I think you might be missing the point. The gift that she wanted was the house cleaning service. She had already been planning/considering hiring someone anyway. The gift was that she would not have to do the work to find, vet, make the calls, research, arrange payment, schedule, etc. for this task. The gift was supposed to be him taking over that work.

> The gift, for me, was not so much in the cleaning itself but the fact that for once I would not be in charge of the household office work. I would not have to make the calls, get multiple quotes, research and vet each service, arrange payment and schedule the appointment. The real gift I wanted was to be relieved of the emotional labor of a single task that had been nagging at the back of my mind. The clean house would simply be a bonus.

also

> I had wanted to hire out deep cleaning for a while, especially since my freelance work had picked up considerably. The reason I hadn’t done it yet was part guilt over not doing my housework, and an even larger part of not wanting to deal with the work of hiring a service. I knew exactly how exhausting it was going to be. That’s why I asked my husband to do it as a gift.

I think you missed the point. Yes, she wanted a house cleaning service. But that’s not the gift she wanted. The gift she wanted was for her husband to magically divine that she wanted him to use her emotionally-laden approach (seeking recommendations via social) to solving the problem of hiring the service instead of his pragmatic approach of identifying the cost of the service, which he then used his prior training as a magical diviner of her expectations to arrive at the conclusion she wouldn’t budget for it. Perhaps incorrectly. But that’s the problem with expecting your spouse to be a mind reader, they will try to do it, often to an undesirable result.

While I get the idea that my wife allows certain things to drag her down emotionally, and the solution is to step up and surprise her by taking care of things (and recognizing her contribution to the drudgery), what I see in this article is much different. I see a narcissist who expects others to read her mind, and a codependent husband whom she declares as inept and sees no problem at all pillorying him in Vanity Fair. And a bit of dishonesty too. She claims she doesn’t want to micromanage her husband yet is obviously displeased because he chose a pragmatic approach to her gift as opposed to doing it her way.

PS my wife’s solution to this problem. She asked. Not to do the dishes or clean the toilets. She asked me to take care of some things that concern her, without her having to ask me. Things I would normally “step around” because they’re not priority for me.

She seems like the sort of person who is very particular about the way things are done, and if you don't do them that way she'll be upset. He probably knew he was setup for failure, since she knows exactly what she wants, but won't tell him. He is definitely too passive, but she has probably inadvertently trained him to not do things without permission, because when he's tried she's been upset because he did something she didn't want. She wants him to take initiative, but he's probably gotten in trouble for initiative in the past.

It seems to me that she felt like his attempt to do the task was pretty half-hearted.

Expectations are an opportunity for disappointment.

I mean think about it. If you were tasked at your job with evaluating venders, would you talk to just one, and then tell your boss it couldn't be done within the budget? Probably not.

If I got one bid that was kinda high, and I knew I could do it myself in an hour, I would just do it. Because hiring a vendor would mean I would spend an hour dealing with them, then have to pay them on top of that. That's the "emotional" component the wife wanted to be freed from. So bottom line, she's pissed that he didn't go down the road of emotional drudgery like she would have chosen for herself and just did the job instead.

Yes, because then she's left running around watching the kids and taking care of everything else while he does that (which totally defeats the point because what she wanted was a rest) and he's only provided a one-time "solution." The article kind of goes off the rails after that but this complaint seems both fair and easy to understand.

It was an unreasonable request to begin with.

She wanted two things. She wanted someone else to clean the house. This is fine. It happens all the time. But the second thing was that it still had to be done to her exacting standards.

So the request was, in essence, "First, become me. Then do this thing that I want in exactly the way I would do it." Hidden requirements.

The husband, not understanding this, went about hiring the cleaners in his own way, to meet his own standards. I know exactly how I would do it. I would set a budget limit of $300, which is acceptable for the spouse-to-spouse birthday gifts in our household, and try really hard to find someone to clean once a month for 12 months at $25 a pop, which seems like the minimum amount that would be required to get the van to roll, for a 90 minute appointment.

