7 ms·

I think you might be missing the point. The gift that she wanted was the house cleaning service. She had already been planning/considering hiring someone anyway

I think you might be missing the point. The gift that she wanted was the house cleaning service. She had already been planning/considering hiring someone anyway. The gift was that she would not have to do the work to find, vet, make the calls, research, arrange payment, schedule, etc. for this task. The gift was supposed to be him taking over that work. > The gift, for me, was not so much in the cleaning itself but the fact that for once I would not be in charge of the household office work. I would not have to make the calls, get multiple quotes, research and vet each service, arrange payment and schedule the appointment. The real gift I wanted was to be relieved of the emotional labor of a single task that had been nagging at the back of my mind. The clean house would simply be a bonus. also > I had wanted to hire out deep cleaning for a while, especially since my freelance work had picked up considerably. The reason I hadn’t done it yet was part guilt over not doing my housework, and an even larger part of not wanting to deal with the work of hiring a service. I knew exactly how exhausting it was going to be. That’s why I asked my husband to do it as a gift.

hasbroslasher 9y ago
My response, then, is "Oh poor you! You have to call the proletarian house cleaners, rub shoulders with the 'help'! How difficult it must be." Leftist cynicism aside: I'm talking more about the "socks on the floor, chair in the way, keeping the house in order mentally" side of things
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  It's not about "talking to the proletarians". It's about the emotional work involved with talking to a bunch of people, organizing those discussions, comparing the results, etc. As a generally introverted person, just thinking about discussing the details with 3 or more people makes me feel exhausted. And that doesn't even count the planning, review, time off of work, etc.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Nomenclature question, why are we calling the work involved securing a vendor emotional labor? In any office this would just be called labor.
    - BarkingChicken 9y ago
      Its just the common term for it. Is it the most correct term? Probably not. But its this invisible labor that many people don't even recognize exists, so to lump it in with regular physical labor pretty much to ignore it.
    - Mz 9y ago
      Basically, the term emotional labor gets used a lot to mean "women's work" and especially to refer to the largely invisible parts of what women are expected to do. I don't like that usage, but I usually don't bother to nitpick it. I do understand why this is kind of a hot topic and why the term emotional labor gets applied to it. I don't have a better solution. It seems like there simply isn't a good way to talk about these issues. (FWIW: I'm a woman.)
      - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        To steal words from your post, maybe invisible labor? Does that express what you're trying to say?
        Mz 9y ago
        I didn't write the piece. Another issue writers run into is that if you aren't using any of the hot catch phrases, no one will read your piece. I wrestle with this fact a lot. I blog at times about such issues. I try to be evenhanded and sympathetic to both sides. I really struggle with titling stuff and my writing gets damn little traffic. My refusal to use the standard catch phrases, because of their frequently toxic framing, is a barrier to being heard at all. And I sometimes wonder which is worse: Putting out a fucked up message in hopes of some partial solution emerging or simply howling into the void and going entirely unheard. Making any progress is incredibly challenging. This piece was published in a major publication. If it didn't use a popular catch phrase, they probably would not have published it at all. Those popular catch phrases are important hooks for titling things and for communicating with the public. On my own personal blogs, I have the luxury of refusing to use phrases I don't like. You generally don't have that luxury when trying to get published by an organization that needs to hit certain traffic targets to survive and keep their doors open. The part of this that genuinely is an issue of emotional labor is her desire for her husband to actually be considerate. That is the crux of the issue here. The article perhaps is not as clear as it could be about that fact.
- BarkingChicken 9y ago
