A Labor of Love

The 5th grade is when I learn that girlhood is a battlefield.

Most girls learned it before then, but I'd always been immature. I'd always been oblivious to the social scheming and plots around me.

In 5th grade, obliviousness stopped being an option.

I'd always been popular enough. My class was full of smart kids - nerds that weren't really interested in bullying each other yet. I was talkative and friendly and excitable, and always had friends to spare.

One of these friends was Heather. Heather came from a nice family, in the nice part of town. She wore pretty dresses and had nice, long hair.

Heather and I were supposed to work on a project together. So, she came over to my house after school, and we worked on our project in between snacks from my mother and after playing around for a bit. Sometimes we had to fend of my brothers, who were super interested in all the girls that were suddenly in the house, or maybe who were just envious that we were getting the good snacks, and they weren't.

My older brother, known to terrorize his fair share of siblings, taunted us the most, taking our pens and pencils, throwing them, breaking some of them.

He broke Heather's very nice pencil and made her cry.

It wasn't until the next day, when we were back at school, that I realized exactly how pissed Heather was at me. Pissed enough to leave our group project. Pissed enough to stop hanging out at recess. Pissed enough that our friendship was basically over.

The crime, of course, was my brother's. But, my laissez faire attitude about "brothers" was not the apology she wanted or needed. She might have been mollified if I had bought her a replacement pencil, but that wasn't what she really wanted. What was necessary, what I failed to offer, was horror. I needed to be angry and appalled at my brother with her. I needed to plot revenge.

I couldn't understand that, anymore than she could understand that after a thousand crimes, I'd stopped registering my brother's actions as anything but normal.

While I remained pretty solidly outside of cliques and girl groups and popularity challenges for the rest of my school years, that was the moment when my ability to ignore it changed.

After that, relationships were always work. There were apologies, and angry conversations, where both sides were fighting to explain emotions neither fully understood. There was posturing and anger and quiet passive aggressive battles that waged in girls bathrooms for years. I had to learn to navigate not just my friends hobbies and schedules, but their emotional needs and wants as well.

For me, and most of my female friends, by the time we reached adulthood, these emotional navigations were second nature. We'd learned the intricate emotional language that was always unspoken, unclear, often not even understood by the person who felt it.

Later, much later, this language, and the work around it, has been called "Emotional Labor." It's the core point of most female friendships, most male romantic relationships, and a key element of positive workplaces.

I have many male friends who are working on their Emotional Intelligence. They want to form real, meaningful bonds with their friends. They want to learn to navigate their relationships better. They want to understand their own emotional lives better. They want to carry their own weight in the workplace.

They cannot turn to their male friends for help. After all, their male friends are as ignorant of this world as they are. But when asked their female friends rebuke them for asking women to not just do emotional labor, but to take on the additional burden of teaching it to men in order to free themselves from the burden of it.

There's anger arising on both sides from this, and like my friend Heather and I, our failure to understand each other's perspectives is a key element. After all, these are the well-meaning men, who want to fix the system, and they don't understand how they are supposed to do it without help.

Men, you're right. Emotional Intelligence has a steep slope. It's a nightmare battlefield to learn, and it isn't fair that none of you learned the skills when you were young and impressionable and your marriages and decades-long friendships weren't on the line.

But the women in your life didn't just stumble into this knowledge. While you were memorizing Animorphs facts or Michael Jordan games, the girls around you were practicing intricate social warfare. And while as adults we think of the stakes as lower, as children it certainly didn't feel that way. It isn't fair that our childhood was cut short by the necessities of emotional labor while yours was not. It isn't fair that most of us have been taking care of your emotional needs, applying deep emotional understanding to patch and make work and smooth your lives.

The solution isn't simple, but complex issues often have simple solutions.

"Just teach us how" my male friends cry, but they treat the teaching as something cheap and dispensable. Just some insider knowledge that girls whispered to each other in our little cuddle circles. Like every pearl and understanding didn't come at the cost of friendships and time and emotional trauma. Acknowledge that. We learned the hard way, and if a woman is willing to teach you so you can learn the easy way, appreciate that.

More importantly, some things can only be learned in action. Otherwise our mothers would have spared us the gritty learning. They'd have let us grow up ignorant of the dramas, and then draped the knowledge around us as we became women ourselves. The Emotional Intelligence necessary for Emotional Labor isn't something that can always be taught. We try, but the art of exposing our hearts and defending each others needs to be learned in practice.

So go, practice. Expect rejection. That's part of the process. But don't practice on the women in your lives. They've spent enough of their life in that battlefield, and they'd like to finally retire. Your romantic partners have borne the weight of your emotional stunting your whole relationship. Your female colleagues have been working against a stacked deck for years.

Practice with your male friends. Go, hang with the dudes. Open up your heart. Tell terrifying truths. Heal awful wounds. There are some things that only platonic friends can heal and answer.

Yes, some male friends will reject this. Your feelings might get dismissed, it is the risk that comes with all emotional work. But you'd be surprised how many of those male friends have reached out to female friends desperate to find another guy who wants to build real emotional connections. You'd be surprised how many are ready for a male friend confidant, how many despair of finding that close connection.

Women can't do this for you men. You have to build those bridges yourself.

It takes a risk. It's worth it in the end. Worth it for the close knit, deeply supportive friendships that you envy your female friends for having. It is worth it to make the workplace the sort of environment where all your colleagues can thrive and not just the men.

The reward is great, if you are man enough to take the first step.