In 2024, a little-known British singer-songwriter, Paris Paloma, skyrocketed to prominence thanks to her song “labour.” The lyrics read, in part:
All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph, then a virgin, nurse, then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24/7 baby machine
So he can live out his picket-fence dreams
It’s not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labour
Big Issue dubbed it “the viral soundtrack to ‘female rage,’” observing that the song’s “explosive, furious lyrics struck a chord with millions of young women at the end of their tether” who “have used the track to share their own experiences of misogyny, and the need for an avenue to direct the fury that’s been smouldering inside them.”
Soon after, social scientist Katie Jgln published a popular essay on Substack titled “Why Women Pay the Price for Caring for and Understanding Men.” According to Jgln, “It’s not just the amount of domestic labour that women in relationships with men have to do that exhausts us — it’s all the emotional and cognitive labour, too.” The term “emotional labor” encompasses not only the administrative burden of running a household, which studies indicate does tend to fall disproportionately on the female partner, but also something more difficult to pin down. Jgln describes women’s many burdens in maintaining relationships with men, which include “regularly checking on their day and feelings, being mindful of their changing moods and regulating your emotions accordingly, or even helping them out in their relationships with other people.”
I’m sympathetic to the claim that many women tend to be more attentive to the emotional side of a relationship than many men, and the women who resonate with songs and articles like these may well have something to complain about. As anonymous Substack author Cartoons Hate Her puts it in “My Proposal to Scrap ‘Emotional Labor,’” “Generally, when women are always going on about emotional labor, invisible labor, and how nobody appreciates them, it’s because they have a spouse who, well, doesn’t appreciate them.”
Nonetheless, it’s worth taking a deeper look at the assumptions behind the concept of emotional labor. Jgln, for example, seems to assume that if women don’t carry out their wide web of self-assigned emotional tasks, the relationship will fall apart. She also takes for granted that in any given relationship, the woman is right (emotionally aware, appropriately sensitive), and that the man is wrong (an insensitive boor who doesn’t understand how feelings work). The underlying premise is that men cannot be trusted to manage their own emotions. This is a strangely common assumption. From Reddit to Psychology Today, it’s often taken as a given that men fail to healthily process their emotions—and that women must pick up the slack.
This is not the only option. There is, in my view, a better way. Rather than accepting unhealthy relationship patterns, women can choose to let go of culturally conditioned distrust. We can put down emotional burdens that aren’t ours to carry, stepping forward into the kind of self-respect that allows men and women to relate to one another more freely.
What We Lose When We Choose Distrust
Navigating conflict in relationships is difficult for anyone, and women may be culturally or biologically conditioned to be overly attentive to others’ needs and emotions, giving rise to additional challenges. In a 2017 Harper’s Bazaar essay titled “Women Aren’t Nags, We’re Just Fed Up,” writer Gemma Hartley writes that “walking that fine line to keep the peace and not upset your partner is something women are taught to accept as their duty from an early age.”
Writers like Jgln and Hartley seem to wish that men would become more like women in this regard, becoming more attentive to the moods of their partners. Yet this “emotional monitoring” is generally seen by therapists and psychologists as an unhealthy relationship behavior, sometimes arising out of trauma. It’s related to people-pleasing—a behavior that researchers suggest is more common in women than in men. Even though they may be ostensibly motivated by a desire to preserve the relationship and care for the other person, these behaviors tend to arise when there is a lack of mutual trust.
Women who feel that they can’t trust men to communicate their real feelings may become resentful or frustrated about emotional problems that men aren’t really experiencing. Women may also tiptoe around issues that, to them, feel obvious—failing to bring these issues up explicitly because they are uncomfortable with conflict. On the men’s side, this distrust can become frustrating, too. If you’re guilty until proven innocent—of failing to meet “emotional needs,” of “withdraw[ing] from emotional openness and availability,” of “normative male alexithymia,” defined as the “inability to identify emotions with words”—then why even try talking about your feelings? If women approach their relationships with men assuming distrust as a starting point, it will be difficult to arrive at a place of emotional security for both partners.
Instead of pathologizing men for being different from them, women can choose to put some of those emotional burdens down. To do this, women must trust and respect not only their partners but also—and more importantly—themselves.
Self-Respect: The Antidote to Emotional Labor
In “On Self-Respect,” an essay written for Vogue in 1961, Joan Didion writes that “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” If we lack self-respect, she warns, we experience “alienation from self.”
In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one’s sanity becomes an object of speculation among one’s acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.
It’s easy to recognize in Didion’s words some common complaints of women in our own day. (I, too, have been crippled with guilt over unwritten thank-you notes.) But, unlike many authors of “emotional labor” think pieces, Didion dares to suggest that some of our emotions could be disproportionate—that we might have a duty to nip some of our spiraling feelings in the bud.
Women take on emotional and administrative tasks for an amalgamation of reasons—because society encourages them, because they are necessary, because we fear judgement if we don’t complete them, because we find them rewarding, because we are choosing to build community, because they utilize our talents best. The discourse around the mental or administrative load is most helpful when it is a discussion of the balance of responsibilities within a partnership. But this balance cannot exist in a relationship where one partner is unable to stomach conflict or cannot take ownership for her own decisions and preferences.
Feeling the need to check in with a man about his feelings multiple times a day—for fear that the relationship will fall apart if one does not—sounds a lot like codependency, a dysfunctional behavior pattern that is more common among women than men. Codependent people tend to suffer from low self-esteem, and their constant “caretaking becomes compulsive and defeating.” In a codependent relationship, the caretaking partner is unable to emotionally regulate if he or she does not feel liked, accepted, and approved of by the other.
Can men improve? Of course. All human beings can. But what’s within our control is our own behavior. Joan Didion has good news: “That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.” With each small decision—choosing not to seek validation, presuming good intentions, being willing to live with another person’s dissatisfaction or disappointment—mutual trust can grow.
If women’s emotional burdens feel too heavy, perhaps the right path is not seeking to “fix” their partners’ emotional lives, but instead to attend to their own. In this way, over time, they can develop the confidence and self-respect that does not depend on the emotions or approval of another.
