The Distribution of Labor in a Relationship is Hard to Quantify
An examination of whether "mom rage" is really "marriage rage."
I once dated a guy who desperately wanted to be the arbiter of justice for the entire world. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. He was an Aquarian though, so perhaps this is more accurate than not.
Regardless, he happened to be the nicest man I’ve ever met, so you’ll have to trust me when I say this wasn’t an ego thing. He truly hated to see unfairness in the world, especially the small one in which he lives, and he felt like it would be great if someone could do something about all of that.
It’s kind of a lovely thought, isn’t it? That the world should be a fair and just place where we all live in harmony and no one ever feels wronged or personally attacked because everything is undeniably equal? I get the appeal. I’m a dreamer, too.
But if you think the world as a whole is a chaotic dumpster fire of inequity, just wait until you get into a relationship! Things don’t suddenly get fairer because you’re now betrothed. Commitment, it seems, is sometimes a setup for harsher conditions. You know what I’m talking about.
Now that you’ve opted to be in one another’s lives for the foreseeable future you both stop trying so damn hard. Because being “on” is fucking exhausting. Thankfully, you’re locked down now. Bending over backwards to impress your beloved has become a past-you thing. And often to your dismay, vice versa.
I’m being purposefully dark here for humor’s sake. I don’t actually think we all become useless slobs the moment someone puts a (sometimes metaphorical) ring on it. I do, however, believe the scales of effort begin to teeter and totter a bit more than they used to.
Sometimes the “one person cooks while the other cleans up” rule bends a little or you find yourself doing a lot more laundry than you used to when you lived in a lady apartment with a dog who wasn’t a big on dressing up. You decide you hate the frequency, methodology and comprehensiveness with which your person wipes up their coffee, wine and other straining liquids on the weirdly porous mostly white countertops, so you spend an inordinate amount of time scrubbing them down yourself. This meme comes to mind…
So, when I recently stumbled on a post that asked whether the phenomenon known as “mom rage” was actually “marriage rage” in disguise, I decided to bite. I’ve spoken about mom rage previously and shared my experience with it. I have to admit that I actually don’t feel mom rage at all these days. This might have a little to do with the fact that my child now sleeps through the night and the fact that my hormones are no longer at war against my very being, but I’m pretty delighted with motherhood.
Marriage rage, though? Yea, I sometimes feel that one. Occasionally, I rebel against my own rules about approaching the distribution and execution of chores with grace and gratitude, and simply allow myself to go ape shit on the inside. Now, whether my animosity is always warranted is another question. We’ll get to that a little later. First, let’s dive into what Virginia Sole-Smith and Lyz Lenz had to say on the topic.
I plan to do an audio companion that breaks down the perspective the two women shared in more detail, but that might be a little while because I recently treated myself to a fancy new computer and if you know anything about me and technology, you know that I do not weather the transition well. Also, Mercury is retrograding through the sign of Aries and my entire household is in shambles. So, in the meantime, I’ll share the important tidbits here.
The first thing to know is that both women are happily divorced, one of them famously so. They also appeared to be married to men who did not pull their weight, and they both seemed to experience a serious lack of equality in how their households were run when kids entered into the mix.
A limiting-but-perhaps-adequate-enough summary for the purposes of this post is that these women found that they weren’t actually upset about the abundance of extra responsibilities that come with having kids—they were fucking enraged that their partners seemed to expect that they would be the ones to shoulder the brunt of them.
I mean no disrespect to Virginia and Lyz when I say this, but overall, their experiences are not reflective of my own. That disclaimer aside, I absolutely believe that “mom rage” sometimes masquerades as “marriage rage.” I don’t mean to pick on the men here, but a lot of male partners don’t pull their weight. There has been scientific research conducted about how men and women weigh their contributions to the household based on comparison.
We could look at essentially the same phenomenon when talking about parenthood. If a decent number of fathers tend to compare themselves to deadbeat dads and congratulate themselves for merely showing up, while mothers are out there wearing hair shirts because their family life doesn’t look like the picture of domesticity proffered amongst the momfluencer charlatans on Instagram, we are going to end up with a workload problem.
This issue is also more nuanced than I think the conversation between Virginia and Lyz made it seem. It has been well reported that women take on more of the homemaking/managing tasks and the majority of the emotional load in a heterosexual partnership. And that’s leaving out the problem of the libido-destroying adult child, which we don’t have space to get into again here.
But I don’t think this is always as straight forward as we’d like to believe. Fairness is never black-and-white, especially not in relationships. It can be nearly impossible to achieve a perfect 50-50 split in the task list, even with two committed parties trying their very best (a sentiment that is outright generous in a lot of cases). Allow me to explain.
I have a hard time quantifying how much effort R. and I each expend toward the endless task list that is domesticity for two overarching reasons: 1. I am prone to overestimating my own contributions and 2. I am sometimes picky (OK, OK, I am often picky) about how things are done.
In the first category, conversations like this one can be illustrative…
Me: What do you want to do this weekend?
R.: Well, I have to cut the grass.