All that "household office work"? Don't do it. Instead of spending 30 minutes on the phone with a cleaning service, haggling and scheduling, scrub one toilet. Instead of vetting a person to make sure they won't pinch your porcelain statuette, vacuum the floors. You don't need administration and management in an organization with less than 6 people in it. If you're one of those "all children are a blessing" families, with 10+ people in one house, yes, someone needs to be a household manager. But for most families, the chore chart is as far as it needs to go. Stop whining about how hard it is to micromanage everything, and let other people have their own responsibilities, with their own performance standards.

If you like everything done just so, you're going to have to be the one doing all the things.

And I know how it would turn out, too. My spouse would end up cleaning the house the day before the cleaners were scheduled, so they wouldn't be cleaning a dirty house. Madness. Knowing this, I would simply get a gift of comparable value that was not requested. And I'm not even going to explain why, because that way leads to a fight.

> "It was an unreasonable request to begin with.

She wanted two things. She wanted someone else to clean the house. This is fine. It happens all the time. But the second thing was that it still had to be done to her exacting standards."

Nope, you missed the point.

The point was the wife wanted a day free from housework, which isn't unreasonable. The husband screwed up because by doing the cleaning instead of hiring someone in (which was suggested they could afford from money she earned) he left her needing to do the rest of the housework, like looking after the kids. The end result = no day off.

She didn't ask for what she really wanted, so she didn't get it. This story is repeated every day, everywhere around the globe. She made a wish, and it was granted by a monkey's paw, or an evil genie, instead of a fairy godmother.

Part of the job that I get paid for is to help people figure out how to say what they want in a way that other people can understand well enough to give that to them. The amount I get paid indicates that this sort of thing may be a somewhat uncommon skill, but also in high demand. You can't really expect that skill to be present in every 2-person relationship.

Cleaning services don't watch your kids. If you want a day off, ask for a day off. But when you take that day off, you can't reasonably expect that everything you normally do will still get done in the way that you do it. The world does not revolve around you, and it takes constant effort to fool yourself into thinking it does.

Micromanagement is bullshit at the office, and it's bullshit at home. If you want relief from the emotional burden of making sure the whole world dances to your tune, you will have to allow someone else to play theirs. You will have to accept that you are the only person that wants exactly what you want, and that sometimes close to that is good enough.

If you cooperate with a person that overextends their will onto the world, you are not really helping them. You are reinforcing their unhealthy behaviors, and allowing them to export their self-torment to you. Some people enjoy that sort of thing, and that's fine. Sadists can pair up with masochists, and make each other happy. It's not my thing, so when people throw that kind of relationship at me, I dodge instead of catching it.

This "emotional labor", as described in the article, is not real work [in my opinion]. It is squirting neurotransmitters into your own brain, that will occupy receptor sites for a time, and then reuptake to be squirted out again later. If your own emotions cause you enough distress to raise your cortisol, medical treatment is available, including therapy by trained professionals that specialize in your exact problem. Would you ask your spouse to set a compound fracture in your leg? Not unless you were on walkabout in some hinterland. Normally, you go to an orthopedic surgeon at a hospital. The same holds true for a broken brain. It is not acceptable to use another person as your brain-crutch for the rest of your lives when genuine treatment is available. And if you value your own life, you will not be that crutch for someone else for any longer than it takes to get them to someone that can actually help them.

Don't allow yourself to be micromanaged (unless you like it).

> "She didn't ask for what she really wanted, so she didn't get it."

Incorrect. Read this...

"My husband waited for me to change my mind to an "easier" gift than housecleaning, something he could one-click order on Amazon. Disappointed by my unwavering desire, the day before Mother's Day he called a single service, decided they were too expensive, and vowed to clean the bathrooms himself."

The husband understood what the wife wanted, because he made a half-arsed attempt to meet her request, and then tried to get out of it. Does that sound like the actions of someone who doesn't know what his partner wants? The husband wouldn't have made such a song and dance about the gift request if he didn't know what his partner had asked for.

I'm not presuming that this particular husband would have done any better if she had made a more precise request.

He didn't actually have the balls to just ignore the request and come up with his own gift idea, either. So this is definitely not entirely on the wife.

