Emotional labor is not referring to the completion of material tasks / chores, nor is it referring to the amount of hours completed at a workplace. So I'm not sure what it is that you're trying to communicate by responding to a comment that was specifically about emotional labor with this comment - emotional labor has nothing to do with "talking bad" about relative degrees of contribution in a relationship.

edit: now I see - it's related to the comic in the GP comment. That comment implies that the comic is explaining emotional labor, but it isn't (the comic pretty much states this in the final panel). So that GP comment confused the thread. I'll respond directly to that comment.

The concept of emotional labor is not much different. Emotional labor in itself is a description of a carefully selected subset of actions we do when we mutually care for people we are close with and that most people gain meaning through doing, and it is associating the word labor with these meaningful actions due to how labor to many has a negative connotation. People that further emotional labor as a grievance intentionally misrepresent the world in order to further a specific political ideology, and it is typically the same groups that create the misrepresentations in the PSID report. This is Grievance Studies 101.

Emotional labor as a concept is manipulative, and it makes it harder for us all to appreciate the part each of us play in making a whole in exactly the same way as the PSID misrepresentations and make it harder for us to gain the meaning we normally do through mutually caring relationships.

The sad thing about both the PSID and the emotional labor concept is that it discourages the ones with few healthy relationships from mimicking the actions that will most likely help build them.

Thanks for explaining your viewpoint - sounds like we have incredibly different definitions of the concept of "emotional labor". I have never experienced it as being manipulative, nor in support of a specific political ideology, and based on my understanding of this concept, these traits are completely orthogonal to the core message.

While I'm highly skeptical of the notion that this concept is inherently manipulative, I certainly understand that select people will use whatever tools they have at their disposal to affect manipulation. I'm fascinated that you have had this experience and I'd like to hear more about what brought you here.

I would like to learn why we have such different viewpoints. Do you see emotional labor as a concept as something else than a grievance? What do you think is a good definition of the term? It is reasonable that we have different definitions since it seems to be used without a clear or consistent definition.

This is where I come from: The claims I can find about emotional labor mostly seem to refer to the PSID report, and it currently seems like there is an effort at claiming the conclusions of the PSID report support a similar claim about how the genders relate in the workplace. Emotional labor seem to be interchangeable be used for both contexts without a clear definition, and as a generalization of the PSID report. However, I can't find any data supporting that this is how the genders relate in the workplace and as I showed earlier the PSID report is also not a good representation of how people relate at home due to its misrepresentations.