Therapist Says Failing Relationships Can Only Be Saved Once A Man Chooses To Take On The Emotional Labor
She believes that men have to be willing to put in the work, and a lot of them aren't.
lilartsy via Unsplash / BooBoo Studio, ESHKA and Bianca Marie Arreola via Canva A self-described "mental health/emotional intelligence instructor/therapist” named Julia, who goes by @julesgirl4 on TikTok recently posted a video in which she revealed that she’s had an influx of men coming into her practice because the relationships that they’re in are ending.
She believes that there’s an interesting “phenomenon” occurring in these relationships that shows the distinction between “transactional” actions and “transformational” actions in relationships where men fail to see that the root of the problem seems to be the man’s emotional absence.
She claims failing relationships can only be saved once a man chooses to take on emotional labor.
Julia explains that once a relationship is deemed to be failing, which typically only happens once the woman decides she’s done doing the emotional labor, a man will being to resent the “transference of urgency.”
“Women often do the emotional labor in relationships, and I don't think that that's a revolutionary thought,” Julia says in her TikTok. She says that women will carry this burden for whatever amount of time until “She simply says, I'm unhappy. I don't think our marriage is working. I think we ought to separate,” in an effort to protect her own mental health.
At that point, there’s a transference of urgency to the man to figure it out. When a woman tells her partner that there’s this massive, fundamental issue in their relationship, the man senses the “danger and risk,” but he also sees it as a power grab.
“They'll be told things like, ‘Here are the things that aren't working,’” she continues. “‘You're not helping out at home. You're never doing the dishes, you don't take care of the kids, etc,’ and so how that's perceived is men will often go, ‘Well, I'll help out with dishes, I'll pick up the kids, I'll do these other things.’”
Except, that isn’t the real answer. These aren’t permanent fixes. The real problem doesn’t lie with doing dishes or taking care of the kids. She claims that “What the woman is often saying is that ‘I feel emotionally alone and now disconnected because I can't count on you. You're not a partner. You're just another person living in this home that either I have to take care of or that you have watched me struggle all of this time.’”
This is something that women often struggle with, and Jules says that she’s seen a lot of emotionally absent men who would never even bat an eye at the disconnect.
She says men fail to acknowledge the emotional disconnect in their relationship.
“No relationship that I've ever counseled has been solved by somebody doing more dishes or picking up the kids more as if that's the solution,” she says. “That's a transactional solution, not a transformative solution.”
“I rarely hear men say something like, ‘You know what? Until she brought it to my attention, um, I wasn't aware of how much I want [a] connection with her. I wasn't aware of how much I want [a] romance with her. I wasn't aware of how lonely I was in the relationship.’”
To her, it seems like men are simply okay with the fact that there’s a lack of intimacy or an emotional disconnect in their relationship. Instead of focusing on bringing back that feeling, they’re focused on how to keep her from leaving.
She claims that men just want the quick fix and shy away from doing real, emotional work in order to fix things. She says that men have to want to buy into the relationship, and she can’t really help them solve anything unless they’re actually looking to solve the problem for the long term.
Washing the dishes and taking care of the children isn’t taking care of the problem, and women are tired of doing all of the emotional labor. "I heard someone say 'they don't want to be husbands. They just want wives,'" one person wrote, highlighting how men often look for someone to fulfill an area in their lives without reciprocity.
In order to save a failing relationship, both partners need to be emotionally engaged. Marriage is a partnership, one that can only be fulfilling when both partners provide support both physically and emotionally.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor for YourTango who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.