I wanted to take a moment to round up the various things I’ve read that explain the problem of emotional labor, or mental labor.
This is very often a gendered problem; but it isn’t always, and we should be careful not to dismiss cases as irrelevant when the genders don’t shake out in the usual way. (In a rare moment of self-awareness, I sometimes refer to myself, in my mom group, as “the useless husband of the marriage.” I’m the one who doesn’t mind little hairs on the sink, toothpaste bits on the mirror, etc.)
The post that made me think about the subject today was https://www.mamamia.com.au/delegate-mental-load/ (2021) – the one about the dog. For full disclosure, I think she’s being really pointlessly stressed about the dog itself – but the point of the overall post is that it’s not about the dog.
Another one that’s a classic in my circles is Fallait Demander, translated into English as You Should Have Asked (2017). It’s told in comic form (and I’m not sure if it has alt-text?) but it’s a very well-told narrative explanation of how this sort of thing tends to happen.
A little before that, a man wrote a good essay explaining it from his side – “She divorced me because I left the dishes in the sink” (2016). As he explains in it, it’s not actually about the proximate causes of the crisis, but rather about everything else that’s going on.
For emotional labor in specific, which is often grouped in with household mental labor but is worth examining separately, The Toast’s “Where’s My Cut?” (2015) is a good read.
On the subject of grouping emotional labor with the mental load: It’s useful to be able to separate these things out and classify them individually, because a given relationship dynamic is likely to have variance from other relationships (cf. the famous Anna Karenina quote). In my example, I’m bad at the mental load of remembering to wash the dishes or how much food we have in the house; my husband is great about those things. But we had a lot of angst a few years back about emotional labor, expectations of how to handle extended family, and the like. Even someone who is good and wonderful in one area can sometimes fall down in another; and I find it helps to give credit for the good parts while still asking firmly for the bad parts to be remedied.
Here in 2023, I’ve been finding some other things that summarize the Mental Load pretty well. This TikTok (and the one it’s linked in from) talks about how Thinking (of what tasks need to be done, etc) is itself a form of labor. “There are a hundred things that need to get done around this house and at any given time I’m thinking about at least six of them. I need to to take six minutes, come up with a list of six things that need to be done, and then go execute four of them.”
I saw this list of links in a Reddit comment, and figured I’d add it here!
- https://www.nytimes.com/article/emotional-labor.html
- https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a12063822/emotional-labor-gender-equality/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3925744/
- https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/
- https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/50-ways-people-expect-constant-emotional-labor-from-women-and-femmes/
- https://www.salon.com/2023/04/02/the-toll-of-emotional-labor-you-have-a-hierarchy-of-whose-experience-matters-and-whose-doesnt/
Emilybook 
For an additional link about emotional labor, I found this one recently, which also seems on point, and provides concrete actions we can take to even the load: Why Women do the Household Worrying. (Non-paywall version: Why Women do the Household Worrying.)
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