I liked the idea of “mental load” when I first heard it but I’ve had enough of it now. When, this week, I read the news that it was the subject of a study published in the journal Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, I’m afraid I simply sighed.
According to this new research, by academics at Bath University, even as women’s earnings increase the bulk of home-related “life admin” remains their responsibility. On average mothers have 67 per cent more tasks on their to-do list — 13.72 as opposed to 8.2 among fathers.
The phrase was coined in 2017 by a French comic artist and — twist! — computer science engineer who goes by the name of Emma. She drew excellent and relevant simple comics that illustrated, literally, the silent and unseen cognitive extra domestic work done mainly by women. Those mental lists seem to run on for ever and are filled with tasks so completely random — book GP appointment, dinner tonight, Sam new cricket boots, Kitty D of E award form — that none of them actually get done.
The other phrase floating around at the time was “emotional labour”, which means meeting the “emotional” requirements of a job (looking interested, being cheerful, biting one’s tongue when insulted) when you don’t feel like it. I liked that one too. It perfectly described the requirements of parenting. So not just emotional labour but unpaid emotional labour! To the barricades!
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But, like I said, I’m over all of this: 2026 will be the year I ban self-pity. Because, with two small children, work and housework to do, I did spend a long time feeling sorry for myself. It was all this mental load I was carrying and all this emotional labour I was having to do. I looked at my husband, as I was being encouraged to by internet memes, cartoons and long, angry personal essays, and saw an idle bastard, with no mental load, doing no emotional labour.
And it wasn’t just me fuming about this. The twin ideas in society of mental load and emotional labour have ramped up a sense of injustice and a common understanding that men are The Worst because, well, it did resonate. Mental load and emotional labour aren’t just things that happen in life that now have a name, these are things being done to women, mostly by men. Men are not sharing the mental load or doing the emotional labour. So now, not only are they not putting their own shoes away or the lavatory seat down, they are also absent from this other domestic work. This is just more for women to do.
It’s absolutely true that the ideas of mental load and emotional labour have been useful to women who need commonly understood phrases to articulate what’s wrong with their marriage. To enable them to explain to themselves and to the world that they are bound to child-men who refuse to shoulder a good portion of domestic responsibilities (decide among yourselves what that means).
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But I now feel a bit duped by what is essentially clickbait, rage bait even. It’s a bit like the word “adulting”, used to refer to the tiresome things we have to do when we grow up — wash own clothes, make own dinner, do own paperwork — which is all such a shock to the cosseted young millennial that it needs a name. But, come on now, who do you think is supposed to be doing this for you? Staff?
I have been encouraged to focus so much on my own mental load that I haven’t appreciated my husband’s mental load. Yet it’s there and, as my own mental load and emotional labour lifts (our children are getting older), his mental load remains because it’s less tied to child-related things and more tied to permanent and really frightening things, like the boiler.
It’s helpful to recognise mental load and emotional labour and to give those amorphous things in family life a name. But, similarly, if we are going to make peace with unchangeable things about family life we do also need to be careful not to wind ourselves up. I occasionally meet women who talk about the mental load and emotional labour like they have caught some sort of terrible disease. “It’s the mental load,” they say, in the same way they might once have said, “It’s the diphtheria.”
Family life requires an enormous amount of work, particularly at the start, that even if everyone is doing their bit, you still go to bed feeling like Iggy Pop on the last day of Burning Man. You can wonder, at times, just what the hell you personally are getting out of all this.
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Most people come to the conclusion that family life is worth all this work. But staying married also requires work. You have to want to be married, you have to do some spousal emotional labour (looking interested, suppressing annoyance), and you are absolutely entitled to expect that same work done in return. But I wonder if perfectly sound marriages are being chipped away by wider societal attitudes towards it. All the cool girls online are ranting about how useless their husband is: should I be doing this too?
In the past few years I have even found myself grateful for the mental load and emotional labour requirements of family life. I periodically suffer from bouts of bad anxiety and a thing that I find alleviates it is to attend to mundane domestic tasks. Another thing that helps is to plaster on a cheerful air for my children and husband. My father has a phrase: “Pretending to be asleep is halfway to being asleep.” Behaving as if I’m absolutely fine is halfway to being absolutely fine.
Is this poisonous mental load and emotional labour? Or are these precious aspects of family life that I will powerfully miss when they are gone?