If this is what the author wanted, which I 100% agree with you it is, why didn't she just say that? Admittedly, I often find myself in the clueless husband role, but my wife has been making a huge effort to directly say what she wants. The result is that both of us are much happier. If the author of this article wanted her husband to do the legwork of finding a housekeeper she should have asked for exactly that.

It's a hallmark of passive-aggressive behavior. Expect someone to know what you want and subtly imply it rather than just outright saying it, often becoming frustrated when people don't behave the way you want them to.

I may be missing something fundamental, but what is the point of a cleaning service, if not a clean house? Is there some other benefit to be gained from a cleaning service? Why did it matter how the house got cleaned?

It's a normal and healthy part of relationships to come to an agreement about what tasks should be done, how thoroughly, and who should be responsible for them. It's something else entirely to stipulate the _means_ by which someone else should accomplish tasks. That's micromanagement, and it verges on an assault on human autonomy.

Maybe part of the concept of the gift was establishing an ongoing relationship with a cleaning service, but the article really makes it sound like a one-time concern.

> I may be missing something fundamental, but what is the point of a cleaning service, if not a clean house? Is there some other benefit to be gained from a cleaning service?

Not having to worry about a clean house. And a service is probably going to do a more thorough job that can be repeated. Hence, she asked him to arrange for a cleaning service. She did not, apparently, explain why she wanted a cleaning service, but he also did not ask her that.

One benefit is that someone from outside the household does the cleaning, which means that everyone else is available for other household tasks, like watching the kids (which the author had to do while her husband was cleaning).

My response, then, is "Oh poor you! You have to call the proletarian house cleaners, rub shoulders with the 'help'! How difficult it must be."

Leftist cynicism aside: I'm talking more about the "socks on the floor, chair in the way, keeping the house in order mentally" side of things

This breaks the HN guidelines, which say:

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

So would you please not comment like this? It takes effort not to, but it's effort we all need to make if this community is to not suck. I'm tempted to call it emotional labor but I suppose that would be trolling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not about "talking to the proletarians". It's about the emotional work involved with talking to a bunch of people, organizing those discussions, comparing the results, etc.

As a generally introverted person, just thinking about discussing the details with 3 or more people makes me feel exhausted. And that doesn't even count the planning, review, time off of work, etc.

Nomenclature question, why are we calling the work involved securing a vendor emotional labor? In any office this would just be called labor.

Basically, the term emotional labor gets used a lot to mean "women's work" and especially to refer to the largely invisible parts of what women are expected to do.

I don't like that usage, but I usually don't bother to nitpick it. I do understand why this is kind of a hot topic and why the term emotional labor gets applied to it.

I don't have a better solution. It seems like there simply isn't a good way to talk about these issues.

(FWIW: I'm a woman.)

I think the economic term would by "economic externalities". That's used as well when, for example, a coal plant dumps sewage into a town's water source, and the town is then forced to clean it up. Someone has to pay for that, but the coal plant avoids the responsibility. We're starting to get past that as a society now, with coal plants being required to pay for the environmental damage they do, and it might be time to start noticing that "women's work" - childraising and housekeeping - is an unaccounted externality as well, that someone has to pay for.

It does seem kind of confusing. The first time I encountered the term "emotional labor" it referred to aspects of customer service work (like responding politely to abusive customers, being performatively cheerful, etc) and it was intuitive to me what it meant. Using the term to mean unpaid, typically female labor seems less intuitive.

Emotional labor is a real thing and a large part of what women are expected to do is rooted in catering to the feelings of other people. But, yeah, it gets used kind of sloppily. Just about anything women want to complain about gets lumped in with it and the writing frequently fails to make it crystal clear how x, y and z actually relate to or are rooted in the expectation that women cater to everyone's feelings.

To steal words from your post, maybe invisible labor? Does that express what you're trying to say?

I didn't write the piece.

Another issue writers run into is that if you aren't using any of the hot catch phrases, no one will read your piece. I wrestle with this fact a lot. I blog at times about such issues. I try to be evenhanded and sympathetic to both sides. I really struggle with titling stuff and my writing gets damn little traffic.

My refusal to use the standard catch phrases, because of their frequently toxic framing, is a barrier to being heard at all. And I sometimes wonder which is worse: Putting out a fucked up message in hopes of some partial solution emerging or simply howling into the void and going entirely unheard.

