One of the best things about working in a bookstore is that publishers send you advance copies of upcoming books as part of their promotional campaigns. When an advance copy of Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward by Gemma Hartley showed up in a package of advance copies of new non-fiction books, my inner anti-feminist perked up. The book is based on Hartley’s September 2017 Harper’s Bazaar article, “Women Aren’t Nags—We’re Just Fed Up,” which went viral. I vaguely remembered it, but I was more familiar with emotional labor as an excuse offered up by social justice warriors when they refuse to explain their points in online exchanges. The infamous 2014 HuffPost Live interview comes to mind, in which activist Suey Park told host Josh Zepps that she wouldn’t “enact [the] labor” of explaining why she took offence at his criticism of her ideas, when asked. A whole book about that entitled, huffy petulance? Sign me up for that dumpster fire, I thought.
I only had to read the first page to discover that Fed Up wasn’t quite the limp feminist lettuce I thought it would be. Hartley begins with a story about Mother’s Day. Her husband asked her what she wanted as a Mother’s Day gift, and, after thinking about it for a while, she told him she wanted him to hire a cleaning service to do their bathrooms and floors once a week, and maybe clean the windows if the rate was reasonable enough. They could afford it, and since Hartley’s freelance writing career was picking up steam and the couple had two young children, she didn’t have time to do those chores as often as they needed to be done. The cleaning service would take care of it and if her husband hired the service—researched, asked friends for recommendations, paid—that meant that she wouldn’t have to. That was half the treat. For once, something would get done in their house, and she wouldn’t even have to think about it.
Her husband waited for her to change her mind to an “easier” gift, “something he could one-click order on Amazon.” He procrastinated until the day before Mother’s Day, when he finally called one housecleaning company and was appalled by their rates. Hartley, who controlled the household budget, assured him they could afford it and affirmed that she still wanted it. Hartley’s husband instead announced that he was going to save the money by doing the cleaning himself. He gave her a necklace for Mother’s Day.
He didn’t do as good a job as the professionals would have done, and he only did it for a few weeks before stopping, but the part of the story that actually made my throat block up with tears was the necklace. The necklace, a material item that Hartley hadn’t asked for and didn’t want, was thrust into her hands by the man she loved in lieu of an act of service that would have required some effort. Instead of putting in some administrative work—phoning around, comparing rates, working out a schedule—to get a job done and ease some of the stress his wife was feeling, Mr. Hartley gave her a meaningless thing and half-clean bathrooms for a few weeks. What she wanted: someone else to arrange for the cleaning to be done so she could concentrate on her work. What she got: a thoughtless gift, a house that was hardly cleaner than before and a husband who complained about the amount of effort it would take to get her the help she had asked for.
I couldn’t believe a gender studies book had actually articulated a problem I’ve had. I still sensed a divide between the kind of life Hartley described, with her budget that allowed for a cleaning service and her freelance writing career that left her too busy to do the cleaning herself, and my own below-the-poverty-line existence, but another story in the first couple pages drove her point home. On the same Mother’s Day, Hartley’s husband had taken down a bin of wrapping paper, ribbon and gift bags to wrap both a gift for his mother—a gift Hartley had chosen and purchased—and the necklace he gave to Hartley. He wrapped the gifts, but left the bin of wrapping supplies on the floor in the middle of their master bedroom. Hartley was immediately bothered by it, but decided to wait and see when he would put it away. Days later, the bin was still sitting in the middle of the room, pushed and kicked out of the way when she needed to grab laundry bins or he needed to grab his workout clothes. Despite the fact that he was the one who had taken it down, he never put it back. Eventually, Hartley dragged a chair into the closet so she could put the bin back.
Watching her, a short woman, struggle to lift the bin above her head, her husband said, “All you have to do is ask me to put it back.”
Reading that, I had to swallow my anger. I read his words again and again, scarcely believing his audacity. How dare he? How could he lack the self-awareness to realize that he was admitting that he could have put the bin away, but he didn’t because she didn’t tell him to? He knew it was in the way, he knew it needed to go back, but somehow he needed her direction to get off his butt and do it? Who does he think she is, his mother? Those are the exact same things I think when my boyfriend does something similar.
Just a few days ago, after we walked home from the grocery store, my boyfriend sat the bag he had carried home on the kitchen floor. There was a carton of milk in there, as well as some cans that needed to go in the cupboard and a six-pack of Irish Spring soap that needed to go to the bathroom. I watched him, waiting to see if he was going to put the items away. He took off his jacket and shoes and beelined straight for the living room. Within a minute, Red Dead Redemption 2 was loading, his headphones were on, and the grocery bag was forgotten.
