Great read! I enjoyed Norah/Ned's misconception that straight women are looking for a woman but in a man's body and that women generally seek a stoic man. In my own "way back machine" as a single young man, young ladies soon realized I was verbal, both sharing and inquisitive to intimate feelings and expression. It was then that a few of…
Great read! I enjoyed Norah/Ned's misconception that straight women are looking for a woman but in a man's body and that women generally seek a stoic man. In my own "way back machine" as a single young man, young ladies soon realized I was verbal, both sharing and inquisitive to intimate feelings and expression. It was then that a few of them grew to appreciate the "strong and silent type" as they preferred to have a monopoly on intimate expression. It is possible for a woman to feel insecure about a man skilled at such things when their female prowess was previously assumed. Having a man in touch with his feelings and expressive, for a few, was not what they had fantasized! In the end, hopefully we all find what we want or need. :)
Of course! An obvious example of emotional labor differences is where a mother has "mommy brain" which wakes her up in the night to any noise while the father sleeps away. Whether or not you thought people need to wake that often or easily is not my point. That one person can rest knowing the other person has mommy brain is! For example, whenever our kids were young, and my wife went out of town, suddenly I developed mommy brain, and woke far more easily to little sounds. I no longer had the assurance that my wife would hear things 'go bump in the night'.
You see this labor difference in all kinds of places where there isn't even a gender role formally assigned. How many of us know someone who is typically cleaning the bathroom and their partner rarely does? If the rarely cleaning partner thinks the bathroom needs to be cleaned just a few days less often than their partner does, the bathroom will always get cleaned before the other thinks it is needed. They will rarely clean it!
Same thing with cleaning the car and filling up the gas. I swear the cars would always be filthy and running out of gas if I didn't care for them, and I am always the one to do it. Does my partner not care about the car? Of course she does. Since I care about it more, I am the only one that takes care of it, yet we never decided formally that those were our roles. Also, I obsessively tidy the house and especially the kitchen. I am not sure if this has encouraged my wife to do almost no tidying. I am sure she cares about it, but she does it less than ever. That is likely due to me obsessing over it.
When my bride and I were new to being married, we both had high-commitment jobs. She started expressing being stressed out about getting home in time to make dinner, juggling her job with her 'new responsibilities'. I asked her when I showed such an expectation, and she realized that was her image of marriage and not mine. I reminded here that we want to eat together but not if it is difficult. I reminded her that I had been taking care of myself for much, much longer than we had known each other, and that I had not forgotten how to do that nor how to take care of her. It took some days to fully let go of self-imposed expectations, but she soon allowed herself to feel free of expectation.
My examples are how labor gets exerted, even when the partner does not intend to place it on the other. If it can happen that simply, it can certainly happen for emotional labor, and it can certainly be explicitly expected.
By strange sort of conclusion, I question the partner-commitment of an otherwise intelligent/inquisitive person who is unable/unwilling to "do the emotional labour" to question the explicit, unstated, and self-imposed expectations with their partner. This does not mean they come to agree 100% on what is needed and who provides it, but it does not remain a mystery.
Great read! I enjoyed Norah/Ned's misconception that straight women are looking for a woman but in a man's body and that women generally seek a stoic man. In my own "way back machine" as a single young man, young ladies soon realized I was verbal, both sharing and inquisitive to intimate feelings and expression. It was then that a few of them grew to appreciate the "strong and silent type" as they preferred to have a monopoly on intimate expression. It is possible for a woman to feel insecure about a man skilled at such things when their female prowess was previously assumed. Having a man in touch with his feelings and expressive, for a few, was not what they had fantasized! In the end, hopefully we all find what we want or need. :)
On the reverse do you think a lot of men expect too much emotional labor from women?
Of course! An obvious example of emotional labor differences is where a mother has "mommy brain" which wakes her up in the night to any noise while the father sleeps away. Whether or not you thought people need to wake that often or easily is not my point. That one person can rest knowing the other person has mommy brain is! For example, whenever our kids were young, and my wife went out of town, suddenly I developed mommy brain, and woke far more easily to little sounds. I no longer had the assurance that my wife would hear things 'go bump in the night'.
You see this labor difference in all kinds of places where there isn't even a gender role formally assigned. How many of us know someone who is typically cleaning the bathroom and their partner rarely does? If the rarely cleaning partner thinks the bathroom needs to be cleaned just a few days less often than their partner does, the bathroom will always get cleaned before the other thinks it is needed. They will rarely clean it!
Same thing with cleaning the car and filling up the gas. I swear the cars would always be filthy and running out of gas if I didn't care for them, and I am always the one to do it. Does my partner not care about the car? Of course she does. Since I care about it more, I am the only one that takes care of it, yet we never decided formally that those were our roles. Also, I obsessively tidy the house and especially the kitchen. I am not sure if this has encouraged my wife to do almost no tidying. I am sure she cares about it, but she does it less than ever. That is likely due to me obsessing over it.
When my bride and I were new to being married, we both had high-commitment jobs. She started expressing being stressed out about getting home in time to make dinner, juggling her job with her 'new responsibilities'. I asked her when I showed such an expectation, and she realized that was her image of marriage and not mine. I reminded here that we want to eat together but not if it is difficult. I reminded her that I had been taking care of myself for much, much longer than we had known each other, and that I had not forgotten how to do that nor how to take care of her. It took some days to fully let go of self-imposed expectations, but she soon allowed herself to feel free of expectation.
My examples are how labor gets exerted, even when the partner does not intend to place it on the other. If it can happen that simply, it can certainly happen for emotional labor, and it can certainly be explicitly expected.
By strange sort of conclusion, I question the partner-commitment of an otherwise intelligent/inquisitive person who is unable/unwilling to "do the emotional labour" to question the explicit, unstated, and self-imposed expectations with their partner. This does not mean they come to agree 100% on what is needed and who provides it, but it does not remain a mystery.