Your Husband Won't Pick Up the Mental Load If You Put It Down
Thoughts on being raised by a single dad and the advice to “just do less”
I spend a lot of time thinking about the mental load and the division of labor in hetero relationships. It impacts my own life, but I would also go so far as to say that the quandary of how to more evenly divide labor is the number one stressor that partnered hetero women on my caseload struggle with. This applies to the mothers on my caseload, but it is also a critical issue for the childless women on my caseload who are partnered with men. The cultural expectation that women should do the bulk of domestic and emotional labor is a perennial problem that we can’t seem to find a solution for.
I was hopeful about The Fair Play Deck and the books and documentary that are part of The Fair Play franchise; but what I have seen when women try to have Fair Play conversations with their male partners is that it doesn’t go well. Women think, “Ooh, now I have this visual tool that will finally illustrate for my husband just how much invisible labor I am doing, and since he loves me and knows it’s not fair for me to do more than he does, he will step up and do more, and we will redistribute this labor fairly.” Please post in the comments if you or anyone you know has actually had this experience with Fair Play. Instead, what seems to happen is that men obstinately argue that they are doing just as much as their wives even when confronted with ample evidence that contradicts that. Many men deflect the conversation by pouting about how they are unappreciated, or how there is no point in trying harder because they don’t get enough credit for the things they do. Others argue that they can’t do more because they are overwhelmed with the responsibilities of their paid work, often ignoring the fact that their wives are working as well. Cindy DiTiberio describes her disastrous Fair Play conversation here. While Fair Play is a nice idea in theory, in practice, what seems to happen is that most men will find any justification not to do more domestic labor. Fair Play is validating and empowering for women, but it does not seem to be an effective tool for actually redistributing the work.
The other piece of advice I keep encountering is some variation on the theme that the answer is to “just do less.” Kerala Goodkin wrote an excellent essay about how this is “bad advice that pretends to be empowering” for a variety of reasons. The way this advice lands for me is by making me feel ashamed of my habitual tendency to overfunction, as if others would do more if I didn’t always do it first.
In an interview on We Can Do Hard Things, Kate Mangino, the author of Equal Partners, blamed “maternal gatekeeping” for men not stepping up at home. She argues that because women don’t have equitable power at work, they “maintain power in the house” by nitpicking about how their husbands perform domestic labor, which discourages men from trying to do more. She argues that women need to “step back to create the space for other people to come in and find their way.” (It’s cute how she says “other people” as if the “other people” aren’t almost always men. I think she’s trying to be gender-inclusive, but it feels like gaslighting to me. “Maternal gatekeeper” is gender-specific, so who do we imagine these “other people” are if not overwhelmingly fathers?) A minute later, she says she doesn’t want anyone to think she’s blaming women for the inequitable division of labor, but I don’t see any other way to interpret that.
This interview came out a year ago and has been percolating in the back of my head since then. (Her book came out in 2022.) This idea sank it’s hooks into my tendency to internalize and blame myself for everything. On some level, I absorbed the message that it must be my fault that I carry the mental load for our household because I’m just so efficient and overbearing and exacting about taking care of everything that there’s no room for my husband to step up.
But then I got to thinking about what it was like to grow up being raised by a single father, and I started to question this. My mom took off when I was seven, leaving my brother, sister, and I to be raised by our dad. She moved eighty miles away and was not involved in raising us from that point on, except in the most trivial of ways (i.e., a visit at Christmas). This was 1989, so my dad was highly unusual in having de facto sole custody of his kids. I didn’t know any other kids who were being raised by a single dad. There was no “maternal gatekeeper” in our household to discourage my dad from taking on the mental load. I’m sorry to say that he did not step up.