Our apartment is far from a spartan, pristine space. Pretty much the opposite. We consciously choose relaxation and fun—and, for me, time to work on my writing—over a perfectly tidy living space. I tolerate a lot of laziness from both of us, but an abandoned grocery bag with perishable food in it just won’t fly. Now, I’m a disagreeable woman with a passive-aggressive streak so pronounced my second grade teacher mentioned it on my report card. My reaction was to sigh heavily and stomp around as I put away all the groceries. The last thing in the bag, the Irish Spring soap, didn’t belong in the kitchen and wasn’t going to spoil, so I sat it on the side table next to my boyfriend and said, “Put this in the bathroom when you get a sec.” It would be the one thing from our grocery run that he would put away, I decided.
A few hours later, I went into the bathroom. There, sitting on the counter in front of the sink, was the six-pack of Irish Spring. The bathroom cupboard, where he damn well knows it belongs, was right underneath. All he had to do was open the door and place the soap inside.
I marched back into the living room, held up the soap, and asked, “Why didn’t you put this in the cupboard?”
“You just said to put it in the bathroom,” he said, without even pausing his game.
I don’t consider myself a feminist anymore, but within the first few pages of Fed Up, I knew deep in my bones that Hartley had a point. Emotional labor is real, but we have a problem of definitions preventing us from discussing it properly.
True to an older meaning of the term, Dictionary.com defines emotional labor as “work that requires good interpersonal skills.” Some still use the term when they talk about service and retail jobs that demand emotional acumen, which are filled mostly by women, but the oh-so-eminent Urban Dictionary’s cynical definition is, surprisingly, more accurate:
Emotional labor was originally a word for people who have to put a lot of uncompensated emotional effort into their job. Recently, however, it’s more along the lines of “idk, it kinda sucks when I have to listen to my boyfriend” or “now that I’ve made my statement, I don’t want to defend myself or back it up because it’s emotionally laborious[.]
By Gemma Hartley’s definition, emotional labor is not an excuse you can use to avoid having to explain your ideas. It’s a skill, an extra layer of effort you put into something when you really care about it. It’s the figuring out, the organization, the planning and coordinating that goes into everyday life that mostly women take on. Getting the kids to school on time, with everything they need, including nutritious, thoughtfully packed lunches? Emotional labor. Meal planning? Emotional labor. Decor that turns a house into a home? Emotional labor. Planning weddings, anniversaries, vacations? All emotional labor. Not to mention household budgeting, finding the right doctors, dentists and specialists when needed, and making decisions regarding social situations, like what gifts we should give to extended family members or which side of the family we should spend Christmas with. Emotional labor is the work others often don’t see, because a lot of it happens inside women’s’ heads as they worry and agonize. Should the family embark on a new healthy eating plan? If so, which one, and how will you juggle your oldest child’s picky eating? Should you email your youngest child’s teacher and schedule a meeting to talk about the bullying he told you about? If so, when? The car needs new brakes … when would be a good time to take it in? It’ll have to be soon, since your husband’s big business trip is coming up …
Those are examples Hartley mentions in Fed Up, and you’re correct if you detect a mommy slant to them. They aren’t exclusively the domain of women. But they are things that, if women don’t do, no one does. Even good fathers, who Hartley acknowledges have picked up more of the domestic and childrearing responsibilities in the past few decades, often don’t grasp the level of care that keeps a household running. Hartley’s husband often cooks dinner, does the dishes and puts the kids to bed when she’s up late working. She refers to him as a “good man and a good feminist ally,” and says that it “feels greedy, at times, to want more from him.” He’ll do any chore she asks him to.
But that’s the rub: he’ll do any chore she asks him to. After the gift wrap bin debacle, Hartley describes saying, though tears, “I don’t want to have to ask.” That deeply resonated with me. Like Hartley, I “don’t want to micromanage housework. I want a partner with equal initiative.”
