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In his talk on Sunday Morning, Elder W. Craig Zwick, now an emeritus Seventy, told of a woman who kept an electronic list of things her husband said or did that irritated her. He relates that later, while taking the sacrament and reflecting on the Atonement, she realized that this practice was driving the Spirit from her life, so she deleted the list. The emotion with which he said “Let it all go!” suggests that he found this story a powerful example of forgiveness, and he offered it as an example of overcoming spiritual shortsightedness.

Granting that this course of action may well have been the right one for her, there are risks to generalizing the idea that women should learn to overlook their husbands’ faults. [fn1] This is a delicate issue, because every successful relationship thrives on mutual forgiveness, and yet emphasizing the importance of forgiveness can invite people in abusive circumstances to remain in those situations, by encouraging the belief that forgiving those who abuse them is the Christian thing to do. That may in some sense be true, but it does not require staying in the relationship (and may even require leaving it). Indeed, for one friend of mine, it was reading back over the list she’d been keeping that helped her realize that she was in an abusive situation and get out. Sure, we’re better off just letting some things go, but some things need to be worked through together, and recognizing when your partner puts something in the latter category rather than the former is pretty important. Working through things may mean that one partner needs to find a voice and the other, ears. [fn2]

That work brings me to a deeper matter, which is the gendered division of emotional labor. A good definition of emotional labor is “the stuff that won’t get done unless I think about it, because nobody else is going to do it.” Emotional labor means noticing that the bathroom is dirty and figuring out when you have time to clean it, as opposed to wondering why the bathroom is still dirty (if you noticed at all). Assuming that the woman in Elder Zwick’s story is not in an abusive marriage, I’d be curious to know how many of the items on her list involved emotional labor that she was doing while her husband sailed along obliviously. Leaving fingernail clippings on the bathroom counter is a little gross, but otherwise it may not seem like that big of a deal. Expecting someone else to do the minute task of brushing them into the trash is another matter, though, especially when the person to whom this labor falls is the backstop for ten thousand other such tasks in your relationship. You may be willing to help, but if she has to ask, she’s the backstop, and that matters. [Guys, especially: if you haven’t yet read the MetaFilter thread, start today.]

The congregation’s laughter when Elder Zwick related the woman’s acknowledgment that her husband wasn’t going to change anyway reminded me of the line from Guys and Dolls: “marry the man today / and change his ways tomorrow.” This line is funny in part because of the willfully self-deluding cheer with which it’s sung—because, in other words, it lampoons the Sisyphean quality of women’s emotional labor vis-à-vis the ne’er-do-well men in their lives. The musical is grappling in part with the ways that its male characters will need to change if they are to have successful relationships (in other words, if the show’s comic ending is going to work). Although the song on its surface says otherwise, in context its message is that the task of changing falls to the men. It’d be pretty ironic to ask women to do the emotional labor of resolving the problem that women do a disproportionate share of emotional labor. Or rather, it is ironic, because it happens all the time. [fn4]

As a guy, I get that talking about emotional labor can sound like demanding that we be aware of every little thing around the house, and making us feel guilty when we aren’t. But that’s not the point, which is, rather, about being aware that someone has to think about all of that stuff or else it doesn’t get done, and that there’s no gendered reason why either partner should bear any particular part of that burden. I say “burden,” but really what I mean is all of the quotidian stuff that goes into making life happen. Without emotional labor, none of what we understand as the good parts of life could happen. Want to have a nice evening going out to dinner and a play? Who’s going to make sure that the right clothes are clean (and ironed if necessary), childcare arrangements and dinner reservations have been made, theater tickets bought, and everything else that goes into it?

I’m learning these days that I’ve taken for granted a lot of emotional labor from the women in my life. Not only has this made them do a lot of work that remained mostly invisible to me, but it also left me less able to form other meaningful relationships. Emotional labor isn’t just about making sure that bathrooms stay clean and laundry gets done—all the usual feminized domestic chores. More fundamentally, as one of my favorite articles on the subject puts it:

Emotional labour is a skill set. It is work that is supportive, that lifts people up and holds space when things are hard. Often invisible, emotional labour is always working behind the scenes. Foundational to emotional labour is the capacity to listen deeply without trying to fix things; to hold space for people moving through difficult feelings; to offer constructive feedback; to help people feel loved, valued, seen, and cared for. Emotional labour can look like remembering that people need to eat. It can look like making sure a space is clean and ready for work to happen. It can mean being available, showing up, holding someone’s hand, making space for someone’s pain. Sometimes emotional labour takes the form of educating others, of drawing on painful lived experiences to offer up important knowledge. Sometimes it takes the form of creating the conditions for others to speak their truth. For those of us who do emotional labour frequently, we can be very good at it without having ever articulated what it is we are actually doing. It is only when emotional labour fails to happen and things start to fall apart that we begin to notice how essential this work is.

In other words, relationships require emotional labor. There’s no avoiding it. The question is not whether it needs to be done, but who is going to do it, and whether each partner will notice and acknowledge the emotional labor that the other does. Seen this way, learning to do emotional labor is an important part of keeping our baptismal covenants to bear one another’s burdens. I’m not saying that men never do emotional labor; what I am saying is that our culture trains women to do emotional labor in a way that it doesn’t train men, and that this imbalance hurts all of us. Elder Zwick is right that relationships need forgiveness to thrive, but making sure that forgiveness benefits the relationship as a whole instead of mostly favoring one partner takes work, and that work is hardly likely to produce the desired result if one person carries the primary responsibility for doing it.

I still have a ways to go in developing my emotional labor skills, but my life is better for trying, and I believe that attention to this relatively unheralded work can set us all on the path to living more abundantly. Can we work on this together?

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Notes

[fn1] It’s important to acknowledge that men can suffer abuse, too. I’m talking here about broad social patterns, not essentialized gender characteristics. We can acknowledge the pattern while also taking the exceptions seriously.

[fn2] I can hear the rejoinder now: “My wife doesn’t need to find her voice; she’s nagging me all the time!” I’m going to suggest that this response may indicate a crucial failure to hear what’s she’s saying about the division of emotional labor in your relationship. The problem has more to do with your ears than her voice. Keep reading. (See, however, fn1 as necessary.) [fn3]

[fn3] Although this post originated in a discussion begun by women, fn2 is why a guy had to write it. Process that as necessary.

[fn4] As evidence for which, my awareness of this issue owes entirely to women, especially the women of BCC. Thanks, friends, for your willingness to invest the time and energy in me.