The Feelings Department

In many couples there is one person who notices when something is wrong. She raises the difficult conversation. She suggests counselling. She asks, on the drive home, whether he noticed his mother was upset. She knows the emotional temperature of the household at any hour, the way some people always know the time.

I've started calling this person the feelings department. In most of the different-sex couples I interview, it is staffed by one woman. This is what people usually mean by emotional labor in relationships.

Where the term "emotional labor" comes from

The phrase comes from the sociologist Arlie Hochschild's 1983 book The Managed Heart. She used it for paid work, such as flight attendants whose job included managing their own feelings in order to produce a feeling in passengers. Over time people began using it for unpaid work in families and couples too, so it is worth being precise about what we mean.

In relationships, the work I hear about has a specific mechanism. One person becomes the designated processor of difficulty. She names the problem. She starts the repair. She monitors how everyone is doing and steps in when they aren't.

What the research found

In 2004, Lyndall Strazdins and Dorothy Broom studied 102 Australian couples with young children. When emotional work in the couple was unequal, it shaped women's experience of love and conflict in the marriage and helped explain their higher psychological distress. Men's distress wasn't affected in the same way. Couples often explained the imbalance as natural, simply how men and women are.

That last point matches my interviews. The woman in the feelings department rarely chose the role. She was better at it early on, or more bothered by unresolved tension, and the job settled on her. I described how that kind of drift happens in How Nobody Decided.

Why the role is so tiring

The work is invisible when it goes well. A conflict defused early never becomes a fight, so nobody sees the effort that prevented it.

It is also lonely. The person who always raises problems is easily cast as the person who causes them. Several women told me their partners saw them as the source of every difficult conversation, when they were only the messenger.

John Gottman's laboratory studies of newlyweds found that conversations opening with a "harsh start-up" tend to go badly. Some of the broader predictive claims from that body of work have been questioned, but the point is useful. It also has a catch. When one partner is the only person who ever opens these conversations, she is the only one who can be blamed for opening them badly.

What happens when she stops

The most revealing interviews are with women who stopped doing this work, on purpose or from exhaustion. They describe the same sequence.

At first nothing seems to happen. Then small things go unrepaired. Coldness lasts longer after an argument. A grievance goes unspoken and grows. Family relationships she used to tend, his especially, start to thin.

In some couples, this is when he discovers how much she was doing and begins to do some of it himself. In others the relationship drifts, because the only person maintaining it has stopped. Either way, the stopping shows what the work was holding up. I saw a similar pattern in The Partner Who Must Be Managed.

Sharing the emotional work

Couples who share this work tend to agree on a few habits. Both of them raise problems, so it isn't always the same person opening the hard conversation. They check in at a set time each week, which takes the job of noticing out of one person's hands. And each partner looks after their own family relationships, calls and birthdays included.

None of this requires anyone to become more emotional. It requires both people to treat the relationship as something they both maintain.

Questions people ask

What is emotional labor in a relationship?

It usually means the work of noticing problems, raising difficult conversations, starting repair and keeping track of how everyone is feeling. The term began with Arlie Hochschild's 1983 study of paid work.

Why do women usually do the emotional work in relationships?

It often settles on whoever was better at it, or more troubled by tension, early in the relationship. Couples then tend to explain the imbalance as natural.

What happens when one partner stops doing the emotional labor?

Small problems go unrepaired and the relationships she maintained begin to thin. Some partners respond by taking on the work, while in other couples the relationship drifts.