What We’re Getting Wrong About Emotional Labor
Women aren’t doing emotional labor. They’re doing existential labor. The difference is damning.
Modern marriage is a sleight of hand magic trick. I’m increasingly convinced of it. You would be, too, if you sat with couples day after day, watching the same subtle patterns repeat themselves with uncanny consistency.
The way she couches her requests, wrapping them in gentleness the way a veterinarian hides an old dog’s medication inside a treat. The way he readily cops to the minor offenses—mea culpa, just enough humility to be disarming—before positioning himself as the injured party once the conversation turns toward the deeper, more consequential issues.
Men often come to therapy at their wife’s behest. Or they arrive as a Hail Mary, a final gesture of goodwill after years of quietly draining her reservoir of patience. Displacement is the name of the game. Now you see me taking accountability, and now you don’t.
If I sound cynical, don’t let me fool you. I am deeply pro-monogamy, which is precisely why I am so fed up with those who half-ass it.
I believe a lifelong partnership offers one of the most potent opportunities for human formation available to us. It is no small thing to chronicle the inner life of another person over decades. I myself have been permanently shaped for the better by the steady, daily investment of a man who has witnessed my every iteration.
But even before I am pro-monogamy, I am deeply—devoutly—pro women are people, for crying out loud.
Which is why I want to talk about why the term “emotional labor” is failing us.
The Sleight of Hand
When women name emotional labor, men often respond with a peculiar mix of relief and absolution.
Yes, she does do more of that than I do. Honestly, more than necessary. I never asked her to take all that on. No wonder she’s exhausted. She should slow down.
This is the sleight of hand.
Because what women are doing is not excessive caretaking driven by anxiety or control. They are not fussing unnecessarily or manufacturing complexity where none exists. They are doing the existential work required to keep a shared life alive, and they are doing it because someone has to.
“Emotional labor,” as it’s commonly used, suggests optional softness: remembering birthdays, smoothing interactions, maintaining warmth. But what I see in my office goes much deeper than that. What women are doing is not merely emotional or even logistical—it is existential authorship.
They are holding responsibility for the life itself.
What Existential Work Actually Is
Existential work in a marriage is not about managing problems when they arise. It is about inhabiting the relationship as an ongoing project, rather than assuming it will more or less take care of itself.
It looks like three things.
First, it means sustaining forward motion. This is what dating actually is: the ongoing discipline of asking, How do we keep this life alive? Choosing meaningful activities. Creating shared experiences. Refusing stagnation. A relationship left to inertia does not remain neutral; it decays. Momentum is not romance—it is maintenance at the level of meaning.
Second, existential work means tending the interior climate of one’s mind. Your partner does not just live with your actions; they live inside your inner world—your resentments, your distractions, your unexamined narratives. I do not want my husband to have to inhabit a mind cluttered with contempt, disengagement, or psychic noise. I do not want to think about the person I love with the same mental posture I use to scroll or mentally check out. That is not neutrality. That is neglect.
Third, existential work means taking responsibility for one’s own formation. Growth is not a private hobby inside marriage; it is a moral obligation. When two lives are bound together, inner states are no longer self-contained. Who I am becoming shapes the life we are living. There is no such thing as private stagnation in marriage. There is no private bitterness, no private irresponsibility, no private decay that does not ripple outward.
We understand this intuitively in physics: entangled particles influence one another across distance. Why do we imagine marriage—an infinitely more intimate entanglement—would somehow exempt us from this reality?
There is no private morality within marriage.
Why Women Carry This (And Why Men Don’t Notice)
This existential work often shows up as anticipatory labor—the mental work of thinking ahead, planning, noticing patterns before they become crises. Women do not do this because they are anxious or controlling. They do it because someone must hold the future in mind.
When men say, “She could just do less,” what they are really saying is: I cannot see the collapse that would follow if she did.
That is part of the luxury of being a husband in many modern marriages: the ability to experience the stability of a life without having to author it.
Women are not over-functioning. They are compensating. Suggesting otherwise is like diagnosing a limp as the problem when the leg is broken. No, that’s not quite right.
Suggesting otherwise is like diagnosing a limp as the problem, without noticing that the other leg, having fallen asleep, is dragging behind.
Anxiety Is Not the Bug — It’s the Signal
When one partner is tasked—implicitly or explicitly—with holding responsibility for momentum, meaning, and formation, vigilance becomes unavoidable. Anxiety, in this context, is not a disorder. It is the psychological cost of being the only one mentally inhabiting the life.
Anxiety is the sound of the artificial lung breathing life into the body of the relationship.
I can’t say this clearly enough, to any woman reading this article:
You cannot regulate your way out of a life that requires you to do the thinking, feeling and caring for two adults.
The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno once wrote, “There is no right life in the wrong one.” He was talking about systems—about the futility of asking individuals to perfect themselves inside arrangements that quietly depend on their depletion. The principle holds here. The problem is not a woman’s nervous system. It is the wrongness of the structure she is being asked to endure.
What Men Are Quietly Forfeiting
I am not particularly interested in centering men’s feelings here. Women have spent generations doing precisely that. I should not have to argue that men benefit in order to justify women’s exhaustion.
And yet—because I love individual men, because I am raising one, and because I believe marriage can be a site of profound formation—I will say this anyway: this arrangement diminishes men, too.
When a man opts out of existential authorship, he preserves comfort but forfeits depth. He remains largely unformed by the very relationship he claims to value. His character is spared friction—and therefore spared growth.
Marriage, when fully inhabited, demands adulthood in the deepest sense: foresight, restraint, initiative, moral imagination. Men who step into that demand do not lose themselves. They become more coherent, more grounded, more alive.
The irony is that the very work women are asking for—the thinking, the cultivation, the willingness to hold the whole—is what would make men’s lives richer in the long run. Not easier. But truer.
What now?
At this point, some readers will ask the reasonable question: So what? What do we do now?
The answer depends entirely on who is asking.
The purpose of this essay is not to solve your life for you, or to hand you a checklist that would allow you to feel better by tomorrow afternoon. I hope that much is clear. Its purpose is more modest—and more demanding. It is to invite you back into contact with discomfort. To help you tolerate a few uninterrupted minutes of unease without rushing to explain it away, optimize it, or numb it out.
As a therapist, I see this impulse constantly. People come into my office asking, in one way or another, to feel less—to be less anxious, less lonely, less restless—without first asking what those sensations might be signaling. But that isn’t my job. That’s like asking a dentist to eliminate tooth pain without ever looking for decay. Relief that bypasses attention is not healing; it’s avoidance with better branding.
My work is to help people notice what their bodies, relationships, and lives are already communicating—to slow down enough to hear the signal, tolerate the distress it brings up, and then decide, consciously, what they are willing to take responsibility for.
This essay is meant to do something similar. Not to tell you what to think or how to live, but to interrupt the reflex to move too quickly toward comfort. Because until we can stay present to what feels wrong, we remain remarkably committed to preserving the conditions that produced it.
What you do next is up to you. But first, you have to be willing to stay with the question.
A Closing Word
Women are not asking for perfection. If they were, many would have opted out of marriage altogether by now. They are asking for partners who do not confuse passivity with goodness, or intention with character. Partners who understand that love is not proven by sincerity alone, but by existential participation.
The way forward for both men and women is mutual investment in making the marital ecosystem a healthy one.
The only true marriage is one in which both partners actively, willingly participate in transformation. It is one in which both partners taking seriously the prosperity of the other. Anything less is not marriage in spirit. It’s an arrangement of convenience— for one party, at least.
