Fighting with your partner? Use these 4 phrases.

This was the subject of a dedicated email from The New York Times that recently graced my inbox. It claimed to offer four magical phrases that will help people in relationships share their “grievances in ways that speed the repair process.”

Well, of course, I clicked through to the story. I’ve been fighting with my estranged husband since June. I’ve shared plenty of grievances, but there has been no repair process, speedy or otherwise.

Like all of my self-help-obsessed American counterparts, I was eager to know what I was doing “wrong” so that I could fix it. This, even though I already had a pretty good idea of what these four phrases would be, had already wrestled with them in multiple therapy sessions and had already felt like a failure because they never worked in the way I was told they should work.

Now and then, there were some flashes of understanding, some glimmers of empathy, but they never took hold. And, of course, I blamed myself. Clearly, I just wasn’t doing it “right.”

The four phrases this particular article recommends?

“This is what I saw or heard.”
“This is what I made up about it.”
“This is how I felt.”
“This is what would help me feel better.”

It’s not bad advice  —  for some types of conflicts. When it’s simply a matter of two parties coming to the table with two perspectives, the “story I’m telling myself” approach can prevent defensiveness and encourage empathy.

But more often than not, as in the case of this article, counselors, relationship “experts” and self-help gurus apply this advice to conflicts surrounding domestic labor inequity — which, let’s face it, is a primary driver, if not the primary driver, of marital strife.

 In doing so, they imply that these conflicts are nothing more than communication problems that can be solved if we can successfully articulate our feelings and refrain from putting our partners on the defensive.

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The article’s author recounts a recent situation in which she was cleaning up the kitchen while her husband was on his phone in the living room. 

After repeatedly asking him for help and receiving no response, she “slipped into an old habit,” imagining “a thought bubble above his head” that went something like this: “Life is good… I’m kicking back while my wife does everything! My time is more valuable than hers!”

In this particular case, Dunn eventually confronts her husband about the story she’s “concocted” that involves “him deliberately ignoring me and prioritizing his leisure time over mine.” The cute twist at the end? Her husband takes out his earbuds and says, “I’m sorry, what?”

This is supposed to prove that Dunn’s story about labor inequity and the devaluation of her time was just that — a story. Now she and her husband can share a laugh about her getting all worked up over nothing.

Maybe we can let Dunn’s husband off the hook in this particular case — and I say maybe because even with earbuds, was her husband oblivious to her bustling around the kitchen? Was he not aware that the kitchen was a mess and required attention?

But hey, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Regardless of exactly what happened this time around, it’s still abundantly clear that Dunn, like nearly every heterosexual wife or ex-wife I know, has experienced frustrations in the past regarding labor inequity and the devaluation of her time.

There is a much, much larger problem at play here  —  a problem that has nothing to do with communication or lack thereof, a problem that cannot, nor ever will, be solved in the home.

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The problem is this: As a society, we simply don’t value care work and household work, including the emotional and mental labor they entail. 

The labor that women disproportionately take on — often before, during, or after the jobs we work that are recognized by the formal economy — is not “profitable” and, therefore, not really labor. It’s just “stuff around the house,” a series of menial chores, nothing to get all worked up about. It’s not like it’s paying the bills.

And besides, our husbands are happy to help! We just have to communicate better about what we need them to do. Which is, of course, its own form of labor, but details, details. I mean, do we expect our husbands to read our minds?

Of course, it isn’t just our husbands who consistently demonstrate an utter lack of regard for our labor and our time. This disregard is systemic — deeply embedded and deeply internalized.

We fail our infants and young children during crucial developmental stages with scant parental leave options and a wholly inadequate, patchwork system of childcare that is not deemed “important” enough for government funding. We design workplace demands around outdated assumptions that workers have partners at home, and we deem essential household labor as trivial compared to the male-dominated industries that power our country’s economic engine.

We either pay peanuts for caregiving and domestic labor, or we pay nothing at all. If we were to factor women’s unpaid labor into our GDP, it would grow by an estimated 30–50 percent, according to a 2021 article by the Center for Partnership Systems. And if women globally earned just minimum wage for this labor, a 2020 Oxfam analysis found that it would total $10.9 trillion annually. That, according to The New York Times, is more than the “combined revenue of the 50 largest companies on last year’s Fortune Global 500 list, including Walmart, Apple and Amazon.”

Studies from Gallup, Pew Research Center, The Lancet Public Health, the National Library of Medicine, and other sources too numerous to list here show that even when men and women contribute roughly the same amount to the paid economy, women consistently put in far more unpaid hours at home.

Most of these studies and surveys don’t even factor in mental and emotional labor. That is to say, if one spends an hour a week purchasing groceries, the time it takes to survey the fridge and pantry, plan meals for the week, and make a grocery list is entirely unaccounted for. '

Even when visible household and caregiving tasks are divided somewhat evenly amongst men and women, women are far more likely to be doing the invisible planning that goes into them, according to a 2019 study by the American Sociological Review.

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We refuse to name these well-documented inequities for what they are: exploitation. Instead, we trivialize them as “relationship issues” and “communication problems.” 

Our husbands can be annoying and clueless, but my goodness, they’re not monsters! I don’t believe that men are inherently monsters any more than I believe that women are inherently nags.

 But I do believe that as long as we refuse to recognize the economic and social value of care work and domestic labor, wives will continue to “miscommunicate,” husbands will continue to respond defensively, therapists and articles will continue to arm us with inadequate phrases and tools, women like me will continue to try them, the results will continue to disappoint us, and we’ll continue to blame ourselves.

This is what I see or hear: Women consistently do more unpaid household and caregiving labor and enjoy less leisure time.

This is what I’ve “made up” about it: We’re being disregarded, disrespected, and exploited in our own homes.

This is how I feel: Freaking furious.

This is what would help me feel better: If we all stopped treating this as a story, or something we’ve “made up,” and started treating it as a reality that millions upon millions of women live with every single day.

Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.

This article was originally published at Mom, Interrupted. Reprinted with permission from the author.