I run the show that is my relationship with my boyfriend. If I don’t start the text message brainstorming over what we should have for dinner, I’ll get home from a closing shift at 10:30pm not only to no dinner, but not even to an inkling of an idea of food. You would think we’re amorphous blobs who don’t require sustenance, based on my boyfriend’s meal planning. We’ve lived in the same apartment for two and a half years. Garbage day has always been on Monday morning, but in cases where I forget to ask him or don’t do it myself, the garbage does not make it out to the bin, and therefore does not make it out to the curb. He does the dishes and cooks—once I’ve initiated the conversation around what we should have, and often outright decided the matter. I refuse to take charge of our relationship with his disparate, distant family, and as a result we have next to no relationship with them. When he drops the ball, I don’t pick it up.
Hartley details her heartache and reluctance over that method, espoused by Tiffany Dufu in her book, Drop the Ball: Achieving More By Doing Less. Dufu advocates simply not doing the jobs that your family and spouse refuse to help you with. She doesn’t instruct women to neglect their children—merely to let go of the things they do because no one else will do them. Things won’t go smoothly. Timmy may forget his jacket one day, hubby may go five years without visiting the dentist, but those you take care of will live with the consequences and learn responsibility. I like this method for my day-to-day mental health, but I sympathize with Hartley’s defense of emotional labor as a set of crucial skills that enrich your life, not drag it down.
I don’t call myself a feminist for the same reason Hartley thinks men should take on more emotional labor: a society in which women flourish but men suffer is just as unacceptable to me as the reverse. Women are now the majority of university graduates; men are dropping out at alarming rates. Women in their early twenties are out-earning their male counterparts. It’s not a bad thing that women are doing well, but for every kick-ass woman I know, I can name at least one man on the outs. Leaving aside the serious issues of mental health and financial outcomes, more and more men are living into their twenties and even thirties without knowing how to do basic adult things like apply for credit cards, climb the workplace ladder or replace expired ID cards.
It’s very important that men get up and go to work to support their families every day, but if that’s all they do—if it’s the wife doing the budgeting, arranging things like doctor’s appointments and writing the family’s Christmas newsletter—what happens down the road, when the wife dies? A Rochester Institute of Technology study found that recently widowed men experience a thirty percent increase in mortality; women don’t seem to have any increased chance of dying after the deaths of their husbands. In an interview for the Telegraph, the lead author of the study, Javier Espinosa, said, “When a wife dies, men are often unprepared. They have often lost their caregiver, someone who cares for them physically and emotionally, and the loss directly impacts the husband’s health.” Even worse, the risk of death rises by sixty-six percent in the first three months after men are widowed. Without their wives, men are less likely to watch what they eat and take care of themselves physically. They’re more likely to become socially isolated, because the work of maintaining a couple’s social relationships mostly falls to the woman. Depression rates skyrocket.
I’m a millennial. Looking back on my upbringing, I know I was coddled. My mom took on a lot more emotional labor than she should have in raising me. Sometimes situations arise that I don’t know how to deal with, and I feel helpless and sort of resentful that no one can deal with them for me. Millennials and Gen Z are experiencing extended childhoods, reaching adulthood’s milestones later than Gen X and baby boomers did. Emotional labor is a big part of it. We’re used to being cared for, not to caring for ourselves. Our moms made our dental appointments for us until we were eighteen, and in many cases, she still does. When there’s no one to make the call for us, we tend not to make the call at all. Leave aside the whole men vs. women issue: emotional labor is an essential part of growing up, and we aren’t empowered, capable adults without it.
Hartley describes emotional labor as “essential.” She says it “strengthens our bonds and creates care-centered structures of order within our lives.” Hearing it stated like that, I drew parallels to Jordan Peterson’s philosophy of Meaning, with a capital M. I think if Jordan Peterson heard Rufi Thorpe, an interviewee of Hartley’s, describe her husband as “show[ing] up to a life [she’s] organized,” a tear would come to his eye. When you aren’t involved in the planning, deciding and architecting of your life, you aren’t truly living it. You’re a pawn. You’re a puppet. Men aren’t empowered if they aren’t doing the work it takes to live a meaningful life.
It’s no 12 Rules for Life, but reading Fed Up felt revelatory to me. It isn’t always sensible—Hartley takes a few detours into social justice ideology that feel a little tacked-on—but she ultimately brings it around to a conclusion I didn’t expect, even three-quarters of the way into the book. She spends much of the book detailing the many ways her husband has let her down, not met her standards and acted like an overgrown child, but at the end she has a revelation: a lot of the expectations she has, for her husband but also for herself, are unrealistic. It deeply bothers her that her husband will spend a day at home with the kids and leave a big mess, but maybe the floor doesn’t have to be clean enough to eat off. There’s no way everything he does can please her all the time, but through communication and open-mindedness they reached a place of understanding. He stopped seeing domestic and interpersonal labor as women’s work and therefore valueless, and she learned to get past her perfectionism. “The more I let go of that perfectionism, the more we both benefit,” she writes in the last few pages. She makes some changes, and of her changes, she says, “I have the time and mental space to enjoy my family and my work, because I’m not so laser-focused on being in charge.”
