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You can learn to control your own emotions or you can walk around waiting for everyone else to make sure you're happy and comfortable. Only one of these strategies is going to have any chance of success.
I'm not sure I buy this. In my experience at least, it all comes down to standards — it sounds like this woman has higher standards for what constitutes a "running household", and gets frustrated when her husband doesn't share those standards. It sounds like he would be content with boxes on the floor, dirty bathrooms, etc. When she asks him to raise the house to her standard, she is asking him to adopt her perspecti…
I found this comic on the topic also insightful: “You should’ve asked” https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are missing the forest for the trees a bit here by focusing just on cleaning standards. As the author said, part of the emotional labor is the management of the household but also the management of relationships within the house. This isn't about forcing a man "to fully adopt her perspective." This is about the idea that women are more often expected to be the ones to suggest a compromise, or to be the on…
I think you didn't understand parent's point. It's not women that are expected to put effort, it's the party that's not satisfied with current state that is expected to put effort. > Why doesn't the husband notice that his wife is always picking up after him, or that she is not recieving acknowledgement of the work she has done, work that he feels should be acknowledged when he does it? Blind spots of attention. When…
It's not silly. It's called kindness, and it's part of emotional labour.
Which seems to bring us back around to the first point again.
That all sounds like household management with some relationship management thrown in. What does it have to do with labouring over emotions? It sounds like this person needs a partner who shares more household responsibilities and has an organization and cleanliness habit that is more in line with their own.
EDIT: I just did a quick search of this term "emotional labor" and this comes up from wikipedia:
"Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, co-workers and superiors."
That seems a lot more reasonable definition for emotional labour. Actual emotion management. The author of the featured article seems to want to attach this term to just about every kind of task that occurs in a household.
"If I were to point out random emotional labor duties I carry out—reminding him of his family’s birthdays, carrying in my head the entire school handbook and dietary guidelines for lunches, updating the calendar to include everyone’s schedules, asking his mother to babysit the kids when we go out, keeping track of what food and household items we are running low on, tidying everyone’s strewn about belongings, the une…
This is a topic where the more I learned about it the more I opened my eyes to it and saw it happening on my own life. I'm very easy going and there isn't much I get too worked up about. My wife, on the other hand, is a meticulous planner. I could see her getting stressed out making decisions for a vacation. I realized that by not caring, I wasn't helping and offloading the burden to her. Now I truly didn't care if w…
I think that true zen for me is finding a way to just relax and be okay with emotional inefficiency. Not sure how to do that.
But why is that the case? Why can't there be an Uber* for housecleaning? Even better, why can't they pay an actual maid to clean the house all the time? Every hour she is cleaning the house (or researching to hire a one-time cleaning service) is an hour she could be working, so unless her labor is less valuable than a maid's, she would actually be saving money by not cleaning the house herself.
I understand that in the US this sort of thing is not that simple because in developed nations labor costs are so high (in the third world more families have maids than washing machines and dishwashers), but even so, there is still inequality. Her labor should be more expensive than a maid's labor. Why can't they take advantage of that, reap benefits of trade?
*ETA: I now believe "Uber for housecleaning" is a terrible idea. The correct thing would be "Upwork for housecleaning". Something more focused on long-term professional relationships.
She would complain that I didn't make the top sheet tight enough.
My response was if you want the sheets tighter, make the bed yourself.
It's childish to expect someone else to care about something as much as you do.
Did the author make her expectations clear or was she expecting her husband to read her mind?
It sounds like she was expecting her husband to care about the same things she did.