  As the other commenter said, it has nothing to do with elitism. Research takes time. Calling people takes time. And god forbid you have to call a government or medical entity, you might be on the phone for hours. Do you realize how hard it is to get a straight answer on how much things SHOULD cost with regards to housekeeping, lawn care services, plumbing, tree services, roofing, foundation repair, and the list goes on? Sure you can call the company and ask, but are you getting ripped off? Now you have to call 5 companies and compare to see what the average price is and where you might get the best price. There goes 45 minutes of time (if you're lucky). Plus you have to vet these people. If they're going to be in your house/yard handling your things you want to make sure they are trustworthy and possibly licensed/bonded as may apply. So you go down the rabbit hole of yelp and NextDoor and Thumbtack and whatever else you may find only to read about things that you didn't even realize you needed to be worried about. Well, there goes another hour. Finally you have to actually call them back and schedule. Does this day work? What do you need to do to prepare for them to come? Do you need to be there? Who needs to take off work for that? Its just... a lot. Its a lot of work. And keeping track of what needs to be done and when and your husband won't use a damn google service so you can't just sync calendars and he won't even look at the one on the fridge anyway is just exhausting. There's a reason why one of the highest ranked reasons for strife in a marriage is an imbalance of housework. I actually do hope that my comment reads as anxiety inducing as I think it does. Its a lot, and it feels stupid at the time to even have to do it. You think we don't know that we seem like over-anxious worriers? We're in 2017! Why can't we have automated this? But then I'd have to be the one to figure out what automated service to go with and determine if we can trust it to not rip us off and figure out what their customer service is like if something goes wrong, ad nauseum.
  - mlrtime 9y ago
    That is just called labor, it is work aka life.
- dang 9y ago
  This breaks the HN guidelines, which say: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. So would you please not comment like this? It takes effort not to, but it's effort we all need to make if this community is to not suck. I'm tempted to call it emotional labor but I suppose that would be trolling. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
CodeWriter23 9y ago
I think you missed the point. Yes, she wanted a house cleaning service. But that’s not the gift she wanted. The gift she wanted was for her husband to magically divine that she wanted him to use her emotionally-laden approach (seeking recommendations via social) to solving the problem of hiring the service instead of his pragmatic approach of identifying the cost of the service, which he then used his prior training as a magical diviner of her expectations to arrive at the conclusion she wouldn’t budget for it. Perhaps incorrectly. But that’s the problem with expecting your spouse to be a mind reader, they will try to do it, often to an undesirable result. While I get the idea that my wife allows certain things to drag her down emotionally, and the solution is to step up and surprise her by taking care of things (and recognizing her contribution to the drudgery), what I see in this article is much different. I see a narcissist who expects others to read her mind, and a codependent husband whom she declares as inept and sees no problem at all pillorying him in Vanity Fair. And a bit of dishonesty too. She claims she doesn’t want to micromanage her husband yet is obviously displeased because he chose a pragmatic approach to her gift as opposed to doing it her way. PS my wife’s solution to this problem. She asked. Not to do the dishes or clean the toilets. She asked me to take care of some things that concern her, without her having to ask me. Things I would normally “step around” because they’re not priority for me.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  It seems to me that she felt like his attempt to do the task was pretty half-hearted.
  - CodeWriter23 9y ago
    Expectations are an opportunity for disappointment.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I mean think about it. If you were tasked at your job with evaluating venders, would you talk to just one, and then tell your boss it couldn't be done within the budget? Probably not.
restingrobot 9y ago
