A girl's gotta get status somehow
Clashing values and waxing floors
ACAF book club on Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution will be on 12/27 at 5:30 pm EST. The event will be for paid subscribers who RSVP on this google form and I’ll send out Zoom details the day of. Hope you can join us!
A lot of relational conflict, or really conflict in general, is downstream of unstated value differences. One that comes up frequently in hetero relationships is having different minimum standards for the cleanliness and overall aesthetic presentation of the home, with women tending to care more than their male partners. This raises the question of how the work required to maintain that standard should be split up. For tasks which both people in a couple agree are necessary, the fair thing to do is to split them up roughly equally so that both partners are putting in similar total effort while taking into account differential skill sets and proclivities—this is pretty uncontroversial. But what to do when one partner values something the other doesn’t?
In Let’s be honest about the second shift, I noted that survey data indicates that married parents tend to put in similar total working hours. On average fathers work a few more hours a week outside the home and mothers work a few more hours a week inside the home, but overall neither men nor women appear to be getting an obviously unfair deal in aggregate. I’ve often heard people discuss the concept of the “second shift”, which refers to mothers who work full time but nevertheless end up taking on most of the childcare and household tasks, without it being acknowledged that not all “full time jobs” are equivalent. If you’re working 35 hours a week and your partner is working 45 hours and bringing in more income… yeah, you should be taking a relatively more onerous “second shift”.
From my perspective work is work, so paid work responsibilities are always relevant to what a “fair” split of housework looks like. And this was my criticism of a recent article on the subject (which
also wrote a very good note on). In the post a woman describes her frustration when, during a negotiation with her ex-husband on how to share household tasks, he brought up his paid work responsibilities (she was not doing paid work at the time). She had initiated the discussion and wanted to use a card game which was designed to organize these conversations. The card system is meant to help the couple explicitly identify all relevant responsibilities so that both partners can understand what the other is doing, making invisible work visible, so that relative effort can be roughly quantified:Can we discuss a few other items? He asked.
He then pulled up a spreadsheet of all he did for his clients, all the tasks he was tasked with at work. He felt like his paid work, and how much bandwidth that required, should be factored into the equation.
Let me stop and pause here. My reaction, in the moment, was dumbfounded shock. […] If you are the sole one earning a paycheck, it certainly gets you out of a number of cards, […] But we were each performing jobs during the day. I was managing the household and the children (and launching a new career), and he was managing clients. Then, when we each “clocked out” of that daytime job, we shared the job of parenting and household management in the evenings.
If our conversation hadn’t taken so long, perhaps I could have sat there and listened as he went line by line through his spreadsheet without losing my shit. But the presence of the spreadsheet signaled to me that he was missing the point.
[…] I wanted more support once he got home or on the weekends or with big picture tasks like what are we eating this week? and what are we getting the kids for Christmas? and should we give up on sending holiday cards because Lord knows he isn’t willing to do that?
I was asking for more buy in on family life in general, asking for him to learn to see and value things that he thought were unnecessary, or were simply invisible.
So I told him I didn’t think the list of work tasks was relevant to the discussion today, perhaps we could find another time to talk about it. And then I went to put the children to bed.
It’s not that I can’t at all understand where she’s coming from. Perhaps if they had considered all of his responsibilities, and the stress he was bearing by being solely responsible for providing for the family’s material needs, they would’ve realized that he wasn’t doing his fair share of evening and weekend work or managing big picture tasks. But you’d still need to take his paid work into account to find that out. And scolding him for thinking a spreadsheet was appropriate in a conversation where you’re using cards to organize and aggregate your contributions seems entirely unfair. If she wanted to have an emotional and open conversation about her needs and their values mismatch I’d have a lot more sympathy. But come on lady, you’re the one who brought the cards to the table!
What I think was really going on is summarized in this sentence:
I was asking for more buy in on family life in general, asking for him to learn to see and value things that he thought were unnecessary, or were simply invisible.
She wanted him to have values which were more similar to hers. She wanted him to want to send out Christmas cards. Don’t we all! This dynamic is not at all uncommon, you can find plenty of “couples comedy” bits that address exactly this. Another great example is that scene in The Breakup where Jennifer Aniston tells Vince Vaughn: “I want you to WANT to do the dishes” to which he responds: “Why would I WANT to do the dishes??” When one partner, often the wife and mother, has higher standards for the state of the home (and often the quality of food the kids eat or just their general standard of care) it’s easy for resentment to build up.
