Reply to Emotional Labor - a good read for men AND women

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "Emotional Labor - a good read for men AND women"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Yeah, I feel like there is a lot of denial in this thread by women who think this could never happen to them (and by men who don't think emotional labor is a thing they should be concerned with).

But I also have to say I'm so glad there are lots of women in this thread saying this issue just is not a problem in their marriage, that emotional labor is equitable, or that their husband performs the lion's share of the emotional labor.  While I wish these women would be more cognizant of the problem and trap that some women get stuck in, I'm so glad that marriages seem to be becoming more equitable than they were for, say, my parents.  Maybe my daughter has a chance of having a better experience with this.

I'm teaching my daughter already about emotional labor in that I'm teaching her about how to be thoughtful about somebody else.  If I had a son, I'd teach him the same thing.  But I'm also going to teach her strength and independence and feeling empowered to say no when someone asks you for something you don't have time or enough spoons to handle.  Nobody really ever taught me anything about emotional labor except ingraining me in how to perform it, and that's probably why I do so much of it now.

The hardest part of this for me in my marriage is that I perform some emotional labor because I think it's important but my husband doesn't think it is.  So I'm doing some stuff that he thinks has no or low value but I think has high value, and we just disagree.  On the other hand, my husband really has changed during the course of our marriage, or maybe he has always been good at this and I just appreciate it more, in finding things that would improve my life and giving them to me.  He does notice little things that I like and tries to give me them -- he's actually much better at this than I am -- and it's really sweet.  And he performs a great deal of emotional labor with our child now.  So even though I was always the one who took care of the baby in the middle of the night etc. and otherwise wish like my husband and I could be on the same page with emotional labor, it's not as simple as a one way street in our household, and that's complicated, but really a good thing.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics