Let's Talk to Each Other

Whether in my nightly readings, daily conversations, or social media feed, I'm picking up a number of trends that are worrisome to me:

1. Kids are really struggling in the aftermath of total and then partial isolation.

2. Parents are really struggling to love their kids through these struggles, least of all due to having to navigate their own life challenges, work complexities, and domestic responsibilities.

3. Women have been hit particularly hard, because structural inequities and societal expectations result in an impossible setting for women to survive let alone thrive.

That third point is a killer for me, because sexism is not only evil but unproductive, and women deserve better than to be constantly assailed and unsatisfied. We have a lot of work left to do.

For many of us seemingly enlightened urbane folk, our minds go to things like protesting in the streets, working to change policy at the employer and government level, railing against clueless politicians, and hustling to get our candidates in. All well and good: we should be engaged in all of those ways and then some. 

But, and this is an "in addition to" and not an "instead of," I also propose that we who are in relationships and are trying to navigate all of this as a team of two, we should also do something that is far more immediate and tangible, albeit probably harder, which is let's talk to each other.

Apologies if the following over-generalizations offend you: they are, on purpose, OVER-generalizations, and I actually assume that the vast majority of people do not neatly fit into these caricatures. That being said, let me lay out a couple of perspectives I've picked up that warrant attention and correction:

1. Studies seem to show that when women are professionally successful, and particularly when they out-earn their male partners, they end up feeling pressured to spend MORE time on domestic chores, because their men are already feeling emotionally precarious. Guys, we have to lose the insecurity and step up. If your partner makes more than you or is otherwise more vocationally prominent, celebrate that and support her. And part of supporting her is doing your share and then some around the house.

2. The flip side to the above point is that many people (stereotypically women) put upon themselves the impossible burden of carrying all that goes into running a modern household, between kids and bills and chores and errands. It seems some people derive something meaningful from running themselves into the ground (and mumbling about how clueless and unhelpful their partner is), rather than having a grown-up conversation with that partner about a more equitable distribution of responsibilities.

Talking to your partner about what each person needs and who's going to do what is not nearly as sexy or Insta-worthy as railing on some sexist politician or making a clever sign for the next protest. But I believe that it, along with policy changes and societal pressure, is part of what it will take to navigate this new normal we're in now, and particularly for the benefit of those (mostly women) who are at their wit's end trying to juggle way more than is literally humanly possible.

In my own marriage, we've had to navigate these dynamics, and some days we do better than others, both in sharing the load and in talking it out in the first place. So I speak not from a high horse but in the same muck as everyone else. 

Folks, it's not good that some people (mostly women) are just utterly spent, least of all because it's based on social expectations and unspoken obligations that don't need to govern how we act. I liken it to running a race against the stiffest of competition, and, instead of doing everything we can to do our best, we've decide to tie our shoelaces together. Life's hard as it is, especially now. Why are we making it harder by not doing the thing right in front of us? 

Which is having a grown-up conversation with the person we've committed to building a life together with, about who's doing what and what's fair and what do I need. Some of us (mostly the men) need to stop being clueless or hiding behind past or assumed divisions of labor. And some of us (mostly the women) need to choose the path of asking for help in redistributing the load over stewing over how imbalanced that load distribution is.