamic to a more equitable position in the subheading “Men need to make up for the imbalance.”
4. But then the article goes on to pretty much talk about how the author is “not like other men,” and how terrible it is that women are socialised to take care of others and men must recognise the “societal pressure” that women are under…which all feels like it’s blaming women for shouldering the burden too much. Rather than challenging men why they think they are entitled to have free head space.
5. Then in the para that does finally talk about what men should “do”, there’s actually very little doing to be seen. It’s all about “checking in” with the partner, “talking” about collaborating and coordinating, “think[ing] of” responsibilities etc. C’mon folks. Men are masters of talking endlessly in circles as a substitute for actually doing any work (including mental / emotional labour / management work).
6. Then we have a brief foray into men needing to get in touch with their feelings, their partner’s feelings, set “boundaries” and “communicate their needs” - pointless advice in a world where men are already excellent at setting de facto boundaries by not doing anything at all and threatening or ignoring their partners when they raise issues, and where the whole world is set up to cater to men’s needs…Again, more feelings talk rather than actually just doing the work!
7. And then finally the article further absolves men for actually doing stuff by pointing out that hey, the system is the problem! We need systems change! Capitalism is to blame! Um hello? We’ve had like 3000 years of patriarchy well before capitalism got going.
8. And the article ends by centering men and pointing out how much men are “struggling” and exhausted too. And how they could really use some R&R. And implied is if we fix capitalism, we could all get more free time and support. Not so fast, folks: we actually need to smash the patriarchy and do away with men’s entitlement to women’s bodies, minds, lives, futures. Because all that pre-dates capitalism.
The problem seems to be that in trying to appeal to men, the article is being too “nice”, which is to say, cosying up to power (men), rather than calling a spade a spade and centering women in a world where men are constantly centred. It goes too easy on men, and risks letting them off the hook. It avoids the big hairy issues of “power,” “entitlement”, “abuse.” In fact, other than a cursory nod to Zawn Villines’ extensive work on these themes, it hardly even mentions these three words.
Just a related comment: A friend and I discovered that most women feel exhausted when we're in a relationship.
And I don't just blame the men. Speaking just for myself, I glide into a role so subconsciously that I don't even realize how much more I'm doing.
Also, male privilege is so visible in relationships. Women are blamed for so much, even when men are the responsible party sometimes but almost never have to shoulder the blame.