Emotional labor

Yeah.

Another thing that reminds me of is the concept of emotional labor in academia.

I was just

going to say that.

But then it's invisible.

You're just kind of a raider.

You're doing all the emotional labor, but no one is giving you credit for it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So on this section, I want to ask you about The fact that you've said that care is fundamentally emotional labour, which it is.

What do you believe the sector still underestimates about the emotional intelligence required to do this work well?

Yeah, and that's a huge question.

And that's not often a partner.

or necessarily someone in family, but it's about thinking, who is it that you know who actually has done this work alongside themselves and who will be there for you in those moments? And that's failing of the sector, because the sector should have a whole infrastructure that guarantees people in this work that it will be there for them.

But I'm not convinced we're there yet, which is why I think emotional labour, which is what I call this, is not being matched by the emotional ask that we're asking of staff.

Yeah, thank you.

We're not feeling that desperation to be in a relationship anymore.

because we are able to provide for ourselves now and then a lot of the times women if a man has not done the internal work on himself and he hasn't gone through the healing process and trying to unlearn bad behaviors that leaves a lot of the emotional labor on the women in the relationship women are not wanting to do all of the emotional labor and we also have higher standards which is why we are choosing to be single Not higher in comparison to men, but we are expanding or raising our standards as time progresses.

Now, we're not necessarily asking for perfection, but we are asking for compatibility.

And that just goes back to those questions I stated earlier that more and more women are starting to ask.

And then just to go back on the emotional labor part.

We are not looking to be somebody's therapist, somebody's mother, or somebody's life coach simultaneously in a relationship just to be in a relationship, just to say we are in a relationship.

We're not looking to take on all of that emotional labor anymore just for the simple fact of claiming we're in a relationship, a happy relationship.

Because that's not happy, that's depleting you if you were taking on all those different roles.

... another two books I'm looking at right now, I, I have not finished them, but one is called Fair Play.

The other one's called Emotional Labor, and it's all about the woman and all the work she has to do.

And I do think that like one of the things I did in this Fair Play book that they s- that they recommend is like write down everything that you do.

Hmm.

And now what do we do? We are doing what I think we now need to do.

I've talked in previous books about emotional labor, kind of the emotional work that you do often in everyday life or at jobs, to how we direct our feelings, how we manage our feelings.

And I think now we need to do a political form of emotional labor.

We need actually, some people will say, oh, I can't stand to look at the news.

Oh, you know, he's just destroying everything I ever believed in, you know, and I can't look at, oh, I've heard people say, oh, I'm going to get a new passport.

And when you look at gender, this is I found so interesting because if you're a woman who dates men, you already know the work of dating is not always equally distributed.

There is a huge body of research and cultural conversation around the fact that women, we just perform a lot more of the emotional labor and heterosexual pairing.

So things like Maintaining social relationships, reading social cues, initiating hard conversations, managing other people's feelings, all of that.

Women shoulder a lot more of that work when we're in a pairing with men.

As the theorist Silvia Federici has shown, this unvalued labor counts for most of the work on the planet.

How could the burden be redistributed? In the late 2010s, the conversation centered on the unequal emotional labor of managing the heterosexual household.

This labor involved logistics because the frustration and overwhelm came from constantly remembering all the household details and taking the lead in ensuring its smooth operation.

Though not at perfect parity, LGBTQ plus households tended to divide logistical labor more evenly.

so

much emotional labor.

So you holding that and it's so nice to see how it's all unfolded.

So now your child gets that attentive, aware mother and, who's homeschooling or unschooling and and you can address those those things like be outside go play you know have quiet time like oh my gosh so amazing like the new generation of children that have conscious parents it's like

system that literally targets women and it's not to say that there aren't amazing men in the world absolutely my husband's one of them so mine

too

yeah and um there's a saying that i read recently it says if you can't see it you can't heal it so i'm just curious whether you feel similarly like in terms of the women that come to you there there are these really common patterns among women, this people pleasing, not enoughness, overburden, taking the grand majority of the emotional labor of the family, being CEOs of their family, literally like coordinating schedules.

There's X number of children who has food is as this.