Who does the emotional labour in your home?
Issue #112: Hint - She does.
Hello ji,
Earlier this week, I was talking to a newly married friend.
He mentioned that his wife and parents are having some adjustment issues at home because of their cultural differences, building tensions in their relationship.
I asked him how he planned to diffuse the situation to make the transition easier for all of them.
He looked confused by the question.
He said, “They are all adults. Let them manage their own relationship. Why should I get in the middle of it?”
I was just as confused by this response.
In my head, someone who chooses their partner is very much responsible for facilitating the relationship between their family and their partner.
I am one of these ‘lucky’ people - because that is what you call Indian women who get the basic right to choose their own partners - and in many ways, my partner and parents come from two different universes.
My parents are emotional people, who use words only for logistical communication. Their most important communication - like their feelings, hopes, dreams, and disappointments - are conveyed in subtext, body language, and - our family’s national mode of communication - eyebrow movements.
Proof that I have native fluency in subtext 👆🏼
My husband, on the other hand, is the kind of man who - bless him - would not notice Subtext if it danced in front of him wearing Deepika Padukone for skin.
And so, I take it upon myself to bridge this chasm of communication between The Husband and The Parents.
This means that I often remind Parents to not read too much into things that Husband says / does not say / does / does not do.
Similarly, I give Husband a heads-up every time I see him say / not say / do / not do something that would convey an unintended message to Parents.
If reading that was exhausting for you, imagine how living it feels.
Maybe I should illustrate with examples:
For instance, on Husband’s side of the family, asking how many rotis (Indian flatbreads) you will eat for dinner is a normal, practical question that is asked to plan meals.
In my Punjabi family, it is an offense of epic proportions.
Another example: Texting.
I am programmed to send family elders long texts that convey respect and care:
“We have landed safely, Papa. I hope you had your dinner.”
“Thank you for the wishes, Aunty ji. Happy diwali to you and Uncle ji too!”
Meanwhile, Husband’s chat messages are largely:
“Ok.”
Or, if he is feeling extra creative:
👍
When I pointed out this difference to him, he showed me the last 20 texts he had exchanged with his Dad, which were all versions of:
Boarded.
Ok.
Landed.
👍
I have spent years sensitizing Husband that when he sends “Ok.” on our family group, Parents feel this:
I told my newly married friend all of the above.
He remained resolute that it was not his job to “interfere” in the relationship between his parents and his wife.
The fact that they were all in each other’s lives because of him did not matter anymore, according to him, because now they are ‘family’ and have to manage their communication gaps themselves.
The whole conversation was a reminder to me of what is known as Emotional Labour:
Emotional labour is the effort it takes to stay cognizant of the feelings of people around you, and the work you do to keep these feelings as positive as possible.
Here are some stories that reflect how this load - much like mental load - is disproportionately shouldered by women in relationships:
The emotional load of maintaining relationships
Farah remembers everyone’s birthdays and anniversaries on both - her and her husband’s sides of the family - as well as both their sets of friends.
“My husband has a reputation for being ‘terrible at keeping in touch’. This used to seem cute and charming at first. But now it has become a running joke among his friends that I am ‘the PA’ as all communication to him must be routed through me otherwise he would not respond at all.”
Farah’s ‘PA duties’ extend to maintaining a relationship between her husband and his own family and friends.
“Soon after we got married, I realized that it was a pattern for him to ignore texts and calls from people trying to connect with him. For him, a person who was out of sight was also out of his mind.
This might have been okay for acquaintances but he also did it with people who truly loved him. For example, he used to be very close to his Chaachi (aunt) who was a close maternal figure for him when he was a child.
But now that we are settled in another country, and he hardly ever picks up the phone to call her. Even when she reaches out with a text on WhatsApp asking how he is, he takes forever to respond to her.”
Farah took it upon herself to bridge the gap between her husband and the people who love him.
“With his permission, I started responding to messages from loved ones on his phone, as if he were sending the responses. I would wish his family members on festivals, birthdays, and anniversaries from his phone so they felt happy that ‘he’ had remembered them on special days.
It has been years and I still do this regularly. He does not mind me doing it, but he still never makes the effort to pick up the phone and call them himself.
His closest friends and families now know they need to call me when they want to check in on us. Every month or so, I call them too, so that they feel in touch with him through me.
His Chaachi and I are in regular touch today. We have conversations about our blood sugar management (we are both diabetic), and just check in on each other’s wellbeing from time to time.”
Women may marry men looking for a ‘partner’ for life.
But it turns out, most men are only signing up for the first two letters of the word.
The emotional load of maintaining traditions
Supriya moved to London with her husband and infant a few years back.
She spoke to me about the extra burden most NRI women bear to ensure their children stay connected to their cultures.
“Festivals are all about emotional, mental, and physical load only on women. This disparity becomes even more stark when you live abroad.
