My partner, E., is responsible for taking the trash out to the curb on Sunday evenings. But on a recent Monday as I was sitting down to work, I noticed that the garbage bin next to my desk hadn’t yet been emptied. I spent a good five minutes dithering over what to do next. My thoughts went something like this:
If I remind him to do it, he might expect me to remind him in the future. And if he expects a reminder, then I’ll have to add “trash day” to the long list of tasks already swimming through my brain and crowding out more important stuff. Then again, if I forgot, I’d probably appreciate a gentle reminder. Everybody slips up from time to time. But ugh, this is so gendered! Why am I the one thinking about this?! If he can’t remember to take out the trash, how will he remember to pick up our future children from daycare?!
This may seem like an extreme reaction to an objectively unimportant incident. But before you judge me too harshly, consider some background: I’m a sociologist who studies the division of household labor. I focus on the cognitive aspects of that labor, which you can think of as project management for the household. Who finds a plumber to fix the leaky faucet? Who notices that a child has outgrown her shoes? Who remembers that it’s trash day?
When you’re an expert on household labor, a garbage can is never just a garbage can.
In most of the different-sex couples I’ve spoken with (75 and counting!), the answer is usually that the female partner does it. Women do more cognitive labor overall, and a lot more of the work of anticipating, remembering, tracking, and monitoring. Men are often involved in making important decisions for the household. But it’s typically women who initiate the decision-making process and, later, who follow up to make sure everything went as planned.
When I began this research, I was single and mostly motivated by curiosity about the weird stuff I saw coupled people doing. Why were my feminist friends doing all the wedding planning? Why did the moms I spoke with know way more about their children’s needs than the dads did, even though they described themselves as equal partners?
After conducting dozens of interviews, reading hundreds of academic papers, and thinking about these questions for untold hours, I considered myself an expert on household labor. I offered advice to couples looking to share their cognitive workload more equitably. Above all, I was confident that my extensive knowledge would keep me from falling into the gendered patterns I observed among my research subjects. Instead, I planned to have an equitable partnership. Not necessarily one where every chore was split 50/50, but one where my hypothetical partner and I divided up the load thoughtfully, rather than unwittingly use gender as a heuristic for assigning responsibilities.
And then I met E., and the issues I was accustomed to documenting and diagnosing as an observer became my everyday life. If I initiated a conversation about weekend plans and coordinated meetups with friends, I worried about becoming the default social coordinator (a typical female responsibility). When he offered to pay for dates, I was torn between gratitude and guilt. My graduate student stipend was minimal compared to his salary, but I also hated to replicate the trope of the male provider and the female dependent on his financial support.
Hence my uncertainty over what to do on trash day. When you’re an expert on household labor, a garbage can is never just a garbage can.
Much to my disappointment, I soon realized that knowledge and good intentions would not be enough to buck the norm and help us forge an equitable relationship. Figuring out when to just accept that, for whatever reason, I enjoy organizing dinner parties and he does not, and when to push for a less traditionally gendered arrangement, was a decision my research could not make for me.
Who finds a plumber to fix the leaky faucet? Who notices that a child has outgrown her shoes? Who remembers that it’s trash day?
Also working against us were the expectations of others (parents, grandparents, family friends, and random strangers) who usually mean well but sometimes find E.’s and my choices strange, like when we got engaged—without a ring.
We had discussed the engagement beforehand and decided that the asymmetry of a diamond on my finger and nothing on his set the wrong precedent for the egalitarian marriage we hoped to build. I felt good about our decision but second-guessed myself as soon as that decision became public knowledge. Friends asked for ring pictures, and I had none to offer. My father sent me links to jewelry websites in hopes I would change my mind. Every single engagement card we received had a giant rock on the front. I realized that our personal choice was something we would have to explain to others—and that many would not understand.
Whereas my research is characterized by clarity and logic, my life is far messier. Fortunately, over time E. and I have come up with strategies for managing the mess. Though my academic knowledge failed to magically protect me from the challenges of pursuing an egalitarian relationship in a gendered world, it has helped me design systems and habits that make it a little easier for us to swim upstream.
When E. and I moved in together, for instance, one of the first things we did after unpacking the boxes was divvy up responsibility for physical and cognitive housework. We enumerated all the shared tasks, agreed on standards for their completion, and recorded each person’s duties in a spreadsheet. A decidedly unsexy solution. But a solution.
Parts of the division we came up with are traditional: I do more of the cooking and laundry, for instance, and E. takes out the trash and cares for the car. I was tempted to volunteer for all the “male” tasks, just to counter the stereotypes. Then I remembered that I hate dealing with the trash cans and dread visits to the mechanic. Ultimately, we decided that ensuring our overall workloads are equal was more important to us than bucking traditions just to be contrary.
I’ve noticed parallels between the work of being a good social scientist and being a good partner … One must learn to tolerate uncertainty, be willing to experiment and change, and commit to trying again when those experiments flop.
Especially in the early days, relationships are supposed to be made of spontaneity and romance, not routines and spreadsheets. The excitement of finding The One is supposed to crowd out prosaic concerns about who remembered to take out the trash. But spontaneity and romance provide little protection against the social forces that steer most different-sex couples down gender-traditional pathways. We, at least, need guardrails in place that remind us to align our actions with our values.
In the process of designing those guardrails, I’ve noticed parallels between the work of being a good social scientist and being a good partner. To succeed in research, one has to be willing to venture into the unknown, test things, fail, and most importantly bounce back from that failure again and again. To succeed in a new relationship, one must also learn to tolerate uncertainty, be willing to experiment and change, and commit to trying again when those experiments flop.
One more overlap: rigorous science and egalitarian partnership both tend to involve spreadsheets. When E. and I sat down to plan our wedding, you’d better believe our first steps were deciding on a shared vision, identifying the nonnegotiables we wouldn’t be talked out of, and figuring out who would be responsible for which pieces of the process. We recorded those decisions in a spreadsheet, of course.
This article first appeared in Behavioral Scientist’s award-winning print edition, Brain Meets World.
