One thing my social circle has started doing recently, which I find very useful, is using the “wrench” and “ear” emoji to indicate whether they are looking for help fixing a problem, or just needing to vent about their problems.
The issue between Fixers and Venters is longstanding; nobody is wrong for having their own ways of coping with a problem, but it can still make our friends feel frustrated and unheard if we try to help them the way WE want to be helped, if it’s not the way that they prefer or need.
I can’t think of any great think-pieces about Venting versus Fixing, but if any cross my mind I’ll come back and post them here. (Edit: Apparently Multiamory has a podcast about this, but it breaks it into three reactions. I’ll see if I can dig up a transcript.)
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.
a while ago, I learned about the mental load — and created a comprehensive guide to cleaning! Check it out if you haven’t! #mentalload
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!
In the religious tradition I grew up in (Roman Catholicism), we did talk about consent some (in the sense that all sex should be both Unitive and Procreative, and non-consensual sex is not Unitive), but we still very much used the “Sex God approves of” and “Sex God does not approve of” set of boxes.
Being able to put this idea into words – the idea that Catholic sexual mores were lacking, and didn’t match up with how I felt about morality – was a liberating experience, and I credit it with being the beginning of my own sexual awakening. For a long time, I think I had held on to the ideas I learned as a teen steeped in Catholic youth culture — that sex was wasteful and unhealthy if done in a “wrong” context, and that only a very small number of sex acts were even plausibly “right.” Even when I verbally disavowed that attitude, it hung on in my subconscious for much longer than it ought to have.
In my mind, the thing that makes a given sexual act moral is whether it is Consensual and whether it is Honest. Not whether a given religious doctrine says it is appropriate.
The first thing I’d like to share here is the concept of Ask Culture and Guess Culture.
I first learned about this on Captain Awkward’s blog, back in…2010? 2011? Something like that. It really made an impression on me, and shaped how I think about all of my interactions.
I am, myself, a strongly Ask Person. I ask for things ALL THE TIME, and I often let people know pre-emptively “It’s okay if the answer is no!” when I do so. But many of my friends are Guess People, and I’m trying to be more cognizant of that when I’m interacting with folks.
My best example of how this plays out awkwardly is a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago – my daughter (“Rosie”) and her older son (“Dash”) are about the same age, and I needed to get something done on a day my husband was busy, so I asked if she could watch Rosie for me. She hemmed and hawed for a while, so I said “It’s okay if you can’t!” to which she replied “Yeah, I’d love to but it’s just that I have Jack-Jack’s birthday that day, so I’ll be hosting 20 toddlers at the house and I just don’t think I can keep an eye on Rosie too.” I was HORRIFIED that she had even CONSIDERED saying yes to my request – if I had known it was Jack-Jack’s birthday, I wouldn’t have even asked her to watch my kid. But from her perspective, she would never ask unless she desperately needed the help; so she was weighing if she could give me this help in the context of her own life. And I’m sure that if I had been having a true emergency, she would have helped or helped me find someone who could! But we weren’t talking Emergency Appendectomy here.
So if you find yourself in conflict with your friends or family members, or even co-workers (though the rules can be different there), consider: Is this a result of different request styles? And if so, can you use the Ask vs. Guess framework to communicate better with your loved ones?
August 2022 update: A friend recently linked to this essay, “They Might Say No,” and it reminded me a great deal of the Ask/Guess dichotomy, so I’m adding it to this essay!
Additionally, doing an idle Google search found me a couple more takes on this concept, from The Guardian and Scary Mommy. So, I figured I’d share those for additional perspective.
March 2023 update: Found this TikTok about translating conversations that can take place between people who are neurotypical and people who have autism. It’s very similar to Ask/Guess!
Emilybook 