Which festivals we must celebrate, which we can let pass, who should we celebrate with, when, where and how - all of these decisions are taken by women in NRI families.
If the woman does not do this, the family would pass by all Indian festivals without even noticing them because we are in countries where these festivals are not big.
Last year alone, I hosted three Diwali parties at my home, for three different groups of friends here. We also attended various parties thrown by other Indian families on each Indian festival. Planning these parties, decorating our homes or booking venues, give and take of gifts, menu planning, cooking, cleaning - all of it falls on the women.”
Supriya ran me through the steps involved in simply ensuring her family dresses traditionally on these occasions.
“I have to make sure I order everyone’s attires for each occasion well in advance from India. They not just have to be the right size and quality and fit in our budget - but also have to reach us in time for the celebration.
I am constantly on the lookout for these items on sale on Amazon India or Indian vendors on Instagram. I order them at my parents’ place and then keep an eye for anyone traveling across our continents who can get them, or look up reliable courier services to deliver them to us when we need them.
I do this - not just ethnic clothes - but also the materials we need for poojas (rituals), traditional decor items, non-perishable food items from our cultures, and Indian gifts commonly exchanged on the festivals.
All of the above load is all mine.”
I pointed out how exhausting all of this sounded and that I had never thought about this extra burden on NRI women.
“Actually, I do very little by standards of other Indian women I see around me. Every NRI woman around the world does all of this - and much more - to ensure their children are exposed to their culture and roots.
We live with the added feeling of guilt of ‘how will our kids learn our traditions if they never see us practicing them?’
If I ask my husband to contribute to these preparations, he will say he does not care about celebrating these festivals.
But this is not true. Fathers want their kids to ‘be Indian’ too, but most just do not want to do the work involved in achieving it.
And of course - if our kids appear too firangi (foreign) to our relatives back in India - they will remark that the mother has not taught the kids their own culture.”
The emotional load of maintaining everyone’s mental health
Payal has often felt the weight of being not just her partner’s wife, but also his therapist.
“This is not easy. His parents went through an extremely ugly separation when he was a kid. So he comes with a lot of childhood trauma.
In the early days of our relationship, I used to think that ‘in sickness and in health’ means that it is my job to ‘fix him’ in every sickness, including his mental health.
But we have been married for 10 years now, and I have thankfully overcome this conditioning with time and experience. He has come on board too, and sees a professional therapist now instead of expecting me to play that role.
However, I still have to keep an eye on his appointments with the therapist, and gently remind him when it has been a while since his last appointment.”
While Payal continues to shoulder a part of that ‘sickness and health’ load, her mother-in-law has a different outlook.
“She believes her son’s mental health is a problem that I created.
She told me once, ‘My son is not crazy. He did not need any depression medication or therapy until you came into his life.’
Her objection to therapy does not bother me too much, because I know this is how most desi parents feel about it.
But I it does hurt when my caregiving for his mental health is portrayed as me making him mentally ill.”
I have heard many stories where a young man is about to marry a woman - and just a whiff of marital troubles in her family is enough for the man’s family to advise him to reject the woman.
But in Payal’s case, the news of her would-be in-laws’ separation had the opposite effect on her relatives.
“When we were engaged, members of my extended family heard about his parents being separated. Many of them commented that maybe I can be the one to bring them together again!
Mind you, by that point, they had been separated for 15+ years. Yet, people imagined that I would now hold the absurd responsibility of reuniting a couple that has been separated for over half my life!
To me, it just shows how many undue emotional expectations women are burdened with in a family.”
The emotional load of children’s emotional wellbeing
If I wrote out every “birthday party planning” story I got for this issue, I would crash all Substack servers in one newsletter.
Suffice to say that behind every child’s birthday party is a deeply exhausted and exploited mother who has been working tirelessly for weeks to make her child’s day memorable.
And a dad who showed up - sometimes late - with no clue who the kids running around him even are.
(I sometimes ask the dad what is in the packed return gift my kid gets at parties, just to enjoy the sight of a grown man squirming.)
But a birthday party demands more than the physical and mental load of event planning.
It is an emotional investment that a parent (the mother) makes to ensure their child has that basic need crucial to every kid’s mental and emotional health - friends.
Alka told me about the efforts she makes to this end.
“Being around other kids is probably the single most critical factor in a child’s growth. So I see this as an important part of parenting.
When we moved to a new city recently, I was concerned since our son is an only child and there were no cousins for him to play with in this city.
I also knew it would be a difficult adjustment for him since he was very attached to his grandparents, and now he could not see them everyday anymore.
When I told me husband that we should do something about this, he said, ‘I don’t want to control his friendships also now. Let him make his own friends like we all did.’
And that was the end of the conversation from his side.”
But Alka did not think that this conversation should end there.
