22- Your Partner Didn't Cause The Mental Load Problem. Neither Did You

I wanted an egalitarian marriage, but instead, what I got instead surprised me. Tune in and you'll find me sharing about: 

• wanting non-traditional roles but sliding into old scripts 
• how family of origin teaches roles and responsibilities 
• “worry” as a learned language of love 
• traditional father models and the invisibility of domestic labor 
• Herman’s upbringing and why the mental load stayed unseen 
• having a vision but no architecture or roadmap 
• competence, shame, and taking on everything by default 
• the to do list as a cage that blocks real connection 
• naming the imbalance while recognizing generational conditioning 
• becoming allies against the pattern and why change stays hard

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Transcript

Egalitarian Dream Meets Reality

1:17

Herman and I talked in our marriage about wanting something different than our families, and we talked extensively about what our family situations were and how traditional they were and how we wanted something completely less traditional, more egalitarian, more feminist. And we even talked about how. Our people around us in who were more on the evangelical Christianity side of things, were not doing that. And we wanted to be different. We wanted to have more involvement from the both of us, specifically from Herman in defiance to the culture around us, but also to our upbringings. And then we just got married. Things just formed. They, everything. I actually covered everything in the first year of our marriage. I did everything except, and I was actually fired from doing the finances because I almost I missed so many. I think like the auto pay didn't work and I almost accidentally foreclosed our home at that time. Because I was, I didn't pay attention to how the autopay wasn't drafting. And anyways it was a whole big thing. But I think what I was really scared about is looking back, is how do we go from having egalitarian desires to just having a traditional. And I think a lot of people fall in that trap. A lot of people go into their relationships thinking, I really want an egalitarian marriage. And then they find themselves in very traditional marriages accidentally, where they end up carrying the woman or the female identified person carries a lot of the mental load. So I think I wanna go back to my role or my time before Herman, where. I wanted to share about the house I grew up in and the house I grew up in is I think, where a lot of this stuff starts. Where we get our first imprint about roles and responsibilities in our family. My mother ran my home, basically, but she didn't, I think looking back, she didn't know that she had a DHD and now I know. I mean it's unofficial, but my parents were not really present in the home. Both of them. They worked a lot. And I was a latch teach kid, and my mother carried the weight of everything. Even though she didn't do a lot, she didn't go above and beyond her parenting. I think she would say that she did. But she would say that she would worry about everything. And that's maybe the, how she communicated to me that she loved me. She told me she was my job for you and the way I love you is I'd worry about you. And I would tell her to stop worrying. She said's so annoying. But eventually she said, my, I can't stop worrying about you. That's my job. And part of why. The way I love you is to worry about you, and that I did not realize stuck so hard in me. It took me, first of all, a long time to realize that her worrying about me was her saying, I'm carrying the mental load in our family, and mostly it's around you. And that the only language he had with carrying the invisible weight of the family who my dad. Was a very traditional person, so he walked around like the king of the castle and he was checked out and maybe not oblivious to it, but just not really invested in the wellbeing of our family. I think he took a really traditional mentality with it. He was worried about making sure he could pay the bills more than my wellbeing and. I watched that in my whole childhood. I absorbed it and I didn't choose it, but I absorbed it implicitly and I didn't decide to choose it, but on some level. I watched her and I thought, I don't want that. That's not the template that I want. That's not the way I wanna do relationships in my family, and I've never seen another way of doing things. I superficially watched it, but most of the people that were around me had very traditional relationships and I brought her blueprint without knowing that I was carrying that blueprint. So I didn't know she was handing it to me. And she did the best that she could with what she had. But I inherited a script and now I know about patterns and I know that it doesn't start with my, with me, it didn't start with my mom. It goes back to way before that. And my mom didn't ask for that blueprint either. And she was just handed to her. And on Herman's side of things, his mother carried everything, every detail of his life, every single aspect of it. She held it and her husband, my father-in-law was very adamant that he was not carry any of the mental load. So he was similar to, my dad was really worried about paying the bills, but actually the bills. Didn't even go to the family. He, it just went to his personal spending. So Herman grew up in a house that was really similar to mine and the invisible work was genuinely invisible, and he never saw it and he was never asked to look for it. And he grew with a person that watched. Everything. He watched it appear out of nowhere and he was sometimes pressured and shamed into helping, especially as the oldest son and I'm the only child, so he had his experience of being forced to do some help and labor after my mother-in-law was at the end of her rope or