Why Women Pay the Price for Caring for and Understanding Men

On the emotional and hermeneutic labour in romantic relationships and what it can cost us

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Although it’s been a few years since I watched The Breakup, the 2006 rom-com starring Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn, when I heard it mentioned recently, I immediately remembered just how awful it is.

As the title suggests, it’s a story about a woman and a man deciding to end their relationship after some years together. However, it also accurately shows what often makes women, in particular, want to call a relationship quits: all the labour we have to do when we’re in one.

The scene where Brooke, played by Aniston, complains to her partner Gary, played by Vaughn, that he only got three lemons instead of twelve — which she needs for a family dinner they are supposedly hosting ‘together’ — is forever etched in my mind.

Gary sees no problem with the situation. Brooke is, understandably, frustrated and has to explain the issue to him as if he were six years old.

The conversation that ensues, in which Gary makes up all sorts of excuses as to why he won’t help Brooke with the dinner preparation, is even more painful (and enraging) to watch.

But what that scene makes clear is that it’s not just the amount of domestic labour that women in relationships with men have to do that exhausts us — it’s all the emotional and cognitive labour, too. All the planning and organising and reminding and explaining and deciphering their feelings and anticipating their needs and trying to make them understand you and doing everything else to keep things running smoothly.

It’s a lot. Still, we serve all that labour up on a golden platter to men in our lives, and not just them, because we believe this a ‘woman’s job.’ That all relationships and maintaining them is a woman’s job.

Unfortunately, that’s not doing us any favours.

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When sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild first introduced the concept of emotional labour in her seminal 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling, defining it as ‘the silent work of evoking and suppressing feeling — in ourselves and in others,’ she described it in the context of women in the workplace.

Feminist scholars have since widened Hochschild’s original account to encompass other areas of human interaction that involve said labour and that place an undue burden on women to carry it out, including in the domestic sphere and intimate relationships between women and men.

As Finnish-Canadian philosopher Mari Ruti notes in her book Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings:

Young women are watching romantic comedies and television shows that teach them to accept the idea that men just don’t ‘get’ emotions and that they are consequently likely to act in hurtful ways — even though, deep down, they mean well, so please have some sympathy.

And since men just don’t ‘get’ this ‘emotional stuff’ — which, as Ruti points out, even sometimes conveniently excuses their hurtful behaviour — it’s up to women to take charge of the emotional domain of their relationship if they want it to continue. In practice, this can look like regularly checking on their day and feelings, being mindful of their changing moods and regulating your emotions accordingly, or even helping them out in their relationships with other people.

I recently came across a paper published last year by philosophy professor Ellie Anderson, who argues there’s also a related but distinct form of care labour that should be recognised alongside emotional labour, which she penned as ‘hermeneutic labour.’ Anderson came up with the concept after observing how much cognitive work women tend to do interpreting the cues and scarce words of their male romantic partners, who often lack the emotional vocabulary to explain themselves properly, and then imagining what they might be feeling or needing and carefully crafting their action plan in response.

While emotional labour can be, for instance, listening to your partner complain about a bad day they had and trying to make them feel better (even though your day might have been just as shitty), hermeneutic labour is wondering whether your response was appropriate, if you could’ve done more and whether next time you could bring up your day, too, without hurting their feelings.

As Anderson puts it, it’s ‘the entanglement of self and other, as well as of cognition and emotion.’

And just like emotional labour, hermeneutic labour is both demanded from women but also rendered largely invisible and hence undervalued.

Men obviously benefit from having their feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations — as well as those of their female partners — interpreted and having the health of their relationships routinely monitored and maintained, but they often might not even realise that’s what’s happening. It doesn’t necessarily occur consciously, though, or require any ill will. After all, that’s what everyone is used to.

Meanwhile, women taking on this role of informal therapist and relationships-maintenance expert might not realise they’re doing it either, but they don’t benefit from it as much as men do, if at all.

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It’s no secret that women are, on average, less satisfied in relationships with men than vice versa. And no, this isn’t necessarily because men and women have wildly different expectations.

A study of one hundred young heterosexual couples conducted by communications scholar Tamara Afifi found that even though female participants didn’t have higher standards for relationships than men did, including when it comes to desired levels of affective accessibility, they more frequently felt that these standards were not being met. Even if they were shared with their partner.

