If someone asked me to, I could probably delineate every chore we had in my family growing up and whose responsibility it was. I know my dad scrubbed the bathroom tubs and toilets and my mom vacuumed and dusted. My dad mowed the yard; my mom did the laundry. My dad packed our lunches and my mom drove us to school. I don’t remember these things because I was so observant, I remember them because it’d be impossible not to. My parents negotiated roles and responsibilities nearly every day.
In every system, there are certain responsibilities, or chores, that need to get done to keep the system running. These chores and responsibilities can be grouped together to form a role. For example, cleaning, doing laundry, putting things on the calendar, and buying groceries could all be lumped into the role of the household manager. Roles are really just an adaptive way to find your place in a system and to divide and conquer. In a professional setting, roles and responsibilities are the equivalent of a job and a job description. Of course, there are always gray areas, but generally, employees know who is responsible for what.
In long-term relationships, however, roles are often assigned automatically or unconsciously and are not always discussed until they become a problem. The problem usually arises when roles are not clearly defined or the labor load is unfair, when one partner is tired of his or her assigned role or not feeling appreciated, and when partners are rigid about role assignments.
How can a couple properly define the roles and division of labor in their household?
In therapy, it’s nearly impossible to talk about roles without going back a generation or two and discussing what roles looked like in each persons’ family of origin. Family size, socioeconomic status, attitudes about gender roles, sibling order, parents’ marital status, parenting styles, etc. all influence how roles were defined and how labor was divided during childhood. We tend to define roles the way they were defined in our family of origin. We all get to choose the extent to which we repeat patterns in our adult relationships, but who we initially choose to partner with is often unconscious.
We tend to choose someone that makes us feel good and what feels good is usually what is familiar (keyword: FAMILY-ar). So, in the absence of conscious thought or intention, we end up choosing what feels familiar to how we were raised. Thus, the roles and division of labor get passed on generation to generation until you consciously choose something different and understand how these roles developed in the first place or external variables impose a change (ex. loss of job, health issues). When the automatic no longer works, the relationship needs to adapt.
What if I don’t like the role I’ve been assigned? Can roles change? How?
To redefine roles in your current relationship, you might have to deconstruct the old ones first. Therapy is a great place to have conversations about what it means to partners to be the provider, the caregiver/nurturer, the household manager, and any other roles that might exist. These titles can carry a lot of assumptions, expectations, and even shame that can create resistance to switching roles. Harriet Lerner says, “Changing roles is equivalent to breaking up the mutual defensive arrangement, with the subsequent surfacing of repressed fears”. Switching roles can be very vulnerable! Chances are your current roles serve and protect you in some way.
Once you are ready to move forward, you could start with outlining all of the responsibilities necessary to keep the household running in a given month, week, and day. The more specific the better. For example, cleaning could be broken into many smaller tasks by month (dusting, polishing floors, etc.), week (laundry, unloading the dishwasher, etc.), and day (putting clothes away, scrubbing the kitchen counter, etc.) You could follow the same process for responsibilities pertaining to finances, kids, pets, food, cars, scheduling, and any other tasks you might want to negotiate.
Then you can divvy up responsibilities based on a number of variables including preferences, availability, and skill-sets. This part is a little more challenging, but most couples are able to come to an agreement on their own about this if they talk about them. The key is to TALK about the division of responsibilities, don’t just assume. As an incentive, a recent study found that equal sharing of housework is more positively related to sexual intimacy and relationship satisfaction. Interestingly, the division of dishwashing proved most consequential to relationship quality, especially for women.
Then the final step is the follow-through which requires ongoing communication. I would argue one sign of a happy couple is the amount of flexibility in roles. When one or both partners take a “that’s not my job” stance, the level of mutuality in the relationship takes a hit. The division of tasks does not have to be 50/50, you just have to get the relationship to 100.
What if one partner does not want to do their “chores”?
In an ideal world, your partner would WANT to do his or her share of the chores and you’d both be on your merry ways. In real life, most of us don’t light up at the thought of adding more things to our plate. It’s ok to want your partner to want to do something, but it’s important to remember that wanting and caring are not always the same thing. Your partner can care about you, your relationship, and staying on top of things, and still not want to vacuum the house. If he or she does it anyway, that’s still a win.
What’s most important is that you both keep the lines of communication open. If you disagree with the chores you’ve taken on, speak up! If you know you are going to be spread thin in the upcoming week, tell your partner or ask for help! Sometimes there’s a temptation not to say anything and just hope your partner doesn’t notice. This might be a good short-term solution, but this usually doesn’t work out in the long run. When you agree to do something and don’t do it (intentionally or unintentionally), you lose your partner’s trust. When you do more than you think you should and silently build resentment towards your partner, your relationship suffers. In order to maintain an equal partnership and collaboration, you need to voice your opinions and feelings.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, there are always adaptive reasons people do not speak up or ask for what they need. However, you are not doing yourself any favors by staying quiet to avoid conflict or staying in a relationship where you can’t have a voice. Your job is to be brave and direct. A softened start-up with direct language can be the difference between being heard or being dismissed.
What is the difference between physical and emotional labor?
Physical labor involves doing. Emotional labor involves monitoring, remembering, initiating…and a lot of other invisible tasks. When someone brings up the topic of emotional labor, he or she is probably referring to the less visible or invisible work that goes into managing a household and the relationships inside of it. It’s one thing to complete an assigned task. It’s another to identify/create the task that needs to be completed, assign the task, and remember to track it or initiate conversations about it until it is complete.
The energy and effort that go into emotional labor are often unacknowledged and unmatched because partners are often unaware someone is carrying this weight. Doing the emotional labor in a relationship becomes a problem when one person feels exhausted or resentful about carrying a heavier load and is in need of acknowledgment and/or help. This is usually about the time that couples initiate therapy. It’s not uncommon for one partner to come into therapy feeling exhausted and the other to come in confused.
In the absence of negotiation, emotional labor nearly always falls on the female in the relationship (although there are exceptions). This “labor of love” has the capacity to turn into a cesspool for resentment. But it doesn’t have to! If you recognize your partner does the majority of the emotional labor in the relationship, “you never asked” does not cut it. If you see your partner looks exhausted or observe her struggling around the house, your job is to initiate a conversation or offer to help.
How does couples counseling help better define household roles?
Couples counseling creates the safety and connection individuals need to circumvent surface-level conversations that are usually a defense against the harder ones you need to have. You might have noticed that I spoke very little about which partner should be responsible for x,y, and z in this article. Similarly, you might come into counseling wanting to talk about responsibilities but find that we talk very little about who cleans what. That’s because the issue is usually much deeper and the meaning attached to each role has a history. Your relationship can survive one of you being better about cleaning up after yourself. Your relationship cannot survive a lack of intimacy, trust, and mutual respect and appreciation. Counseling is a place to facilitate this type of connection and to build the patience with each other necessary for long-term sustainable change.
