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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.