Áilín Quinlan: Finally... we have a name for it...a phrase you won’t forget

Dear God. Don’t you just love this world of ours, where if you want, you can learn something new every day.

So, in bed with a chest infection, I found myself reading the agony aunt page.

In her byline photo, the agony aunt looked about 12. By the end of paragraph four, however, I had realised that this was a very learned, highly articulate, experienced and extremely formidable agony aunt. But there you go.

The agony aunt was responding to a letter from a reader who was worn down by her husband’s issues with insecurity, low self-esteem and inability to tolerate criticism of any kind.

She had tried talking to him about it. No go.

She asked him to attend counselling. He did attend, but didn’t engage with the therapy.

He was opposed to taking antidepressants too.

And so his mental health struggles meandered on until, long story short, the lady had had enough and wanted out.

At the same time, though, she was afraid of the effect a separation would have on their children, their finances, their standing within the community, and, most of all, the devastation a break-up could wreak on her emotionally fragile husband.

The agony aunt said bluntly that the husband was responsible for his own healing and that this woman was entitled to stop putting all her energy into saving a person who refused to help or save himself.

She said other things too. Very impressive things.

One phrase came up, which blew my mind.

The agony aunt referenced a researcher called Ellie Anderson, who had coined a phrase to describe the imbalance of emotional work and care in heterosexual relationships.

Hermeneutic labour is a form of work (I would say yet another form of work) that women often end up doing for their male partners.

The letter-writer, warned the agony aunt, had been shouldering all the hermeneutic labour in that relationship on her own by essentially taking it upon herself to try to fix her husband’s problems.

Fascinated, I googled “Ellie Anderson” and “hermeneutic labour” and found an article published by her a couple of years ago.

As I understand it, hermeneutic labour is a kind of care labour or emotional work.

It is, Anderson says, the “burdensome activity” of understanding and coherently expressing one’s own feelings, desires, intentions and motivations and discerning those of others.

It also, I understand, involves one person, often the woman, inventing solutions for what Anderson called relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions (which as I understood it, means women basically going it alone in trying to fix the problems in their relationships.)

Anderson believes that in heteropatriarchal societies ( that is, in societies dominated by straight men whose mainstream bias would be generally unfavourable towards women or gay people) hermeneutic labour falls disproportionately on the shoulders of women, particularly on the shoulders of women in intimate male-female relationships.

There is an expectation that women are the relationship-maintenance experts. And therefore, given the world we live in, women’s hermeneutic labour is massively exploited.

Well. What do you know! A name for it! At last.

Back to the highbrow agony auntie.

Men, she observed, are not socialised within a patriarchal society (which is more or less generally what we still have here in Ireland) to be attuned to their emotions or to express their needs.

As a result, the women in intimate relationships with them tend to spend a heck of a lot of time compensating for this lack of emotional self-awareness, lack of emotional regulation and lack of communication around their emotions.

The women end up “over-functioning” in terms of obsessing over their partner’s emotional needs and trying to address them. Sound familiar?

Woman obsessing over trying to analyse and resolve a relationship issue while the man stolidly refuses to acknowledge or engage?

The agony aunt also said that she believed there were a lot of good men out there who are not taught to care for themselves or for others or even for their partners and this was causing a lot of damage.

And that was the only thing the agony aunt said that I disagree with.

Women, in my experience, are not formally “taught” how to care for others.

It’s simply an expectation thing. It’s a socialisation thing. It’s in the air they breathe as they grow.

It’s something that happens for girls as they grow up and it is something that does not happen for boys as they grow up because men are simply not expected to do this work – in fact the expectation is that they will not and will never do it - and therefore, unlike women, they are not socialised in their formative years into learning how to do it.

So the letter writer, according to the agony aunt, was left doing all the work of not just addressing her husband’s emotional needs, but also the needs of their relationship. This was draining and exhausting because it was one-sided as all this work was quite unreciprocated.

The agony aunt also pointed out that research showed that following a separation or divorce, straight women reported feeling happier and remained single while straight men reported being unhappier post-separation, and tended to remarry much more quickly.

This, she explained, is linked to the fact that married women not only pick up more (I would say a lot more) of the domestic and childcare load involved in family life, but are also expected to shoulder more (I would say probably most if not all) of the hermeneutical labour.

Well, we all know about it. Nobody could deny its existence. But, finally, we have a name for it. Hermeneutic labour. There’s a phrase you won’t forget in a hurry.