Making any progress is incredibly challenging.

This piece was published in a major publication. If it didn't use a popular catch phrase, they probably would not have published it at all. Those popular catch phrases are important hooks for titling things and for communicating with the public.

On my own personal blogs, I have the luxury of refusing to use phrases I don't like. You generally don't have that luxury when trying to get published by an organization that needs to hit certain traffic targets to survive and keep their doors open.

The part of this that genuinely is an issue of emotional labor is her desire for her husband to actually be considerate. That is the crux of the issue here.

The article perhaps is not as clear as it could be about that fact.

Its just the common term for it. Is it the most correct term? Probably not. But its this invisible labor that many people don't even recognize exists, so to lump it in with regular physical labor pretty much to ignore it.

I don't know, this is the first time I've really ever heard this term. If I had heard the term outside of this context, I would imagine it to mean "interactive/inter-communicative/social" work, instead of physical work, but it feels like there's some kind of historical/feminist context here that I'm not aware of.

It depends where you're reading, I guess. I've been hearing it a lot lately.

As the other commenter said, it has nothing to do with elitism. Research takes time. Calling people takes time. And god forbid you have to call a government or medical entity, you might be on the phone for hours.

Do you realize how hard it is to get a straight answer on how much things SHOULD cost with regards to housekeeping, lawn care services, plumbing, tree services, roofing, foundation repair, and the list goes on? Sure you can call the company and ask, but are you getting ripped off? Now you have to call 5 companies and compare to see what the average price is and where you might get the best price. There goes 45 minutes of time (if you're lucky).

Plus you have to vet these people. If they're going to be in your house/yard handling your things you want to make sure they are trustworthy and possibly licensed/bonded as may apply. So you go down the rabbit hole of yelp and NextDoor and Thumbtack and whatever else you may find only to read about things that you didn't even realize you needed to be worried about. Well, there goes another hour.

Finally you have to actually call them back and schedule. Does this day work? What do you need to do to prepare for them to come? Do you need to be there? Who needs to take off work for that?

Its just... a lot. Its a lot of work. And keeping track of what needs to be done and when and your husband won't use a damn google service so you can't just sync calendars and he won't even look at the one on the fridge anyway is just exhausting. There's a reason why one of the highest ranked reasons for strife in a marriage is an imbalance of housework.

I actually do hope that my comment reads as anxiety inducing as I think it does. Its a lot, and it feels stupid at the time to even have to do it. You think we don't know that we seem like over-anxious worriers? We're in 2017! Why can't we have automated this? But then I'd have to be the one to figure out what automated service to go with and determine if we can trust it to not rip us off and figure out what their customer service is like if something goes wrong, ad nauseum.

That is just called labor, it is work aka life.

We were looking for a new washer and dryer. Our friends moved and offered us their old units. I was amazed at how much stress this removed--not because of the monetary savings, but because it removed our need to make a decision about what to buy. I think that was the point of the article. The decision-making process is emotionally expensive and that is what she wanted as a gift.

Dan Arielly calls this "the pain of paying". Supposedly the secret to good gift-giving is that you should get something that the other person wants but finds painful to acquire.

For example, some people feel guilty for buying luxury items when they "should" be saving or spending on their children, so luxury goods or gift cards make good presents for them. Some people have problem choosing among similar alternatives so gift cards are terrible for them.

In this case, it looks like they both find cleaning services painful, the wife because there are many alternatives and it's emotionally draining to choose and the husband because it's expensive and he feels like a sucker paying for it when he can clean the bathroom himself. It was mostly bad luck and misunderstandings.

That is a very insightful approach to gift giving.

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't find figuring out which product to buy a painful or emotionally draining experience. I rather enjoy researching different models and features, comparing and contrasting. How hard is that?

Imagine you don't enjoy researching a household item. (Why? Maybe you'd rather do something else. Doesn't really matter.) Now it's harder. Either way, it's definitely effort, and you can only squeeze so much effort into a day.

It is significantly easier when making decisions by yourself. With the washer/dryer example, there was a lot more going into it including how long we may end up staying at that house, etc. There wasn't anything that really stood out as being the "correct" choice, so not needing to decide was very welcome.