“The harsh reality is that we do not live in the 80s and 90s anymore - when kids used to run amok in the streets, unsupervised by adults. In this age of gated colonies, and parents’ growing concerns around child safety, kids - especially very young kids like mine - need parents to make a bit of an effort to forge friendships, at least in the early stages.
I made an effort to become friends with other moms in the neighbourhood and from his school. I started inviting them and their kids over for playdates.
It was not easy. I sacrificed my leisure time to do this, often moved work stuff around to align schedules with others, and - to be fair - tolerated my fair share of unlikeable parents and hell-raising kids who painted graffiti on my house walls.
I also counseled my son through his first encounter with a bully - an older kid in the neighbourhood who was forbidding other children from playing with my son - probably because he just wanted to pick on the ‘new kid’.”
Her efforts bore fruit.
“Pretty soon, my son bloomed into a socially active kid and adjusted to the new city. Today, he has a thriving circle of friends who love him and whom he adores. Six months back, he used to cry himself to bed every night saying he hated the new city. Today, he says he never wants to move away from here.
My husband sometimes sees him playing with his buddies and says, ‘See? I told you he would find his friends.’
He has no clue - nor will he ever appreciate - the amount of effort I have made to make this happen.”
Recently, Alka made a WhatsApp group of like-minded parents in her new city, to make playdate coordination smoother.
“I see all the mothers on the group making an effort to ensure our kids get to meet despite our busy work, travel and social schedules. We also ensure that everyone does their fair share of hosting the others’ kids so we can all catch a break once in a while.
The fathers on the group mostly forward memes and discuss cricket scores.”
The emotional load of planning weddings
Samyukta got married ten years ago but remembers it like it was yesterday.
And it is not for any romantic nostalgia you might imagine a bride having about her wedding.
If you did everything she did to plan an event, you would remember it too:
“For our wedding, I managed all the guest lists, invitations and RSVPs. I also did all the work around designing the invites, planning the venue, decor, catering, hiring the right photographers and videographers, hair and makeup stylists, picking both our wedding outfits for each celebration, shopping for gifts to give relatives on both sides of the family, pick up and dropoff services for our guests, and coordinating with all the vendors involved.
All the while, making sure that we stuck to our budget for the wedding.”
What was Samyukta’s partner - the groom - doing for the wedding, you might ask.
Surely his to-do list was just as long - if not longer - than the bride’s?
My would-be husband was assigned only two tasks: one, picking up his own sherwani (wedding coat) after I had picked the design and ordered alterations for his size.
And, two showing up.”
I thought Samyukta was being excessively kind, counting ‘showing up’ as a task the groom performed at his own wedding.
But, she says, he had what seemed to be a logical explanation for it.
“His excuse for his lack of involvement was that he did not want a wedding in the first place. As the eldest daughter of a traditional Indian family, this was not an option available to me. I am not sure even his family would have agreed to it, but he was adamant that I was the only reason we were having a wedding at all. So I agreed to take almost all the wedding planning and execution on myself.”
To make things worse, the groom signed up to appear for a major examination just four days before the wedding day.
“Every time I brought up the wedding in conversation, he would react with irritation. He was irritable even when asked to smile at our pre-wedding shoot.
He would keep complaining, ‘Are we done yet? I have an exam to study for!’
I had to almost drag him out of his house just to give his measurements at the store for his own wedding sherwani. If I physically could have, I am sure I would have done that for him too.
The least I expected was for him to show some excitement in inviting his friends to our wedding. Instead, even the job of reaching out to his friends - some of whom I had never even met - for invitations and RSVPs fell on me.”
At the time, Samyukta tried to empathize with the pressure he was under.
I guess the notion that he needed to empathize with the pressure she was under never crossed her mind.
But today, after ten years of marriage, she questions the whole thing.
“That exam he scheduled four days before our wedding actually happens thrice a year. And our wedding date had been decided 18 months in advance.
So looking back, I realize that he could have easily picked another date for the exam and been an actual partner to me when I needed his help the most.”
I am not saying that Samyukta’s partner intentionally scheduled a big exam in the week of their wedding so he could dump all the emotional, mental, and physical load of wedding planning on her.
But my eyebrows are.
The price of emotional free-riding
Men are as much products of patriarchy as women are.
They are - in more ways than one - also victims of patriarchy.
“Let my wife and parents manage their own relationship.”
“Let my kid find his own friends, and deal with his bullies himself.”
“Let my bride plan her own wedding.”
All of these statements reveal a stunted understanding of how human beings and their emotions work.
One of the first encounters a little boy has with gender roles is when he bruises a knee and an elder tells him, ‘Boys don’t cry’.
How can someone who has never learned to recognize emotions in themselves recognize them in others?
