What Most Married Men Don’t Understand About the Mental Load

First things first: It has nothing to do with yard work

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Apparently, married heterosexual men do a lot of yard work. At least that’s what they keep telling me. I’m not sure why they keep telling me, but it’s really important to them that I know this.

I mean, why are women like me out here complaining about inequity in heterosexual marriages when all these men are out there doing yard work? Yard work is serious labor! It is sweaty and grimy and tiring. (Gardening, meanwhile, is a cute, feminine side hobby, but I digress.)

Ever since I’ve lived in a house with a yard, albeit a very, very small one, I too have done yard work. My ex-husband frequently referenced a time when he did all the yard work, a time that existed only in his imagination. He also liked to talk quite a bit about all the yard work he did. Then he stopped doing yard work because he didn’t feel like doing it anymore, which meant I went from doing some of it to all of it, while he talked about all the yard work he used to do.

Now, as a single mom, I not only do all the yard work, but also all the other manly chores my husband used to do, like taking out the trash and packing the trunk when we go on a trip. And guess what? These are all my favorite chores. They are eminently satisfying, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. They don’t have to be done all that often. And when it comes to chores like yard work, I often get praise from neighbors and sometimes even my own children, who are generally stingy with their mother in the praise department.

Guys, it’s great that you do all that yard work. Really. But your yard work is rarely, if ever, relevant to any point I’m trying to make. That’s because the division of labor in a marriage is about much more than the division of household chores. Despite time use studies that consistently show that heterosexual women still tend to do more than their husbands in the household chore department, even when they engage in the same amount of paid labor as their husbands for the same amount of pay, it’s in the invisible labor—the trifecta of behind-the-scenes labor, emotional labor, and the mental load—where the most significant imbalance lies. And not only do men tend to do far less of this labor, they are far less likely to understand what it is, or acknowledge that it even exists.

What’s the difference between invisible labor and a household chore? A household chore is a discrete task, easy to see and easy to check off as “done.” It is generally completed on a specific cadence—take out the trash every Thursday, mow the lawn every Sunday, empty the dishwasher every few days, wash the sheets every month—er, I mean, week.

Household chores aren’t always fun, per se, but they often entail a sense of accomplishment, however small. Even if no one else seems to notice that you did them, you get to enjoy fresh sheets or an orderly looking lawn.

Invisible labor is more reactive. It doesn’t conform to your schedule and much like a game of whack-a-mole, it pops up continually no matter how hard you hack away at it.

Sometimes invisible labor can be a physical task, like sorting through a growing child’s motley collection of hole-ridden and too-small socks. While these tasks are irregular and always behind-the-scenes, they can still offer an element of satisfaction. In fact, I used to take a day off each quarter, which I called my “Podcast & Purge” days (trademark pending), during which I’d spend the entire day purging and organizing the house while listening to podcasts. This way, I figured, we might occasionally be able to find shit when we needed it and my kids wouldn’t need to paw through drawers stuffed with clothes that no longer fit them when they got dressed in the morning.

I loved my Podcast & Purge days. And while I can’t say I always love that other form of invisible labor, emotional labor, there is an element of gratification in that, too. In fact, studies show that jobs that require more emotional labor—that is, investing in the emotional well-being of those around us—can lead to greater job satisfaction and performance. At home, women disproportionally take on emotional labor, but we also disproportionally benefit from it by enjoying more fulfilling relationships.

It would be lovely if all invisible labor were… well, less invisible, but it’s the third leg on the invisible labor stool that is the most taxing, the least acknowledged, and the least rewarding.

Yes, I’m talking about The Mental Load.

Why is the mental load so uniquely challenging and so grossly misunderstood? Let’s take a moment to break it down.

The mental load is the sum of hundreds of constantly moving parts

We all carry a mental load. Managing logistics for our own lives is hard enough these days, but it becomes exponentially harder the more people you add into the equation. For mothers, who handle the bulk of the kinkeeping, childcare coordination, and family logistics, whether or not we also engage in paid labor outside the home, our mental load bears a unique heft.

It includes, but is not limited to, managing the family calendar and scheduling appointments and canceling appointments and rescheduling appointments and signing kids up for things and finding things to sign them up for and figuring out how to get them to the things you signed them up for and researching products and returning products and responding to the texts and responding to the emails and sending the texts and sending the emails and researching the books and finding the books and planning the weekends and planning the meals and making mental notes and forgetting mental notes and making more mental notes and writing grocery lists and writing packing lists and writing to-do lists and writing to-do lists for your spouse and writing to-do lists for your kids and responding to more texts and responding to more emails and…

I could go on for hours, but I’ll spare you.

When mothers talk about the strain of the mental load, we are not only talking about the sheer number of small, niggling tasks that comprise it, but also about the incessant, interconnected, and unpredictable nature of these tasks.

