like a rising comet

But brushing your teeth for 30 seconds is better than not brushing them at all when that 2 minutes seems exhausting.  Doing ten minutes of yoga is better than 10 minutes of sitting when 30 minutes of cardio sounds impossible.  Changing my clothes is good when a whole shower is impossible.  Standing on the porch for a few minutes is worth it after being in the house for three straight days because I don’t have the energy to go anywhere.

The next step is marking the emotional labor provided and relied on as valuable, and sometimes even vital. Such a marking needn’t necessarily be rewarded with money. Marking a performance as valuable can involve nonmonetary rewards like affording the doer of the task real status, expressing gratitude, and marking the performance as deserving of reciprocity or even an IOU for another type of performance.

For couples seeking to make their relationship more egalitarian, emotional labor sweat equity can start being attained with timekeeping as one way of measuring output, as long as emotional labor is seen as its own category on top of other activities and chores. Whose feelings are being put first? Whose experience is being protected? Who is filtering their emotions for the benefit of the group? Who is taking up space? Negotiating different responsibilities, including sharing the overall responsibility of the well-being of a family unit or a group, or deciding in a way that feels fair who can carry the burden of that responsibility, is an obvious part of it too.

Licensed psychotherapist Shirley Johnson said that she often reminds people who have been in relationships for decades that it is never too late to renegotiate labor divisions or dynamics. Communication lines need to be open. Johnson, who works with individuals and couples, explained in an interview that emotional labor came up especially as an issue in “hetero cis” couples. She agreed with studies and interviews that this was mostly an unequal burden carried by women even if they worked, or by those playing traditional feminine roles in non-breadwinner situations.

But Johnson warned that better dynamics when it came to emotional labor also involved women letting go of what she called “compulsive caretaking at one’s own expense.” This was something the psychotherapist had observed in all people who at one point had been socialized as women, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, or religion. “I see this so prominently in my practice that women are very much in this compulsive caretaking role. And often they don’t know it, and it is so entrenched as the norm in our society. Even the idea that they should keep someone happy. It becomes very toxic.”

Erica, my coffee shop interviewee, was particularly reflective on the amount of personal responsibility she carried in performing an inordinate amount of emotional labor and household duties, on top of working and being the primary parent. “The men say, ‘I didn’t ask you to do it, nobody cares if our kid’s sandwich is cut into little stars.’ That’s always a balance. My husband, when I get frustrated, I come home and I am going to have to do the dishes, and he says, ‘I will do them, I will do them!’ And I say, ‘I know, but I want to start dinner,’ and he says, ‘Why don’t we just order something,’ and I say, ‘I know we can just order something but I have this nice really healthy meal planned for all of us. So that we can stay healthy and not die.’”

Erica’s emotional labor lies in the details of the tasks she performs—injecting thoughtfulness into pretty sandwich cutting and doing what needs to be done to get her husband to be healthy and avoid hereditary heart disease. Some of it she sees as superfluous, and some of it is necessary, even if she ends up caring more for her adult loved one than they are caring for themselves. “The world wouldn’t stop if I didn’t do it,” she told me. “So part of this is that whole balance of how much of this is because we choose to do it, because this is what we think we are expected to do.”

Johnson explained that “often the person doing that labor is scared of handing over that labor because their identity is baked into that labor.” This was something I also encountered in some interviews with parents, particularly a few mothers of toddlers, who were desperate for more hands-on help but were also unwilling to give up much of their role. Erica despaired at the amount of labor, including unpaid emotional labor, she did, but also took some of the blame.

“Part of it is me. I like keeping everyone around me happy. I want to be a good hostess, I want to be a good mom, I want to be a good wife, I want everyone to be happy and healthy. I want to keep our son’s teachers happy. I want to make sure he has all his extra clothes, and he doesn’t run out of diapers.”

Johnson suggested a two-pronged approach to address compulsive caretaking. First, women, or people socialized in feminine roles, needed to learn “to tolerate a bigger array of emotions” and accept that not everyone was going to be happy all the time. Accepting this would lead to the withholding of the labor to other members of the family or the group, who—through the absence of the labor—would be forced into acknowledging it was there. The second component involved each person taking responsibility for their needs, identifying what they were, and seeking to fulfill them, including through communicating them to their partner. “The more each person is caring for their needs, self-caring, the stronger the relationship is,” Johnson said.

Doing an inventory of needs and sharing that with a partner was key not only because it helped fulfill that need but also because it decreased a key component of emotional labor: constant preemptive thoughtfulness. “We are supporting decreasing anticipating one another’s behavior,” Johnson said, as constant projection into the future causes anxiety. This exercise disrupts the notion that one person or group should have their needs seamlessly anticipated and catered to, and another person should be in a constant, anxious state of multidimensional projection.”]