Someone Told the Trads About the Mental Load

Talking about your husband as an achievement robs everyone of autonomy

Sometime in the last 10 years, the term “mental load” entered the Instagram Mom pop psychology canon. Coined by sociologist Arie Hochschild in her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Emotion in Modern Times, it refers to the invisible and disproportionate mental energy women in hetero partnerships often spend on household management, domestic tasks, and childrearing. Particularly as dual income families become more common, it’s clear that women are absorbing more of the “traditionally” masculine expectations around career, salary, and education without jettisoning any of the traditionally “feminine” expectations about how to be the perfect wife and mother. Moms understandably latched onto this concept, as it gave voice to a dynamic so many of us saw in our own homes— namely that, with the addition of a third, fourth, or fifth family member, a new set of tasks, deadlines, and expectations descended that seemed to fall disproportionately on them.

There is, frankly, no single cause for this, and it happens in many families regardless of any other factors. While it’s true that some of this is old-fashioned male entitlement from the fiery hell of The Patriarchy, it’s also sneakily engrained in the culture. Daycare will call Mom no matter what’s noted on the form. Many workplaces, if they offer family leave at all, will only provide it to the birthing person (often Mom), thus leaving only one member of a partnership alone to contend with a new baby for months. The night wakings, tiny clothes, breast pump, well-child appointments, and “mommy and me” classes become the sole province of Mom even as Dad’s life doesn’t change much. Without a lot of intentional resistance (something in dramatically short supply in the hazy newborn days), many of us default to the models we saw growing up, bolstered by a lack of structural and cultural support for moms to step away from their families or for Dad to step in.

Since we can’t have nice things, instead of having a productive conversation about what we might actually do about this— things like equitable family leave, appropriate paid time off for working parents to care for their families even if there is a parent staying home, and a safe, non-judgmental conversation about how many of us have seen this dynamic emerge, uninvited and by surprise, in our own marriages— the cultural narrative has devolved into a pointless chorus of “well, my husband does every single thing for me and the kids, provides everything we need, and spoils me rotten! Sorry you chose a loser, babe!”

I can’t help but notice that how much men do— or don’t— in relationships, has now become a center of exhausting and useless competition… between women? Men, autonomous individuals capable of learning, researching, reading, and (we’re told) possessed of great reasoning skills are now reduced to immutable archetypes women pick out, like the perfect handbag. Men’s behavior, then, presumably boils down to how well their wives have curated them (and, the unspoken assumption that the more desirable a woman is, the better her husband will treat her). Talking about your husband as an achievement robs everyone of autonomy and, more importantly, shifts accountability from the structural factors making families’ lives harder back onto the very same women most oppressed by this system.

Choose better, they say, have higher standards, be more [fill in the blank] and you, too, will find the perfect husband and father to complete your family! This idea not only places both credit and responsibility for the actions of men on women, it also denies men agency over their own choices.

Now, Lauren, you jealous hater! I bet you wouldn’t be saying that if your husband did enough for you! Listen, yellowcard. My husband is amazing, in ways both big and small— and I want to be clear that I am grateful for everything he does and is. Any man who will cancel his morning softball game to schlep two toddlers and his mother-in-law downtown to a half marathon sideline in the cold, through road closures and chaos, to see me run past him for three minutes, is a hero in my book. And yet, he is this person because he chooses to be, because he understands how important this is to me without being told, and because he grew into parenting so beautifully and compassionately I’m in awe. I didn’t fashion him into who he is, and while I love to celebrate him, I do so in the knowledge that he did the work here.

He certainly wouldn’t want me using the example of everything he does as a cudgel to boost my own image or to disempower a fellow mom whose husband didn’t— or couldn’t— do the same that day, or even a friend who doesn’t have a partner at all. He also wouldn’t want me to position myself as an authority on how to have the perfect relationship based on what he does. He understands that being an ally is about more than just being nice to your wife and kids and shows it by treating all women, including those who don’t live under his roof or do anything in particular for him, with respect. He uses his experiences as a husband and father to empathize with women and moms at work, in the parking lot at daycare, in our neighborhood. He does it whether or not I post about it, so I mostly don’t.

Shouting down women who are trying to have a productive conversation about modern gender dynamics with “well, sucks to suck, nerd, my man would NEVER” is not only annoying to see on TikTok, it’s dangerous. If we agree that unequal mental load in relationships is a problem, the solution can’t be shaming those who have that problem. It creates a chilling effect on dialogue that makes it impossible to discuss what’s actually happening. To indulge me in an analogy, let’s say your house was on fire, and you called me and said “hey, my house is on fire!” Would it help you if I said, “well, my house isn’t on fire, and just so you know— it’s the nicest house in the neighborhood. Maybe someday you could have a house like mine! Follow me for real estate tips!” would that help you? Would it support you in doing what you needed to improve the situation? Or would it, as is often the case in these situations, make your very real problem about me in a way that ignored the actual emergency?

To address the mental load in relationships, we need to interrogate why women so often end up in— and stay in— situations where their home life is suffocating them. Most women don’t actually choose partners who seem like they wouldn’t be good husbands or dads, and yet many women find themselves waking up one day not so very long after their first child is born feeling adrift and unsupported with no idea how they got there. We need to map all the points along the way from marrying a guy who genuinely agrees that parenting duties should be split equally to being the only person in the house with the password to the gymnastics Parent Portal or who knows to sort outgrown clothes. We could learn more from that than any preening, I promise.

While I’m here, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that, for the partnerships where this isn’t much of an issue, it’s often because they simply have the ability to leverage (or hire) a lot of help. While this isn’t inherently bad for those who can afford it, it doesn’t help economically-squeezed families (which is most of us) manage. That said, it does point to solutions, which mostly boil down to capacity and community care. If it really does now take more than two people to build the village the average family needs, what cultural and policy work do we need to undertake to ensure that village exists in a world of increasing individualist tribalism? I’ll start: the work isn’t printing a chore chart and telling women to hang it on their wall next to their toddlers’ macaroni art.

Men in hetero partnerships, I hope you understand that, to the extent there are unequal demands in your own homes, the responsibility to change that lies primarily with you. You benefit from this dynamic, so don’t expect your wives and girlfriends to figure out how to make you relinquish it. I believe you can figure it out. You can start by listening, which I’ve found is a great strategy. Talk to other men about it, be a productive bystander if you see your peers dumping the lion’s share of the responsibility on the nearest woman (doesn’t have to be their partner!). I will celebrate you when you do, probably not on my social feeds which are mostly dedicated to the things I care about more than who took out the trash that morning, but with my respect, which is worth more to me than any like or share.

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