Victoria over at Here Be Dragons has an interesting post in which she addresses, in what I think is a pretty balanced way, two issues that are of interest to me. One is the way that one partner in a relationship — typically the woman — tends to do more of the work regulating the emotional stability of the relationship. The other issue is that such an imbalance gives the more emotionally sophisticated half of the couple a certain kind of power, and that this power, which is often wielded by women, complicates, even in the most patriarchal of societyies, the unipolar picture of male power.
She writes:
… there is another sort of work that women do more then men. Emotional work. The emotional maintenance of a relationship. Monitoring the mood of the parties, monitoring the relationships with family, smoothing over problems and preventing problems, articulating feelings and resolving problems.
Emotional maintenance is hard to quantify and there is a lot of disagreement on the subject. Is it real? Is it necessary? Do men really not do it? Do men really need it?
I think it is both real and necessary and that women are trained for it and men aren’t. A side effect or accompaniment of this is that there is, in fact, a certain subtle power that this gives women.
One part of emotional maintenance is being aware of when your partner or family member is angry or sad and what to do to change it. It’s logical that if a woman knows how to do this, then she can also not do it, or exacerbate the situation. This sounds like a lot of power, and it is, but unlike any other oppressed group women always have power in a patriarchal society. A functioning society has to have paths to happiness for women, spheres of influence.
Feminists often deny that women have any real power in patriarchy but that’s not necessarily accurate. What is accurate is that the power that patriarchies give to women are always subtle powers, and when they come into conflict [with men’s blunt power], blunt power beats subtle power every time, sometimes literally so.
In my marriage, the emotional maintenance is, overall, pretty evenly distributed between my wife and me, but what’s more interesting (I think) is that because we have different aptitudes for different kinds of emotional work, there are situations in which I’m doing more of the kind of emotional work that’s traditionally done by the wife.
I’m a good listener. I’m good at recognizing that sometimes people just need to vent and if you can let them do so, and make them feel okay about it without amplifying their grievances in a destructive way, then it gives them space to process their emotions and sort out the useful reactions from the dysfunctional ones. I’m good at apologizing, and falling on my sword, in the short term, so that enough good will can exist so that my wife and I can both on ourselves over the long term. I have an easier time, in certain ways, being direct about how I’m feeling than my wife does.
My wife, on the other hand, is much better at a lot of the traditionally male things. She makes more money. She’s better with power tools. She’s better at bargaining with salespeople and demanding the service we deserve at restaurants. She’s also better at quite a few of the emotional things, but worse at some of them.
As a result, I’m the beneficiary of some of that subtle power that Victoria wrote about, but also, because such work is rarely recognized and honored in the way that more tangible work (cleaning up, fixing things around the house, making money, caring for the child, etc.) is honored, I have some of the resentment that women, I imagine, often have when they feel like their men are benefiting from the emotional work they do but not recognizing it as an essential contribution to the relationship.
