Emotional labour, and what the phrase actually meant

The phrase has become common in discussions of relationships. Its original meaning was narrower, and separating the two makes the underlying argument stronger rather than weaker.

The original concept

Emotional labour was coined in a sociological study of paid work, describing the requirement in certain jobs to manage and display particular emotions as part of the role.

Flight attendants, care workers and service staff were the original subjects. The argument concerned the cost of sustained emotional performance required by an employer.

The concept was about paid work, about display rules imposed by an organisation, and about the strain of the mismatch between felt and expressed emotion.

The broadened use

In popular usage it now generally covers unpaid emotional and organisational work within relationships and households.

Remembering birthdays. Managing the family's social relationships. Noticing when someone is upset. Absorbing another person's moods. Holding the household schedule.

The person who coined the original term has objected to this extension, and the objection is reasonable as a matter of terminology.

It is also true that the broadened use is pointing at something real which lacked a name, which is generally why terms drift.

What is being described

Two distinguishable things, worth separating because they have different remedies.

Cognitive labour — the noticing, planning, tracking and anticipating that keeps a household running.

This is well documented in time-use and household research, distributed unequally, and largely invisible because it produces no observable activity.

Emotional management — attending to other people's states, smoothing conflict, maintaining relationships, and regulating one's own expression to keep a household comfortable.

This is harder to measure and appears consistently in qualitative research on household labour.

Why it goes unrecognised

It leaves no trace. A completed task is visible. A problem anticipated and prevented is not.

It is continuous rather than discrete. There is no point at which it is finished, which is part of what makes it wearing.

It is frequently framed as personality. The person who does it is described as organised, or as caring, which relocates work into disposition and removes any question of distribution.

Delegation does not reduce it. Asking someone to do a task is itself part of the load, which is why a partner who does things when asked has not shared it.

Addressing it

Transfer ownership of whole domains. The practical fix that appears repeatedly in this area.

One person owns everything about food — noticing, planning, buying, cooking. Another owns everything about the household administration, or the children's schooling, or the maintenance.

Ownership includes the noticing, which is the component that matters.

Externalise what can be externalised. Shared calendars, standing orders, subscriptions, automatic reminders.

Every item moved out of someone's head is a genuine reduction.

Accept a different standard. A transferred domain will be run differently. Correcting it returns the load to the original holder, which is the most common way these transfers fail.

Name it specifically rather than generally. The abstract conversation about emotional labour produces defensiveness. A specific list of what one person currently holds produces recognition.

The other side

Two counterweights worth stating.

Some of this load is self-imposed. Standards higher than the household requires generate work that nobody asked for, and the resulting resentment is directed at a partner who did not set the standard.

Separating the genuinely necessary from the optional is uncomfortable and it is worth doing before the conversation.

And the phrase is occasionally used to characterise ordinary care as a burden. Attending to a partner's state is part of what a relationship is, and framing all of it as uncompensated labour describes something that would not be worth having.

The complaint is about distribution and invisibility, which is a much stronger argument than the complaint that the work exists.

The handover problem

One practical obstacle to transferring these domains.

The person currently holding a domain knows a hundred small things about it that are not written anywhere — which supplier, which date, which arrangement with the school.

Transferring it therefore requires a period during which the new owner is worse at it and asks questions, which feels to both people like the transfer is not working.

Expecting that period, and pushing through it rather than reverting, is what determines whether the transfer holds.