"Just Tell Me What to Do": Why Helping Isn't Enough

The chief executive could not find his daughter's pediatrician's phone number, and I wish I had invented that.

I'll call him David. He ran a company with operations in eleven countries. He could recite a division's quarterly revenue without opening a laptop and remember a restaurant in Tokyo he had eaten at once. He could not tell me the name of the woman who had examined his youngest child's ears every winter of her life.

"Why would I know that?" he asked. "My wife handles that."

The questions in the wrong order

He was good company, and I want to say so plainly, because the temptation in a story like this is to give the man a smaller mind than he has. He was quick and funny, and he made a stranger feel the next ten minutes mattered.

So I asked him the questions a clerk would ask. Doctors? His wife's. School events? They went together. Who knew when they were? His wife. Who put them in the calendar? His wife. Groceries? Delivered. Who ordered them? His wife. The weekend meals he cooked? She planned those too.

Halfway through, his phone buzzed with a message about a school form. I asked which form. He said, quietly and pleasantly, that he didn't know.

Labor and ownership

When I asked what his wife said about all this, he answered: "She says she's the project manager. I tell her I'll do anything she wants."

That sentence is meant kindly, and it is the whole problem. On the back of the club's menu I drew two columns. Under LABOR I wrote: buy groceries. Under OWNERSHIP: know groceries are needed, plan meals, check what's left, order, adjust, remember.

"Just tell me what to do" offers the first column and leaves the second where it was. To ask, someone has to notice first, then decide, then pick a moment, then explain, then check it happened. Delegating is managing, and the manager is still working even when the person she manages is willing and affectionate. I wrote about this split before in Helping Is Not Holding and What Is the Mental Load?.

His side, which was fair

David had an answer of his own, and it was a good one. Years earlier he had put something in the dryer that should never go near one, and was told off. After that he left her clothes alone, so she did them. "If someone criticizes how you do something every time, eventually you stop volunteering."

He was right. Fear of doing it wrong leads to withdrawal, and withdrawal hands the task to the other person for good. That's a problem two people make together.

His wife, whom I'll call Helena, agreed the washing machine wasn't the argument. Some things he owned completely: the cars, the insurance, the investments, the travel. The morning their daughter had no costume for costume day, he drove out at seven-thirty and came back with a pirate outfit. "He was magnificent," she said, and meant it.

Then she showed me the family chat. Where are the scissors. Eleven messages later he found them in the drawer they had lived in for eleven years.

"I don't want him to rescue me from things I shouldn't have been carrying alone," she said.

What owning a task looks like

Rescue is dramatic and gets thanked. Responsibility is repetitive, and when it's done well nothing happens, so nobody notices it. If you're the partner who says "just tell me", try this instead:

• Take a whole area, start to finish: the dentist, the school calendar, the groceries. Planning included.
• Don't ask where things are before you've looked properly.
• Accept that your way will differ. Agree the standard once, then stop asking for a review.
• Check back in a month on whether she has actually stopped thinking about it.

There's more practical advice for men in How to Take On the Mental Load. David and Helena's story is chapter eight of Become My Papi, and it's also in the shorter Mini Version. The research behind it is in The Work Nobody Sees.

Questions people ask

Why is "just tell me what to do" a problem?

Because asking requires someone to notice, plan and follow up first. The offer covers the labor and leaves the planning, the ownership, with the person who has to ask.

What is the difference between helping and owning a task?

Helping means doing a task when asked. Owning means noticing it is needed, planning it, doing it and remembering it next time, without a reminder.

Where is David and Helena's story from?

It is chapter eight of Become My Papi by Nora Vellick, also included in Become My Papi: Mini Version.