Mental Load: The Other Side

I’ve been married for 7 years now, have three small children, and am perennially online. To be unaware of the concept of ‘mental load’ at this point would require wilful ignorance. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, it’s essentially the managerial aspect of household/familial management. Taking the bins out is a job. Knowing when the bins need to be taken out and ensuring that it happens is the mental load associated with that job.

Typical Problems

The typical online zeitgeist with respect to mental load is that women typically bear the brunt of the mental load. Men often complain “if she’d just tell me what to do, i’d be happy to do it,” to which women reply “why do i have to know what needs to be done, and tell you? Why do I have that job?”

Of course I’m gender stereotyping and every relationship is unique (“all happy families are alike…“), but I’m willing to say that generally women take on more of the mental load associated with co-living and, in a more extreme way, with co-parenting.

My Excuses

I don’t like to imagine I’m a bad guy, a bad husband or a bad father, and yet I’m pretty sure that my wife takes on more of the mental load in our family than I do. How did that happen? Why does it happen? And should I feel guilty about it and fix it?

The Emergence of Asymmetric Mental Load

Let’s imagine a somewhat hypothetical scenario. My wife thinks that bedsheets need to be washed every week. I think that they need to be washed every other week. At the end of week 1 of living together, my wife washes the bedsheets. Next week, she washes them again and notices that I haven’t washed them yet. The same again, and again, and again…

I’m happy - I get clean sheets every week and I don’t have to do any of the work. Washing the sheets has become my wife’s “job”. I recognise the asymmetry, and if asked I’d wash them. But mentally, I’ve shelved this as my wife’s job and I know that she’ll wash them when she thinks they need it. I mentally check out and a job has become owned.

This is just an example (and there are examples of the reverse, where men are more likely to take out the bins or handle the finances), but ultimately what I’m talking about is variable standards.

Variable Standards Lead to Mental Load

This was a simple example, but I think the same is true across all aspects of co-living and co-parenting. I’m happy with the kids wearing clothes until they fall apart or are clearly too tight. My wife wants the kids to be well presented. I’m happy cobbling together dinner with whatever we’ve got in the fridge. My wife wants us to have a well-rounded and nutritious meal.

To put a ‘business’ slant on this, there are different definitions of success and in the absence of a shared definition, variable mental load emerges.

Tyranny of the Lazy

Let’s take another example - children’s birthday parties. Roughly every other weekend we attend a child’s birthday party and there’s a card to be bought (and written in), a present to be bought and wrapped and then party attendance. I don’t mind admitting that my wife bears the brunt of this mental load.

Again, I think it’s because she cares more. If I buy a somewhat embarrassing present at the last minute from Amazon and put in in a gift bag rather than wrapping it…no biggie. Whereas for my wife, that is a much bigger deal.

Perhaps another way of looking at this is in an honest and straightforward answer to the question I posed earlier on: “Why do i have to know what needs to be done, and tell you? Why do I have that job?”

Because you’re the one that wants the job doing and you’re the one who wants to say how it should be done.

By simply operating at different cadences or disagreeing on how often and how well a job should be done, I think mental load necessarily falls on the most demanding party.

Now before I get lynched, let me say that some jobs might not be negotiable. However, most people think that the jobs that they want doing are non-negotiable. Of course the children have to eat healthily (and my definition of healthy is obviously the right one). Of course the children have to be appropriately clothed (and my definition of appropriately clothed is the right one). Of course you have to manage the finances optimally (…).

The point is, optimal means different things to different people. Maybe “healthy” is enough food such that they don’t starve to death. Maybe “healthy” requires home-cooked organic food at every meal and snacktime. Different people have different “obviously right” answers to each of the questions, and the person with the most demanding answer is going to be the one who ends up doing either the work, or at least the mental load work.

Mental Load in Academia

I saw a paper on mental load (you can find it here) - it made a few headlines when it was posted and I saw it (rightly) lambasted on Reddit. Ultimately, the authors hand-label traditional tasks as either being episodic or daily, and then use those labels to determine that women take on more of the daily mental load.

Generally, I don’t think that the academic literature explores mental load in the way that I’ve suggested, and instead views all jobs carried out as essential and looks at how those jobs are distributed.

The authors in the paper I shared also make some fairly bizarre decisions when it comes to those labels. Children’s birthday is classified as a daily factor whereas managing finances is treated as an episodic one. Now, given the regularity of other children’s birthdays and the amount of planning that goes into your child’s birthday…I can kind of see why the authors might have thought child’s birthdays should be labelled as daily. Kind of. But not labelling managing finances as a daily activity…

I actually think they really make a good argument for representation in academia - two female authors labelling a number of mainly-female activities as daily and mainly-male activities as episodic and then concluding that women bear more of the mental load based on that…well, it seems pretty much like the perfect argument for representation!

Communication as the Solution

Viewing this as a management/leadership problem, we have two people/teams who disagree about the definitions-of-done for a given project. Clearly, the solution is communication and agreement. Let’s work as a team to decide how often we should wash the sheets, how the children need to be turned out, how the dinners should be planned, and how children’s birthday parties need to be attended.

This communication rarely happens openly, honestly, and at anything like the cadence needed. Think of all the different decisions you have to make as a couple or as a parent…imagine trying to get an agreement on all of those.

Perhaps this is where grace is required. I don’t agree with my wife on all of these things, and I don’t know that we have the time and/or energy to litigate every single potential household and parental chore. This is why living with somebody you love is easier. I don’t agree with all my wife’s choices, but I generally do what I can to follow what she likes because it makes her happy. She certainly doesn’t agree with all my choices, but she does what she can to make me happy.

Conclusion

The relationships between husband and wife, through both co-living and co-parenting are deeply stereotyped, deeply personal, and deeply dependent on the couple in question. However, I think that a large part of the asymmetry we see emerges from the tyranny of the lazy: one partner caring much less about an issue than another partner, and therefore the other partner assuming the mental load.

How partners navigate those different priorities and definitions of success will determine how successful they’ll be as a couple.