Feminist literature excels at identifying problems, but it’s often short on practical, rational solutions. For Fed Up to end with a call for change on both sides, instead of a dogmatic “men need to change but women are perfect angels” stance, was unexpected, but the perfect ending to a book that could have been so much worse.
The author received an advance reading copy from the publisher. This has not influenced her opinion of the book. All quotes have been checked against the final bound copy.
More divorces have resulted from disputes about this topic than any other of which I am aware.
It all comes down to the value society places on emotional labor. Until it is seen as worthy and noble, these articles will continue to prove otherwise.
“Emotional Labour” seems roughly equivalent to “the gap between what I want and what I’m getting.” All else aside, when we want something done (once, or repeatedly through time) we can: do it ourselves, hope for the best or ask someone else to do it. The “hope for the best” option may turn out to mean “put up with it not being done”. It’s the risk we take if we’re not willing to ask. Having to face that three/four-way choice comes from being attached to that outcome. To the degree that your special “someone else” spontaneously does things you want, the way you want, when you want, that’s sweet. We choose our partners because it’s true of at least some part of their behaviour (don’t we?), most likely more so than others we’ve met who didn’t get to be our partners, but it won’t be true of every part of… Read more »
Well extreme examples always do make for good copy, n’est pas?. I am a professional man in my 60s. I am THE breadwinner and when I had two children with my 3rd wife (25 years my junior) I was also the primary homemaker. Why? I would enter the kitchen and see the exact path of her culinary adventures…drawers and cupboards open, utensils-plates left on the counter, along with all of the things out of the refrigerator in support of the dish at hand. Changing diapers, washing clothes-dishes -surfaces – toilets and little butts was a daily duty – and don’t forget reading to the wains at night time. I will acknowledge that she loved the kids and did nurse them – something beyond my plumbing constraints……I think it is an individual experience. By the way I have taught my boys to sit on the toilet to urinate. My motto, leave… Read more »
Hi, I think that your definition of emotional labour needs to be more rigorous for me to understand it. A definition that predicts all cases that qualify as emotional labour and prohibits all things that aren’t emotional labour. It is a very, very fluffly concept in this essay but I do think that there is a thread of truth to it.
Perhaps a lesson that could have been learned is that what qualifies as emotional labour for one is not necessarily so for the other, and this could be part of the definition by containing a clause that specifies the individuality of it.
I’m a guy who isn’t pissed off at the essay. In reading all the comments it appears Amnesty International’s recent report of the high extent of harassment women face on Twitter is going on here.
I’m curious as to why one would defend any person who admits they stopped reading the essay and then reacted to things obviously read incorrectly.
This is bizarro world in this comment section and it’s not sane the anger and defensiveness going on toward commentators of unknown but assumed gender. Y’all are sounding like the Twitter trolls.
I stopped reading the article after the second example. Emotional labour seems to be a euphamism for justification of extreme female entitlement bordering on abusive behaviour. The first example is a classic. The husband asks his wife for a present and in return she asks him to permenantly engage a cleaning service. Quite clearly this should be a discussion about household finances, time and overall priorities but the woman probably knowing how that conversation woudl go instead chooses to use emotional blackmail about her present to try to force the husbanfd to do what she wants. She then presents the reaction to this bporderline abusive and certainly deeply manipulative behaviour as if she is the victim. Teh second is another classic. Teh authour passively aggressively make sthe mans live unpleasant and feels virtuous because she would rather wallow in this negativity than simply asking her partner to help her out… Read more »
Emotional labor seems to be used in the context of “Someone has to be in charge of the household, and darn it, I want a break from it!” Someone does have to be in charge (the leader) and households are mission critical activities, 24x7x365. Granted, men generally defer to women on household leadership. But it’s no different than being on a team, in corporate management or military leadership, just a different context. Fundamentally, someone has to organize the tasking, organize where things go and household processes — it doesn’t really matter which partner, but it has to be clear who leads and who follows. Emotional labor is overhead that comes along with being the leader. In the case of many husbands, I’m willing to conjecture that we wait for direction out of fear of criticism/conflict avoidance. Take the “put the box away” example. Was she actually done with the box,… Read more »
I love my wife and know she puts up with a lot and learned to say, “Yes, dear” because I know she is always looking out for me. She’s my Everything. We’ve been married for over 40 years.