Cleaning is not emotional labour, and the article doesn't claim so.

Being in charge of cleaning is the emotional labour.

That sounds like normal labour to me. Just a more administrative/managerial type instead of the hard physical type.

If my boss asked me to call some cleaning companies and arrange a schedule so they come clean the office, all on my "free" time, I'd expect extra payment because that is extra labour.

It's emotional because one partner is expected to care about it while the other may remain indifferent. Sometimes your partner needs you to care so they can take a break from doing so. Now deep down you don't have to really care; there are things I do for my wife not because I care whether it gets done, but because I care for her and if she wants me to care, then damnit I'm going to care.

But caring about cleanliness wasn't labor for the author. It came naturally to her. If anything, it was the husband that was expected to apply emotional labour to make himself care.

Which I now see was the point. Women are traditionally expected to care about their partner's preferences even if they don't really understand or care themselves, while men are expected to be practical, cold and uncaring. Thus gender roles contribute to an imbalance in the distribution of emotional labour.

> "It came naturally to her."

Did it though?

A lot of life admin isn't satisfying or enjoyable, it's just a drudge. Are you suggesting that relentless, menial work with no end in sight comes naturally to anyone?

I'm single, and I've found ways to keep life admin to a minimum, but when you're running a household there's tons of small jobs that add up. It becomes hard to switch off. I've seen it happen multiple times.

The actual work of cleaning does not come naturally to anyone. The "emotional" work of worrying about cleanliness is a different matter.

If she did not care about housework, she would just not do it, not hire anyone else to do it, and the house would be a mess. That's what the husband does and it works for him because that's his personality. He only cares when someone important to him nags him about it, and he has to "work" to at least pretend to care.

The actual work of cleaning the house he did, eventually. He never did the emotional work of convincingly pretending to really care about it.

You missed the point of the article. The husband screwed up with the cleaning too, even though he did the cleaning. It was never about the cleaning, per se, but the mental drain of running a household.

Read the article again. This is the key part...

"I was gifted a necklace for Mother's Day while my husband stole away to deep clean the bathrooms, leaving me to care for our children as the rest of the house fell into total disarray."

If the idea behind Mother's Day is to give mothers a day off, can you see why the gift of getting cleaners in would've worked, but the gift of offering to do the cleaning did not?

I agree with you, but I think we are using different semantics.

He technically did the cleaning. He screwed up because he didn't consider what the point of cleaning was (like you say, giving her wife a day off) and he just did something that he thought was approximately equivalent to what she literally asked.

I call that "not really caring". If he cared, he would have realized he should have cleaned the day before and given "a clean bathroom on Mother's Day" as a present instead of "the act of cleaning the bathroom on Mother's Day".

> "I call that "not really caring"."

I call it "not really understanding". The cleaning was most likely more work than a few more phone calls to cleaners for quotes would've been. If it was about not caring then why wouldn't the husband put in the minimum effort and get in someone else to do the cleaning?

Because it was expensive and it goes against his pride to pay so much money for something he can do himself. Maybe he cared a lot about his self-image as a self-sufficient most-definitely-not-a-spoiled-rich person.

"He told me the high dollar amount of completing the cleaning services I requested (since I control the budget) and asked incredulously if I still wanted him to book it."

In the article she mentions that she controls the budget, so it was probably over the budget he had to work with.

I'd suggest that's a massive stretch considering the lack of details about the husband's attitude towards money in the article. The only relevant information was him finding one particular quote too high. I don't think you can extrapolate a pattern of behaviour from that single data point.

Throughout the whole article, the author gives the impression that her husband is a stereotypical man. According to stereotypes, typical men don't want to call "the guy" to repair things when they break, especially when it costs a lot of money.

To be honest, the author's culture is alien to me and I only have stereotypes (TV and movies, mostly) to go on.

Well said. It was real clear to me when in the middle of the article there is the following line:

“That’s the point,” I said, now in tears, “I don’t want to have to ask.”

Either she has communication problems and is unwilling to have even one talk about her tidiness standards, or she has already tried that and he just ignores it.