If this is what the author wanted, which I 100% agree with you it is, why didn't she just say that? Admittedly, I often find myself in the clueless husband role, but my wife has been making a huge effort to directly say what she wants. The result is that both of us are much happier. If the author of this article wanted her husband to do the legwork of finding a housekeeper she should have asked for exactly that.
- tpallarino 9y ago
  It's a hallmark of passive-aggressive behavior. Expect someone to know what you want and subtly imply it rather than just outright saying it, often becoming frustrated when people don't behave the way you want them to.
logfromblammo 9y ago
It was an unreasonable request to begin with. She wanted two things. She wanted someone else to clean the house. This is fine. It happens all the time. But the second thing was that it still had to be done to her exacting standards. So the request was, in essence, "First, become me. Then do this thing that I want in exactly the way I would do it." Hidden requirements. The husband, not understanding this, went about hiring the cleaners in his own way, to meet his own standards. I know exactly how I would do it. I would set a budget limit of $300, which is acceptable for the spouse-to-spouse birthday gifts in our household, and try really hard to find someone to clean once a month for 12 months at $25 a pop, which seems like the minimum amount that would be required to get the van to roll, for a 90 minute appointment. All that "household office work"? Don't do it. Instead of spending 30 minutes on the phone with a cleaning service, haggling and scheduling, scrub one toilet. Instead of vetting a person to make sure they won't pinch your porcelain statuette, vacuum the floors. You don't need administration and management in an organization with less than 6 people in it. If you're one of those "all children are a blessing" families, with 10+ people in one house, yes, someone needs to be a household manager. But for most families, the chore chart is as far as it needs to go. Stop whining about how hard it is to micromanage everything, and let other people have their own responsibilities, with their own performance standards. If you like everything done just so, you're going to have to be the one doing all the things. And I know how it would turn out, too. My spouse would end up cleaning the house the day before the cleaners were scheduled, so they wouldn't be cleaning a dirty house. Madness. Knowing this, I would simply get a gift of comparable value that was not requested. And I'm not even going to explain why, because that way leads to a fight.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "It was an unreasonable request to begin with. She wanted two things. She wanted someone else to clean the house. This is fine. It happens all the time. But the second thing was that it still had to be done to her exacting standards." Nope, you missed the point. The point was the wife wanted a day free from housework, which isn't unreasonable. The husband screwed up because by doing the cleaning instead of hiring someone in (which was suggested they could afford from money she earned) he left her needing to do the rest of the housework, like looking after the kids. The end result = no day off.
Footkerchief 9y ago
I may be missing something fundamental, but what is the point of a cleaning service, if not a clean house? Is there some other benefit to be gained from a cleaning service? Why did it matter how the house got cleaned? It's a normal and healthy part of relationships to come to an agreement about what tasks should be done, how thoroughly, and who should be responsible for them. It's something else entirely to stipulate the _means_ by which someone else should accomplish tasks. That's micromanagement, and it verges on an assault on human autonomy. Maybe part of the concept of the gift was establishing an ongoing relationship with a cleaning service, but the article really makes it sound like a one-time concern.
- scott_s 9y ago
  > I may be missing something fundamental, but what is the point of a cleaning service, if not a clean house? Is there some other benefit to be gained from a cleaning service? Not having to worry about a clean house. And a service is probably going to do a more thorough job that can be repeated. Hence, she asked him to arrange for a cleaning service. She did not, apparently, explain why she wanted a cleaning service, but he also did not ask her that.
- bostonvaulter2 9y ago
  One benefit is that someone from outside the household does the cleaning, which means that everyone else is available for other household tasks, like watching the kids (which the author had to do while her husband was cleaning).