was overwhelmed, but this is where he. Thought, I am going to not be like my dad and I'm just going to really be present, really be hands-on and really be equal partner. And there we are, two people inheriting two separate blueprints and we wondered why we ended up. So this is a conversation we actually had. And when, before we got married, we talked about it extensively. We wanted something different from our family and we wanted really non-traditional roles, and we wanted balanced partnership. And we talked about how, I talked about how I really wanted Herman to be really present and not the type of person that. Our dads were, so we had that vision conversation, but we never had the architecture conversation about how we're actually going to create the dynamic. And we definitely didn't have a roadmap on how to get there. So there was desire and there was a vision, but not really a. So we defaulted into our roles into the blueprint in which our family gave us. And the road was basically the road that was taught to us, which is we just do whatever we are obligated to do. And this is what I just feel like is important to acknowledge is. My identity was based on someone who's very competent. And so to be viewed as incompetent was something that was very shameful. And so that in combination with having a blueprint of my mother do things and then having a desire for something different, but not a roadmap made for a recipe for disaster because we have these ideals that we cannot follow through on. And I think that building my identity around being the one who holds it all together made it very easy for me to take on all the responsibilities. And I just thought with more control, with more intention, I could shape our future. So the load and I, my identity was almost the same thing. Like I felt like if I took on the load. That would mean that I'm a good parent and I didn't know when or where my mental load ended and my identity started. Both were the same, and so for me, doing the mental load is the same as saying I am the mental load. So I thought, I genuinely thought that this is how I love my family is by taking on a mental load. And I didn't know that the planning, the managing, the holding very detail that it was a labor of love, but it was actually something that was blocking me from the love. From giving love, from giving actual connection. So going back to the Christmas story of holding the Christmas magic together, I was so busy holding that magic together that I couldn't be present at Christmas. So I was so busy holding the mental load of everything that I had nothing actually left to connect with them, with my kids and my partners loving my family. But it was behind a wall of things to do. And I was convinced that my things to-do list was a way that I love my family. So the wall was so thick I couldn't see through it, and I built my own cage that I was imprisoned behind this cage of love that was built around these to-do lists. These worries, these concerns about planning. Holding and remembering, anticipating all the details. And then I really wondered why I felt so alone in it. And so I don't, honestly, I think part of me, because I'm a sociology undergrad major, knew that this was something bigger than my marriage. But honestly, I still to this day feel like Herman not being able to carry the mental load. As much as I do is a result of a personal failing, even though I know that it's not, even though I know that he's conditioned to not carry the mental load in the same way and not see the competence inside the household as something to hold, as a labor of love, I seriously, right now, even today, have not fully internalized that this was a result of. So many generations of conditioning, enough of me personal. And so when I step back and I tell myself this, I could see that it is different. I could see that it is a result of his conditioning and it's not personal. But that took a lot of work and it still is something that's really hard for me to grasp. I think also realizing that this is something that was handed down to us and conditioned for us. It almost feels hopeless'cause it's like just feels too big to grasp and so too big to change. And so I think what I wanna tell people who are watching this right now is that if you are angry at holding a lot of the mental load, don't let anyone talk. Talk you out of it. And that imbalance deserves to be named. And it's real if it's real to you. And also, your partner did not invent this. Your partner did not come out and deliberately try to cause this imbalance. And he or they also didn't know that this is something that was being passed down to them that they inherited. And. That it doesn't make you or your partner bad people, but you are fighting a pattern that's bigger than you, and that's older than you, that's bigger than your household and you're fighting a pattern that's inside a person, both you and your partner. And the cool thing is, the thing I wanna tell people is that you can work on it together. And that's the part that nobody told me because I just always have the script that nobody is gonna change. And so the moment. I stopped aiming my missiles at Herman metaphorical missiles. I started noticing the pattern that comes from the systems that we inherited, and then we should become allies in it, fighting together against it. And for the first time in a long time, we're on the same side of something and that's what is possible. We could be on the same side of something, even though you can feel like your partner is your enemy and. Next week we're gonna talk about why, when you know all of this, even when you name it and explain it and had all the right conversations, change is so hard because there's something happening underneath the pattern that nobody really talks about, and that's what we're gonna dive into next.