The author offers a realistic and honest perspective which I can’t help but agree and feel is what makes wives the better half.
My purely anecdotal experience is that men who live with their wife/girlfriend tend to spend more time doing housework (in the general sense) than do men who live alone. However, he still usually does less housework than her. This is because, from his point of view, she usually creates more housework than she does. Not by being messy, but by defining far more tasks as being housework that needs to be done, exactly as in this article.
Caveat: On average, anecdotally.
Consider the following scenario: The wife works part time or stays home with the kids. The husband has a long commute, has a stressful job, and there is a reorganization going on at work so he is worried about layoffs. He has just dealt with a two hour urgent home repair and his brain is now mush. The wife is now on his case because he didn’t hang his coat, didn’t put away glass he drank from, and forgot about the social engagement coming up. You women need to understand that there is only so much band-width in a human brain, and keeping his job and getting stuck in rush hour and fixing urgent home stuff have just used it all up. He literally cannot see the toys on the floor or the mess in the sink–it is all fine because it is not on fire. If it was on… Read more »
Women cannot seem to even imagine the emotional labor that men do, the organizing, the planning. Maybe all the feminists have married slobs, but the men I know work hard, help kids with homework, try to teach them sports (the girls too), fix stuff constantly, know the car maintenance schedules, pay the bills on time, work more hours than their wives. Women want to be in charge of the social life and men are happy with that, but then women resent being in charge of the social life. Make up your minds, girls. Men also resent getting in trouble for small stuff, for not reading her mind, for not being perfect when no one is perfect. Women have a tendency to think the only good husband is one constantly working. If you love someone don’t you try to give them a break, help them relax some? There is a natural… Read more »
I have two general criticisms of the emotional labor theory. For the first let me offer an anecdote. At one point in my life I had started to read about Permaculture. As an environmentalist and progressive I found these ideas exciting, fresh and compelling. I told my sister in law, who is a very intellectual, educated, “woke” feminist from an agricultural background about my exciting discoveries. She looked unimpressed and in a condescending manner replied “in my family we just called that farming”. Emotional labor is not anything new. It’s just a new word, carrying a new theory along with it. We used to call this, and most of us still do, dealing with life, or getting along with people. Sometimes life and people are easier or more difficult, but it’s not something separate from life, it simply is life. My other criticism is of the frequent feminist slant. The… Read more »
Don’t worry, it always takes time for young woman to understand that men are strange creatures…
For example:
1. We, men, are lazy.
2. For you, woman, your home is the place where you live. For man the home is the place where he wants to have a rest.
There is no rational solution, just get used to it. “Millennial” is a new word but the world is the same
I must be the woman in my marriage (I’m not, I’m a man and my wife is a woman) because I’m always having to put things away that my wife left out, I do far more of the cleaning and neatening than she does (3 to 1 ratio at least), and I’m generally much tidier and neater about things. She just has different values. So what? We work together. It’s not a cultural problem or something in need of a federal case or movie of the week.
Hi Rebecca, Great article, thanks a lot for it! I was expecting a feel-good read from someone who essentially the same opinion on the topic as me, but was happily surprised when the direction changed and challenged my own thinking. In the end, I believe you indeed found some very good points that Gemma Hartley had in her book (or article, which I of course followed up on to read in full). I also think that there’s a lot more to it, than first meets the eye. I think this very topic, household chores and the running of households by women has a lot more to say in both the current and the historic relationship between men and women. I’d very much like to have this explored more, and can only urge you to write more on it! Thanks again, and I’m looking forward to any future articles from you… Read more »
My problem with even this particular framing of “emotional labor”, is the obvious difference between the two parties and what they care about. Look at a typical slob’s apartment, the box of soap sitting on the counter where each new bar is pulled out as needed- is set up that way because the slob simply does not care about it being tucked away neatly or out of the way. A ‘cleaner’ person DOES care, and their preference because of this care is to put things away. Now, I suppose we can argue about whether we can choose what we care about, but I find that this is not the case. If I don’t care whether a place is a mess, and someone else does- then by all means do whatever you want to remedy the situation to your satisfaction. If I don’t care about messes- the place is ALREADY in… Read more »
elevating couple’s various petty squabbles to the level of SERIOUS SOCIAL PROBLEM will get us nowhere. men and women have different priorities, and don’t always understand the big deal about the other’s priorities. we negotiate these differences by choosing to cohabitate, and yes, sometimes those negotiations break down. such is life.
if there is a broad social problem in this it is not that one gender is insensitive, oafish, superficial or anal retentive, and the other is not. the broad social problem is that we habitually refuse to believe that there should be a learning curve or compromise in finding the right balance between the priorities of couples.