hasbroslasher 9y ago

My response, then, is "Oh poor you! You have to call the proletarian house cleaners, rub shoulders with the 'help'! How difficult it must be." Leftist cynicism aside: I'm talking more about the "socks on the floor, chair in the way, keeping the house in order mentally" side of things

CaptSpify 9y ago
It's not about "talking to the proletarians". It's about the emotional work involved with talking to a bunch of people, organizing those discussions, comparing the results, etc. As a generally introverted person, just thinking about discussing the details with 3 or more people makes me feel exhausted. And that doesn't even count the planning, review, time off of work, etc.
- Spivak 9y ago
  Nomenclature question, why are we calling the work involved securing a vendor emotional labor? In any office this would just be called labor.
  - BarkingChicken 9y ago
    Its just the common term for it. Is it the most correct term? Probably not. But its this invisible labor that many people don't even recognize exists, so to lump it in with regular physical labor pretty much to ignore it.
  - Mz 9y ago
    Basically, the term emotional labor gets used a lot to mean "women's work" and especially to refer to the largely invisible parts of what women are expected to do. I don't like that usage, but I usually don't bother to nitpick it. I do understand why this is kind of a hot topic and why the term emotional labor gets applied to it. I don't have a better solution. It seems like there simply isn't a good way to talk about these issues. (FWIW: I'm a woman.)
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      To steal words from your post, maybe invisible labor? Does that express what you're trying to say?
      - Mz 9y ago
        I didn't write the piece. Another issue writers run into is that if you aren't using any of the hot catch phrases, no one will read your piece. I wrestle with this fact a lot. I blog at times about such issues. I try to be evenhanded and sympathetic to both sides. I really struggle with titling stuff and my writing gets damn little traffic. My refusal to use the standard catch phrases, because of their frequently toxic framing, is a barrier to being heard at all. And I sometimes wonder which is worse: Putting out a fucked up message in hopes of some partial solution emerging or simply howling into the void and going entirely unheard. Making any progress is incredibly challenging. This piece was published in a major publication. If it didn't use a popular catch phrase, they probably would not have published it at all. Those popular catch phrases are important hooks for titling things and for communicating with the public. On my own personal blogs, I have the luxury of refusing to use phrases I don't like. You generally don't have that luxury when trying to get published by an organization that needs to hit certain traffic targets to survive and keep their doors open. The part of this that genuinely is an issue of emotional labor is her desire for her husband to actually be considerate. That is the crux of the issue here. The article perhaps is not as clear as it could be about that fact.
BarkingChicken 9y ago
As the other commenter said, it has nothing to do with elitism. Research takes time. Calling people takes time. And god forbid you have to call a government or medical entity, you might be on the phone for hours. Do you realize how hard it is to get a straight answer on how much things SHOULD cost with regards to housekeeping, lawn care services, plumbing, tree services, roofing, foundation repair, and the list goes on? Sure you can call the company and ask, but are you getting ripped off? Now you have to call 5 companies and compare to see what the average price is and where you might get the best price. There goes 45 minutes of time (if you're lucky). Plus you have to vet these people. If they're going to be in your house/yard handling your things you want to make sure they are trustworthy and possibly licensed/bonded as may apply. So you go down the rabbit hole of yelp and NextDoor and Thumbtack and whatever else you may find only to read about things that you didn't even realize you needed to be worried about. Well, there goes another hour. Finally you have to actually call them back and schedule. Does this day work? What do you need to do to prepare for them to come? Do you need to be there? Who needs to take off work for that? Its just... a lot. Its a lot of work. And keeping track of what needs to be done and when and your husband won't use a damn google service so you can't just sync calendars and he won't even look at the one on the fridge anyway is just exhausting. There's a reason why one of the highest ranked reasons for strife in a marriage is an imbalance of housework. I actually do hope that my comment reads as anxiety inducing as I think it does. Its a lot, and it feels stupid at the time to even have to do it. You think we don't know that we seem like over-anxious worriers? We're in 2017! Why can't we have automated this? But then I'd have to be the one to figure out what automated service to go with and determine if we can trust it to not rip us off and figure out what their customer service is like if something goes wrong, ad nauseum.
- mlrtime 9y ago
  That is just called labor, it is work aka life.
dang 9y ago
This breaks the HN guidelines, which say: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. So would you please not comment like this? It takes effort not to, but it's effort we all need to make if this community is to not suck. I'm tempted to call it emotional labor but I suppose that would be trolling. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

CodeWriter23 9y ago

I think you missed the point. Yes, she wanted a house cleaning service. But that’s not the gift she wanted. The gift she wanted was for her husband to magically divine that she wanted him to use her emotionally-laden approach (seeking recommendations via social) to solving the problem of hiring the service instead of his pragmatic approach of identifying the cost of the service, which he then used his prior training as a magical diviner of her expectations to arrive at the conclusion she wouldn’t budget for it. Perhaps incorrectly. But that’s the problem with expecting your spouse to be a mind reader, they will try to do it, often to an undesirable result. While I get the idea that my wife allows certain things to drag her down emotionally, and the solution is to step up and surprise her by taking care of things (and recognizing her contribution to the drudgery), what I see in this article is much different. I see a narcissist who expects others to read her mind, and a codependent husband whom she declares as inept and sees no problem at all pillorying him in Vanity Fair. And a bit of dishonesty too. She claims she doesn’t want to micromanage her husband yet is obviously displeased because he chose a pragmatic approach to her gift as opposed to doing it her way. PS my wife’s solution to this problem. She asked. Not to do the dishes or clean the toilets. She asked me to take care of some things that concern her, without her having to ask me. Things I would normally “step around” because they’re not priority for me.

