Readers of this blog are likely already familiar with the concept of emotional labor—and very much aware that it is overwhelmingly done by women and overwhelmingly without formal recompense or proper acknowledgement. You also know that many people, unfortunately, are not.
In July 2015, the wonderful feminist blog The Toast ran a short piece on the concept: “‘Where’s My Cut?’: On Unpaid Emotional Labor.” (If you do not already follow this blog, you should.) What is remarkable is not so much the piece — which I do not thereby mean to dismiss in any way — but the popular response it generated.
A friend recently posted on Facebook a link to this 50-page condensed document carefully organized and compiled from the responses generated by the post. To say that the concept “struck a chord” would be an understatement. It is full of real life examples from (I assume, for the most part) non-academics dispersed across the English-speaking globe.
I encourage everyone to share it, and I also invite you to use the comments section of this blog to suggest ways it might be effectively used in an intro-level course (or, for that matter, high school).
To provide a flavor, I re-post the top-level headings along with a selection from each:
I. DEFINING EL
Count me in as someone who loves doing emotional labor if it’s acknowledged. But omg, maybe one of the saddest things ever for me in relationships is when I do something and put a lot of e ort into it and am so excited to do so because I just know it will make my partner feel so happy and loved – to do all that and then have the recipient literally not even notice or not say one word about it – omg. My heart just falls. I mean, it’s like I can almost feel it falling. It makes me SO sad. This is also a big trope in movies. The wife who goes out of her way to make herself look nice or make a nice dinner and set the table or whatever, and she’s so excited at the expectation of his reaction, and the husband just sweeps in and doesn’t even see it and you see the wife’s face fall. That never, ever fails to make me tear up. I’m tearing up just thinking about it. I don’t know why this thing in particular makes me so sad, but it really, really does. It’s just so hurtful.
posted by triggerfinger at 1:51 PM on July 21
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II. ANSWERING THE TYPICAL OBJECTIONS
I started a relationship 20 years ago where I vowed not to do it out of step or proportion with my partner. I verbalized this notion at the rst missed birthday: ‘“it’s on you dude, to remember your family members’ birthdays/ and also, while we are at it: you can also: make appointments to see a doctor/lawyer/dentist/ choose your own shoes/shirts/pants/shampoo / write job applications/ know when your bills are due/pay them / clean your own shit o the toilet bowl/ buy us all loo paper etc” Doing all this stu for a bloke is exhausting and invisible in its expectation – from the guy himself and the family and community he inhabits. Yet, fteen years on, the It’s Probably Just Easier To Do It Anyway aspect of holding this line, or breaking my line, killed the relationship.
As was so quickly and earnestly contested early in this thread to abdicating blokes (“Well, duh Ladeez, stop doing it if you hate it so much”) there are consequences of losing this core Kin Keeping work. If you stick to this line of behaviour you have to do without all those things you’d love for yourself. You close o that labour supply and hopeful expectation of reciprocity and maybe, like me, you realize you’re better o alone.
posted by honey-barbara at 8:09 AM on July 20
III. EXAMPLES OF EL
easter queen: This is a whole thing I’ve never acknowledged before– that being a female partner in a straight relationship means a BUTTLOAD of emotional labor around sex, that you really really can’t talk about, because there is so much male fragility on this issue.
HELL YES. I hadn’t even thought of this. Yet as soon as I read your comment, there he was popping up right in my head: Mr Previous, complaining that I ‘was ruining the mood’ if I told him that it hurt when he was rough or clumsy (or just impatient) during sex. So, never mind MY mood, whenever he did something that hurt me, I couldn’t just go ‘Ouch, that was a bit too rough, sweetie’, no… I needed to word my pain in a gentle and, I guess, sexy way, in order not to ruin his precious, precious mood.
Of course, this was the same guy who got impatient during foreplay, and asked me if he couldn’t just stick it in every now and then, without all of that hoopla? And then I had to be gentle again while I tried to explain that that’s not how vaginas work. Or at the very least not mine.
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:50 AM on July 22
IV. THE CURIOUS PUZZLE OF MEN AND EL
So that’s fascinating to me, endish thingy, because it taps into another discussion I’ve been having recently with a group of female friends elsewhere. Some of them have been divorced and are in the dating world again, involved with partners for several months, and trying to gure out whether these are people with whom they should try marriage again. As they talk this through with other people in the group this theme keeps coming up that these boyfriends should be dancing as hard as they can now to be the best possible partners and prove they’re worth marrying, and that obviously after that they’ll get lazy, that’s to be expected, but they should be on their very best behavior right now until they can get a ring on my friends’ ngers.
That conversation is confusing as hell to me, probably because I’m the only one of the group who has opted out of marriage in favor of a long-term (15-year) unmarried partnership, so I don’t have the same framework for understanding marriage as those who have experienced it personally. Emotional labor has changed in my relationship over time in ways both good and bad, but not in relation to some speci c milestone like a wedding.
So I’m pretty seriously weirded out to nd that my good friends explicitly expect and plan for the men in their lives to start o acting one way to get married, and then to change after marriage and become a less-good partner, and that’s just…the way it’s supposed to be? It feels like something I don’t have standing to challenge in these conversations because I know jack about marriage. But I really thought this pattern was something to expect men to break, not to just deal with it by expecting them to dance twice as well as you need them to before marriage so that when they slack o after marriage they’ll still be somewhere in the realm of acceptable partners. I want better for my friends and it makes me sad watching them tie themselves into these knots for people they fully expect will let them down later.
posted by Stacey at 6:09 AM on July 20
V. (RE)EVALUATING RELATIONSHIPS
This thread made me remember a long-ago conversation I had with my spouse. where I tried to express my frustration with the weight of all the tasks that were left for me to do: the mission critical tasks necessary to the functioning of our daily lives and how sucky it made me feel that if I didn’t do these tasks, they were left undone. I said that what really wrung my heart was the worry that someday I would be too old to take care of all these details and there would be no one who would take care of me. He insisted that I shouldn’t worry about such things, that he would step up. And I cried, “So what’s stopping you from stepping up now?”
No answer.
posted by [username] at 11:32 PM on July 21