When managing logistics for multiple people, one unexpected change of plans can trigger a cascade of consequences. For example, last fall, my son’s soccer practice, my daughter’s volleyball practice, and my appointment were all smallish things that all took place on a normal, mundane Tuesday afternoon. They all fell within the same hour on the same day because… life, which meant arranging a carpool for my son because my daughter’s practice was closer and I could hightail it from her drop-off to my appointment.

Where was my husband in all of this? Back when I had one, he gave rides when asked, which helped of course, but I was still doing all the arranging. And if he was at work, I was out of luck, just like so many other wives are out of luck. That’s because men typically assume their wives will ask for and prioritize flexibility at work, even if this comes at a cost to their careers and earning potential.

So back to the normal, mundane Tuesday afternoon. When the carpool for my son fell through, which often happens because no one can seem to follow through on commitments anymore, then that meant I needed to drive him, arrange a carpool for my daughter, and see about rescheduling my appointment. All in all, this single, normal, mundane afternoon entailed at least a dozen phone calls and text messages, and then a dozen more when the original arrangement had to be… rearranged.

Perhaps I can block out time for proactive planning and proactive researching, but there is no time blocked out in my schedule to deal with the fallout when plans change. It just has to be dealt with when it has to be dealt with, including during work hours, and if Plan A goes awry, then that’s more time I need for proactive planning and proactive researching.

Are you bored yet? I’m kind of bored writing this. That’s because the mental load is boring. Mostly, it’s just a slog—shit that has to get done so the kids have childcare and healthcare and don’t find themselves stranded at 8 p.m. after basketball practice on a Tuesday night.

When men aren’t busy celebrating all the yard work they do, some seem to enjoy insisting that the mental load, in fact, consists of shit that doesn’t actually have to get done, shit that women just make up because we love making up shit and then complaining about it. Not only is the mental load very, very real, but there’s a reason we’re talking more about it. Which brings me to point #2:

The mental load has increased exponentially in recent years

For decades, women have been sorting socks and managing the emotions of their families. The behind-the-scenes physical labor and the emotional labor our society consistently asks of women hasn’t dramatically changed in scope, but meanwhile, the mental load has spiraled out of control.

Major shifts over the last few decades have made the mental load more untenable for all of us. We are worried about more things, we have less support, we feel less in control, and our attempts to communicate with other humans are, more often than not, overwhelming, dispiriting, unproductive, or all of the above.

But a common perception, particularly amongst heterosexual men, is that mothers are entirely to blame for our own mental loads because we are all overbearing helicopter parents, intent on micromanaging the minutia of our children’s lives. I’m not denying that parents are generally more protective of their children than they used to be, but let’s ask ourselves—did helicopter parenting come about because a bunch of neurotic moms randomly woke up one day and decided to start coddling their children? This absurd logic is implied in the stories many men tell these days about modern mothers.

What actually happened, of course, is far more complex. Helicopter parenting has its roots in the “stranger danger” fear-mongering of our mainstream news, starting with highly publicized kidnappings in the ’80s and ’90s. Of course, when compared to all the other dangers lurking out there, kidnappings have always been, and remain, highly statistically unlikely (in fact, children are more likely to have a conjoined twin than they are to get kidnapped by a stranger). But it’s hard to analyze statistics when missing children’s faces are staring you down from the backs of milk cartons as you eat your breakfast cereal.

Parallel trends have led to a lot less unstructured, unsupervised play around the neighborhood — including the rise of car-dependent suburban living, steep declines in civic and community engagement, media-driven perceptions of rising crime even in decades when crime rates were dropping, and the ever-multiplying screens that lure kids inside.

I, for one, have invested quite a bit of energy in proactively adopting an opposite free-range parenting approach so that my children can build resilience and learn how to navigate the world on their own. But even if I want my kids to run around the neighborhood, which I do, it’s exceedingly difficult to find other children for them to run around with. Out of over 200 kids at my son’s elementary school, he’s one of only a handful that walks without an adult to school. But up until age nine, as dictated by school policy, he still needed to be accompanied by an older child; he wasn’t allowed to leave the school grounds by himself or with another same-age or younger child.

According to a series of books published in 1979 that offers checklists of age-appropriate milestones, a six-year-old should know their left from their right and be able to “travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to the store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home.”

Oh, how times have changed.

I am unequivocally not the mother who is frantically over-scheduling her children and cramming their days with structured activities. My children, now older, participate in one sport at a time at their request, and that’s about the extent of their extracurricular activities. Most weekends, we just hang out and take walks around the neighborhood.

But the mental load is still enough to do me in. Just for fun, back in May, I counted the number of communications I received in one month regarding my two kids’ schools and sports practices.

The grand total? 229 communications. 52 emails, 130 Whatsapp messages, and 47 text messages.

I think back to my parents, who got a weekly Tuesday note home, which my teacher pinned to my shirt in my early elementary years. One piece of paper with text on one side that they read once a week. And while I’m sure there were a few phone calls and other forms of communication here and there, I’m also sure there weren’t 229 of them.