However, the same study also found that ‘both women and men expect women to be aware of a relationship’s needs and to have developed a set of skills to manage any problems that arise in the relationship.’ In other words, we all believe it’s a woman’s job to carry out all the emotional and hermeneutic labour necessary for a thriving relationship.

This is also evident in studies examining couples seeking relationship counselling and who initiates it. Surprise, surprise: it’s usually women. (Also, and unsurprisingly, same-sex couples seek relationship counselling far more often than heterosexual couples.)

Now, apart from lower satisfaction in intimate relationships, another consequence of this asymmetrical distribution of care labour is that women’s emotional needs might frequently go unmet. After all, if we have to manage our own feelings, those of our partners, and then the relationship as a whole, something might have to give sometimes. And that something is often ourselves.

Women also pay the price in the form of depleted time, energy, and cognitive resources that could be spent elsewhere, including to work on our well-being. (This could partially explain why unmarried women report higher levels of happiness than married women.)

But as the patriarchal romantic norms tell us, we should be happy to pay this price and put in the work because just being in a relationship with a man is supposed to be rewarding enough. And if you want to improve the situation, well — just do more care labour!

Although much has changed in our world in recent decades, the private and domestic spheres have scarcely progressed at all. If anything, you could say some things got worse. Today, there’s an epidemic of male empowerment gurus, coaches, and ‘influencers’ urging men to be more indifferent, detached, and callous, not less — and sometimes also even downright abusive — if they want to be successful with women.

And the more men withdraw from emotional openness and availability; the more women are expected to oversupply.

Relationships take work, we often hear, but then that work falls almost entirely on women’s shoulders.

None of it is ‘normal’ or, as some claim, ‘part of our biology.’ Instead, it is a result of a lifetime of ‘social training’ in line with traditional gender roles that depict women as instinctively emotional, nurturing, and caring and men as simply not ‘cut out’ for it. These norms also frame vulnerability, emotional expressivity, and empathy as inherently ‘unmanly’ and hence ‘uncool’ and even ‘shameful’ for men to possess.

This hurts men, too, though. Men’s inability to identify emotions with words, for instance, called ‘normative male alexithymia’, is associated with higher rates of fear of intimacy and lower rates of relationship satisfaction and communication quality.

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When The Breakup came out in 2006, it wasn’t exactly well received.

However, Brooke and Gary’s issues weren’t really attributed to the lack of equality in their split of domestic and emotional labour and, instead, they were described simply as ‘communication problems.’

Back then, men’s reluctance to do their fair share around the house and the inability to open up emotionally were still largely shrugged off as ‘men being men’ or as women simply not ‘communicating’ clearly what they wanted. (Even though we see Aniston’s character doing just that.)

If the movie were released today, though, I have a hunch this aspect would be the only one people talked about.

While things in the sphere of the heterosexual relationship are indeed moving painfully slow, more and more women are waking up to the fact that they can be quite emotionally and mentally laborious. There’s even a whole ‘decenter men’ movement online that encourages women to redirect energy from seeking male validation to focusing on their own well-being and self-care.

Why be in a relationship if you’re the only person actively working to maintain it? Why sacrifice your mental energy and time and, to some extent, even your well-being to build something that will come crashing down the moment you stop pouring yourself into it?

These realisations are also amplified by recent evidence that suggests ‘traditional’ gendered scripts of behaviour aren’t necessarily innate. Experiencing, interpreting, and managing emotions, as well as maintaining and deepening intimacy, are all skills that can be learned and improved.

Men aren’t any less emotional than women; they are socialised to suppress the expression of vulnerable and caring emotions and sometimes even penalised for not doing so.

Still, women are penalised for the masculine norm of emotional restriction, too.

We do need to start recognising it.

And stop expecting women to be emotional containers for men in their lives without them ever noticing it and without getting anything in return.

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A resurfaced clip of Meryl Streep speaking at a Washington Post panel has recently gone viral on social media, in which she says:

It’s like women have learned the language of men [and] have lived in the houses of men all their lives. We can speak it… Women speak men, but men don’t speak women.

But women ‘speak men’ simply because we spend years deciphering their feelings and intentions and learning how to read their nonverbal cues, which, in part, also happened out of necessity. We had to adapt to a world that, historically, gave us less power and autonomy and that tied our worth with the success of our romantic relationships.

It’s time, though, that men learned how to ‘speak women’, too.

For the benefit of the women they are partnered with and their relationships, yes, but also for themselves.

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