The emotional load of bullshit, failed mothers and household management.

So now that the buzzword of 2017 (human trafficking) has faded, the new buzz for 2018 is the inequitable distribution of household work and emotional labor.

• When housework is equitable, the complaint will be, that instead, she harbors the primary emotional and or thought load. This is analogous to the head of the household. This is a valid non-starter. It's valid, because you should be the head of household.

• When housework is "inequitable" the complaint will be that her husband is more work than if he wasn't there at all or something close to it.

The non-obvious, obvious

99 times out of 100, this is a symptom of a bigger problem. Tingles uber alles. Frankly, your lack of them. So you'll have to work on this in parallel. Just do not ever let house work be the lever she claims is how you get sex.

This is also compounded by the fact that you're probably with a woman that has a low maternal drive.

If you've ever been around a woman with a high maternal drive, she's too busy playing with her kids to get too worked up by much. Her "emotional load" is dominated by her desire to get those reward hits from her brain by engaging with her children.

In your case, she's probably more mechanical, that's why she's looking for reasons why she doesn't feel like the jackpot she thought she might hit when her body was screaming it was time to conceive.

Tough luck buddy, you picked a dud. Your job is now to rewire her junk programming by cleaning off her plate, running your house and forcing her to spend more time with the kids.

If work becomes a focus over your children, book an appointment to the shrink politely because her children need her, and she is somewhere else.

These arguments are all underscored by a degree of contempt that if you read it is my kids aren't really all that great. You let her win at her game, and she doesn't really find it all that great.

Her children are burdens. Not something she loves to work on.

In a properly run household with a maternal woman your job is to get out of her way, because she's too busy setting up things to do for the kids or with them, and she's enjoying every moment she has to spend with them.

Just like when you're trying to get that project at work off the ground, the slavery still makes you feel good.

In women where this isn't happening, her children are a job she hates. You might be part of it, but ultimately, you picked a masculine woman who probably shouldn't have had kids anyways.

Acceptable contempt

What you should understand is these arguments hold a degree of socially acceptable contempt that most women would never allow to enter their household if they treated it in the way that men believed it was understood by their wives.

Do you remember that time when she wanted nothing more in the world than a baby girl or baby boy?

And where are you now?

To the point where what probably amounts to an hour or two differential in housework duties has given her mental justification to burn the whole house down.

And how much work do you think Chad or Billy take a some other dude's kid in is going to do? As much as you? If the answer to that is yes then, well, she's right. But hopefully the answer is probably "no way." Of course, most of the guys on the other end of these complaints are plow horses.

Don't work harder, work smarter.

On equitability

1 Nothing in life will ever be completely equal unless you start from the premise of equality of outcome.

If you want a job occupied by a 50:50 split of men and women, the only way that will occur is by random chance (which would occur more the closer a job is equally as desired by equally qualified men and women) or by enforcing the outcome by explicitly hiring an equal number of each candidate, dividing your candidates into two hiring rounds.

So in many of these cases one of the actual issues that can be a non-gendered issue is a lack of actionable accountability.

Have you ever worked for a company that vollied requests over a cubicle? Delegated two different versions of the same request from multiple departments?

The way that companies often solve this issue is through the use of a project management portal. Where the issues are centralized and explicitly delegated. Each task is given an owner and an expected outcome. In this case, the way you put this fire out is draft up a list, do not hang this up like you are 10 years old. It's just for reference. You're already beyond a point of reason, now you need accountability.

Solution : Draft a solid distribution of housework and do it. In MMSLP they call this the "l word" for laundry. MRP calls this "owning your shit." The rest of the world calls it adulting. Regardless, in most cases, the issue isn't really a lack of willingness, but a breakdown of communication as a woman tries to push the choreplay framework.

Warning : Do not ever agree that housework should or would have any impact on your sex life. If the reason why your girlfriend, plate, wife, hooker, fwb etc won't sleep with you is because you forgot to vacuum, your problem lies elsewhere. That is, unless, you actually are in a relationship where you exchange household duties for sex. And in that case, continue on dustslut. Get a good lawyer on retainer for your divorce.

2 Rarely does anyone feel they're getting the good end of the stick unless they've got almost the whole stick.

Again, one of the major benefits of centralizing things like this, including KPIs (key performance metrics) is to track, analyze and account for difference within populations.