When you think about the mental labor of receiving 229 communications, there’s first the distraction element. There are an average of 7-8 messages coming in daily, at all times during the day. Then there’s knowing that these messages need to be read. And even if they don’t require a response, they often require a next step, like putting something on the calendar or adding something to a to-do list.

This summer, my kids are each participating in a one-week sports camp. We have our annual camping trip and our annual trip to visit family. That’s it. They are otherwise busy drawing, writing graphic novels, running errands for me, playing basketball in the street, and trying to sneak extra screen time.

But still, the sheer effort required to patch together this relatively relaxed summer has been immense. Since I need help getting kids to and from their one-week camps (whose locations, despite my best efforts to find closer options, are clear across town and whose hours never in any way correspond to a typical workday), I tried to coordinate with other families, just as I tried to coordinate with a few families for our camping trip (because camping is always more fun with more people), just as I tried to coordinate a few gigs for my daughter, like babysitting and dog sitting (because she is dying to work this summer, but there is simply no infrastructure to meaningfully engage, and meaningfully compensate, 13 year olds).

Our increasingly isolated lives and the increasingly fragmented nature of human communication have made even the simplest of tasks daunting, to say the least. We’ve lost our “commons,” spaces where social connection happens organically, which means that calendars must be coordinated and activities and engagements must be arranged, which means that any event that requires coordinating with any person who resides outside our home reliably turns into a morass of disjointed text messages over multiple days and weeks. Even when we manage to make plans, those plans often become moving targets because it’s become socially acceptable to back out of things, even—perhaps especially—at the last minute.

Multiply one morass of asynchronous text messages by 20, then throw in a healthy handful of emails and at least a dozen unexpected logistical puzzles—oh yeah, then add the paid labor that entails its own mental load and isn’t even factored in here— and you’ll get some idea of what most mothers contend with on a daily basis.

This is more than an occasional annoyance. This is a Big. Friggin’. Deal.

The increasing strain of the mental load diminishes our quality of life

Wait… where was I? Oh yeah, I was about to talk about how distracting the mental load is, and how the sum total of a hundred different but interconnected distractions significantly detracts from our daily quality of life.

But I got distracted. My cousin texted to see if my daughter can dog sit next week instead of this coming week, which I think should work but I’ll have to see if it might conflict with her friend’s birthday party. In any case, I’m not going to respond now because I’m trying to focus on writing this article, but I will make a mental note to respond later, and then I’ll most certainly forget, and my cousin will be rightfully annoyed at me for not responding, which means she’ll have to follow up with me again and I’ll have to profusely apologize.

Mommy brain! 🤦🏼‍♀️

The mental load involves a lot of self-deprecating apologies. But here’s what’s generally not involved in the mental load: intellectual stimulation, emotional connection, or soul-nourishing creativity. The mental load does not fulfill us or make us particularly happy. In fact, as I’m sure many married men can attest, it makes us pretty grumpy a lot of the time.

We have all experienced a diminished ability to focus since smartphones and social media began dominating our lives. For mothers, it’s not just the distractions of the actual text messages causing our phones to buzz at all hours of the day, but also the nagging worries that tug at our brains when we’re trying to focus on other things.

I cannot even quantify the numbers hours I’ve spent over the last 13 years consumed by worry when I’m struggling to find childcare for my children. I’m not talking about babysitters for date nights (though that was always a tall order, too), but about the childcare I need so I can work and provide for my family. I’m talking about the 79 days my children have off from school in any given year that I do not have off from work, and the days when my kids were young and daycare providers called in sick, and the days when my kids have had to call in sick, and all the other random days when shit happens. The ultimate irony is that I need the childcare in order to work, yet I consistently find myself distracted at work because I’m struggling to piece together childcare. And the precious time I spend with my children doing the actual work of parenting is all too often overshadowed by concerns about The Next Thing that needs to be figured out on their behalf.

The mental load diminishes our ability to be present, to focus on the things that bring us joy, or even just to focus on the things that pay the bills. There is never not something to worry about. And sure, we can employ all the self-care tools—mindfulness, meditation, blah blah blah—but let’s not pretend that these will actually get to the root of our anxiety.

The only thing that will really help diminish the mental load is to… well, diminish the mental load. As I wrote about in a prior story, “How Mothers Unwittingly Perpetuate Patriarchal Gender Norms,” there are some actions mothers can take to more equitably distribute the load. But seriously addressing the social forces that have led to its exponential increase over recent decades requires a collective effort across genders—an effort that involves school districts, neighborhood associations, elected officials, urban planners, community organizations, after-school coordinators, Big Tech, and more.

And it can’t be a collective effort until men acknowledge that the mental load does in fact exist, has in fact gotten worse, and is disproportionately carried by women. To start, that could mean less defensiveness, less self-aggrandizing talk about yard work, and more authentic curiosity when women talk about feeling overwhelmed.