Reading this piece was emotionally laborious for me.
This is just awful. Bottom of the barrel stuff.
EVERY (or nearly every) person in a relationship thinks they are putting in more effort than the other. While that doesn’t mean that unequal relationships don’t exist, it does mean that the truth isn’t as simple as the “waaah, poor women” screed you’ve just inflicted upon us.
In every relationship I’ve been in, I’ve done more “domestic” chores, ALL “handyman” jobs and the bulk of the shopping. Do I then whine and CRY that women are lazy entitled pricks? No I don’t because my terrible choices of woman-children as partners do not define the other 3.7 billion women out there.
The problem with the whole “emotional labor” as a tool to oppress women thesis is that the men who take the time to be, as they say in hispanophone countries, “detallistas”, confront much the same problem. As at least one commenter has pointed out, however, that anybody engages in this kind of lop-sided behavior in the first place signals that they have a very personal problem at the root of it.
A dissident feminist is still a feminist, and I agree with the above commenter that thou dost protest the term overmuch; furthermore, “dumpster fire” has one single connotation and one only in today’s political climate, and that connotation is most decidedly not the one for which you have feebly co-opted it here. I, too, read the same excerpts you use from _Fed Up_, in some review or something that went viral last year, and was similarly affected by the wrapping-paper bin/Mother’s Day anecdote. Nothing you describe from your own life yet gives you a firm basis by which to aggressively critique either the substance of Hartley’s important book or the catch-phrase it helped popularize. People misuse Shakespeare all the time; that does not thereby invalidate the beauty and usefulness of iambic pentameter, or of the phrase (for example), “What’s in a name?” Get thee back to a deeper analysis, young… Read more »
I wonder why you’re not a feminist. Because the grievances in this article smack heavily of everyday feminist grievances, and they have very similar roots. In particular, your operating assumption that your boyfriend either should have the same standards as you do, or that your boyfriend should be able to infer your own internal mental conclusions and assumptions about the meanings of non-literal statements — e.g. the “bathroom” vs “cupboard” non-issue, which is eerily analogous to Hartley’s “he knew it needed to be done” fallacious conclusion about the wrapping paper. Not everyone thinks everything needs to be put away at all times. Not everybody thinks that the rug needs vacuuming if there’s more than one crumb per square yard. Not everybody thinks the windows need washing once a month *just because.* Just because one member of a household thinks it does *doesn’t mean it actually does.* It’s a matter of… Read more »
Rebecca, thank you for writing this piece. I’m not particularly fond of the term emotional labor but decided to give it a try and get to know it a little better through your article. You didn’t disappoint me, and I believe I have a better grasp of what it means now. It is frustrating to realize that we’re living in relationships where we’re putting more effort than the other part. However, I see that not as a problem of emotional labor but as a problem of boundaries and personal responsibility. I have yet to meet a person who has both these concepts well integrated in his/her life and also complains about emotional labor. Those who do complain about emotional labor are often the ones who struggle because they adopt a passive-agressive approach to their problems, and often (justifiably) don’t get the results they want. If you haven’t yet, I recommend… Read more »
Areo must be really really short of submissions to publish this. Hey – my female partner is really lazy around the house, if I write an article detailing all the things that irritate me, will you publish it?
Several thing bothered me about this article. But the one that stood out is that you give orders to your boyfriend. You are acting like his mother instead of his lover. When he’s slobby he’s acting like his father instead of your lover. You both have an infantile relationship. You two should be negotiating your relationship like adults, including — most especially — things about each other you don’t like. You have expectations inherited from your great-grandmother, raised in the 1950s. She not only had nonsensical ideas about how clean her house should be, she also had the idea that her husband didn’t need to do anything around the house. He’d just mess it up and she’d have to do it anyway. You inherited her beliefs and your boyfriend inherited her husband’s. Alas, you lack your great-grandparent’s truce; both you and Hartley, when confronted with your spouse/boyfriend behaving like their… Read more »