When Jack says Jane is a lazy brown nose, the first thing any competent manager does is look to see if Jane's KPIs demonstrate such a deficiency. Just as corrupt police hate body cams, people that have an aversion to responsibility will refuse to be measured or will reject such measurements as biased or try to maliciously comply.

If she refuses and instead says "you should just know" or deflects, then make a chart yourself of what she's doing and what you do. Then work on the distribution based on her own words.

But if she refuses, again, your problem lies elsewhere. She's probably looking for reasons to hang you and once she runs out of reasons you'll just be an abusive asshole. And who is going to argue with that once she's giving out free pussy?

3 You get what you get, and you don't throw a fit

I actually jacked this one from my daughter's preschool teacher, credit to her on that one. But that's it, what you've given her to go from, yourself to follow and the results from that is what you get. Give it some thought and imagine the ways she will contort your plain requests, because you should expect that from anyone, even well meaning people will have different views of the same thing.

Have you really completed a task that is done suboptimally in the view of the other?

Is it fair you've got garbage which is once a week when the bathroom should be cleaned every day?

Your job when this issue breaks out is to let her hang herself.

Solution : Give yourself the worst distribution and let her argue her way into the optimal distribution for you. Rest assured, if you take all the heavy tasks, she'll try to argue that you instead took the easy ones. Give them to her.

The mental load of bullshit

Now understand this argument above about equity is a failure of the human condition, not gendered, but also exacerbated by a woman's orientation to feelings and built in fitness testing. That's why #3 exists. If she feels its unfair, then it's unfair. Even if rationally, you taking all the hard tasks should be self evident.

On the same front, understand that the mental load of bullshit houses the former debates. Underneath this, is the fact that you've let her argue you into a corner because you're lazy or you believed what she said. Silly silly man. If facta non verba should teach you anything, it's that women talk out of both sides of their mouth.

What she's actually saying to you is why the fuck am I doing your job, you effeminate loser?

One thing that many households learn is that it's okay if your wife makes more money or a lot more money, so long as she still feels as though you run the house. Frankly, if such a thing is true, you have the leverage legally speaking. Have her pay you alimony, child support or whatever if she wants to throw a tantrum and eject. Adopt that frame.

Wrestle control of your household back by hook or crook. Have her send you problems and iron them out. That IS your job, period. Equal household duties are a farce.

THIS CAN NOT BE MORE CLEAR. YOUR JOB IS TO RUN YOUR HOUSEHOLD, HER JOB IS TO BE THE MOTHER OF YOUR CHILDREN. If you're married and you don't have and don't want kids, why god, why?

She gives you problems, and you solve them. Her complaints translate into actionable objectives to sort out. And for all the work you do in this domain to turn 1,000 complains into 999 solutions, the only thing you'll get out of this is complaints about the last one and the 10 that weren't solved in the way she thinks it should be solved, even if you already did the math on her way and figured out it wouldn't work, even though she thinks it would.

In these cases, you can let her fail and take ownership. This is one of nature's great delicacies, a form of marital schadenfreude. If she's not a complete moron she'll show some gratitude here and realize that's really not her gig. Don't chide her, take the opportunity to have an ego free discussion for about 10 seconds before her programming hijacks her back.

The frame

The frame here is simple. Solve the problems in the household in a transparent, non-demonstrably maliciously compliant way, exactly what you should expect from her, demanding in return simplicities like courtesy, feminine behavior etc with an expectation you have a woman with low maternal drive.

Her complaints of emotional load are valid because you shouldn't be running an equal household. You should be doing most of it and having her focus on the kids. You're the CEO of the house and the operations manager. She is the president of the child care division.

When that doesn't work, you'll have the proof of what you already know, things are way more fucked up than you thought when you started. From there, she'll either take to the kids well, or completely unravel, reject her motherly role and try to relive her life as a girl.

In parallel, work on the fact you're not bringing tingles. And remember, if she really loved her children and you, you'd be able to have a discussion about this and solve it, but you can't. Because she doesn't love you, and she probably is suboptimally wired in terms of her attachment to the children.

I am taken aback at the level of contempt in this message on how it's become accepted in society. Such a thing can only be accepted because family and children don't hold a high spot in the world any longer.

And if you extend out the olive branch that "you would fight for 50:50 custody" she'll probably take you up on that because that's a 50:50 vacation arrangement for the failed mother you're now managing.

Good luck.

Reference my boiling the frog as you go through this process.