emodendroket 9y ago
It seems to me that she felt like his attempt to do the task was pretty half-hearted.
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  Expectations are an opportunity for disappointment.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I mean think about it. If you were tasked at your job with evaluating venders, would you talk to just one, and then tell your boss it couldn't be done within the budget? Probably not.

restingrobot 9y ago

If this is what the author wanted, which I 100% agree with you it is, why didn't she just say that? Admittedly, I often find myself in the clueless husband role, but my wife has been making a huge effort to directly say what she wants. The result is that both of us are much happier. If the author of this article wanted her husband to do the legwork of finding a housekeeper she should have asked for exactly that.

tpallarino 9y ago
It's a hallmark of passive-aggressive behavior. Expect someone to know what you want and subtly imply it rather than just outright saying it, often becoming frustrated when people don't behave the way you want them to.

logfromblammo 9y ago

It was an unreasonable request to begin with. She wanted two things. She wanted someone else to clean the house. This is fine. It happens all the time. But the second thing was that it still had to be done to her exacting standards. So the request was, in essence, "First, become me. Then do this thing that I want in exactly the way I would do it." Hidden requirements. The husband, not understanding this, went about hiring the cleaners in his own way, to meet his own standards. I know exactly how I would do it. I would set a budget limit of $300, which is acceptable for the spouse-to-spouse birthday gifts in our household, and try really hard to find someone to clean once a month for 12 months at $25 a pop, which seems like the minimum amount that would be required to get the van to roll, for a 90 minute appointment. All that "household office work"? Don't do it. Instead of spending 30 minutes on the phone with a cleaning service, haggling and scheduling, scrub one toilet. Instead of vetting a person to make sure they won't pinch your porcelain statuette, vacuum the floors. You don't need administration and management in an organization with less than 6 people in it. If you're one of those "all children are a blessing" families, with 10+ people in one house, yes, someone needs to be a household manager. But for most families, the chore chart is as far as it needs to go. Stop whining about how hard it is to micromanage everything, and let other people have their own responsibilities, with their own performance standards. If you like everything done just so, you're going to have to be the one doing all the things. And I know how it would turn out, too. My spouse would end up cleaning the house the day before the cleaners were scheduled, so they wouldn't be cleaning a dirty house. Madness. Knowing this, I would simply get a gift of comparable value that was not requested. And I'm not even going to explain why, because that way leads to a fight.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "It was an unreasonable request to begin with. She wanted two things. She wanted someone else to clean the house. This is fine. It happens all the time. But the second thing was that it still had to be done to her exacting standards." Nope, you missed the point. The point was the wife wanted a day free from housework, which isn't unreasonable. The husband screwed up because by doing the cleaning instead of hiring someone in (which was suggested they could afford from money she earned) he left her needing to do the rest of the housework, like looking after the kids. The end result = no day off.

Footkerchief 9y ago

I may be missing something fundamental, but what is the point of a cleaning service, if not a clean house? Is there some other benefit to be gained from a cleaning service? Why did it matter how the house got cleaned? It's a normal and healthy part of relationships to come to an agreement about what tasks should be done, how thoroughly, and who should be responsible for them. It's something else entirely to stipulate the _means_ by which someone else should accomplish tasks. That's micromanagement, and it verges on an assault on human autonomy. Maybe part of the concept of the gift was establishing an ongoing relationship with a cleaning service, but the article really makes it sound like a one-time concern.

scott_s 9y ago
> I may be missing something fundamental, but what is the point of a cleaning service, if not a clean house? Is there some other benefit to be gained from a cleaning service? Not having to worry about a clean house. And a service is probably going to do a more thorough job that can be repeated. Hence, she asked him to arrange for a cleaning service. She did not, apparently, explain why she wanted a cleaning service, but he also did not ask her that.
bostonvaulter2 9y ago
One benefit is that someone from outside the household does the cleaning, which means that everyone else is available for other household tasks, like watching the kids (which the author had to do while her husband was cleaning).