Emotionally stunted men is a reality we all have to live with because no one told boys that it is okay to cry, okay to feel scared, okay to be anxious, and okay to express these emotions.
I sometimes think if I could travel back to every man’s childhood and tell him this, I would come back to the present having solved war and climate change.
But women, children, and families are not the only ones who pay the price for men being emotional free-riders.
Men suffer for doing this themselves - perhaps more than anyone else.
Sample the story of Jyoti, her husband Saurabh, and their daughter Kiara.
“Kiara is a heart baby (adopted child). She came to us when she was five months old. That was nine years ago, and since then, every decision about her upbringing has been mine to make.
Saurabh loves her but he has no opinion on anything I ask him related to her. Right from small things like planning playdates or preparing for her exams, to big things like what values we want to give her - he doesn’t spare much thought about any of it.”
One of the ‘big things’ is helping Kiara navigate her emotions about being adopted.
“Ever since we applied for adoption, I have been educating myself around navigating an adopted child’s unique emotional journey. I am on many adoptive parent groups online, I attend webinars about this, and I am constantly reading books on it.
Talking to your adopted child about where they came from is not a one-time conversation you can get done with. Different issues keep cropping up at different ages.
As all the experts advise, I have kept adoption as a day-to-day topic in our house. We talk about it like we do about any other subject, without giving it too much attention. But we acknowledge that this is how our family came to be.
This has been a very conscious effort on my part.”
I asked Jyoti to share an example of a difficult conversation and how she navigated it.
“One day, my daughter was crying in bed at night. When I asked, she told me that they had studied animals and their young ones at school that day. She was upset because all animals give birth to their young ones, but I did not give birth to her and didn’t nurse her.
It was totally unexpected and I had to work through my own emotions before I answered her, held her, and comforted her.
The one thing I have made sure she knows is that whatever life throws at her - her mother will hold her and work through it together with her.”
Jyoti feels a well-earned sense of pride about this.
“Building this trust with my daughter that she can share all her emotions with me - around her adoption specifically, but everything else too - is something I have achieved after years of thoughtful and continuous efforts.
I never had such a relationship with my own mother So I know how much it hurts a child when they cannot trust their parent with their emotions and feelings. And what a life-changing difference it makes when they can.
I consider this my biggest parenting win.
Mine. All mine.
I read, I educate myself, I meet and befriend other adoptive parents, I join communities that equip me to navigate this journey better.
Saurabh has always called these conversations ‘too emotional’ and shirked the responsibility of having them with Kiara.”
Jyoti says she now sees Saurabh paying a heavy price for not having built that emotional bond with Kiara.
“I often see Saurabh looking from the outside at the little circle of trust Kiara and I are in. I see that he wants in too. But he does not know how to join us. He does not even know where to start.
I can see him feeling frustrated about this. Sometimes, I feel bad for him and try to prompt him with ideas for things he can say or do.
But beyond a point, I don’t want to be a mother to him too. The line between being a supportive partner and a mother to your husband is very fine and I constantly find myself oscillating between the two roles.
And all this heartache, simply because men are never taught the basic life skill of managing their own emotions, let alone others’.”
If you have a son or sons, please consider this a reminder to hug and kiss them.
Do it often. Do it every day.
Teach them how to recognize their own emotions, and express them in healthy ways.
Teach them it is okay to cry, to feel scared, vulnerable, and sad. To hug and want to be hugged.
Teach them to love, respect, and accept themselves - so that they grow up to be men who are capable of doing the same for others.
If you are a man, lead by example.
If you don’t know where to start, ask the woman who has been doing it for you.
❤️
Mahima
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Amazing piece Mahima! Your writing helps me see through my own conditioning and the situations where I should have shown more strength/backbone. Love the stories you wrote ❤️
Thank you for this. I am 38 years, married for 4 years now. We married just before COVID lockdowns happened and therefore ended up spending all the time with each other right at the beginning of our marriage. My wife lost her mother when she was 6-7 years and her father, as advised by elders of the family, remarried. These incidents left a deep impression on her I feel. Her younger brother, whom she looked after like her own child after her mother's death, too passed away last year. I, on the other hand, am the youngest of three. My father wasn't around during my growing up years, he had to work hard to give us the education and opportunities like others. My parents always ensured the three of us got the same opportunities, meaning no bias that way. However, since he was so into the thick of things that all i remember of him from childhood is anger, frustration, disappointment. I didn't realise it then, but it formed me into an emotionally stunted person as you describe in the article. All in all, I was not qualified to take care of my own self and then wife came in with her stuff too. It all ended up such that we are separating now. I am quitting my job and returning back to my parents. She will continue with her job here. I do not have any plans for the future, but just know this much that I am not capable of handling all of this and it's therefore better to step back. Not sure why I shared all of this here, was relating to a lot the things you shared and it triggered my response. Thank you again!