Me: Nooooo. Cutting the grass is so stupid, and it takes forever. Don’t cut the grass this weekend.
R.: Karli, I have to cut the grass. It’s really long, and if I don’t cut it this weekend, I don’t know when I’ll be able to get it done.
Me: BOOOOOOOOO
So, yea. I don’t value yard work. I think it sucks, and I don’t want anyone to spend time doing it ever. See also: weeding, putting in beds, fixing the dilapidated fence, going to Home Depot, planting things, cleaning up leaves. The list of outdoor tasks that I don’t want to do but simultaneously also don’t want R. to do is enormous.
I actually made him purchase a lawn mower last weekend because I was sick of him taking four to six hours to weedwack the entire thing while accounting for battery changes. Weekends are for sex and eating at restaurants and walking in the park. Yard maintenance can go fuck itself.
The other issue here is that I spend a lot of time doing all the annoying little things that one needs to do to keep the house from looking like a flirty, fuck-around-and-find-out child massacred it. “Picking things up off the floor 6,000 times a day” was not on my bingo card for my life until recently. That and “reorganize the pack-n-play so there’s enough space for a small child to sit in it.” I mostly load and unload the dishwasher, wipe the counters, wash the dishes in the sink because it annoys me when there are things crowding the sink for longer than 10 minutes. We do our own laundry, but I tend to do mine along with the Bean’s.
R., however, does all the sweeping, which with three dogs, is not the quick-and-breezy task you might imagine in an 1,100-square-foot home. He also does the work of brushing out the dogs—an effort I’d care more about if I were the one sweeping the floor. He is the only person among us who can get a duvet cover back on the duvet.
R. will also do more deep cleans than me. He’ll bust out an entire bathroom or tackle the whole kitchen from appliances to cabinettry in one go. I’m more of a clean as I go gal. R. likes to dedicate himself to the entire project at once. This might also be because, unlike Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, he cannot do two things at once.
Which brings us to my belief that I do everything efficiently (and perfectly? Should we say perfectly? We probably should), and R. does them in ways I would not (thus, imperfectly). I’ve often felt that a lot of the labor that comes with having munchkins is that women tend to be overly particular about how things get done.
There can be some reasoning behind this, such as mom knows that child will be inconsolable if you put his shirt on before you put on his pants and shoes. She wants to save herself and the neighborhood from having to hear the meltdown, so she tells dad how to keep said child from losing his shit.
Many times, however, it doesn’t matter how the sausage is made. I try my best to focus my efforts on the former category. I don’t want to be in charge of R.’s relationship with Baby E. He’s going to do things his own way. I will step in if I’ve found a method of doing something that seems to work better for our fiery little Aries bean. Otherwise, I stay in my own lane. And if R. chooses to keep doing things his own way, I’m fine with that. It’s up to him.
Now that you see me for the magnanimous mother that I undoubtedly am, let’s get into what a micromanage-y wife I can be. I don’t want to be a nag, so I mostly keep these grievances to myself until I want to yell at an unsuspecting stranger (but social graces prevent me from that, so I just end up yelling to myself in my car like a complete maniac), but my God do I have opinions.
Why is it that while feeding the Bean I can also wash the dishes I used, clean up the floor, rearrange the pack-n-play, feed myself and respond to a few emails, but R. only feeds E.? How can I clean up the counter while making coffee, but I find brown rings and grounds everywhere when R. does it?
It comes back to multitasking, yes, but it also comes down to my belief that I have to squeeze in as many things as possible in the moments when I can, so I have more than five minutes to write at some point without being distracted by what I see as a mess than needs to be taken care of immediately. If there are dishes, you better believe I can’t focus on my work until they are not there. It’s kind of a problem if I’m being honest.
No one is pressuring me to give all the undone chores a once over before I settle in to start creating but me. And I shouldn’t be holding R. to a ridiculously high standard (one that I don’t even really like but is unfortunately a quirk I cannot quit) when he has a very different idea about what needs to be done when. On the flip side, he obsessively sweeps the floor because that’s the thing that drives him nuts. Sink dishes is my personal battle to fight.
What all these examples prove is that domestic labor really is hard to quantify. Even with all the mental and emotional labor I take on, R. counterbalances by doing all the paperwork, yelling at all the shady contractors, filling out the forms, making sure the utilities get paid. I may not feel like things are fair in every moment. That would be impossible. But I most definitely have a man who pulls his weight. Our individual workloads ebb and flow, and ultimately, we’re better off not keeping score.
Fairness might feel out of reach when you’re attempting to be the arbiter of justice for your relationship. I would gently suggest that maybe you accept this is a tall order where no one really wins and put down your metaphorical scales. A far more realistic bar to set is one where the conversation around domestic labor remains open. When we need more from our partners, we should feel comfortable asking for what we want. And if you’ve taken nothing else away from this post, remember this: When your partner suggests doing yard work on a goddamn Saturday, the correct response is always BOOOO.
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix
P.S. Don’t forget about my tarot workshop! If you want to be able to ask all the questions about sex, love and relationships (and many other essential topics) and receive all the answers, sign up today ;)