Your wife is your partner not your mom…
Couples therapy for couples
What is invisible labor and how is it hurting your marriage?
How is the division of labor handled in your house? Is it equal? Is it fair? As a licensed couples therapist who provides therapy to couples in North Carolina, one of the things that often comes up in my couples sessions as a source of constant tension is the unequal division of labor in their home. I hear women saying “I need you to help more!” and I hear men saying “Just tell me how to help!” The conversation sometimes even starts off playfully, with that sentiment we have all heard from someones wife before: “My husband is really just my third kid” and the husband laughs it off as a cute joke that he is happy to play a role in. Sometimes the wife will laugh too, patting her husband on the knee as if to reassure him of that role. Underneath that joke and reciprocal laughter is usually a lot of pain and exhaustion, though. I usually chuckle back with them for a bit before gently challenging how that dynamic has impacted their relationship. Sometimes they say it hasn’t, sometimes the wife will cry. As an experienced couples therapist, I know to tread this line carefully.
According to one study done by Pew Research, women in heterosexual relationships end up being responsible for the majority of domestic work and childcare duties even if they work full-time earning the same wage or more than their husbands. Their study shows that while 45% of American women in heterosexual marriages make the same amount of money as their husbands, or more, they are also spending 3.5-4.5 more hours on household tasks per week than their spouses. Besides the emotional labor that many women take on as the unpaid family manager, married mothers also do more housework than their single or divorced counterparts.
What exactly is invisible labor? Sometimes called worry work, invisible labor is the overseeing of tasks. It is the mental load that comes with anticipating, planning, and managing all of the needs, resources, and schedules of the family.
Raise a hand if any of these sound familiar:
“Hey, hon — when is *childs* school play?”
“Where are my socks?”
“When are we going on vacation?”
”What day does the trash go out?
“What’s for dinner?”
“Where do we keep the scissors?”
Keeping track of pantry stocks, grocery lists, birthdays, appointments, and homework deadlines, as well as planning and coordinating schedules, vacations, and social events is mentally exhausting. There’s also the burden of having to give reminders and requests for help to one’s partner, rather than them proactively taking on any of the planning. For every household task that needs to be completed there is a 3 step process - conception, planning, and execution. Conception, meaning noticing a problem or that something needs to be taken care of. Planning, meaning putting together the list or set of things that need to be done. And execution, meaning actually doing the thing. If you have to ask your partner to clean the dishes or pick up the kids, you’re only asking them to take care of the execution part. This inevitably leaves the default parent to handle the invisible labor, i.e the conception and the planning part. This leads to burnout.
Interestingly, even with decades of studies and hordes of evidence about the “second shift” of unpaid labor that falls on women, men in heterosexual relationships seem to live in a state of denial about how much they are actually doing. In study after study, men consistently say they share equally in the housework, and women consistently disagree. Partners may think they’re being supportive by saying “Just let me know how I can help” but that puts all the onus of project management back on the other partner who must keep brain space dedicated to “keeping track of everything.” Compounding mental load is the emotional labor that goes into social networking and the maintenance of social connections. Emotional labor is the interpersonal effort of maintaining and strengthening social connections and providing support to one’s network of family and friends.
The invisible labor that falls on women needs to be called what it is: labor. And just because “learned helplessness” — the belief that men are less capable of household tasks or child care because many haven’t had to do them — may make it seem that women are somehow inherently better at it, the truth is we are not. Learned helplessness is a funny concept. It implies that the behavior is unintentional. But we all know that sometimes the behavior is intentional, and when it is, it’s called “weaponized incompetence.” This is the act of feigning incompetence to get out of doing it. It sounds like “I’m just not as good at doing stuff around the house.” A video of a woman jokingly creating a grocery list for her husband went viral on TikTok once because the grocery list included pictures of items and a hand drawn map of the store. Weaponized incompetence has since become a subgenre of humor, much like women joking about their husbands being a third child.
I read a blog post once, a terribly long time ago, titled She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by the Sink. The author, Matthew Fray, went viral for that blog as it was shared and re-shared multiple times on Facebook and via email. Women and wives everywhere resonated with the underlying message, posting statuses that said “Finally! A man that got it!” The message wasn’t just about a dish by the sink, but that his wife had been asking, pleading, begging him to hear her and he refused. Every time she was upset over a chore, or a request, he dismissed her as irrational or nagging. As a marriage and couples therapist, I hear this often. I hear women say “Why do I have to be this man's mother? Why is it so easy for men to be permanent children? What do I have to say to make him understand?” And I hear men who say “Just make me a list. Just ask me to help. Why is that dish such a big deal?”
I once had a wife in tears while trying to explain how utterly exhausted she was with the overwhelming and never ending household tasks that she felt totally alone in completing. She had gone on a cooking and cleaning strike between sessions, and he hadn’t noticed. Why aren’t men noticing? Are they noticing and not caring?
I’m not really sure that I have the answer to that. I know that there are a lot of great men, and a lot of great husbands, and that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
I know that we haven’t always set men up for success, either. I grew up hearing that marriage is a 50/50 partnership. You each need to give your full 50% in order to create an equal 100% of the relationship. Analytically, that never made much sense to me, but I understood that the general idea was the notion that each partner had to put in an equal amount of effort to make a marriage work. But what exactly does it mean to give your relationship the full 50/50? And, is that even feasible? I had a hard time conceptualizing what that would look like, especially as a person who did not see much 50/50 relationship modeling. The relationships around me growing up had moms and women dominating life inside the home, and dads or men dominating life outside the home. Ideally, contributing equally in a relationship should set you up for success. Boys were told they couldn’t play with dolls or kitchenettes, and yet we expect them to have equal involvement with childcare and the house. Have we set men of older generations up for failure? That is probably a topic for another day….
If you read this blog and thought “Hm, that sounds a lot like my life” then you might benefit from couples therapy where we work on communication, conflict management, and reconnection. (And yes, I can help you get more equality with the household chores!) Reach out today to schedule a free 15 minute consult where we can discuss your goals and get you on the path to a happier and healthier marriage.
Author: Danielle Minges is Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor and a Licensed Clinical Addictions Specialist in Cary, North Carolina.