The partner with higher standards (who I’ll assume is the woman for the rest of this piece, but it can certainly go the other way and of course this dynamic is also relevant in non-hetero relationships) ends up doing most of the work required to maintain them. And it’s understandable that she might wish her husband would pick up more of the slack. But it’s also understandable that the husband in this situation finds it irritating that his wife keeps nagging him to do what he sees as completely unnecessary tasks that add little to no value to his life.
When you’re negotiating about tasks both partners think need to be done, both partners have a stake in the outcome. But when you’re talking about tasks which only the wife sees as necessary… it’s easy for the husband to say, “listen, if you want to do it, you do it, I don’t care if it doesn’t get done and so I’m not going to spend time on it.”
This sort of negotiation is most often discussed with respect to married couples, but it can arise between any two household members. For example, in this clip Bryan Caplan (who, btw, I will be debating feminism with on a Moral Mayhem podcast to be released in the first week of the new year, so subscribe here to be notified when that comes out!) tells Richard Hanania an anecdote revolving around his mother’s insistence on waxing the floors and his reluctance to help:
I think Bryan was being completely truthful. I believe him that his reluctance to wax the floors didn’t at all reflect disrespect for his mother’s time. What we’re seeing here is a clash of values. Bryan’s mom valued the floor being waxed—she felt this was something that needed to be done. Bryan did not value the floor being waxed—and he can’t comprehend why anyone else would, he didn’t think anyone would even notice!
Now, I probably wouldn’t notice, but I bet he’s wrong that no one would. Wouldn’t his mom notice? Wouldn’t other women like his mom notice? Could it be that the sort of women who would notice are exactly the sort of women who exist within his mom’s social circle? Might these sorts of women mildly judge or esteem one another on the basis on how well the floors were waxed (among other markers of being a good homemaker)? And might it be reasonable for his mom to care about her status in the eyes of her peer group?
[Important Disclaimer! I have no knowledge of what Bryan’s mom’s social circle was like or how she spent her time, so this is not about this particular case, the video clip is just a helpful reference for starting a more general discussion.]
Now, what do we do when we have a value clash with our loved ones? We might try to resolve the value clash by clarifying relevant facts—sometimes doing so will reveal that we don’t actually have a real value clash, we just had different beliefs… and one of us was wrong. Maybe Bryan’s mom valued waxing the floors not because she wanted people to notice, but because it keeps the floors in better shape, saving them time and money which otherwise would’ve been needed for future repairs or replacement. Maybe Bryan just didn’t understand that waxing the floors had this sort of utility.
On the other hand, maybe Bryan is right… maybe waxing the floors only marginally decreases the pace of wear (such that the effort is a bad investment) and doesn’t even look that much better. Maybe the task of waxing the floors is more of a habit than it is something his mom actually cares about. Maybe maintaining waxed floors was net negative for her, even if she hadn’t realized it until he interrogated her reasoning.
Or… maybe waxing the floors isn’t so much about waxing the floors but about signaling. Signaling to the other moms who come by the house that you’re a good homemaker. That you’ve got your shit together. And if you have a more “traditional” family structure, one where the mom stays home and takes care of all the household tasks so that it’s as easy as possible for her husband to pursue his paid career and as easy as possible for her kids to succeed in school and at life, valuing this sort of status seems super reasonable to me! (Again, I don’t know if this was the case for Bryan’s family, but it is the case for many families.)
A mom in this sort of family structure has essentially given up most of her avenues for accruing personal status. Sure, she can get some secondhand status from the success of her husband and her children. But still, while taking on a supporting role might have been desirable to her and may have been entirely her choice, it’s a sacrifice in this sense. If she’s structured her whole life around trying to help her family members succeed, which also amounts to helping them accrue status in the realms they operate within (even if status isn’t the primary goal), it seems pretty unkind to scoff at her desire for social status in her circles and to refuse to help her attain it. And this is true even if you think her social circle shouldn’t value waxed floors!
Plus… does he really not value the waxed floors??
I also think a more minor part of what causes women to feel resentful in these situations is that they don’t really believe their family members when they claim they don’t value these things. I think there’s often a feeling that their husband would actually hate to live at what he claims is his “comfortable standard” and is refusing to acknowledge this so that he can free ride in their beautiful, clean and orderly home. Or they think he’s being dishonest about how much these things are a benefit to the kids, something he should be equally invested in with her.
For example, what’s a mom to do if her husband insists that he doesn’t value holiday cheer? If he claims that making Christmas special is just her preference and so if she wants to spend a bunch of time and energy creating joyful memories for their kids, she’s on her own and shouldn’t expect excessive praise or assistance.
This example came up in a recent post by
on “emotional labor”, where she acknowledged that some moms really do create their own misery. After all, as she says “nobody dies from having inadequately layered garland, and if it feels like you’re doing way too much, you can probably dial it back a bit instead of being a martyr over Elf on a Shelf.” But, still, she acknowledges that it’s possible for someone’s standards to be unreasonably low, both for the holiday season and life in general:Now, some husbands will shrug at everything that isn’t 100% essential and say they’d be happy to have Christmas with a three foot tall Amazon tree with zero ornaments, order a rotisserie chicken for dinner, and wear their Steelers jerseys on Christmas morning while not attending any gatherings or eating any treats. This is belligerent Scrooge-ass behavior. Even if some of the Christmas stuff seems a bit over-the-top, don’t be an asshole. Try to meet in the middle. No, you do not need four separate Christmas desserts, but you should at least have one, and the very least you can do is say thank you.
I think the radical take away here is… don’t be an asshole! On both sides! If you haven’t seen Love is Blind DC I’m sorry for this reference, but you really don’t want to be the Hannah in the relationship, constantly criticizing Neeik because he hasn’t vacuumed in the past 7 hours. And you also don’t want to be the Neeik… so dysfunctional in the kitchen that you don’t know that the fridge is not the place to search when your girlfriend asks you to get the pasta (no, he was not confused because he thought it was fresh pasta, I promise you).
Assuming you really love your partner and don’t just see your relationship as one giant transaction, the fact that they care about something should already be enough reason for you to care, at least somewhat. After all, loving someone means something like having their utility function internalized as a component of your own. What makes them happy should make you happy too, and what hurts them hurts you.
Either convince them that you’re right OR ask for a favor, otherwise… do it yourself
That said. I think a lot of this comes down to asking for help in the wrong way and refusing to be vulnerable. Ideally, we don’t have value differences with our family members. And as I suggested above, it’s possible that what appears to be a value difference isn’t, and that all you need to do is explain to them why you think the task needs to be completed in order to convince them of its necessity.
But sometimes that doesn’t work. And in those cases, asking your loved one to spend time on something you value (and which they don’t) should be framed as a favor you’re asking them to do for you rather than as an obligation they’re failing to meet. Telling someone they’re failing you brings out defensiveness, but oftentimes asking the same person if they’d be willing to help you out elicits an entirely different and much more positive reaction.
You really don’t need to convince your son that waxed floors are objectively important, he’s probably not going to be convinced, but you can frame it as something you value and tell him you’d be thrilled if he’d help you get it done. And unless it’s something he really, really hates doing, he might be happy to do it for you even if he’d never agree that it “needs” to be done.
Speculation about whether your husband is being honest about his values or in fact secretly values (for example) waxed floors and is just free-riding on your floor-waxing efforts is usually unnecessary. Just ask yourself: When my husband was single and could do whatever he wanted with his free time, did he wax the floors? Did he pay someone else to wax the floors? If not, waxed floors probably are not very important to him.
Talking about waxing floors as a way of achieving status within your group is a bit like talking about pet dogs where there's a whole zoo-ful of elephants in the room. Waxing floors is an easy one because what the women in this pro-floor-waxing group want is to see waxed floors, and not to somehow know it was your husband who waxed the floor instead of you. Bigger problems await when it is your actual behavior that will earn your partner status in their group. Surely women have the experience of taking their husbands to a gathering of their peers and wishing they would behave differently. Saying different things, or perhaps talking about nothing but the weather and people's health if indeed their values are different. Or wishing they were clean-shaven and wearing nicer clothes. And surely men have exactly the same experience with wives. A reasonable starting point in a relationship is to figure you will try to blend in and be uncontroversial when in a group that is primarily your partner's group.
But some things are much harder. I have two brothers. We all married, but I had kids and they did not. I was heavily involved with their care. Once, when getting together with my two brothers, one remarked that my wife "keeps me on a short leash". I didn't see it that way, and didn't very much value having status among my brothers, but it still stung to hear it. But when we talk about sharing overall work somewhat equally, and the way a man gains status with his buddies is to take off and have fun whenever he wants, that's going to be a huge problem. Ideally before a couple has kids together they should get clear on which groups they aspire to achieve status with and what it will take to do that. But how they will divide their time among paid work, childcare, and housework may not be something where they even know what their values are until tested by the huge workload increase that comes with parenthood.
But maybe that's expanding the topic too much and we should stick with things like who waxes the floors. Those questions are important in the real lives of real people, for sure. It surely is a happier relationship if you feel secure enough that you can consider things you do for your partner as a favor you choose to grant them rather than an unpleasant obligation.